Robopocalypse

by Daniel H Wilson
Fic Wilson, Daniel H

Robopocalypse had considerable hype behind it before it even was on bookshelves due to the fact that Steven Spielberg's production company optioned the rights to it based off of an early draft. After the book came out it and people read it; it became the book known as "the World War Z with robots." This due to similar plot and writing structure of the two. World War Z by Max Brooks has been a good seller and is also being turn into a movie starring Brad Pitt and coming to theaters at the end of 2012. I have never read it, but I did get an advanced read of Robopocalypse and after sitting on one of my bookshelves with other need to read books I decided why not. I was coming down from finishing the great Ready Player One and was looking for another good science fiction book to read. I was rather pleased with this book. I only wish that Linda Hamilton had done the audio book to give it that real Terminator vibe.

The book starts off with the war on robots over and one of the main characters is going through and trying to reconstruct a history of how it started and how humanity on a world wide front was able to beat them. The plot starts from the beginning of true A.I. coming into being and from there each chapter is told through a particular point of view. The author does a good job of ending each chapter with how certain tactics will become to mean more in the future as well as give you a sense of how robots existed in the world before they turned.

I can't wait til the movie is all I can really say. The book is very enjoyable and has the popcorn fueled feel to it were this isn't a high achievement in literary terms but one fun ride and a real page turner. Discovery is a large part in the enjoyment so if a book called Robopocalypse sounds like something you would enjoy then I am sure you will.

The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides
Fic Eugenides, Jeffrey

Jeffrey Eugenides has written three novels. The Virgin Suicides was turned into a popular indie film. Middlesex won the Pulitzer prize in fiction, and with The Marriage Plot he creates a modern telling of Austen and other Regency novel writers. The main plot behind those and this novel is coming of age and falling in love and getting married. The idea is that marriage is the plot and is what is at stake.

Swapping out 1800s England with early 1980s New England, we find 3 characters who take turns narrating their own tales. There is Madeleine who is the object of affection of two suitors, Leonard and Mitchell. Leonard is a brilliant, manic depressive from the Pacific Northwest, and Mitchell is a Religious Studies major from Detroit. Leonard is tall and meaty and Mitchell is skinny and Greek. The novel's beginning finds them on graduation day but a lot of the book you will find yourself at some future point and then back story is told to get you back to that point. I found this structure to be rather beautifully constructed when it deals with its characters, but it dragged on me when it slipped into small Wikipedia entries about random things like semiotics, eastern religion, gene-splicing, and depression.

The characters do not live in a Jane Austen world and no simple resolution will do for them. These are smart but young people who are looking for a way to live in the world and have an idea of what they want and do not want but no idea of how to obtain it or if it will make them happy.

I enjoyed this book and I wish Eugenides was a faster writer so we could possibly see these characters again in another decade when they are in their forties. If you are looking for a sprawling character study book with overly bright New Englanders to fill your post-Jonathan Franzen Freedom hangover then look no further.

The Infernals

by John Connolly
Fic Connolly, John

The Infernals is the sequel to the author's 2009 book, The Gates, and while it is possible to skip that one and pick this one up I would recommend it for two reasons. One is that it was a very fun book and the other is that while the author does recap and mention in brief what happens in the first novel a lot of the humor and heart would be missed. The obvious solution is to get both and have a fun time. I wasn't expecting there to be a sequel to The Gates but when I was looking over new releases I was pleasantly surprised and checked it out immediately.

I am a very big fan of British humor and there is a large hole left by Douglas Adams who wasn't nearly as prolific as I would have liked. John Connolly who started as a successful mystery writer and then branched off with what was almost a fantasy novel in The Book of Lost Things. All of his books at most bookstores though are still in mystery. I'm not a big mystery fan so I hope he continues to write more offbeat stories with loads of humor in them like this and The Gates.

The Gates was about a tween named Samuel Johnson and his dog, Boswell, who while trick-or-treating three days early witnesses a Satanic ritual that sets forth events that opens a portal to Hell. In the process of trying to defeat evil, Samuel and Boswell, befriend a demon named Nurd who helps them stop Satan and his army from taking over Earth. The Infernals takes place around a year after The Gates and has most of the community trying to forget that demons tried to invade their community. Samuel is trying to talk to a girl he likes and Nurd is cruising around in Hell in Samuel's dad's Aston Martin. The demons are not happy about being defeated and while they can not open a portal for them to leave Hell once again they can bring Samuel along with a group of angry dwarves and an ice cream truck and driver to Hell. Samuel has to once again be a hero.

The book is rather funny and some of the after affects on the demons who visited Earth are high points in the story. The book moves at a faster pace than its predecessor as it doesn't have to build up multiple story lines from scratch. I would recommend this to fans of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett.

Ready Player One

by Ernest Cline

Fic Cline, Ernest

This is the book I read after the very good The Night Circus after trying to pick a few other books and failing to have any interest in them. It was another recommendation by a friend who pretty much told me it had a lot of references to 80s movies which sold me right away. The inside cover told me it was more of a science fiction story but just as The Night Circus was sort of a fantasy novel they are both still categorized under general fiction. This is an important facet as while this is a story of a future dystopian society set roughly thirty years from now and has plenty of technology and other futuristic contraptions, the majority of the book is centered around a coming of age story. The science fiction elements shouldn't scare you off. If you are familiar with computers and video games as they are now it really isn't that much different in the book nor all that important.

I think the one big requirement of enjoying this novel is how much do you love the 80s, actually like the late 70s-80s with some more current references thrown in for good measure, because they are constantly mentioned and play integral part of the story. There is one part where the character has to play the Matthew Broderick role in the movie Wargames, and if you haven't seen it before then you would of course be lost nor would you get the enjoyment the main character has. I believe I could be friends with both the main characters of the novel and the author Ernest Cline as we both share many of the same interests and loves of pop culture.

It is pretty hard to say what the book is about. The first 100 pages or so is world and character building and there is still a lot of new pieces of the world added in constantly. It is a rich world to say the least and I would love to read more of it. The book is basically set in the 2040s with the world kind of going in the crapper and a huge energy crisis has been going on for decades. Basically all the things we are currently trying to avoid and scared of but just a few decades from now where they came true. Most people escape the dreariness by living life in an immersive virtual reality world called the Oasis. The creator of the Oasis died several years earlier and created a game within the Oasis to give away control of his company and a vast sum of money to the winner. Our main character is one of those that is dedicating his life to winning. He is 17.

I am fairly versed in 80s movies and television shows being born in 1983 and but I still had to look up some references and mostly had a small second hand knowledge of pre-Nintendo video games. I still rather enjoyed this book and would say it has been my favorite of the year. With Christmas coming up, this is a good gift idea for that person who reads some and has more than one Star Wars t-shirt.

The Night Circus

by Erin Morgenstern
Fic Morgenstern, Erin

The Night Circus is a very hard book to explain to someone what it's about. A few people recommended it to me but none could really capsulate a brief synopsis. All that I could really ascertain was that everyone I knew who was reading it loved it and that it had a pair of competing illusionists in it.

As the name would suggest the main setting of the book is a circus that is only operated at night. The book switches between the plot and general details about the circus, it's history, and anecdotes from people who love it. The magic used within this book is real, and there are hints of how the system works but not so much that it bogs down the story. There is very little that slows the story down and with the short chapter style used here it moves along very fast. All of the characters here and interesting and one of the drawbacks is that they are not given enough back story to really understand them. This actually leads up to a rather anticlimactic ending as I didn't feel the tension release in the denouement. I attribute this to the short chapters and how well the author built everything up so much it became pretty transparent where it was all going.

In the end I really enjoyed this book but I didn't love it. It's kind of like a night at the circus. It feels you with whimsy and wonder but by the end you are ready for it to be over.

Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror

by Jason Zinoman
791.43617 Zino

New Horror came out during the same period as Lucas, Spielberg, and Scorsese were creating a New Hollywood, so from the late sixties to 1980. The author explores the landmark films that helped re-distinguish a dieing genre and launch some of the most prolific careers of the last several decades.

Horror films were a very big obsession of mine dating back to the summer after my 8th grade when I saw Scream at the movie theatres. It was the first genre of film that I whole heartily embraced. I would go to my local video store and rent 10 VHS tapes on their buy one get one free Wednesdays and watch them throughout the week. I started by seeing all the greats and every picture mentioned by the characters of Scream and then delved deeper from there. I had seen most of the films mentioned here in this book and all of the titles each chapter focuses on such as Rosemary's Baby, Carrie, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween many times.

I found it interesting of how horror was looked at during the time period before these directors made their mark. Were most horror movies were for drive-in double features and Saturday matinees that focused more on cheesy monster movies and Gothic vampires and werewolves. Even with movies like Hitchcock's Psycho and The Birds, their was little respect for the genre until Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist came and Hollywood took notice of these huge hits. Though the directors of those movies would never admit to them being horror movies which further illustrates how they were thought of. When I went in to see Scream in the Summer of 1997, horror movies were thought of as well in little regard as an endless number of sequels killed off most enthusiasm the fame New Horror directors had created.

As a horror fan the stories told in the book are nice. There is no deep and long engaged dissection of each film but the stories of each film from early production to its legacy that has lived on from its fans to its remakes are deeper than the trivia page you would find on IMDB or Wikipedia.

The Map of Time

Felix J Palma
Fic Palma, Felix J

There has been a small push in fiction literature over the last decade with books coming out that feature writers in similar plots that they themselves could have written. I saw a blurb about The Map of Time in a review journal and thought it sounded interesting and when I was waiting for the next Wheel of Time book to be ordered and processed I decided to pick it up at our local bookstore as my Summer read. (It was checked out here)

H.G. Wells is not one of my favorite Victorian writers, but thanks to other mediums I really love him as a character. There was the 1979 movie, Time After Time, which had Wells tracking down Jack the Ripper in then present day San Francisco. There was also the mini-series, The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells, that used some of his short stories as actual adventures of his.

If you are looking for a more straight up science-fiction tale then you probably need to look else where even if the cover has a steam punk vibe this is more of a standard fiction title. The real delight of this book is the writing and the long passages and anecdotes the are peppered in the novel. Many famous writers and notable celebrities make appearances other than Wells including Jack the Ripper, Marie Kelly, The Elephant Man, Henry James, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Bram Stoker who are either referenced, are actual characters or help frame the plot.

One of the main criticisms of the book and I sympathize with those readers is that the book is divided into three sections and each section is only partially linked. H.G. Wells is advertised as the main character of the book and while he may appear the most often, he is only a side character in the first two parts. If you grow frustrated and quit reading or it slows you down then I feel that your enjoyment of the book will be greatly diminished. You have to read til the very end to see the whole picture of the story and while I wish it had been a little more vague or at least less spelled out to me, the ending is rather a spectacular way to tie up all the events. And while I want to be vague about it, so all I will say is that the book constantly undermines your expectations and this may turn you off as it is playing a game with you. Every time you think you have the book figured out it switches the narrative around and that is kind of rare and delightful.