The Dream Master

This has sat on my shelf for awhile, because although I'm a huge Zelazny fan, I didn't much like the short story that this novel is based on ("He Who Shapes"). It's not that it isn't an interesting premise (it is), or that the prose is pedestrian (it isn't, although I wouldn't say that this is one of Zelazny's better written works), it's mostly that the characters are forceful people without being that interesting. Render, the protagonist, is a condescending asshole, and Eileen Shallot, the other major character, isn't all that sketched out; she's blind, she's strong-willed, she's a doctor.

The premise of the novel is at least interesting -- Render is a neuroparticipant therapist, one who can guide a patient's dreams using a specialized device (called the egg, and descriptions of it echo a return to the womb). Eileen Shallot is training as a psychiatrist, and would like to be a neuroparticipant as well, but due to her blindness, she'd need to become acclimated to sight. She seeks out Render, a leader in the field, in order to become acclimated. After some reluctance (and despite the warnings of his colleagues), he accepts. (It doesn't hurt that she's apparently quite attractive). Everything progresses apace, until we get a confrontation that forces the ending sequence -- which is the most interesting rendering in the novel, even if it feels forced and inconsistent.

Unfortunately, we don't get too many sessions where Render is shaping dreams -- there's a sequence in the beginning, to introduce the technique, and one where Render is recalling a past experience. The sessions with Eileen consist of him accustoming her to colors, landscapes, textures, their surroundings, et cetera. The ending sequence is certainly something, however, and arguably pays the whole technique off.

I suppose my biggest issue with The Dream Master is that Zelazny is trying to write something with echoes of the Greek -- here's a great man brought down by a tragic flaw. But Render doesn't approach greatness (brilliance, yes, but not greatness), and barely manages to rise to likeable. So while his tragic flaw may be arrogance, he's not lacking others, and that's just one reason this is unsatisfying.

A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess seemed to think that his seminal novel A Clockwork Orange wouldn't be as remembered if it weren't for Stanley Kubrick's acclaimed film version. According to Burgess, his best-known work is a simple morality tale, and he was less than thrilled that a) the American publisher omitted his final chapter, and b) that his work was the basis for a film that appears to glorify sex and violence. Although Burgess would prefer his work to have been presented unbowdlerized, he's not enamored with it: "I should myself be glad to disown it for various reasons" and that the work is "too didactic to be artistic", he says in the introduction.

I don't think that Burgess' American publisher was wrong in thinking the twenty-first chapter was a sellout. Burgess himself admits that there was no hint of change in the previous chapter, nor in the rest of the proceeding book. So while the author may contend that the twenty-first chapter is necessary symbolically, morally, and from a storytelling perspective, it certainly feels tacked on as it's a massive change in direction from the remainder of the novel, particularly a novel that is broken into three sections. So on the one hand, I'm not particularly satisfied with the final chapter, due to its stark difference from the rest of the novel. However, as Burgess points out, omitting it leaves something that's less a novel and more a fable.

Overall, I'm glad to finally tick this off my list, but I can't say that this is something I much enjoyed.

Snow Crash

Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash is a novel that's consistently been both praised and recommended to me. As page-turning science fiction novel, it's tough to find a peer for this. While the plot isn't quite as complex as Stephenson's later work, such as Cryptonomicon, in that the narrative is not skipping back and forth in time, there's still enough threads to tie together to keep the story engaging.

Yes, Stephenson names his main character Hiro Protagonist (how the fuck do you think that's pronounced), but the humor is otherwise mostly dry, which is a good thing in a science fiction universe -- too much silliness isn't a good thing in such an artificial world. In re: artificiality, some of the computer discussion is hopelessly dated, but the novel was published in 1992. So it goes.

Despite how dated much of the referencing is, the Internet as conceived by Stephenson (referred to in the novel as the Metaverse) is, if not a realistic vision of how the Internet developed, an interesting vision of an alternate reality. The Metaverse seems like a cross between the Internet as people use it and Second Life. The introduction of Sumerian mythology/history/general culture in the later plot is even more interesting, but since most of us are unfamiliar with anything beyond the basics and possible The Epic of Gilgamesh, it's tougher to double check on the fly. (Yes, this is exactly the sort of question that the Internet is useful for answering)

Very entertaining and fun sci-fi novel that ties together several diverse threads at the end, even if some of those threads are a little simplistic. (The glossolalia comes across as bunk, and the Sumerian as human machine language particularly.) A great diversion, but I'd recommend Cryptonomicon before this.

Cloud Atlas

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas was apparently partially inspired by Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, which contains a series of first chapters of novels, all truncated at a cliffhanger. Mitchell takes this device but modifies it, so while there are six separate tales in Cloud Atlas, each has an ending, but also links to the other stories (novellas?). The linked palindromic structure is unique, but it works, particularly because each segment has a different style, which Mitchell segues between effortlessly. His skill here prevents each tale from reading as a pastiche, although the styles are identifiable.

The six tales are, in order: the journal of an American functionary on a voyage in the South Pacific (ca. 1850), the letters of a debauched and disinherited English composer (1931), the travails of a plucky female reporter working to uncover a corporate scandal, written in the form of an airport thriller (ca. 1975), the memoirs of an aging and broke English publisher (ca. today), the interrogation of a clone in a dystopic future Korea (ca. who knows), and a tale around a campfire of a tribesman's life in post-apocalyptic Hawaii.

While the tales (often frustratingly) fail to gel entirely into a cohesive whole, this is one of the techniques that makes the novel work, as it prevents Mitchell from getting bogged down in explaining why or how this happened to Korea, to Hawaii, or exactly what Ewing was doing in the South Pacific, or how reliable of a narrator Frobisher is. This allows him to focus on the characters and the tale at hand, rather than spending too much time setting the scene, which is a hallmark of subpar science fiction.

For such an oddly structured novel, Cloud Atlas is a surprisingly easy read -- the only section that gave me difficult was the central section ("Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After"), as dialect with liberal usage of apostrophes and colloquialisms tends to make my eyes glaze over and my brain skip past sentences, much like the titular clouds. (Thankfully, the characters don't spend a significant fraction of their time watching the sky and engaging in pareidolia. Symbolism used is more subtle.) An absolutely worthwhile book.