The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay August 28, 2007
Posted by showmescifi in clone wars, comic books, comicbooks, comics, Dark Times, darktower, fan films, fox, kavalier & clay, kavalier and clay, las vegas, Michael Chabon, michaelchabon, pulitzer, pulitzer prize, sarah conner, serentiy, star wars fan films, the amazing adventures of kavalier and clay, zarek.1 comment so far
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
From time to time, I actually stray from reading core SciFi pulp like Star Wars and Star Trek to more …literary works.
After sitting on my shelf for years a recent flight to Europe gave me enough pause to read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. This is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel, which usually is an automatic disqualification for me since i’m not a fan of literary works… this is an exception.
Essentially its the tale of two boys becoming adults in the comic book industry. Now of course there is alot of back and side story, WWII being a major plot backdrop.
Chabon’s style is easy and fluid often interspersed with the narrators voice filling in plot elements. Many times things are left unsaid and the scene changes or jumps ahead and only later we find out what happened.
The beginning, middle and ‘almost end’ of the book kept me enthralled as our ‘heroes’ Sammy Clay and Joe Kavalier go through life’s adventures..the end though wasn’t particularly interesting to me and it felt almost like a let down (read it yourself and see if you agree).
That said, this is one of the best books that i’ve read in years and certainly better than the last Chabon book i read (which was actually written latter) – The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union – Michael Chabon July 18, 2007
Posted by showmescifi in Books, Michael Chabon, Sci Fi, science fiction, sciencefiction, scifi, serentiy, Star Trek Games, star trek tng, starwars, wikipedia, Yiddish Policemens Union.2 comments
What’s a review for The Yiddish Policemen’s Union doing on ShowMeSciFi? Easy – it’s a speculative piece of literary science fiction in that it occurs in a fictional timeline that doesn’t exist.
Similiar but not nearly as dark as Philip K. Dick’s The Man In The HIgh Castle – Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union deals with a US that is different than the one we know in that the State of Israel never survives and as such a seperate temporary homeland for the Jews is carved out of a desolate place of Alaska.
This is their story on the eve of ‘reversion’ the event which will force the Jews out of Alaska as the State of Alaska retakes the land.
It’s an interesting concept and one that drew me in on the speculative – what if – side.
The actual story is another matter. Essentially it’s a murder whodunnit against the speculative history backdrop which is o.k except for the fact that Chabon does a very very very poor job of building a case against the murder. It’s as if he wrote 300 pages and realized he had to pin the crime on someone so he just threw a dart.
The lead character Meyer Landsman is the only one with any real depth the others are sad caricatures that are poorly draw. I would have given up on this book well before reading to the end were it not for Chabon’s easy style. It’s unfortunate that his plot was so utterly lacking.
Serenity Trounces Star Wars ?! April 3, 2007
Posted by showmescifi in firefly, scifi, serenity, serentiy, Star Wars.11 comments
There is no question that Firefly and the Serenity movie are great works of pop SciFi.
BUT..are they better than Star Wars?
Apparently that’s what readers of SFX voted in a recent poll.
At first I thought the poll was some kind of April fools joke..turns out it’s just SFX that is the fool.
Star Wars is the greatest SciFi enterprise of all time period. While others can be extremely good nothing yet produced in the history of the planet earth is better. PERIOD. Nuff Said.
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