Abe > Recent Status Updates

August 8: The characters in this book are pretty interchangeable (as evidenced by how neither the author nor the reader feel much about abandoning the entire main character & plotline from the jacket copy halfway through the book.) The sensawunda level is “meh.” There are ideas, but the far-future doesn’t feel detailed or strange enough to convince, best taken as a not-quite-funny-enough caricature or allegory.

August 1 ctd: On Goodreads some folks have said/complained that the book tries to come off like a Becky Chambers novel, but doesn’t succeed. (For reference, myself and someone else at a different book club agreed that Chambers’ Monk and Robot books are “sooo chill.”) One thing that keeps this book from being chill like a Chambers novel is that it has more techy, hard sf-ish verbiage woven into the sentences.

August 1 post: This book so far is defying my expectations in a couple ways beyond just the talking animals. The “hopeful, uplifting” jacket verbiage leads one to believe that this book will fall into a nascent sf subgenre called solarpunk (we might alternatively call it eco-optimism or Ecotopia after the 1975 book by Ernest Callenbach that may be said to have invented the genre.)

Evocative prose, strongly drawn, heartfelt characters: Hamlin Garland definitely has it. I feel like we should be reading this from this period instead of burlesquing Twain.

I am part of the audience that enjoys weird, idiosyncratic descriptions of things, so I ought to be enjoying this. On the other hand, I disdain Dickensian cutesiness, characters who go, “Ha ha ha ha ha” (and other noises) at pointless intervals, and excessive descriptions of the shapes of people’s mouths, so I’m not enjoying it quite as much as I could be.

This is bad. Thank god it’s also short.

Owes a lot to Milton, Poe, Maturin, and any number of the Decadents. The purplish prose is frequently so over the top that I crack up; still pretty enjoyable though.

The brilliance of these stories cannot be ignored; I feel like I’m going to need to reread this multiple times just to appreciate all the different voices and meta fictional hijinks going on in these stories, then to think about what it all means as allegory. There’s a degree of abandon and sheer insanity in some of them that is delightful and almost akin to Borges or Kafka.