george_salis's review
"...If the human brain was simple enough for us to understand we'd be so simple we couldn't."
It started off strong but became fairly tiresome about halfway through. It’s told by a set of twins who are as digressive and unorganized in their storytelling as Saleem Sinai of Midnight’s Children. They also incorporate a lot of slang and some wordplay, much of it informed by computer code language. These elements were the most enjoyable to me but even they got old after a while. The plot involves a sentient rock that’s actually an organic computer on a level of intelligence that far surpasses human beings. It procreates and one of its offspring threatens to blow itself up unless its demands are met. These things eat radiation and thus are not exactly strangers to decayed or splitting atoms and could even have practical applications. There are cold war implications here as well, but they don’t feel quite earnest, if that’s the right word. Aside from the sluggishness of the plot, it ended up being a lot more provincial than I anticipated, taking place in the same location pretty much throughout the entirety of the novel.
I liked The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle better, featuring as it does a theoretically possible apocalyptic scenario in which a sentient cloud blots the sun to eat the energy. The only way to survive is to communicate with the cloud and tell it to move. It’s nowhere near as literary as Xorander, written as it is by an astronomer, but the implications of intelligent life that isn’t based on DNA, for instance, stayed with me. However, I read it almost a decade ago so I could think differently of it now.
I will definitely give Brooke-Rose’s experimental fiction a chance.
It started off strong but became fairly tiresome about halfway through. It’s told by a set of twins who are as digressive and unorganized in their storytelling as Saleem Sinai of Midnight’s Children. They also incorporate a lot of slang and some wordplay, much of it informed by computer code language. These elements were the most enjoyable to me but even they got old after a while. The plot involves a sentient rock that’s actually an organic computer on a level of intelligence that far surpasses human beings. It procreates and one of its offspring threatens to blow itself up unless its demands are met. These things eat radiation and thus are not exactly strangers to decayed or splitting atoms and could even have practical applications. There are cold war implications here as well, but they don’t feel quite earnest, if that’s the right word. Aside from the sluggishness of the plot, it ended up being a lot more provincial than I anticipated, taking place in the same location pretty much throughout the entirety of the novel.
I liked The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle better, featuring as it does a theoretically possible apocalyptic scenario in which a sentient cloud blots the sun to eat the energy. The only way to survive is to communicate with the cloud and tell it to move. It’s nowhere near as literary as Xorander, written as it is by an astronomer, but the implications of intelligent life that isn’t based on DNA, for instance, stayed with me. However, I read it almost a decade ago so I could think differently of it now.
I will definitely give Brooke-Rose’s experimental fiction a chance.
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