Because I care

[james_davis_nicoll]

As mentioned in comments, Dan Simmons has a dystopic novel coming out.

Canada, used to dividing itself into smaller parts to appease ethnic groups, languages, and claims to prior ownership, [...]

Is that a snipe at Nunavut?

Comments

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

O, Canada,
Dystopic, PC:
We stand in fear
In fear of thee...

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

I picture Simmons rubbing himself with pork grease to keep the Muslims away.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Dear Ghu, it's like reading the John Birch Society manifesto.

-- Steve didn't make to to the Canada part. The dog-whistles were hurting his ears.

Dooooomed America...

[http://users.livejournal.com/krin_o_o_/]

wants to file a copyright infringement on this vision.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

"Sounds like a boring premise on which to build an exciting dystopian novel."

Yes. Yes it does.

[jwgh]

This seems like a book which could have been written forty years ago.

Hard to pick out one single piece of stupid

[(Anonymous)]

but the "tens of thousands of rusting windmills" are probably up there.

(Modern windmills are made of composites. The turbine housing is fiberglass. They don't rust.)

Also, it's unclear why the mountains are covered with windmills that don't work. Did the wind run out of gas?


Doug M.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Damn that looks to be a serious case of brain-eater. Definitely a nasty thing to be avoided.

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

I keep wanting to post something, but I can't get past wordless disgust.

That 'Time Traveller" story he put on his website ensured I'll never buy another Dan Simmons book.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

A few months ago, I thought to re-read all the Hyperion Cantos. I stopped. A few weeks ago, I thought to take all the Simmons books I own and take them to the used book store. I delayed. I may now tear them, and bury them in my front yard under my son's Linden tree. Hopefully it's Canadian hardiness, used to sharp autumns and long winters, can withstand this poison and continue to flourish.

[scott-lynch.livejournal.com]

Ah, christ, I read the announcement.

"Is Flashback a novel stating Dan Simmons' political biases?

In a word... no. In two words... hell no."

And yet, here's his old hobbyhorse Eurabia, buried in the quagmire of this extended press release / outline / spoilerfest:

"We also get glimpses that tell us that the Global Islamic Caliphate -- only a fervent fever dream now in a billion or so minds -- is real enough in the post-Die-Ought-If days of Flashback. The Global Caliphate is a giant crescent, its central curve and core and capital in the Mideast where the triumphant states of Iran and Syria struggled toward mere regional hegemony in our own day. It seems that they succeeded. And then some. The northern horn of the Caliphate crescent stretches from the heart of the Mideast (Mecca and Medina, no longer part of the dead state Saudi Arabia at the heart of this heart) across Turkey and eastern Europe and all of Western Europe with the sharp tip of its crescent ending in Canada."

Yep. Doesn't contain a speck of Simmons' real-world positions, no sir.

[sanskritabelt.livejournal.com]

Rather suprisingly, Nippon -- as Japan now prefers to be known -- has brought back the death penalty after almost a century. It applies only to users and sellers of the drug called flashback. Even more surprisingly, Nippon strictly enforces the law: most of the men and women on Nippon's 3-month-max Death Row are teenagers.


(reminder that in our timeline, Japan still has the death penalty)

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I can't believe Simmons thinks his politics are concealed-- just about everything in the book is a conservative issue. It's not just the Eurabia.

[(Anonymous)]

Boy, he really has pretty much every right-wing nutjob talking point neatly lined up there, doesn't he? It's funny how when they go wingnut, they seem to adopt them wholesale with no annoying heresies like "the Japanese aren't really out to get us."

As reading experiences go, that was like having someone fart in your face.

(BTW, wasn't this expanded from a short story re the detective and the asassinated Japanese guy?)

Bruce

[(Anonymous)]

Am I in a different universe in which Constantine founded his city in 260, and in which the Byzantine empire didn't fall until 1532? Or where Hagia Sophia was briefly a Roman Catholic church because the Greeks were just feeling friendly?

Of course, he's seriously confused as to the use of "logos", but then writers and words just don't mix, see OSC and "observatory".

William Hyde

[caper-est.livejournal.com]

Will nobody else appreciate the brilliantly ironic tension between the scourge of the 'Flashback' drug, and the "I wish a buck was still silver" nature of the whole bad trip?

Here is an uncompromisingly in-your-face evocation of the withdrawal symptoms of the addict who has finally run out of mental flash-powder, and left to confront the irreparably broken horror of a universe in which the 1980s died.

Forever.

[grimjim.livejournal.com]

If they're not the author's personal beliefs, then he's pandering to Glenn Beckian conservative fears to make a buck.

Is American conservative dystopian fiction becoming the counterpoint of the USA (Fortress USA seemingly failing in its struggle against godless Communism militant Islam the nihilistic enemy of the day) going out with a whimper rather than the bang of an Apocalypse (nuclear or divine)?

Moar teeming hordes

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

In Mary Beard's review recommended by oursin, savaging Robert Hughes's Rome, this phrase:

A visit to the overcrowded Sistine chapel has become, he insists, close to unbearable, "a kind of living death for high culture" – which can only get worse "when post-communist prosperity has taken hold in China", and the Chinese flood in by the million.

Likely!

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

According to the Homeland Defense Security Agency's annual assessment, the Sierra Club has become a terrorist organization, responsible for more than three thousand suicide and terror bombings a year. (This makes it one of the minor terrorist groups operating in America in Flashback's near-future present.)

[le-trombone.livejournal.com]

Nick Bottom? Really? I know Simmons likes to make allusions to literature but this is an odd choice even for foreshadowing.

Huh. Just how many times is Val Bottom described as sixteen? I count five. How many times is Nick Bottom described as ex-(homicide) detective? Six. He loves Dara more than life itself twice. I realize that this isn't an edited copy, but I still expect better writing than this.

Hmm. "The most common baby name in Canada in the time of Flashback is Mohammed. (Way back in 2010, this was the most common baby name in Sweden.)"

I've checked multiple sites, and maybe not, although it is (counting variant spellings) beating Mitchell out as the most popular boy's name beginning with M. And one site says that it is the most popular boy's name in Oslo, but of course Oslo is not Sweden¹.

And one has to ask: so, one's name is one's destiny?

---
1. It's also not Norway, but that's not as funny.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

this is also the basic plot of _strange days_, the movie, it just occurred to me.

i expect it to not be as good, though.