Alfred Bester, Tiger Tiger, Golem100
Aug. 11th, 2016 12:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethIn the last couple days I read Tiger Tiger and then, while trying to decide what I thought of it, started reading Golem100.
That one is easiest to comment, because I've stopped reading now and I'm getting rid of it. The book jacket and reviews are no help at all. It's a horror with a dark ending (I skipped to the end when I realised I was getting nothing out of reading except blergh). It's all rape and murder and nastiness. And it gets repetitive. Like, oh look, a rape in public while everyone looks shocked. What's on the next page? Could it be, oh yes, another rape in public while everyone looks shocked. Sometimes also murder. It's just nastiness. I read one review that wondered if it was trying to be feminist and I boggle, because really? Women are summoning up hell on accident because they're bored, leading to rape and murder, and anyone can read that as feminist? Gross. So I stopped reading and it is going away.
So, TigerTiger.
I've heard of this one. It gets called a classic, which unfortunately often means it's okay if you like reading about white men.
It has an excellent first line. Not so much the prologue, though that does okay with 'This was a golden age, a time of high adventure, rich living and hard dying... but nobody thought so.'
'He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead.'
Now that gets your attention.
And I think it's the writing I'm interested in. The 'jaunting', psi powered personal teleportation that can be taught to almost anyone, and its social effects, implausible though I found some of them, that's kind of interesting but not what grabbed me. But the story stayed vivid and immediate and managed to keep me interested with some very caricatured characters in clownish situations juxtaposed with violent adventure. It kept me reading even while I started thinking it wasn't very good. I'd like the trick of that.
There's rape, again, but this time so far from explicit that I didn't realise it was meant to be rape until a bunch of chapters later when the woman returns and tells him off for it. And later part of the protagonist's personal growth is to realise that actually rape is a bad thing. But, you know, that seems like baseline required, so reading about such a thoroughly awful man should have put me off. Just then things kept happening and going around new corners at higher speed and greater stakes. There are female characters, but they're not, you know, actual women, and I can't make them make sense as people in my head. They're getting nudged around by the plot and they do things and end up with men because the book says so.
And then there's the ablism that stalled my reading for a few hours while I was just ??? ?? ? because what? Humans do not work that way. And that's meant to be a human. But it doesn't work. So, turns out the bad behind a lot of the bad things is a blind woman who is killing people by the hundreds because, and she's quite clear about this, she is blind and they aren't so she hates them. Page 203 states very clearly that she's doing it all for hatred, to pay all humanity back, for her being blind. Not blinded even, just that she can't see and she's crippled and dependent, so she's going to make everyone else worse off.
Which, you know, is not how humans work, on the whole.
And that being the case ever character starts looking like broken dolls and I sort of lost the momentum or interest to see where it ended.
But then I picked it up again, because book, and it did indeed end up interesting.
But that one blind woman makes the whole thing look stupid, not least because she's not exactly blind, she just sees in every spectrum except human visual. So what's she complaining about? And the idea that she couldn't jaunt because to jaunt you have to know where you're going and have the picture of the place fixed in your head, that's ridiculous, of course with that much data she's got very complex pictures of any place. And even if she hadn't, she'd know each one distinctively with a very little assistive tech.
But this is also a world where because everyone can jaunt there's no more phones or any form of transport. It's stated several times that transport is for the very rich only. But people can only jaunt where they've seen before, so rich people do the grand tour. But then the whole world is vulnerable to random people jaunting in to wreck stuff? Or poor drunks follow pub closing time around the world? The different bits of world building don't fit together.
And the idea that women would end up locked away to protect them from jaunting assailants... how exactly do they propose to keep them there, considering? So maybe it's just rich women, literally never allowed out? But even they jaunt away in an emergency. So, it loops right back to, how do they expect to lock up their women when locks no longer work?
The people don't work in this book.
And yet, I read it all.
I want to figure out the trick.
I also rather want to rinse my brain out, for the second night in a row, but on the bright side once I get rid of this kind of thing I know the remainder will be safe to re-read.
*sigh*
That one is easiest to comment, because I've stopped reading now and I'm getting rid of it. The book jacket and reviews are no help at all. It's a horror with a dark ending (I skipped to the end when I realised I was getting nothing out of reading except blergh). It's all rape and murder and nastiness. And it gets repetitive. Like, oh look, a rape in public while everyone looks shocked. What's on the next page? Could it be, oh yes, another rape in public while everyone looks shocked. Sometimes also murder. It's just nastiness. I read one review that wondered if it was trying to be feminist and I boggle, because really? Women are summoning up hell on accident because they're bored, leading to rape and murder, and anyone can read that as feminist? Gross. So I stopped reading and it is going away.
So, TigerTiger.
I've heard of this one. It gets called a classic, which unfortunately often means it's okay if you like reading about white men.
It has an excellent first line. Not so much the prologue, though that does okay with 'This was a golden age, a time of high adventure, rich living and hard dying... but nobody thought so.'
'He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead.'
Now that gets your attention.
And I think it's the writing I'm interested in. The 'jaunting', psi powered personal teleportation that can be taught to almost anyone, and its social effects, implausible though I found some of them, that's kind of interesting but not what grabbed me. But the story stayed vivid and immediate and managed to keep me interested with some very caricatured characters in clownish situations juxtaposed with violent adventure. It kept me reading even while I started thinking it wasn't very good. I'd like the trick of that.
There's rape, again, but this time so far from explicit that I didn't realise it was meant to be rape until a bunch of chapters later when the woman returns and tells him off for it. And later part of the protagonist's personal growth is to realise that actually rape is a bad thing. But, you know, that seems like baseline required, so reading about such a thoroughly awful man should have put me off. Just then things kept happening and going around new corners at higher speed and greater stakes. There are female characters, but they're not, you know, actual women, and I can't make them make sense as people in my head. They're getting nudged around by the plot and they do things and end up with men because the book says so.
And then there's the ablism that stalled my reading for a few hours while I was just ??? ?? ? because what? Humans do not work that way. And that's meant to be a human. But it doesn't work. So, turns out the bad behind a lot of the bad things is a blind woman who is killing people by the hundreds because, and she's quite clear about this, she is blind and they aren't so she hates them. Page 203 states very clearly that she's doing it all for hatred, to pay all humanity back, for her being blind. Not blinded even, just that she can't see and she's crippled and dependent, so she's going to make everyone else worse off.
Which, you know, is not how humans work, on the whole.
And that being the case ever character starts looking like broken dolls and I sort of lost the momentum or interest to see where it ended.
But then I picked it up again, because book, and it did indeed end up interesting.
But that one blind woman makes the whole thing look stupid, not least because she's not exactly blind, she just sees in every spectrum except human visual. So what's she complaining about? And the idea that she couldn't jaunt because to jaunt you have to know where you're going and have the picture of the place fixed in your head, that's ridiculous, of course with that much data she's got very complex pictures of any place. And even if she hadn't, she'd know each one distinctively with a very little assistive tech.
But this is also a world where because everyone can jaunt there's no more phones or any form of transport. It's stated several times that transport is for the very rich only. But people can only jaunt where they've seen before, so rich people do the grand tour. But then the whole world is vulnerable to random people jaunting in to wreck stuff? Or poor drunks follow pub closing time around the world? The different bits of world building don't fit together.
And the idea that women would end up locked away to protect them from jaunting assailants... how exactly do they propose to keep them there, considering? So maybe it's just rich women, literally never allowed out? But even they jaunt away in an emergency. So, it loops right back to, how do they expect to lock up their women when locks no longer work?
The people don't work in this book.
And yet, I read it all.
I want to figure out the trick.
I also rather want to rinse my brain out, for the second night in a row, but on the bright side once I get rid of this kind of thing I know the remainder will be safe to re-read.
*sigh*