So there’s this kind of reverse engineering you can do with some music. It might be entirely bullshit, but it’s fun. What you do is take a band you like and trace back their entire career to a single influential song by a sort of demi-god of music that came before them. In some case, it might even be a single not, moment, riff, whatever. So mine: No Quarter by Led Zeppelin explains the entire career of Tool.
Others might be: Run run run by Velvet Underground is all of Violent Femmes.
This novel does that same thing. Contained with this novel is all of William Gibson, it’s all of Lois McMaster Bujold’s scifi, and it’s all of The Expanse books….and probably a million more.
And still, it feels like a completely fresh, hilarious, weird, and near perfect novel on its own. Neil Gaiman says you can tell a 1950s scifi from every one of its words. And this one stands alone against type.
So there’s none of that “I am a man who a man, and men like women, and women are this way” or any of that story built entirely out of a frail conceit with a narrative plopped in there to simply serve that conceit.
This is a story and a story first. The entirety of the story is the point, and the various ideas that come together to help tell that story serve the purpose of the story.
It’s a retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo, but it’s also so much more than. It’s sci fi, it’s space opera, it’s cyber punk (somehow), and it’s all kinds of other things. And it’s written in the 1950s and somehow not boring or trite.
(Photo: https://litreactor.com/columns/tigers-and-telepaths-an-alfred-bester-primer)
this is honestly one of my favourite books in the world. It just surprised me so much!