The Joy of Erudition > Recent Status Updates

The authors have promised to explain why they believe their central premise, but I'm several chapters in, and they have not made an attempt at this yet.

"The Eyes Have It" is a surprisingly comedic flash fiction about a man who reads a paperback novel and misunderstands a lot of common English phrases as being evidence of a hidden alien conspiracy. This is probably some kind of schizophrenia, seeing meaning and connections where none exist, but it's all phrases like this:

"
… he took her arm.

Not content to wait, he had to start dismantling her on his own!"

"Second Variety" clearly laid the groundwork for the Terminator movies. Somehow, it turns out to have been a bad idea to create human-killing robots who can reproduce and modify themselves, with no human oversight. Unknown to the humans, they start making varieties that look like humans, engineered to gain entry to human bunkers before unleashing mass slaughter. There's also some "The Thing" paranoia. Still rough.

"Paycheck"—A lot to say about this one, but too much for the character limit of these updates. Here I'll just say it's a cool time-travel premise, but it's let down by several unaddressed issues and internal inconsistencies, and an ending that makes the protagonist out to be a lot more ruthless and amoral than he had seemed earlier. This ending requires establishing him as an anti-hero.

I had heard these were bad, but I was hoping it was just a case of outlandish plots, which would have been the "good" kind of bad. I need to lower my expectations for this one.

One interesting thing is that we have what they're calling a sorcerer showing up here, appearing in a puff of smoke. Granted, Darth Vader was called a sorcerer in the first movie, but here there hasn't been a single mention of the Force.

"We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" is the famous basis for the movie Total Recall, and more than most of PKD's story-to-movie conversions, many of the recognisable elements are here. The main difference is in scope. The story is set entirely on Earth, with only scattered details of Quail's time on Mars (renamed Quaid in the movie). The final twist is more outlandish than the movie. Both are worth your time.

Really sloppy book. How are these buildings "ruins" if they're sealed and impenetrable even by laser cutters? How do these creatures' offspring survive if the adults only reproduce in gravity wells that crush them within hours? Elsewhere, characters play sabacc on an asteroid with minimal gravity so people can launch themselves through the air, but they toss objects onto a table and the objects fall normally.

There's a possible problem in "The Minority Report". There have been no murders in decades because the precogs always inform the police in enough time to stop them. But Fleming tries to strangle Lisa to death and throw her out the aircraft, and there's no mention at all that the precogs saw this. If it's because Anderton stops him, there should have been some acknowledgement of it.

This book contains "The Minority Report" and several other PKD stories. It's been a long time since I saw the Minority Report movie, but I think it played out very differently from this original story, aside from the basic premise: A police official is accused of a future murder by the pre-crime precogs, and he goes on the run to prove his innocence.

The beginning exposition has been very boring and hard to get through. The author also chose not to use Lando's name at all for the first 3 pages, only calling him "the young gambler", until finally another character calls him by name, as if we don't already know who we're reading about. Plus, the story is written from Lando's point of view, and he knows what his own name is, so why pretend it's a mystery?

A lot of things were left unaddressed, especially with all the skipping ahead even after major events that really needed followups, while lots of time was spent on mundane details like tree-climbing. Still not a bad read, as long as you're not expecting the story to really be *about* the time travel and all the implications it raises.

I can hardly imagine a more contrived, unsatisfying, and unearned ending for this series than what Moorcock delivered here.

I can understand that the scope of this book may appeal to a lot of people, but really, the previous ones were much, much better, and I rather regret reading this one, because it makes me less interested to read the next ones.

I'm glad they're back at the school, but the excuse for sending them back seems way out of proportion. They went into town without permission because WORLD WAR 1 had just ended, and everyone was celebrating, and they wanted to have a look. But this is enough to nearly expel them and terminate their foster parent arrangement?

Okay, I absolutely hate what happened here, and it wasn't even narratively impactful due to the complete lack of development leading up to it. What was the point? My opinion of this book has dropped another notch.

So far this book has been a big disappointment compared to previous ones. It's focused around large-scale military engagements, with hardly any of the fantastical spectacles of previous books, and Elric's relationship with his wife is terrible! The author seems to have regretted marrying them off, as much as he keeps her out of the picture.

"Night after night, Charlotte lay in bed with her eyes open to the dark, thinking up wild and yet wilder schemes for getting herself back to school by night to sleep in the bed with wheels. The trouble was that, as Charlotte, she was not someone who did wild things, except in extraordinary circumstances."

How is that "the trouble"? As if these are not extraordinary circumstances!