Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson

Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America by Robert Charles Wilson


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A very cool book, mildly disappointing. Post oil crisis United States, with a constricted population, Presidential-military-religious government, nineteenth-century values. Country boy Adam Hazzard tells the story of his life with the President's nephew, Julian, in the army and in the capitol of New York.

What's great about this book is that it's post-apocalypse specfic written as a boy's own adventure nineteenth-century novel. And that makes it kind of awesome. The world building is the treat here, because this fundamentalist, stratified, technologically backward future is sad and believable. And Wilson's writing and his control of structure and theme, as usual, shine. This is a book about change and time, about how the future is an imperfect memory of the past, and so is growing up.

So I do give Wilson points for having an actual, you know, reason for the style other than, well, stylism. But that doesn't mean it's not also frustrating and occasionally painful to be confined to Adam's pious, naïve narration. The book is limited to Adam's limitations, except for frequent and often hilarious dramatic ironies (honey, your best friend doesn't like "esthetes," he is so gay. Gay gay gay).

Clever, beautiful in places, perfectly styled. But disappointing to me because of the limitations and all of the classist/sexist baggage that comes along with this kind of pastiche. It's not that Wilson doesn't know about it, because he does. It's just that I got pretty sick of it, after a while, and the way it kept me at a distance.

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Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi

Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Specfic collection, with a tilt towards smart, scary near-future dystopias. People keep comparing him to Ted Chiang. It's accurate in that they're both really good short storyists, but Bacigalupi is doing fundamentally different things than Chiang does. These stories stress-test individual pieces of what we think of as our normal infrastructure – safe drinking water, reproduction, renewable food sources. A few selections, with links to the stories where available online. I recommend the whole collection, though.

"Pop Squad." The problem with immortality is that you really wouldn't want new babies, would you? The one that's sticking with me the most right now. Ouch.

"The Calorie Man," and "Yellow Card Man." Two stories in the same universe, but different hemispheres. When food monocultures are intellectual property, and calories are contraband. Wow. Read them both here.

"The People of Sand and Slag." A different dystopic take on what it would be like if we were all immortal. This freaked me right out. It's prototypical of the collection: beautifully written and effective in its transparent manipulativeness. Read it here.

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