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IN THE PIPELINE
OCTOBER - NOVEMBER, 2003
Altered Carbon, Richard K. Morgan. A noir science fiction detective novel with many of the set-piece elements of cyberpunk as a backdrop for some good writing, plot development and, within the confines of hard-boiled detective fiction, good character development. Unlike most cybperpunk, this story is set in a more distant future, one in which extra-solar colonies have been established. The main plot elements revolve around a technology for recording, storing and transfering human identiy among different bodies, which also provides the mechanism for development of ideas about identity. All of which was somewhat spoiled for me by Morgan's failure to make all the different technologies he plays with mesh well with the society he creates: The very advanced technology doesn't seem to have had nearly the impact on society that one would expect, so that we get basically Bladerunner with body-hopping. Even with this failing, it was a good read. Recommended to SF fans.
The New Chinese Empire: And What It Means for the United States, Ross Terrill. Terrill's been a sinologist for 40 years and this book expresses his current thinking on China's foreign policy and the present polity's character as an empire in the classical sense rather than as a modern nation-state. Although the book could have used some more editing (it's a little repetitious and the tone is occasionally too shrill), this is a worthwhile resource for the China specialist, since Terrill brings together all of the basic academic theories relating to the Chinese conception of national identity relative to the outside world, illustrating them with good examples from history and contemporary affairs. Recommended for the specialist.
The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown. I was talked into reading this book by a client who recommended it enthusiastically. I don't normally read "thrillers" so the cliches and mechanical writing took some getting used to -- I call these kinds of titles "airport books" since you can often read the whole book during one long business trip and the simple prose makes it easy to digest in distracted chunks during travel. At any rate, as such books go, this one was pretty good, and did conjure up a lot of arcane knowledge about Christian and pagan iconography I hadn't thought about in a long time. (N.B. I do enjoy fiction with wooden prose, but my particular taste runs to science fiction, which is usually just as mechanically written.)
SEPTEMBER, 2003
Life and Death in Shanghai, Cheng Nien. A personal account of an elderly Chinese woman's account of the Cultural Revolution. Cheng Nien was relatively unique in being a mature, completely "bi-cultural" observer of the events that rocked China between 1966 and 1976. She spent the worst years of the Cultural Revolution in cruel solitary confinement, but she tells the story in alternating passages that address her own personal story and the larger events in the country. The middle part of the book, recounting her time in solitary confinment is a very good "prison story," detailing how she maintained her sanity and moral integrity in the face of psychological and physical torment by the Red Guards. Recommended.
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