What I’ve Been Reading – March 2015
I’m not dead! And neither is Licence Revoked: A Cyberpunk Novella, although excitingly it looks like it might get renamed. And might even get classified as a very short novel. Who knows? The future is an exciting place!
Speaking of the future, I’ve been reading a lot of the science fiction greats, recently. Aside from Lock In by John Scalzi, here they are in no particular order:
All of the above are featured in NPR’s Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books, save for Lock In, but Scalzi’s Old Man’s War ranks at #74 so I’m going to pretend that counts.
All right. Now that I’ve bombarded you with excellent covers and fantastic authors, I’m going to admit I did something nerdy. Faced with wanting to polish Licence Revoked/[insertnewtitlehere], I dissected Fahrenheit 451 and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? down by themes and scenes, just like we did back in high school. And the result was amazing.
I used to hate reading books for school. Most of them were pretty terrible, or if they weren’t terrible, they didn’t hold up to the deep analysis that school demanded unless they were Shakespeare. It was always a rare and miraculous thing to discover a book I actually liked more with analysis. It certainly made me appreciate the amount of work the author had put into it.
I’d already loved Fahrenheit 451. And I’d enjoyed Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? although I must admit I was still pretty confused about it. Well pulling them apart made me see the sheer genius of both. Because each and every scene established something powerful and potent about the themes the two of them were exploring. And each and every character played into those themes as well. And so each scene built on those themes, and explored, and twisted, and built, and built, until at the end, hey presto! A masterpiece.
So aside from telling me what I need to do with Licence Revoked (like rename it), I’m grateful to the exercise for just blowing my mind with Bradbury and Dick’s mastery of storytelling. And for making me appreciate the stories better. In fact, I’m already looking forward to trying the exercise with other books I’ve read or will read. Nothing like a deep look at a story to make you reflect on the beautiful disaster we call the human race.
How about you? Any books you’ve enjoyed reading and analysing?