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.
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too much (Score:3, Insightful)
In this case read that book!
Gadget Filled (Score:5, Insightful)
They arrested the code dudes in an operation sweeping the entire city. My Pocket Assistant beeped impetuously as Rodriguez dialled the tip-off pager number. Something heavy was going down. Nobody used those digits unless it was a dire emergency. I flipped the cover off the Phoenix handheld and studied the holographic touch screen. The message flashed across in chiselled 3D text:
Reading that doesn't fill me with any desire to read farther. I prefer my fiction to be about the people and the plot, not the gadgets and the buzzwords.
summary or sales pitch? (Score:5, Insightful)
Care to describe that "evocative mystery" for us? I'm surprised that a review would mention something like that instead of just describing it. IMHO, this "review" reads more like a sales pitch, dancing around everything but saying nothing.
Um No Thanks (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cyberspace? (Score:2, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk [wikipedia.org] has plenty of other authors (most of which I've never read, since I'm pretty limited to gibson & stephenson myself for that genre).
Apparently computers are not a prerequisite so much as technology. In that case the Phillip K Dick I've read would fit (though it borders on regular Sci Fi). His work is stupendous in its abilities to create magnificent twists of philosophical (and not just technological) profundity.
The author(s) of that Wikipedia entry don't seem to require dystopia as a theme in cyberpunk; however can anyone think of any examples which aren't dark in their portrayal of technology's impact on the future?
The PDF (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Cyberspace? (Score:3, Insightful)
He's not Super Hardcore geek guy! but i thought that his 4 books on VR gone crazy was good! it's a sci-fi fantasy novel though, not just techie stuff.
Re:Gadget Filled (Score:2, Insightful)
>
> Reading that doesn't fill me with any desire to read farther. I prefer my fiction to be about the people and the plot, not the gadgets and the buzzwords.
I'd give it more than the first three lines, but based on only those three lines, I'm inclined to agree.
If you're going to load up the story with gadgets and brand names, make the brand names mean something.
Gibson, to take just one example, did it and made it work. "Ono-Sendai" was a great way of saying "Yeah, the Japanese took over the world", which was the big business scare in 1984. Similarly, calling the custom-built "Sandbenders" (from Idoru - the most recent real-life analogy to a "Sandbenders" gadget would be the hand-carved wooden iPod overlay) was the kind of brand names that made you think about what sort of social changes had brought them about.
Somehow "Phoenix" and "Pocket Assistant" don't quite measure up. Using "F-55" to refer to a military aircraft, and "Siemens" as a lunar transport manufacturer is a step in the right direction (recognized brand name, new line of business, or name convention that acknowledges that considerable time has passed between "today" and the story setting), but "Philips T1000?" If you're going to reference the Terminator, be a little subtle about it.
OK, I'm being a little harsh. This isn't Atlanta Nights, but then... what else is? :)
167 Pages?! Self-published? (Score:4, Insightful)
I am left with the distinct impression that there cannot be much depth (or character development) in the 167 pages that comprise this book. By the time you load it "full of one-liners" and punny place names all you probably have left is room for a dash of seriousness.
The story seems almost arbitrary...tries to do too much in too few pages
Virtual reality...artificial intelligence...technology ranging from insightful to mundane. And more explosions. Yea. Is the author hoping for a movie-rights deal?
One, your review does not encourage me to run out and grab this book. Two, why did you give this an 8?
There are plenty of books out there that are both short and good but, based upon your review, it seems that the author should have spent more time exploring one theme in a modicum of detail than attempt to pass off a screen-play treatment as a novel.
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.
This smacks of self- or vanity-publishing particularly when combined with the fact that "Ad Libbed, Ltd.", the listed publisher, has no web-presence that I could easily find. Sometimes self-publishing is the right way to go - most of the time it means you couldn't get anyone else to pick up your stuff. Based upon your review, it seems the reader would have been better served had the author turned his novella into a serial short and got it published in a sci-fi magazine or something.
Re:Cyberspace? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Gadget Filled (Score:4, Insightful)
Not necessarily, but that's not the point. It's not the exact content of the first paragraph, it's the way it's written. It seems that the author isn't very good. What I mean is, he doesn't know how to describe things. Therefore he just throws adjectives and names all over the place without any thought as to the result.
You can describe things, and you can mention doing things, but when you combine them the result is often a disaster. No offence to the author, but it's like the sort of think you get from a 10 year old who's learning to write stories, and has just been taught about adjectives:
"Bob got up from the big black chair. He walked across the blue carpet and opened the small wooden door with the shiny brass handle. He walked into the wide long dark corridor with a wooden floor..."
Also the use of 'impetuously' is completely incongruent. The style of the writing seems to be a very casual one, i.e. the narrator isn't exactly eloquent, he uses a lot of slang, probably with some sort of strong accent. But then someone like that wouldn't say 'impetuously'. When you're writing from the perspective of the narrator, you have to keep the style of writing congruent with the character. Otherwise someone reading it will feel that something isn't right, even if they don't know what it is. Like a bacon sandwich with coffee on it.
I'm afraid that the reason this author is effectively giving the book away is that it's no good. You can't judge a book by its cover, but you if the writing in the first paragraph is of a schoolboy level, the rest probably isn't going to be any better.
What drives me nuts about most sci fi (Score:3, Insightful)
It's like all the authors seem to be trying really hard to outline differences between the present and future in a casual and subtle way, so as to make the future seem simultaneously alien but immediate and real... but then they do it so bluntly and unsubtly it's just painful, jarring, and entirely anathemic to the idea of suspension of disbelief. And then they make this even worse by slapping stupid brand names on everything, brand names that would never catch on in real life. Like, "Phoenix handheld". Or "holographic touch screen". In a future where PDAs had holographic touch screens, nobody would ever, ever call them this except the manuals for the actual PDAs. We'd just call them screens.
Nobody in normal fiction insists on mentioning the brand name of every single product that passes before the reader, or adding adjectives to every object to make to note some specific new technology of the last ten years which they utilize. Why must science fiction? It's like trying to watch a movie where all the characters are walking around with NASCAR-style logos plastered all over their clothing.
Re:summary or sales pitch? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's an "evocative mystery" because, according to the author interview [pabd.com], it was the author's wife that did the cover.
This "review" looks more and more like astroturfing. The "novel" is self-published with a cover done by the author's wife; given the high rating this "novel" received, it is likely the review was written by either the Author or a friend.
At least it is released under an open license...