i can't say that i loved this book. i definitely enjoyed the style in which it was written (first person present tense) and the thought that went into building the world in which offred, the handmaid, lives. there was something missing, though.

offred is a handmaid, a woman who is only employed in a household for her viable ovaries and empty womb. there's a war going on, a heady religious war, and babies are a prized possession. when the citizenry isn't being watched by the "eyes" they are sulkily moving about, slowly making their way through the rhetoric and craziness that surrounds them. offred spends each day sitting in her room, going to the market for food, or contemplating how to commit suicide so that she can end her boring and kept way of life. though not much happens to her, the story centers around how she got where she is and how she'll get out of it.

in the end, the story ended and i felt bereft. where was the real meat of offred's life? she lived quietly and her story was quiet right till the very end. hhmmm, i can't say that i was overly pleased but they can't all be winners.

yes, dune is my favorite book of all time. how many times have i read it? hhmmm, that's hard to say. probably more than twenty. each time, though, i see something new. gain a small bit of insight into a tiny theme that threatens to blow the whole story open before my very eyes. it's rich. dense, even, yet transparent and so full of life. i would say that it's the ultimate in storytelling.

to tell the story of dune is to scratch the surface of wider and deeper elements in this universe created by frank herbert. house atreides is asked by the emperor to take over the governorship of arrakis (aka dune, the home of a naturally occuring, addictive substance called "the spice" that inhibits aging and causes prescient visions in many people) from house atreides' most vile advisary, house harkonnen. the arrangement is a clever ruse, though, to destroy the atreides and keep the spice in the hands of the emperor and his minions. the main plot centers on duke atreides only son, paul, and his role as a religious leader come to lead the people of dune, the fremen, to freedom from the empire and give them back the planet that they love so dearly so that they may cultivate it and make it their home.

these plots are the overall arch of the story, though, they don't tell the story in its entirety. when i look at the novel as a whole, i see a story about betrayal, revenge, and redemption, but there are many other stories beneath the surface. one of my favorites is the stories of the women of dune. they are all quite tragic in their own way. jessica, paul's mother, only wanted to love and serve her duke. she never married him so that a way could be left open for him to marry into another royal family. politics, as she so bluntly puts it to her son. then there's paul's love, chani, who also only wants to serve and bare children for paul and the good of the atreides family, but she has to step aside and even encourage paul to marry the princess irulan so that paul may become emperor. then there's poor poor irulan. she will forever be kept at arms length. never to know the love of her husband or feel the warmth of a loving touch from him. all she will ever have is her writing, and it will be little enough to keep her going.

i could go on and on for hours about all the little elements of dune: the playing of politics; the role of the bene gesserit; the quasi-science of mentats; the implications of a society drugged up and looking into the future; the interplay of the spacing guild and its monopoly on space travel; the songs of gurney halleck; the orange catholic bible and its axioms... but it would probably take me months to gather all of my thoughts on each of these subjects. you're better off reading the book and finding them all for yourself.

(p.s. i was going to go on and read the rest of the series, but i got burned out doing that with the rama series and the ender series, so i'm taking a little break and will come back to dune messiah later on.)

it's a surrogate world, with surrogate food, surrogate feelings, and good doses of soma to make it all better. i thought that i had read this book before and never made it past the first couple of chapters but i was apparently wrong. it wasn't at all what i thought it was going to be and in the first 2/3 of the book i was really into this brave new world. i really loved all of the little details. the little pieces of information here and there that fluffed out this dreamland and made it seem real, tangible even. but then came the ending and i was thrown for a loop. it went all downhill and totally unbelievable right before my very eyes. i never believed that john was going to get away from all the heathens of modern life but it would have been better if he had lived out his life in a far away place and everyone else had too. the ending smacked of finger-waving, "don't do it or you'll be damned to hell!", and a big ol' christian lecture. just when i thought that i had escaped into a fun and brilliant world, SMACK! what a disappointment.

(in keeping with my earlier promise, i'm making these entries shorter just so that i can keep up with myself. sorry if you come here for a long written review. i just don't have the time for it anymore but still want to keep track of what i read.)

note: a year has gone by and it was a very interesting experiment to see how my reading habits changed over time but i'm really not interested in writing book reviews... so i'm actually going to scale down my entries so that i can keep up with this blog otherwise it will fall by the wayside and i'll have to ditch it. i'm going to keep them to my basic opinion of the book and a quick summary.

i did enjoy reading through to the end of this series to see how ender was going to pull everyone out of the situation that they were in. the more important parts of the story though are the elements surrouding ender and his family, dysfunctional they may be but ultimately they are fascinating windows into humanity. orson scott card has written several more books in the ender series and, while they are good (especially ender's shadow) they will always pale in comparison with these three. in the end, i thought that the solution for changing the descolada bordered a bit on an unbelievable premise but it was still intriguing none-the-less thus the rating of 8.

continuing on with the story of ender, it's three thousand years later and mankind has spread itself across the universe, living on worlds that the buggers had once colonized. with the invention of the ansible, a communications device that transmits across space in an instant, humans are able to colonize far away places but still remain in touch with their brothers and sisters hence eliminating evolutionary drift. ender has been traveling these past three thousand years. the miracle of faster-than-light speed (also invented after contact with the buggers like the ansible) is that time slows down for those who travel and speeds up for those that don't. when ender (and valentine) are gone for three weeks, fifty or sixty years have passed for everyone else. they have not grown old while everyone they have known is dead gone.

at the end of ender's game, it is revealed that ender wrote "the hive queen and the hegemon", a history of the hegemon, his brother peter, and the hive queen of the buggers. he signed it only "the speaker for the dead" and this book became another sacred object much like the bible. it told only the truth about peter, his wicked and evil childhood and how he conquered that to become the most revered man in all of history, and the hive queen of the buggers, a sentient and caring species who didn't understand human life but once she did vowed never to hurt humans again... just before humans destroyed her. ender spends his time helping to colonize other worlds and while exploring an old bugger world finds a sleeping cocoon of a hive queen that asks to be saved and planted on a new world where she won't be destroyed. ender is saved!

ender, now going by his real name andrew now that "ender" is an evil word associated with xenocide, and his sister valentine, decide to travel the universe to find a new home for the hive queen and on each world they travel to, andrew speaks the deaths of those who ask for it and valentine writes her histories under the name of demosthenes. they travel to trondheim where valentine falls in love with a local fisherman, jakt, and has a family and andrew tries his hand at being a teacher. here, valentine writes about the hierarchy of alienness which explains the differences between strangers and friends and becomes the vocabulary of anyone wishing to delve into the philosophical underpinnings of humans and aliens.

while on trondheim, andrew is called to speak the death of a xenologer, pipo, on the world of lusitania, a catholic charter world where the only other known sentient alien species in the universe lives, the pequeninos. the pequeninos are a short, pig-looking species that live in the forests of lustania. there is a fence that separates the pequeninos from the humans and only a few xenologers venture into their area to study them. the two species, humans and pequeninos, know little about each other. tensions are always strong between the two and mistakes are easily made. the pequeninos are very smart. they learned the languages spoken on lusitania, stark (a derivative of english) and portuguese (this world was settled mainly by brazilian catholics), and speak them with ease. but there is a cultural divide between the two species that simply can't be breached by talk and action. the starways congress forbids the xenologers from giving the pequeninos information about modern society and science so the xenologers are greatly hampered in their studies. one day, pipo, the lead xenologer, goes into the forest and is flayed alive by the pequeninos! the mystery of this alien species has only begun.

there are so many layers to speaker for the dead that i would have to write and write and write for hours before i began to cover them all and that would simply be boring. not only are the pequeninos interesting as a study but so are these humans that have settled lusitania. they are strict catholics and their layers of subtlety and deceit are just as fascinating as the alienness of the pequeninos. throw in a battered and bruised family, a womanly intelligence living among the ansibles, and a virus that wants to destroy all the humans on lusitania and you've got one hell of a story.

andrew comes to lusitania and throws everyone into a loop. he rips open old wounds and lays falsehoods in the open for all to see. he destroys and recreates and is the very thing most feared and wanted at the same time. he is a force to be reckoned with but we know that already from reading ender's game. andrew is not an ordinary human being.

as a book, speaker for the dead is an amazing jump from ender's game. it's more than a sequel and is probably so rich with detail that you could read it and have never read ender's game. there were several points within the book where i just couldn't read it fast enough, where my heart was beating so fast that it took me over an hour longer to get to sleep that night. orson scott card is brilliant. he weaves so many storylines together and they become so dependent on each other that it's a wonder he could have come up with them all!! this book, combined with the next in the series, xenocide, are some of the best stories (and the best scifi) ever written.

it's hard to sit down and describe what i believe to be one of my favorite books of all time. it's in the top 5 next to the wind-up bird chronicles and dune so i have to be careful just how sappy i become when i try to put into words how i really feel about ender and that game he plays... the game of war and mind against mind. imagine, if you will, that war was not man against man. men can talk to each other even if they speak in different languages. they are not wholly alien from one another even if they pray to different gods. they are still men. conversely, imagine fighting an enemy that you couldn't communicate with. no amount of pleading or negotiating or even surrender could be understood. what would you do then? sun tzu writes about the art of war but it's nothing compared to the sort of tactics that ender and those that watch over him have to use to fight the common enemy, the buggers.

it's the future and the earth is overcrowded. religion is suppressed to keep the population's numbers from exploding and everyone lives with the memory of how the buggers, an alien race, came sweeping toward this solar system bent on destroying all of humankind before they were defeated in battle out by saturn. andrew wiggin, also known as ender, is a "third", a third child born to a family when only two were allowed by law. his older brother, peter, and older sister, valentine, are both brilliant and amazing children. they came close to fulfilling the high standards imposed on them by the government and military but failed just short of mark. hence ender, conceived in the hope that he would be the right combination of genes (peter's high intelligence and val's compassion) with the express purpose of becoming a tool for the military should he work out... and he does. before he's five, he's whisked off to battle school to learn strategy and the hard way of life for soldiers.

ender's life -- what he thought of his life -- is now over. from the ripe old age of five, he is taught to be as hard as stone both at work and in his heart. his only goal is to train hard and fight in a toon with other children in a "game" that will teach them about military strategy. the game is not always what it appears to be and neither is the battle school that holds them all. the teachers are doing much more than just showing their students how to lead. they are molding those students into trained military leaders who'll help conquer the buggers once and for all.

seriously, this is a novel that i can never put down once i start reading it. it's fair to say that my knitting suffers greatly if this book jumps off the shelf. i've read it several times now and each time i learn something different from it depending on where i am in my own life. it's fair to say that experience with life will season the reader's interpretation of ender's game each time it's read. the older i get, the more i feel for ender's lost childhood. the next time i read it, i'll grieve even more for the death of his innocence. orson scott card puts so much of ender here that you'd be willing to bet that nothing's left out.

but it's not just ender that gets the bulk of attention in this novel. ender's brother, peter, and his sister, valentine, are just as shockingly brilliant and masterful. though you know that you're reading about children, you're never far from the idea that these are not children after all. that to be this aware so early in life is a crime. a crime against everything that is human and right and good. yet there is a certain duality to this idea. these are smart children.. far smarter than any adult has given them credit for. to deny them the right course of action just because they are young is extreme short-sightedness. herein lies the rub.

ender's game provokes a lot of serious questions about the limitations of youth and adulthood, faith and loyalty, aggression and pacificism, human and non-human. to look here and not see devils and angels in both courts is to look to the ocean and not see water. read it and weep.

i had heard a lot about this book from several different sources including blogs, the news, and bulletin boards. it was all rave rave rave so i decided that anything worth raving about is worth reading and, once again, i was pleasantly surprised (much as i was the first time i read harry potter.. all that raving, and they were right.)

the story of oryx and crake is told from the perspective of snowman (also known as jimmy) as he looks back on his life and what's become of it after a great plague has swept the earth and only he is left standing. this book runs aground more in the speculative fiction camp than science fiction because it takes place on earth in a foreseeable future (i'm going to label it as sci-fi for the time being, though.) this earth is separated into the haves and have-nots. the rich, smart, talented folks all live in compounds administered by the companies they work for. most of these companies sell wares that originated in labs. genetic manipulation is de rigeur. they create pigoons—pigs that are used to incubate cloned organs—or rakunks—the perfect blend of cuteness between a racoon and skunk. no task is too great for the acute minds of the compounds. the rest of society lives in the pleeblands. lawless and wild, these people are germ infested and unruly. the divide is wide between the two cultures.

enter our two protagonists, jimmy and crake (we learn crake's real name at some point but it's easily forgotten.) as schoolboys, these two grow up together playing video games, smoking weed, and watching porn on the internet. they play chess, strange extinction games, and each other over the course of 15 to 20 years when they end up at the same compound facility after college. crake's vision of humanity's future is astounding and jimmy just does what he can to keep up. that is until oryx, a once-prostitute-turned-scientist, shows up and he falls in love. but the end of the world is near and only one of them is going to make it out alive.

i found atwood's sense of style to be very appropriate for this subject matter. she's very good at taking the tiny details, warping them, and re-presenting them to us as something totally new. the names that she would come up with for products and places (SoyOBoy, AnooYou, etc) were clever and deserved a good chuckle every now and again. her style is more stream-of-thought than structured when done well (and here it is) can speak volumes. atwood certainly has a literary gift. it's not everyday that you get to read a novel that so thoroughly beats the formula that is the english language.

while the whole "earth's eventual demise" premise can be completely old and tired, jimmy and crake were far from it. rarely do developed relationships in novels bore me. i don't usually read a novel to understand how warp drive works or how elizabethan england's government ruled the world. a good novel means good character development and interaction. a great and astounding novel takes that to the next level with layers upon layers of details that help form the world around those characters. this is why few novels actually rate a 10 with me. in my time, the only ones that have done it for me have been dune and the wind up bird chronicles (and possibly harry potter and the goblet of fire which i'm going to re-read soon and then review.) this is where oryx and crake falls short for me. though the writing is clever and fun and the story is intriguing, i felt that atwood could have given more... that there was something missing. maybe it's because the whole story was told from jimmy's point of view? maybe i'm supposed to be left in the dark? i don't mind that in the right cases. i like it when a novel (or film) leaves me questioning the characters or plot. still, the whole novel was less than 500 pages so i felt that it was edited a little short. it was still a good read and i will gladly loan it out to others.

at the end of garden of rama, nicole is sitting in jail awaiting her death sentence for treason. her husband, richard, has escaped the human habitat called new eden, fled through the avian habitat (which was subsequently destroyed by the humans in a xenophobic and clearly one-sided war) to the old island of new york in the octospider habitat. he finds the family's old lair still intact and lives there for a time—with two avians that he rescued—while he plans an elaborate escape for nicole and their children.

the society of new eden is in shambles. all of the governing officials were assassinated by the tyrant nakamura, the surviving colonists that were infected with RV-41 (a deadly retrovirus akin to AIDS) are segregated from the rest of the humans, and a fascist and paranoid attitude has taken over the human population. the extent of the damage is immeasurable. new eden, once hopeful and peaceful is now tired and broken, and yet the ramans have still not interfered.

this novel covers a lot of ground. i was amazed when i was done reading it how much actually happens in this book. the humans—under the censorious tactics of nakamura—believe that the octospiders have declared war on them. they don't know that it's all a lie to keep the population in check. war is not just a dividing influence, it also brings together the populace to support one common goal. what they don't know is that the octos have given the wakefield family asylum in their habitat. the octospiders are a peaceful species. they do not believe in war and hope that the wakefields will help them to communicate this to the other humans. the war spirals out of control and continues on both a traditional assault and biological scale. all three habitats come very close to extinction when the ramans finally intercede.

like many good scientists, the ramans wanted only to observe and were willing to sacrifice one or two of the habitats in order to gather data on their experiments, but an all-out extinction via war is not good for results. a stage two intercession is called and the ramans put everyone to sleep and whisk them away to the nearest way station near tau ceti. even here, outside of rama, the humans can't get along with other species and need to be further separated.

the outlook from these novels is bleak but believable. it's just plain obvious that humans believe that they are the center of the universe. we're very homocentric and it's apparent in our religions, our way of life... even the way we treat our planet. i don't think that we'll ever be ready to confront the idea that we're not alone. we still actively make war on our own kind based on religious or ethical differences!! how could we ever communicate or understand something totally inhuman when we can't empathize with the person next door who is from a different country?

in rama revealed, nicole and her family are some of the only non-bigoted humans amongst the bunch. she teaches patience and tolerance when everything around her is in chaos. she's a model herione, someone worth knowing and following... and understanding. understanding is something that we all need to do before it's too late.

garden of rama has the most meat of all the rama books but it's cut short in order to leave the bulk of the story to rama revealed, the final book in the series. garden of rama starts off with nicole's journal chronicling the years that she, richard wakefield, and michael o'toole are stuck onboard rama II after earth's thwarted attempt to destroy the vehicle.

nicole is such a strong heroine that it's almost impossible to believe that this story would be any good without her. by nature, she's spiritual. by nurture, she's logical. she's quite good at assessing a situation and then making decisions based on the available evidence that will best benefit her and those around her. i've often wondered what i would do if put in her situation. imagine that you're the only woman with two other men traveling to a distant speck in space. you have no knowledge of what's going on back on earth. earth may have been destroyed in a nuclear war or something similar and you're the only surviving members of the species. the human race can't die out, right? assume the worst at all times and then draw conclusions based on that.

at first, nicole, richard, and michael live a happy life aboard rama. they learn to interact with the raman computer in order to request food, furniture, or other belongings. they take long walks, talk.. they lead simple lives. nicole and richard mate and have babies. little simone and katie are born, and then nicole realizes that if they all spent the rest of their lives aboard rama, there would be no one for simone or katie to mate with. tension builds amongst the adults when nicole proposes that she tries to have michael's children to diversify the gene pool. michael, though, is extremely religious and not at all willing to bend easily to this idea. an impasse is reached and jealousy consumes richard when nicole goes to michael's bed.

after years of trying to have michael's babies (they eventually have two boys) and a long period of time when richard goes missing in rama, the raman ship comes to a way station in the sirius sector. the entire family disembarks and settles down at a place they refer to as the node. it is here, at the node, that the ramans (or whoever it is that controls the node... nicole and richard prefer to call them the ramans so as not to confuse themselves) explain that they would like to observe humans in order to catalog them as one of the many spacefarers of the galaxy. after a short stay and refurbishment at the node, the family is sent back to earth to gather a thousand humans that will live aboard rama in a colony and be observed during another long trip to tau ceti.

this group of a thousand humans is not ordinary, though. the video that the earth government receives that precedes the rama spacecraft asks for a wide variety of colonists... and a wide variety they receive including convicts, murderers, racists, and a handful that are infected with a deadly retro-virus. greed and power overcome a good number of the settlers and the colony spins out of control within five years. nicole and her family are thrown into a whirlwind of politics and heartache, and the only way out is to escape the habitat and flee to their old lair on the island of new york which still exists on the other side of rama.

this book, like rama II, is a study of human nature. nicole and richard naively believe that if you give humans a fresh start, they can live happily without prejudice or hatred. the instincts to dominate and take control, though, are strong within us and not easily repressed. power is a drug that's easily had. the past can't be swept under the rug. we remember too much. what's even more tragic is that these humans can't behave when they know they're being observed. the ramans are like gods to the human colonists.. they are not seen or heard. faith is the only crutch by which they must stand up and act with morals and integrity. tell me, how many people do you know that live righteously and believe in god by faith alone?

there's a lot of thought-provoking material here and i can't even get into half of it in this entry. i could write pages and pages but that would be boring! the main concepts in this book that inspire me are the what if questions. would i act the same way if i were in this situation? would i be able to believe in the ramans if i never saw them? would i have faith? would you?

slamming through this series like a bulldozer cutting through butter i've moved on from rama II to garden of rama with surprising speed. this is some great writing despite what all of the reviews on amazon say about this series. rama II is the perfect blend of hardened sci-fi and characterized fiction.. some would even say that it's chick-lit in space, but i wouldn't go that far.

it's about a hundred years after the first rama spacecraft came into our solar system and since headed on its way to its intended destination. but the ramans do everything in threes and before long another one is spotted heading our way. much has changed on earth since the last interstellar visit. humanity has seen better days. there was a stock market/world bank crash and, following that, a time of great chaos that turned all of humanity's accomplishments on its head. managing to get the space program back in business, the world government assembles a team of scientists, military men, and journalists to head to rama II aboard the newton, a ship especially engineered for this trip. this human crew has only the data provided by the first team to go on so they do their best to prepare by overloading themselves with gadgets and gear. they hope to make it to rama and back in one piece. it's never that easy though, right?

thankfully, this novel has a lot more character development than the previous rama. the main hero is nicole des jardin, a french/african life sciences officer. though the story is told in third-person omniscient style, we're only allowed in on her private thoughts. she is quite a strong and intriguing character. her background (her mother was from the ivory coast, her father was french) is mixed and varied with a strong historical element. she was once an olympic champion, had a child out of wedlock, and still carries the secret of the child's father around in her conscience. she guides her life on sound scientific principles and gut intuition, a strange and curious mix when the two conflict.

the other members of the crew are equally intriguing and it's apparent from the beginning that they all will clash on social and professional levels. there's a plot somewhere to turn this rama trip into a mass marketing event that will bring fame and fortune to some. too bad the others are left in the dark... left to fend for themselves when the decisions of those in charge lean to what looks best on the front page of newspapers rather than what's right and ethically correct.

i find this book and the next two to come more interesting than the first because, though i love the idea of alien spaceships and intelligence beyond my understanding, i'm a sucker for a good story about people under enormous stress. i spend a great deal of time observing people (new york is a great place for this) and seeing how they interact with one another and their surroundings. this book takes that interaction to another level. how would humanity take the news that they are no longer the center of the universe? what happens to a religion that's inherently based on god giving life to humans on earth when aliens arrive? are they god's children as well? how do you balance your ideas of what's right and wrong with something so supremely beyond your understanding? there's a lot to human nature. we're complex beings and we always ask questions though we may not understand the answers.

i've marked this book down from a 10 to an 8 because i felt like there were some details about the other crew members that could have been left out. some editing should have been done especially to those members that do not make it to the other two books.

i remember reading this book when i was in my early teens and thinking that the title was pronounced "ren-deez-vus". this was before i thought to look up any words that i didn't understand in the dictionary and the memory of that oversight has been with me ever since.

rendezvous with rama is the second arthur c. clarke book that i had ever read (i was a big fan of childhood's end which was the first book that really got me into the fun of reading) and i had dreams about rama for years afterward. recently, i've been spending a lot of time on scifi/fantasy bulletin boards because i was becoming despondent over the state of scifi. it seemed as if there were no real groundbreaking works in the past ten years and, seeing as i love the genre so much, i was extremely disappointed. i feel like hollywood has gone and trashed the good name of science fiction. they seem to think that all scifi is lasguns, out-of-control robots, or star trek. alas, scifi is not just that. it is so much more. anyway, from the chronicles bbs there were a few books that came recommended and i'm going to check them out after i read the entire rama series... again.

starting with rendezvous with rama, clarke paints a wide, galaxy encompassing plot. rama, a cylindrical spaceship that enters our solar system in the early 21st century, is hurtling towards the sun so fast that only one spaceship—currently on solar survey—can catch up to it and make contact. it's humanity's first contact with aliens and what the crew of endeavor finds baffles minds across the solar system. rama is quiet and not willing to divulge its secrets easily. the crew, headed by commander norton, explores the ship and makes deductions based on available evidence.

this first rama book is an action/adventure. it lures you into its world with all the heavy-handedness of a doctor performing routine surgery. granted, there's not much character development in the humans that explore rama but the real star of this story is rama itself. setting the stage for future novels, you have to know rama like you know your house. then once you're familiar with it, you can live there comfortably. i'm not going to go into any details about it because that will just spoil it for anyone who's even vaguely interested. sorry! i like to give my impression of novels but not regurgitate the entire plot.

i really love this book. the interior world of rama is unique, thought-provoking and raises pertinent questions not only about this alien culture but about ourselves. like all good questions, the answers are complex and mystifying... or there are no answers at all. it's one of the few occasions in novels that you are left to ponder them for yourself.

i certainly liked this book a whole lot more than its predecesor, destination: void. where destination: void was technical jargon and abstract ideas, the jesus incident was the human (or clone, take your pick) condition. ideas, interactions, and mysteries, they are the makings of a good novel.

we left off in destination: void when the computer becomes a conscious being, claims to be God, and then challenges its makers with the utterance, "now you must decide how to worShip me!" the ship (or Ship) delivers its human cargo to Pandora, a hostile planet full of demonic creatures on which the humans must learn to survive and make a home for themselves. inevitably, some of the humans are led to the darker side of life—playing where only gods and devils inhabit—and they lead many others astray in their bid to make pandora more hospitable to humans alone. the more righteous set speak or commune with Ship and learn to live together with pandora's demons.

generally, there's a fine line between what i would call fiction and what i would call science-fiction. there are many books that asimov wrote that, though they take place in the future, were less science than fiction. herbert's books ride high on the science-fiction scale. they take large leaps and bounds past our imagination to places less realized than most novels. herbert is quite daring and he exhibits his ability to flexibly mold numerous plot lines and characters into one cohesive novel. he really is a joy to read when he's "on". the jesus incident was "on" as was dune, my all-time favorite. it's hard to read any of his work without referring back to that wonder of a story but it's inevitable. the pandora series is, thankfully on par with dune though a bit paler in comparison.

herbert left plenty of threads hanging in this book but i think that he wraps them up in later novels. there are a few things that i know he will never (can never considering he is no longer living) explain. what's the scream room, really? seems quite disturbing when the small glimpses of it came around. here, my imagination was supposed to make it worse than it really was without any details.. but i was sorta hoping for more information. the book title refers to "the jesus incident" and for a good reason. herbert likes to play with religion but, i personally, find the christian religion to be boring and overdone in novels. he supposes a lot. supposes that christ was ever-present, a person stuck in time. i'm dubious. it's a nice thought but i like to see new forms of religion developed in sci-fi novels that nod to old forms, not just old forms recycled.

well, i wasn't disappointed with this book overall. it kept me interested! i'll have to read the next book now. there's more to find out.

largely described as one of the funniest sci-fi books of all time, hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy (or HHGG), is exactly that: funny, pithy, and ironically british, if you're into that sort of thing, which i am. i love a good ironic, british persona. i enjoy dry, sly remarks and the concept of afternoon tea. in this book, arthur dent, is having a bad day. his house is minutes away from being bulldozed and his friend, ford prefect, is not making things any easier by explaining to arthur that his house is the least of his problems. well, i won't give away the whole storyline (and i'm glad that no one ever gave it away to me.. being that i should have read this book ages ago) but arthur ends up on a galaxy-wide romp with a two-headed alien, zaphod beeblebrox, his girlfriend, trillian, ford prefect, and the "paranoid android" (and i laughed when i read this because i love that track on OK computer), marvin. to be honest—to all of those people who can't stand sci-fi—there's really not much science here. just plenty of fiction. it's more about finding yourself in a really strange situation and laughing through it all. one of my favorite quotes is:

"it is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. for instance, on the planet earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, new york, wars and so on—while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. but conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons."

yeah, i guess to the dolphins we look like we're just mucking about in the water now, eh?

well, very little to tell the truth. seriously, i enjoyed this book to no end. i ripped through it in less than a week because it's written in a very simple style. now, this is not a bad thing (let me say that again! it's not bad to write simple sentences over long and tedious ones.) it's one reason that i love j.k. rowling so much. write for your audience! and her audience is children and all-be-it children-at-heart. i expected a bit more from a sci-fi book, though, because all of my experiences with sci-fi have been with frank herbert, arthur c. clarke, orson scott card, isaac asimov, etc.. highly educated men who wield the english language like a well-balanced spear. this book i would say is a little more comedy than sci-fi which is why i'll stick it in both categories. i think that more could have been done to flush out some of the humor and details which is why it falls short of a 10 for me, but maybe i'll change my mind after reading some of the other books in the series. oh, and be sure to check out the movie this summer! alan rickman (love alan.. can't say enough good things about that man) is the voice of marvin, the paranoid android. ha! looking forward to that.

ah, frank herbert was a genius, that's for sure. i really enjoy his writing techniques, especially those that help build suspense. by telling the story from the perspective of each character you get a glimpse into the specific mindset and progression of the storyline that the characters themselves are not aware of. his use of third-person omniscient style and thoughts-in-italics is proliferate but i know that it would not appeal to everyone. it reminds me of dune and why dune is either a 4 hour movie with no voice-overs or a 2 hour movie with.. and you should know that voice-overs are a general no-no in film. i learned quite a few new words from this book (entropy and phosphatase) because it's subject matter is a bit esoteric. clones in space trying to develop artificial consciousness in a computer can lead to a heavy amount of technical dialog. the storyline reminded me of one of my favorite "star trek: the next generation" episodes where captain picard has to prove that data is not just a machine but also sentient. the subject of sentience (or consciousness... i think therefore i am) is thought-provoking and forces me to evaluate myself as a human being. a mind-boggling experience.

herbert's subject matter can be way over your head if you're not ready for some heavy sci-fi (with emphasis on the science part.) he delves deeply into math, biochemistry, and psychology and doesn't bother to explain most of the concepts. you are just supposed to know them. he also never takes much time to provide backstory and instead you're left to piece together all of the elements as you go. this is normally a great way to build suspense and mystery but—when you are already trying to figure out the intellectual concepts of the story—this technique can be extremely frustrating. it's too many grey areas piled into one narrative. i found myself skipping over long portions of dialog that spouted technical mumbo-jumbo eager to get to the social aspects of the story that dealt with character relationships. as an avid reader, i find this to be disappointing because i enjoy getting to know the author's voice and having to skip over stuff makes that nearly impossible.