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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What I took from the review... (Score:3, Interesting)
So, I agree: Sounds like a big "skip" to me. Which is too bad -- I've been looking for some new SciFi to read ever since I finished reading through the various works of Vernor Vinge earlier this year.
I read the Dan Simmons "Hyperion" series and found it extremely unsatisfying (a strong start followed by weaker and weaker storytelling). Read "Forge of God" by Greg Bear and it was decent, although the sequel was, in my opinion, lousy. I read "Forever War" by Joe Haldeman and found it entertaining enough, although "Forever Peace" was a struggle to even finish. Also read through a couple of other one-hit-wonder authors whose second and third books were rather Wachowski Brothers, if you catch my meaning.
I don't really know where to go from here. Once you polish off the classics and the hits, you're left with a couple of shelfs of books at Barnes and Noble that all have interesting looking covers and rave reviews on the back, but probably aren't all that good...
Re:Here you go. (Score:1, Interesting)
There is also How to Own the Box, the preceding book but it is more a collection of mini-story and I liked it less. No need to read to first one to enjoy the second.
You could also get "The Cuckoo's Egg". This book is awesome even thought it is outdated.
Enjoy!
The best novel is often reality. (Score:5, Interesting)
The moderators were your average schoolyard bullies. The thugs who attack innocent people in the night. I'm thinking more along the lines of Clockwork Orange here. Not just physical attacks, but they partake in the worst sort of psychological perversions.
They are the stereotypical "cyberpunks": nerdy teens with the mentality of 12 year olds who are physically unable to be anything of importance in the non-Internet world, thus they become the punks of the Internet. And their presence really destroys the quality of the forums. But while the quality of the forums as a place for discussion is shitshot, the entertainment value rises immensely.
The best part is that I don't have to chip out a pence to read such novelry. The GameFAQs forums take the best of cyberpunk novels and combine them with an ever-changing reality.
Cyberpunk on wikipedia (Score:2, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk#Cyberpunk_
Re:Gadget Filled (Score:3, Interesting)
The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like a gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.
It's like someone's homework assignment on adjectives, similes, and metaphors.
Re:Gadget Filled (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Here you go. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Here you go. (Score:1, Interesting)
Try reading more varied sci-fi (Score:1, Interesting)
Bosses "rule" subordinates, "love", of course, means money, to "use" someone means to "to have sex with" them, and so forth...
People don't shake hands at business functions, they "palm slide". There are a few other futurisms quietly embeded in the text, and it's an amusing, if overly bright and cheery, view of the future. I particularly liked the addictive recreational drug that was still a total market failure until they improved the packaging.
Read it: it's fluff, but it's worth an evening's amusement. I read it one night during high school, and it evidently made some sort of an impression.
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AC