Post by Max Sinister on Jul 8, 2023 23:23:25 GMT
What can I say about it? Good things first: It's a very ambitious project, it's IMO better than his other books I read (NY 2140, Ministry of the Future), it even goes deeper into big philosophical questions, and thanks to it, I found this essay by him. Thoughts, how Great Men(tm), material conditions, and the butterfly effect work together to create history.
Does this book have any flaws? As said, the scope is very ambitious - more than that, in fact. That's the book's strength - but also its flaw. We are living in a pretty big world, and it's hard to describe its many cultures adequately. Even if you restrict yourself mostly to the big ones - in this book, Chinese, Indians, Muslims, and to a lesser extent Japanese and North American natives. It becomes even worse if you describe this world without Europeans at ten different points in time - from shortly after the catastrophe struck, to a very postmodern-looking world. - There are althistorians who write big scope TLs in the typical date-and-event format (and I am one of them), but these at least allow you an overview. KSR mostly describes his world from the necessarily restricted PoV of his characters.
Oh yes, characters. There are at least three important ones in each of the ten books. If he didn't use the trick that they're somehow all connected by reincarnation, it'd be pretty impossible to adequately describe them, to make them real interesting characters, and even so, that's quite something to achieve.
But there's something else which seems to big of a scope to describe it. KSR wrote about the scientist as a hero. Something that appeals to me, you can think why. Unfortunately, he didn't pull it off well. As some cultural historian I like described it, you have to be at least half a genius to describe a genius convincingly. And here, it breaks: KSR isn't a genius on Einstein level (and in one story in the book, he tries describing scientists inventing nothing less than the scientific method, in Turkestan instead of Western Europe as IOTL), not even half of it. That doesn't mean he was stupid, because he isn't. He's certainly smarter than many people out there, even educated people, as many of his readers are. But true geniuses are still several levels higher.
It reminds me of something happening in a fantasy novel some guy I used to play role-playing games (set in the world he created) with. This fantasy world is threatened by a catastrophe at some point, so some characters decide to go through the whole world and warn everybody. The problem: When they thought their world was as big as an average US state max, it turned out that they had to deal with at least the whole continental US, if not more.
Oh, and the question on whether the book describes an utopia or just a very different world: I side with the latter.
Does this book have any flaws? As said, the scope is very ambitious - more than that, in fact. That's the book's strength - but also its flaw. We are living in a pretty big world, and it's hard to describe its many cultures adequately. Even if you restrict yourself mostly to the big ones - in this book, Chinese, Indians, Muslims, and to a lesser extent Japanese and North American natives. It becomes even worse if you describe this world without Europeans at ten different points in time - from shortly after the catastrophe struck, to a very postmodern-looking world. - There are althistorians who write big scope TLs in the typical date-and-event format (and I am one of them), but these at least allow you an overview. KSR mostly describes his world from the necessarily restricted PoV of his characters.
Oh yes, characters. There are at least three important ones in each of the ten books. If he didn't use the trick that they're somehow all connected by reincarnation, it'd be pretty impossible to adequately describe them, to make them real interesting characters, and even so, that's quite something to achieve.
But there's something else which seems to big of a scope to describe it. KSR wrote about the scientist as a hero. Something that appeals to me, you can think why. Unfortunately, he didn't pull it off well. As some cultural historian I like described it, you have to be at least half a genius to describe a genius convincingly. And here, it breaks: KSR isn't a genius on Einstein level (and in one story in the book, he tries describing scientists inventing nothing less than the scientific method, in Turkestan instead of Western Europe as IOTL), not even half of it. That doesn't mean he was stupid, because he isn't. He's certainly smarter than many people out there, even educated people, as many of his readers are. But true geniuses are still several levels higher.
It reminds me of something happening in a fantasy novel some guy I used to play role-playing games (set in the world he created) with. This fantasy world is threatened by a catastrophe at some point, so some characters decide to go through the whole world and warn everybody. The problem: When they thought their world was as big as an average US state max, it turned out that they had to deal with at least the whole continental US, if not more.
Oh, and the question on whether the book describes an utopia or just a very different world: I side with the latter.