The Neutronium Alchemist by Peter F. Hamilton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The second epic part of Hamilton's epic-length epic about an epic war in an epic science fiction future. Did I mention that it's epic? Because it is pretty epic. Perhaps too much so. Hamilton's space opera is filled with larger than life characters, dramatic escapes, technicolor explosions, super-future tech -- described in plenty of loving technobabble -- and plots within plots within plots.

(Spoilers follow)

Among the multiple plotlines, the central story is the rise of various factions of the Possessed across the human universe. The most powerful and threatening is led by a returned Al Capone, who is able to rally his fellow returning dead into a formidable interplanetary organization. A fascinating concept, although Capone's dialogue can be, at times, reeeeeeally cheesy -- one of the downfalls of Hamilton's writing. Complexities multiply in this volume as Dr. Mzu begins her search for the deadly Alchemist, pursued by multiple competing factions (including the Possessed), the returned spirit of Fletcher Christian pursues satanist Dexter Quinn in an attempt to atone for his past misdeeds, the Kiint reveal their own past contact with the Beyond, and an entirely new, mysterious group of seemingly immortal beings emerge in the conflict with the Possessed. Fun, big, bold, and a bit ridiculous.



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Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Reminiscent of works such as Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" or Alan Lightman's "Einstein's Dreams." A novella of multiple perspectives, fantasies, transforming identities, past and present. During the Interregnum, a foundling named Jordan sets sail to explore the world, discover new fruits, find love, find himself; back in England, his adopted mother -- an impossibly massive creature known only as the Dog-Woman -- brutalizes hypocritical Puritans and longs for the presence of her son, the only person with whom she has ever shared love. The book is airy, fantastical, often confusing in its blurring of reality, fantasy, internal and external worlds; it starts to fall apart, I think, when a modern story is juxtaposed with the historical fiction. Perhaps others will find the mixture of these two stories more compelling, but for me, it caused the work to teeter over the edge: it had been barely held together by the threads of dream logic and imagination, but the temporal disjunction just made it a bit too frayed for me. Still, a beautiful, poetic work for the most part.



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When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D. Yalom

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I wouldn't call it "great literature," but Yalom's novel is a smart, engaging read. Yalom's alternative history posits a meeting between Josef Breuer -- one of the fathers of psychoanalysis and a mentor of Sigmund Freud -- and a young Friedrich Nietzsche. The dialogue can be clunky at times, often coming across as two intellectuals philosophizing to one other rather than two human beings talking, but Yalom has a firm grasp of Nietzsche's thought -- firm enough that he can critique its extremes and flaws while still admiring its scope, audacity, and insight. Readers more familiar than I with clinical psychoanalytic technique will probably also find the discussions between doctor and patient fascinating for their exploration of the tensions, limits, and benefits of the "talking cure"; for me, they were compelling, but I simply don't have the expertise to parse out some of the subtext. Overall very enjoyable, thoughtful, and compelling.



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Some Questions I would like to ask various people involved with Doctor Who

To anyone involved with the first Doctor (William Hartnell) and the early years of the show: During your time, so many "firsts" were established: the first companions, the first appearance of the Daleks, the first historical story, the first return of a previous villain, etc. And so many characteristic images or narrative tropes were established: the Doctor in an apparently deadly spot cliffhanger, the unseen monster attacks someone on camera, etc. These things have all become part of the grammar of the show. What other sorts of lasting impacts do you think you or your period had on the show? What do you see now and say, "That's pure Bill Hartnell" or "That's straight out of Episode 1.4" etc?

To anyone who played a companion:
What other Doctors do you think would make for an interesting pairing with you? And I don't mean as actors, but I mean as characters: which incarnation of the Doctor besides the one(s) you served with would be an interesting counterpart for your companion? (I'd ask the same question of the Doctors re: companions)

To Stephen Moffat and/or Russel T. Davies:
Over its long original run, Doctor Who went through so many versions and tones. What eras do you think are particularly influential for your vision of the show? I'm thinking of the Sylvester McCoy/Andrew Cartmel years as particularly important for the style of the new Who, do you think that's the case?

To anyone involved in the show, but particularly the Doctors:
In those episodes where the Doctor meets past (or future) incarnations of himself, he never seems to much care for them. Why do you think that is? Do you think any particular Doctors would get along remarkably well or poorly, and why?

To Stephen Moffat:
Speaking of Doctors meeting themselves, the old series had a few fairly celebrated occurrences of just that. On the new series, there have been a few teases of the same (the Next Doctor, the Impossible Astronaut) as well as the brief cameo of Peter Davison in a short. Do you think you'll ever do any full-blown Doctor cross-overs? If not, why do you think they don't fit with the new series? If so, what do you think they add to the show, and would you want to combine Old & New series Doctors, just one or the other, or what?

To Stephen Moffat:
You've said that you plan to keep the Daleks off-screen for a while, as their threat becomes diminished when the Doctor beats them handily on a regular basis. Besides simply keeping them off the air, what other ways do you think are useful for keeping the threat of villains palpable, for keeping the tension alive?

To Stephen Moffat and/or Russel T. Davies:
How do you manage the tension between Doctor Who as an ongoing serial with an indefinite (perhaps non-existent?) end-date, something that in a sense requires a return to status quo every week, a minimizing of changes
and Doctor Who as a story with a beginning, middle, and end, that has to develop and go somewhere or else will become stale? Do you feel more of an obligation to change the Doctor and his world or to expand it and keep the series alive for as long as possible?

To anyone involved with the show:
What are the most threatening villains of the series, and why?

I had some others, but I can't remember them now.

Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film by Madhavi Menon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Really 3.5 stars. A more thorough (and even-handed) review from me is forthcoming on Shaksper.net, so I thought I'd make just a few overall comments and mention the things that really bothered me about this book.



Menon is clearly very intelligent, and her work is very theoretically sophisticated. Her argument about the problems with the way scholars "do history" is significant and timely. BUT... at times her desire to differentiate herself from what she calls "heterohistory" results in her obscuring or even contradicting her argument. Her primary argument is that scholarship that assumes a paradigm of difference distorts/obscures its subject in many ways; how ironic, then, that she is so insistent about how different her work is -- to the extent that she distorts/obscures some potentially interesting ideas. This is, though, only natural when one attempts to do something as ambitious as Menon does in this book.



The other thing that bugged me about the book were the rather pretentious lines Menon sprinkled throughout the work. Sometimes intended to be humorous, other times as poetic statements that encapsulated her ideas, they were usually both annoying and off-topic. A few of the most egregious examples:



1) In her chapter on Venus and Adonis and teleology: 'In such a realm, we would stop having successful sex. Or, perhaps, more unhistorically, we would have sex endlessly.' She'd just written about how the poem is essentially devoid of sex/sexual completion (but not desire), but, OK, whatever.



2) In her chapter on Titus Andronicus and origins (which is, I think, the best chapter, besides the introduction): "Shakespeare does not deprive Ovid of a tongue. Instead, he mingles his juices with that of the Roman to produce a melange of tastes that homohistory finds delectable." This is just pretentious. Probably should have gone the way of that old chestnut (Hemingway's?) about always deleting your favorite sentence from your work.



3) In her chapter on Shakespeare in Love and authenticity: "Shakespeare in Love suggests that the sanitary and historical act of giving face is always stained by the messy and unhistorical scene of giving head." Um, what? This is really, really lame, and the oral sex metaphor has nothing to do with (and never otherwise appears, as far as I noticed) in the chapter.



That said, the introduction was pretty great and will be useful to anyone interested in sexuality/desire, Shakespeare, and historiography.



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Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Some Spoilers follow...



The second volume in Frank Herbert's original Dune series. This one finds us 12 years after the end of Dune. The Jihad that Paul Muad'Dib Atreides had feared has been unleashed upon the Imperial Galaxy, leaving over 6 billion dead. Paul himself has ascended to near-divine status, ruling through a theocracy that reveres him as a quasi-god, his mother as a sort of Virgin Mary, and his Sister Alia as an almost demonic force of nature. At the same time, the ecological changes begun by Pardot & Liet-Kynes have been accelerated, starting the generations-long transformation of Arrakis from desert wasteland to water-rich world. As Paul struggles to find a way out the present-future his prescient visions have created, various forces in his imperium -- the Spacing Guild, the Bene Gesserit, disillusioned Fremen, and the newly introduced Bene Tleilax -- are working against him, trying to assassinate him and end the Atreides reign.



Much like Dune before it, Dune Messiah is all about plots, counter-plots, counter-counter-plots, bluffs, double-bluffs, trickery, scheming... you name it. When I first read it in high school -- over 15 years ago -- I didn't like it as much as Dune. I still find it somewhat inferior to the first book (whereas a number of reviews I've read recently actually prefer it to the first), but I appreciated it much more this time around. The tighter focus on Paul humanizes him for the readers at the same time as he is de-humanized in the world around him. His story is far more tragic in this volume; in Dune, he had been a boy coming to grips with an awesome power, struggling against monstrous forces and trying to take control of his future. In Messiah, we see that in struggling to control his future, he has trapped himself in it. Paul's story here is a story of a "great man" who doesn't move history so much as become just another tool in history's passage. The story offers us a fascinating insight into what it means to be a "messiah": a human being forced to become inhuman, looking for a moment when he can slip out of the mantle that has been placed on his shoulders. Most intriguingly, the messiah is only partially aware of the world he is meant to usher in. He knows his actions lead somewhere, but he cannot or will not see it fully.



All this makes for some rather opaque storytelling at times. The book is about mystery, as Paul's prescience is challenged by the muddying prophecies of others with a limited ability to see -- and therefore create -- the future. Each eye sees something else, but only part of the big picture. As readers, we read these competing visions, but only at the climax of the book do they begin to come together. Even then, we have the birth of the Children of Dune (the title/subject of the next volume) Leto II and Ghanima, and the hint at a grander vision beyond even Paul's Jihad and religious Empire. This can be frustrating at times -- one of the reasons why I found the book less appealing when I first read it -- but it is fundamental to what the story is about.



As for the things that bothered me, some of them still do. First is the introduction of the Bene Tleilax. They are thrust into the story without much explanation, but at the same time there isn't a whole lot of "mystery" about them -- it is as though you are just to know who they are. They do become more important in later books, but its a little confusing at first, as you feel like you've missed something from the first book. But more annoying than their sudden importance to the Dune universe is the revelation by one of the Tleilaxu that they had created a Kwisatch Haderach before -- the superbeing that had been the goal of the Bene Gesserit breeding program. A line casually tossed off by one of the Tleilaxu, this really undercuts the sense of Paul's importance and uniqueness. More importantly, though, it makes the Kwisatch Haderach seem less like an evolutionary leap in humankind and more like a science experiment. It also makes the Bene Gesserit look like idiots -- they've spent thousands of years breeding an superbeing, but the Tleilaxu somehow engineered one years before, and that one committed suicide? It really undermines the whole concept.



I was also somewhat bothered by the importance of the resurrected Duncan Idaho. In Dune, Idaho had largely been on the periphery. He rarely interacted with Paul, from what I remember, and died rather early in Paul's journey protecting him and his mother. Noble warrior and all, but a side character. He is reintroduced in this novel as a ghola, a resurrected body created by the aforementioned Tleilaxu. All of a sudden, he is Paul's closest companion. And Idaho continues to be central to the story through the next few novels. Not a big deal, but given how taken Paul is with Duncan you'd think he would have thought about him occasionally inbetween his death early in Dune and his return midway through Messiah. But, I guess Herbert wanted to bring back someone from Paul's past, and Idaho made sense, even if the lines between Paul's past with Idaho and his reaction to him in Messiah are thinly drawn.



So, overall, a very good book. Not quite as good as Dune, and I think the weakest of the first 4 (which are, in a sense, the "first part" of the Dune Saga, with Heretics & Chapterhouse being the "second part"). But still exciting and enjoyable. One thing, though: you can read Dune and stop there, but once you get to Dune Messiah, you're in the middle of a fairly continuous story that runs through God Emperor, the 4th book. So, be ready to invest a good bit of time.



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How to Read Marx's Capital by Stephen Shapiro

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Basically a summary of Capital. Solid, readable, but nothing new. Lacking in the kind of analysis and contextual material that one would expect from a book titled "How to Read," but still, useful. Not as in-depth as David Harvey's "Companion to Marx's Capital" but worthwhile for teaching undergrads or general readers.



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Dune by Frank Herbert

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Re-reading this book for the first time in over 15 years, I realized how much the film versions (David Lynch's & the Sci-Fi Channel mini-series) governed my memories of the story. The novel is significantly different in a number of ways. Not only because the world of the novel is far more developed than that of the film versions, but the novel is both far darker and far more concerned with issues of ecology.



A few examples: The Bene Gesserit are more deeply machiavellian and far less mystical in the novel; that is, it is clear in the novel that they function under the guise religion which they employ to suit their own ends. This extends to the Lady Jessica, who is more conscious and more cynical about the way she and Paul manipulate the legends of the Fremen for their own purposes. Paul's father, Duke Leto, is also much less of a one-dimensional "good ruler" in the novel; he is, certainly, heroic in comparison with the Baron Harkonnen, but he is also a flawed, ambitious, stubborn, and sometimes violent man. Speaking of the Haronnens, the relationship between the Baron and his nephew & heir Feyd-Rautha is more complex and fraught than in the film versions, something that I very much appreciated. And, finally, many of the lesser characters play a larger role in the novel (Thufir Hawat, for example) than in the films, while Paul himself is presented as less of a bad-ass than in the films.



OK, enough about that: It is a great book. Herbert has a wonderful style of writing: he's able to mix the mystical with the scientific, to create a fascinatingly complex and believable world, to create a sense of mystery and tension. He had a penetrating insight into the interrelations between politics, economics, and religion. And the universe of Dune is both strange and imaginative as well as bizarrely familiar and even antiquated. I would say more than anything, he has a keen eye into what motivates humans to wage war and seek power, and what forces in human nature lead to stagnation and decay.



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Promethea: Book Five by Alan Moore

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The final volume. Moore somewhat redeems the series by abandoning most of the new age mystical crap and telling an exciting story about the Apocalypse. And, it's a rather neat twist on the Apocalypse: the world doesn't end, but rather everyone is given a new and more complex perspective on the nature of reality. I like that idea, but Moore still manages to ride his simplistic occult hobby-horse through the proceedings. Moore's idea of enlightenment is, as I've said before, totally juvenile. It's things like, "why can't I pray at a Baptist church to Jesus but also worship a Roman snake god named Azacul? It's all, like, spiritual man!" That's not a direct quote, but it's a fairly accurate paraphrase. The final issue is, yet again, an example of Moore and Williams' brilliance in graphic design: a 32 page series of individual images of Promethea that combine to form a single, complex poster. But, each one is also full of stupid little bites of pothead wisdom, things on the order of "The human body is 70% water... AND SO IS THE WORLD!" or "There are X number of molecules in DNA... and there are the same number of stars in the galaxy!" Whoa, deep man. You just blew my mind.



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Promethea: Book Four by Alan Moore

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


The weakest of the series. Upon my most recent re-reading, I actually couldn't make it through much of this book. It was simply too boring. Those parts that deal with the crisis on earth are still entertaining, but the cosmological/spiritual kabbalistic allegory is just... well, stupid. This is all the more tragic given how inventive the layouts are in this and the last volume. Moore and Williams play with shape, color, perspective... they manipulate the design on the page so as to create multiple, interacting timelines within one set of images... it's really a tour de force. Anyone interested in design should be required to study these texts. But anyone interested in philosophy or thoughtful verbal storytelling should stay far away.

One example of the ridiculousness of Moore's occult system: he seems to believe that hermetic magic is an authentic school of thought from ancient Egypt, and much of his schematic understanding of the allegorical significance of various elements, objects, archetypes, etc. rests upon its ancient authority, within which he subsumes Judeo-Christian and other European systems of occult philosophy. But, it's been known for a few hundred years at least that hermetic magic was a construct of early Christian mystics, an attempt to create some sort of ancient source that pre-figured and predicted the rise of Christianity as the "truth". Hermeticism coincides with so much Xian and Judaic mystic thought because it was created to do so. D'oh.



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Promethea: Book Three of the Magical New Series by Alan Moore

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Moore's interest in the occult takes over the book, and its quality suffers a great deal as a result. The "plot" still exists in some form, as Sophie travels up the kabalistic tree of creation, but it is second to Moore's attempt to synthesize Egyptian, Judaic, Roman, Greek, Norse, Christian, etc. mythologies into a complete system for understanding the world. It really starts to fall into the morass of new age mysticism and hippie simple-mindedness, complete with faux-insightful comments such as, "It's like, we don't have emotions; emotions have us, you know?" That's an actual quote. Moore seems to be very impressed with himself, even having the characters compliment each other on their "deep thoughts" by saying -- and again, this is an actual quote -- "Wow, that's really deep!" I would love to think that this is all just Moore taking the piss, but I know that, unfortunately, he thinks that this stuff is actually meaningful. It's not that various occult systems are not interesting objects of study; all the ways that humans attempt to organize and interpret reality are interesting. Moore just takes it all so seriously despite the fact that his "insights" are so obviously fabricated and require him to stretch and distort various mythological systems to conform to what is essentially a very conventional, and essentialist, Western understanding of human nature. The identification of an essential "father-masculine" force and "feminine-mother" force as the motive powers of the universe is perhaps the most egregious example of his anthropomorphic, heteronormative, and Euro-slash-JudeoXian perspective. But, the artwork by Williams continues to excel and, despite the story's major weaknesses, the graphic storytelling is truly cutting edge. It's just sad it doesn't serve an interesting plot.



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Promethea: Book Two of the Groundbreaking New Series by Alan Moore

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The volume where Moore's work begins to slide. The weakest part of this volume is the final issue, the Tarot issue. In it, Promethea is given a lesson in the significance of the Tarot cards -- each one "represents" some moment in the creation of the universe and signifies a step in the path to enlightenment.



Yeah, whatever.



The issue itself is quite well-done, combining multiple levels of visual and verbal narration. There's one thing you can't deny about Promethea as a series and that's that it pushed the limits of graphic story-telling in fabulously inventive ways. But the structural schematics of Moore's cosmology is, at base, crude, over-simplified, and frankly, very juvenile. As with all attempts to map reality onto a human-made conceptual framework, the supposed "discoveries" of the "truths" within the Tarot are, in fact, projections of Moore's own cultural vocabulary. That is to say, he doesn't uncover any meanings in the Tarot, he creates them based on ideologies that organize his thinking.



But besides this one hiccup, the series itself is still quite good at this point. As a meta-fictional tale about the nature of imagination, it's insightful, if not earth-shattering, and Moore's sense of humor and imagination, when he gives it full rein, is wonderful. He should probably get an award for the single greatest creation ever, the Weeping Gorilla. It's a comic-strip within the world of Promethea; each one is just a sad Gorilla crying while thinking about some utterly banal inconvenience of life that is so pathetic as to be tragic. Example: "Everyone said I should upgrade to Windows 95." Love it.



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Promethea: Book One by Alan Moore

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The premise: Sophie Bangs, college student, is writing her undergrad thesis on a recurring literary character named Promethea. A powerful female figure associated with imagination, Promethea keeps popping up in seemingly unrelated texts as well as in real life events. Sophie discovers that Promethea is real; she is the embodiment of the power of Imagination and dwells in the realm of the Immateria, the world of fiction, fantasy, and creativity. Sophie is on tap to be the new Promethea as the world is coming to a major crisis, but this makes her a target of demonic powers, psychotic super-villains, and religious fundamentalists.



This is by far the best volume of the series. The writing is clever, the story is fast-paced, and the art by J.H. Williams III is simply beautiful. Most importantly, though, Moore doesn't let his own interest in magic and the occult overwhelm the story. Moore has long been a practitioner of various forms of occultism -- kabbalah, hermeticism, etc. -- and this series was his narrative presentation of his ideas about the magical nature of reality. In the early stages, though, he was just telling a complex yet entertaining supernatural story about imagination and creativity. Later volumes would become rather tedious.



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On Dreams by Sigmund Freud

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Freud's first major work was the epic Interpretation of Dreams, published right at the turn of the century (1899, that is). What I didn't know until recently was that the work was a pretty major commercial flop. It only sold something like 600 copies in total over the first few years.

Freud thought his work was very important, so about a year later he wrote and published "On Dreams," a much shorter, much simpler work, intended for a wider audience. It leaves out much of the dense material that makes IoD a slow read -- the survey of the history of dream interpretation, the detailed analyses of multiple dreams. It also leaves out Freud's explication of his theory of mind. But, it does include a succinct and easily digestible overview of what I always found to be most interesting about IoD: the description of the dream-work. While the symbologies Freud devises always seem to me a bit too precise, his identification of the processes by which the "latent" dream content becomes the "manifest" content is useful and provocative, especially from a literary perspective. As I said, he doesn't explicitly describe his theory of mental topography, but it is implied, and I think this work provides a useful intro for those people who would like to get a window into Freud's early work. It can be a helpful starter work before one jumps into IoD, giving one a handle on Freud's basic understanding of mental operations and work as a guide to the longer, more complicated work.



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The Renegado by Philip Massinger

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A simply fabulous play.



Grimaldi the Venetian "turns Turk" -- abandoning his Christian roots to become a Barbary Corsair in the employ of the Muslim Viceroy of Tunis, Asambeg.



He kidnaps the beautiful and virtuous Paulina and sells her to Asambeg, who falls in love with her but, disarmed by her beauty, refuses to force her to submit.



Paulina's brother Vitelli travels to Tunis in disguise to rescue his sister, accompanied by his Jesuit confessor Francisco and his comical, materialist servant Gazet.



Mustapha, a Muslim general, courts Donusa, niece of the Turkish Sultan. But she prefers Vitelli, who she seduces, threatening both his masculinity and his faith.



This tragicomedy about seventeenth-century English fantasies about the Ottoman Empire is made up of equal parts terror and fascination, and it reveals how European anxieties over religious, economic, and gender identities were bound up with one another. And not only is it rather well written, with a few really excellent speeches, but its pretty damn funny too, and especially topical in today's political climate.



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The Walking Dead Vol. 13: Too Far Gone by Robert Kirkman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I love The Walking Dead, but this volume of the long-running series is a bit underwhelming.

We've followed Rick Grimes and his companions for a few years now as they travel across a zombie-overrun United States, attempting to come to survive and develop a new life for themselves. The series has been fascinating for its psychological realism; Kirkman explores the limits of the human mind, just what people will do when their survival is on the line, and how they struggle to maintain some semblance of sanity in a post-apocalyptic world. But, I wonder a bit about what may be left to explore.

This and the previous volume deal with Rick Grimes' arrival at a "gated community" of sorts -- a group of people who have managed to build a small, stable village, relatively "normal" and protected from the horrors of the zombies outside their walls. The drama arises from the conflict between the members of the community -- who have gotten used to a return to a quasi-normal life -- and Rick Grimes' group, strung out from month upon month of living on the edge. The problems that were teased at the end of the last volume emerge here, but they are resolved too quickly and neatly, undermining the naturalistic feel of the series thus far. Another potential threat that is raised is also quickly dealt with, making it seem like an exercise in treading water. The cliffhanger ending promises interesting new developments, but I wonder if the upshot of them will be any different than what we've already seen. There's also some potential in the growing tension between Rick and his son Carl, but again, I don't know what Kirkman can do that will wow us the way he had in the past.

I think that, just maybe, it is time for Kirkman to begin moving us to the endgame. Either that, or something "game-changing" needs to happen -- a shift to all new characters in a radically different situation, something that makes the series new again. While I'll probably keep reading the series as long as Kirkman keeps writing it -- provided it doesn't get completely terrible -- it is slowly moving down my priority list. I am mildly hopeful for the next installment, but I think that The Walking Dead is past its heyday.



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The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I love big books. The first book in Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy is definitely a big book, and I don't just mean in length (although the 1000+ pages help). It's a big book in scope: Hamilton attempts to create a vivid, believable future in which humans have colonized the galaxy, modified their genetic code, and made first contact with alien species.



Hamilton's novel is a galaxy spanning space opera, big on action, sex, and military tech. It's a species of "hard" sci-fi, I would say, although how well thought out and developed the scientific aspect of the story is, I can't say. Despite its length, its a relatively quick read; Hamilton's prose is clear yet evocative, and he handles dialogue and action quite well. Some of the characters are a bit cliched -- the grizzled veteran, the dashing young hero, etc. etc. -- but he keeps it fresh.



The main story, which doesn't really emerge until quite a ways through the novel, is the discovery of "the Reality Dysfunction," a mysterious temporal phenomenon that unleashes chaos on a small, developing planet and threatens to engulf the entirety of human-occupied space. But in many ways, the "Dysfunction" is only a device for Hamilton to imagine how human society may develop over the next few hundred years. He's imagined a fractured galaxy, where corporate interests, religious orders, and neo-feudal dynasties each compete for power and resources. Extraterrestrial colonies are ethnically segregated, and while some embrace new technologies and develop new ways of life, others attempt to turn back the clock and recreate older social orders. Hamilton jumps from character to character, each one providing a different perspective and brought up to understand the workings of the galaxy in completely different ways. While Hamilton is not a world-class writer, he's a very talented and imaginative one, and each character speaks in their own voice. Following each as their lives intersect with one another and with the central story is as interesting as the mystery at the heart of the novel itself.



Speaking of which, the "Dysfunction" is a bit of a let-down when its nature is finally revealed. Don't get me wrong, it is still an intriguing idea, but not quite as mind-blowing or fantastic as I'd hoped. But, the novel ends with major developments in the works and huge plot threads still unresolved, so I think there's a lot of good stuff to come. Definitely recommended for fans of smart sci-fi.



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The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


An ambitious project. In the original Foundation trilogy, Asimov tells the story of a future Galactic Empire of humanity in decline. In response to signs of decay and the prospect of thousands of years of barbarism, a group of psychohistorians -- psychologists who use advanced mathematics and social-economic-political analyses of mass human behavior to predict the major trends of future civilization -- establish a Foundation to preserve knowledge, stave off barbarism, and eventually set up a new Galactic Empire. The first book tells of its establishment and first major struggles; the second narrates the Foundation reaching its zenith, followed by a traumatic upheaval caused by unforeseen and unpredictable events; and the third depicts the aftermath of the upheaval and the attempts by conflicting parties to salvage the original plan for civilization's survival.



The idea of the series is interesting, and Asimov's description of the strengths and limitations of psychohistory is thought-provoking: just how predictable are humans? If our behavior as a group is foreseeable, do we have individual free will? However, Asimov's writing style is rather mundane, sometimes even clunky and awkward, and the "science" aspect of this sci-fi is pretty thin. It's really a book about how people behave in moments of crisis and how we understand ourselves in relation to the forces that (we think) are shaping our future. The big "surprises" are really not that surprising, fairly easily guessed long before the reveal. Still, it's a fun book to read. Asimov's notion of human society is, I think, rather simplified and ignores many of the vicissitudes that affect human life and behavior, but as a space-age version of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," it satisfies.



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Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought by David Armitage

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This collection attempts to expand scholarship on Shakespeare's engagement with the political theory of his time. While not every essay is amazing, they do bring interesting new contexts to a study of Shakespeare's works, and they also complicate recent efforts to claim the playwright as an advocate for republican government. The overall picture that one gets is of a writer fascinated with the exercise of power and extremely cynical about the possibilities for ethical political action. Since most of the contributors are historians and not literary critics, some of the readings are lacking, but its a worthwhile book to peruse.



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