Dystopias

I've been reading... just not blogging. Time to catch up with a first installment of reviews.

Hummingbird Salamander
Jeff VanderMeer

As a big fan of VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, I went into this with high hopes. After all, I loved the trilogy and enjoyed Borne... and hummingbirds and salamanders are both among my very favorite creatures! With such lead characters, how could a near-future dystopia by a master of biologically informed future weirdness go wrong? Oh, let me count the ways. Basically, Jeff phoned it in, with mediocre writing and a perfunctory, almost weirdly conventional suspense plot. That the hummingbird and salamander are stuffed is emblematic of the lifelessness of the book. The ending is a shameless cliffhanger setup for the inevitable sequel, which I doubt I will be reading.

Good Neighbors
Sarah Langan

Heathers meets Desperate Housewives meets Stranger Things, this novel is at its best when it explores the intensely fraught relationships among the kids who inhabit this sinkhole-stricken suburb– fraughtness that spills over to their class-conflicted parents. The climax is a little forced, but it's mostly a fun and nasty little piece of work.

Klara and the Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro's latest is more or less a hybrid of his two greatest novels: The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. It is a good read, but not as great as either of its parents. The protagonist and first-person narrator of this novel of the not-so-distant future is the "artificial friend," Klara. Klara is a wonderful literary invention– brilliant, naive, and tragicomic– but I couldn't help thinking that by now we have had plenty of exposure to interesting cyborgs and synths, if only from some recent TV series. Battlestar Galactica, Humans, Westworld (not to mention movies from Blade Runner to Ex Machina)– each has in its fashion explored quite effectively the territory of synths who become conscious of their exploitation and must decide how to react to that forbidden knowledge. Countless books in the sci fi genre have done the same. What has Ishiguro, Nobel laureate, shown us that we have not already seen? Without giving too much away, the book's distinctiveness and suspense rest with the question of whether Klara– smart, perceptive, and empathetic as she is– is ultimately capable of transcending her artificial worldview and recognizing the true horror of her condition. Like Stevens in the The Remains of the Day, Klara is pathologically self-denying and deluded (in her case, by design). Unlike Stevens, Klara seems profoundly admirable and lovable. Which makes the author's treatment of her– and the reader– that much more cruel.