Quick book rec, quick book rant
Apr. 29th, 2005 11:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stakebaitNewton’s Wake, by Ken McLeod. If you like SF and you can stand written dialect at all, give this a go. It’s the first and only book I’ve read with a singularity in where I felt I knew what was happening and cared. It’s an interesting future, neither too perfect nor too dark nor too simple, and the world feels bigger and stranger than the story. And it’s not American-focused, which makes a nice change. I frequently wanted to take off at a tangent to the main text and follow some other character, but heck, maybe there’ll be sequels.
Rant (not at all about Newton's Wake, but several unrelated books and stories): I'm losing my patience with protagonists who a) make major life changing decisions without consulting their nearest and dearest and then are shocked by N&D's reaction not being exactly what they'd like, and b) deliberately make copies of themselves without at least trying to cope with the fact that yes, there WILL BE TWO OF YOU, and YOU WILL NOT BE HAVING THE SAME EXPERIENCES.
I do grok that this is a hard thing to get a handle on in the abstract, especially if it's a new development in your culture and you don't have a lot of experience with it, but at least *try* to make the effort of imagining what it'd be like to be *both* of your future selves first, instead of imagining yourself solely as whichever one you want to be.
Also, please don't lose all empathy for each other the minute you separate? I realize you're not the same person any more, but there are lots of people who aren't me. Just once I'd like to see the fondness of siblings, or parent/child.
Rant (not at all about Newton's Wake, but several unrelated books and stories): I'm losing my patience with protagonists who a) make major life changing decisions without consulting their nearest and dearest and then are shocked by N&D's reaction not being exactly what they'd like, and b) deliberately make copies of themselves without at least trying to cope with the fact that yes, there WILL BE TWO OF YOU, and YOU WILL NOT BE HAVING THE SAME EXPERIENCES.
I do grok that this is a hard thing to get a handle on in the abstract, especially if it's a new development in your culture and you don't have a lot of experience with it, but at least *try* to make the effort of imagining what it'd be like to be *both* of your future selves first, instead of imagining yourself solely as whichever one you want to be.
Also, please don't lose all empathy for each other the minute you separate? I realize you're not the same person any more, but there are lots of people who aren't me. Just once I'd like to see the fondness of siblings, or parent/child.
