The Escapist 197
| The Escapist | |
| author | James Morris |
| pages | 167 |
| publisher | Ad Libbed Ltd |
| rating | 8 |
| reviewer | Stanislav Blingstein |
| ISBN | 1905290055 |
| summary | Cyberpunk with a darkly satirical edge |
The Escapist is set in an indeterminate future. Space travel seems to exist, but most of the action takes place on Earth. And there's plenty of action, too. From page one, the book races along with scarcely a pause for breath, and by the time you've finished you've been around the world, met numerous bizarre competing factions, and uncovered the plot behind the mysterious Mind Invasions. The storyline takes in locations as far afield as Egypt, Malaysia, Israel, Las Vegas, New York, and London. It almost seems like a travelogue of all the places the author has been in his life, except seen through a warped lens of cyberpunk fiction.
In fact, the story seems almost arbitrary, like it was written as a stream of consciousness. Think Beat Generation, but penned by a Jack Kerouac who's fascinated by computers rather than drugs, jazz and driving. Bentley Dean is carried along by the increasingly frantic stream of events, each one hitting him sideways. All is revealed at the end, but you still get the feeling that many situations occur with no rhyme or reason -- a bit like real life, only with more explosions.
The ideas about future technology in The Escapist can vary from insightful to mundane. The central theme of cryogenic sabbaticals is rather amusing, though. These could be described as "holidays on ice." And though this is clearly a cyberpunk novel, not much of it actually takes place in cyberspace --that's more of a recurring theme in the background. Most of the action occurs in the flesh. This is maybe a good thing, as the novel's description of using virtual reality to explore the human mind is a bit 20th century, perhaps as a deliberate lampoon of how dated films like The Lawnmower Man seem today.
But that doesn't really matter. Most of the time, this is a very funny book. It's full of one-liners which take the present day and twist it to its logical extremes, so you can see just how ridiculous it is. The moon, with its low gravity, becomes a refuge for the overweight. Pandas are saved from extinction by being genetically re-engineered to like eating hamburgers. A strip club is named after Pee-Wee Herman. Bentley buys a fashionable suit made of paper, only to find it too noisy for creeping around at night.
Some of these ideas will have you laughing out loud, although a few of the gags are very much for the geeks in the audience, like the Windows Bar and Grill which takes three attempts to get your order right. There are also plenty of embedded cultural references for film buffs to spot, including HAL, Yoda and even James Bond quotations. You cant help feeling at times that the plot is just there to serve the jokes.
But the book also has a serious side. There's a deeper theme about artificial intelligence, and each chapter is headed by a quasi-philosophical statement. Some of these will really get you thinking, and some are deliberately silly, just to catch you out. If you're interested in the whole question of whether or not computers could ever think like us, and what that would mean, theres food for thought here, hidden among the humour. The Escapist is a book which just doesn't stop hitting you with idea after idea, some of them serious and some intended entirely for darkly comic relief.
The Escapist's main fault is just this -- it tries to do too much in too few pages. It's so fast that at times you have trouble keeping up, and sometimes you wish the characters would just slow down and admire the scenery. And if you need a truly sympathetic character to relate to in your novels, you might find Bentley Dean is just too mean. He's also too much like a cross between James Bond and Kevin Mitnick. But if you have a perverse streak, and a penchant for satire, you'll like The Escapist. You may even wish it was a bit longer.
As well as being available in printed form, The Escapist can also be bought as a PDF direct from the website. And since the novel is published under a Creative Commons license, once you've got hold of one of these PDFs, you can share it around and print it out as much as you like. The cover art is well worth seeing on a real book, though -- it has an evocative mystery all of its own.
Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
"antihero" != "evil" (Score:3, Informative)
An antihero would be a milquetoast everyman who doesn't do heroic things, or who has every good thing he tries to do turn out badly.
Re:Here you go. (Score:5, Informative)
Mindplayers by Cadigan (sort of)
Islands in the Net by Sterling
Holy Fire by Sterling
Burning Chrome (short story) by Gibson
Cyberpunk (short story) by Bruce Bethke
City Come A Walkin' by John Shirley (if by "cyberspace" you mean a proto-network comprised of anthropomorphised city-AIs, and if by "hacking" you mean said city-AIs messing around with the real world via this network)
Eclipse trilogy by John Shirley (a lot of dystopian, but a fair amount of "hacking" and man-machine interfaces, which might interest you)
That's all I've got for now.
Re:Here you go. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A Question (Score:3, Informative)
He said "...a hacker with a cold-blooded killing streak", but he meant "...a sysadmin with a cold-blooded killing streak", which is, of course, perfectly understandable and quite common.
Re:What I took from the review... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:summary or sales pitch? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Gadget Filled (Score:4, Informative)
In the first sentence, the narrator knows what is "going down," but in the third he does not. The second sentence is a mess. Is Rodriguez right there in the room dialing up the narrator's pager? And by the fourth sentence, Rodriguez has been demoted from token minority programmer to "nobody." Then in the fifth sentence, "Pocket Assistant" confusingly turns into "Phoenix handheld." Presumably, back in sentence two, he meant "pocket assistant" and not "Pocket Assistant."
Interview with the author (Score:4, Informative)
What is the Escapist about?
It's an epic, picaresque tale, which I've somehow managed to squeeze into 168 pages. which the author later revealed took him 13 years to write... roughly 13 pages per year on the average.
Why did you decide to self publish your book?
I had tried sending The Escapist to a few agents. I'm sure if I'd carpet bombed all the relevant agencies I would eventually have found representation and some form of publishing deal. Sure you would have... well considering what they publish... you acutally might have But it could have taken ages, and I was confident my book was good enough for prime time. By prime time... you mean posting your own review on
You've taken a Creative Commons license. Why did you do that?
How are you going to market your book?
Well, I hope someone likes it. Read the PDF, burn a copy... to a CD or otherwise... and send this guy some money, but not enough to make him think about writing a follow up.
Re:What I took from the review... (Score:5, Informative)
'Broken Angels', the sequel, borrows the main character from Altered Carbon, but little else. It's primarily a future war novel where the main character and his small group face off against military and corporate interests during a planetary civil war. Both novels contain plenty of violent and sexual content.
There's a third book in the series called 'Woken Furies', just recently released.
Re:"antihero" != "evil" (Score:3, Informative)
Still right. (Score:2, Informative)
Eventually (probably in a few decades) the new meaning comic books invented for "anti-hero" may have become prevalent enough that is becomes accepted as a standard definition. Currently it only exists in subculture.
If you want to prove I'm wrong, please site an actual academic source.
Re:Here you go. (Score:2, Informative)
FWIW, she did the novelization of the Lost In Space movie as well, but I've not read it.
Re:Promotional fluff? (Score:2, Informative)
The Mysterious Stanislav Blingstein (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Promotional fluff? (Score:2, Informative)
Def of Antihero from "Handbook of Literary Terms" (Score:3, Informative)
Antihero: A protagonist who lacks one or more of the conventional qualities attributed to a hero. Instead of being dignified, brave, idealistic, or purposeful, the antihero may be cowardly, self-interested, alienated, or weak. Although instances of the antihero are sprinkled throughout literature since ancient times -- for instance, Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605) and Byron's Don Juan (1819-24) -- the antihero in the current sense is essentially a twentieth-century character. Their antiheroism tends to reflect the spiritual or social afflictions of modern man and woman -- atheism, loneliness, mistrust of authority, disillusionment with Western ideals. Posing a satiric or frank contrast to traditional portrayals of idealized heroes and heroines, antiheroes are figures of moral and psychological waywardness, and also of social and ethical criticism. Their oppositional nature stems not simply from within, but from the interaction of self and society; hence their failings point to themselves and to the worlds they inhabit. Modern examples range from Arthur Miller's Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman (1949) to the sex-crazed Jewish adolescent in Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (1969).
From "Handbook of Literary Terms: Literature, Language, Theory." X.J. Kennedy et al. 2005.