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rumpled testimony
Aug. 25th, 2010 09:30 pm334: The first I've read of Disch. (I first heard of him when he'd died.) It's weird--I've been on a '70s SF fling lately, it seems. Anyway, I'd checked this out a while ago and, well, last day at the library tomorrow so I figured I ought to actually read it. Interesting; I kept being distracted by the fact that, though 2021 was fifty years away in the 1970s, it's only about ten years away now. One thing that frequently strikes me when reading this sort of near-future SF from the past is just how slowly the world changes. Yes, things have changed since the 70s, in some cases drastically, and there are some marked similarities from the world imagined in 334 to the world of today...
We do this in today's fiction, too--particularly apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic. An asteroid hit the Earth, and everything changed. Zombies happened, and everything changed. X happened; everything changed. The formula stays the same. Maybe it's because we have nuclear weapons, and we know that the world really can change in a second, or a fraction of a second.
(I don't think my generation thinks about that, particularly, quite so much--six months after I was born, the USSR broke up, and now although people have nuclear weapons there hasn't been a serious threat of Someone Going To Use Them that I can remember. Everything's more low-level. But it does exist--it is out there.)
Anyway, to return to 334, I was intrigued by the setup of the second half of the book--like an apartment building in and of itself, I suppose, thinking about it now--but don't quite have the time or interest at the moment to untangle all the connections and various ways that one could read it. I flipped back and forth a bit, reading it... in the end, it's a story about a community, a family, how you live in a world that's a bit utopia and a bit dystopia at the same time.
----
A Returning Power rewrite:
This evening I just started reading what I have so far to get my head back in the revision; making a few brief changes as I go through, but nothing huge.
We do this in today's fiction, too--particularly apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic. An asteroid hit the Earth, and everything changed. Zombies happened, and everything changed. X happened; everything changed. The formula stays the same. Maybe it's because we have nuclear weapons, and we know that the world really can change in a second, or a fraction of a second.
(I don't think my generation thinks about that, particularly, quite so much--six months after I was born, the USSR broke up, and now although people have nuclear weapons there hasn't been a serious threat of Someone Going To Use Them that I can remember. Everything's more low-level. But it does exist--it is out there.)
Anyway, to return to 334, I was intrigued by the setup of the second half of the book--like an apartment building in and of itself, I suppose, thinking about it now--but don't quite have the time or interest at the moment to untangle all the connections and various ways that one could read it. I flipped back and forth a bit, reading it... in the end, it's a story about a community, a family, how you live in a world that's a bit utopia and a bit dystopia at the same time.
----
A Returning Power rewrite:
28 / 70
This evening I just started reading what I have so far to get my head back in the revision; making a few brief changes as I go through, but nothing huge.