Equations of the Best Short American Reviews

Hey,

So this Kindle thing is really letting me multi-task my reading. Tonight at Diesel I finished up two books for your reviewing pleasure.

First up: Equations of Life by Simon Morden. This is, hands down, some of the best cyberpunk I've read in quite awhile.

Yup. Cyberpunk. Thought that was long gone didn't you, chummer?

It's all here in spades -- an ecologically devastated Earth (thanks to religious wingnuts with a bomb), the London Metrozone, a barely controlled warren of urban sprawl, criminal megacorps, gritty street operatives who are working on fundamental physics problems in their spare time, quantum computers and AI, jacking in, Bladerunner chic, genetically modified warrior nuns -- it's everything you could want.

Our protagonist is Samuil Petrovich, a young genius with a bum ticker who fled the chaos of St. Petersburg to come to the London Metrozone and do postdoc work in physics. He hopes to lie low, do some good research and eventually make his carefully crafted lie of an existence bullet-proof. Then one day he sees a beautiful young woman about to be kidnapped and, in a moment of uncharacteristic charity, he saves her. She happens to be the daughter of the most powerful member of the Japanese diaspora who's looking to rebuild sunken Japan in VR. He's also the head of the largest crime syndicate in the London Metrozone. And while he's happy Samuil saved his daughter, the Russian mafia who were attempting to kidnap her are less than pleased. Further, Inspector Chain of the London police starts to take a keen and unwanted interest in Samuil.

Things get a little out-of-control after that.

Like I say, really good book in the cyberpunk genre. Nothing particularly new, but things are much more informed and influenced by existing technology and socio-political developments. How much relevance it will have in 5, 10, 20 years is hard to predict, but it's nice to see the genre stretching its legs. Samuil makes for a fun, mostly amoral protagonist.

This is the start of a three book series, but this volume ends at a good stopping point without leaving things hanging. Additionally, the books debuted in the UK so they'll be rapidly making their way over to the US. The second book is out now and the third will be out next month. So no waiting around if you like the first one.

The second book I finished today is Best American Short PLays 2008-2009 edited by Barbara Parisi. Pretty much is what you'd expect it to be. A curated sample of 1-act plays released in the time-frame indicated.

Because it's an anthology work, the quality ranges all over the place. For the most part they were ok. One of them, The Lovers and Other of Eugene O'Neil was pretty dire. The problem is that the play is 75-80% stage direction that explains to the nth degree how everything should be done on the stage and, even worse, explicitly spells out what Every Single Thing Means(TM) -- not that any of this meaning or symbolism is ever conveyed to the audience. I can see what the playwright was going for, but it's just tedious to wade through and I found it hard to believe that an audience would care much.

I was also surprised at how technically demanding many of the plays were. There was the assumption that many of the plays would make heavy use of A/V projections or complex set pieces -- whereas my theatrical upbringing assumes I've got a few black cubes...maybe.

But the lemons and the technical audacity were more than offset by III by Joe Salvatore. This play recounts the polyamorous relationship of Glenway Wescott, George Platt Lynes, and Monroe Wheeler -- artists working in the 20's and 30's who formed a complex homosexual triad. The difficulties of being gay and polyamorous in the 20's and 30's must have been formidable and the play uses the men's diaries and letters to one another as the core for the text.

This is one of the few plays around polyamory that I've ever read and is easily one of the best handled. I've always felt that the options for dealing with polyamory on the stage are limited. If the people involved do poly well, that really sucks out a lot of the drama. If they do it poorly...it's just people behaving badly. This play really touches at the core of trying to build a working relationship between more than two people and it doesn't shy away from either the joys or the difficulties of the process. Just an outstanding play and something I'd seriously like to run under the Theatre@First auspices (so I need to get out in front of the steering committee soon so it won't get lost). Ideally, I'd like to try and find a couple of other one-act plays surrounding unusual relationships and package them all together for an evening.

Anyway, there were a few other nice plays but III was the real standout here.

Finally, a pre-review, review -- the new Lapham's Quarterly is out on the stands. The topic is Work and it's been great reading so far. I'll have more on it soon, but you can probably just go ahead and pick it up next time you're in a bookstore.

later
Tom

Equations of the Best Short American Reviews

Hey,

So this Kindle thing is really letting me multi-task my reading. Tonight at Diesel I finished up two books for your reviewing pleasure.

First up: Equations of Life by Simon Morden. This is, hands down, some of the best cyberpunk I've read in quite awhile.

Yup. Cyberpunk. Thought that was long gone didn't you, chummer?

It's all here in spades -- an ecologically devastated Earth (thanks to religious wingnuts with a bomb), the London Metrozone, a barely controlled warren of urban sprawl, criminal megacorps, gritty street operatives who are working on fundamental physics problems in their spare time, quantum computers and AI, jacking in, Bladerunner chic, genetically modified warrior nuns -- it's everything you could want.

Our protagonist is Samuil Petrovich, a young genius with a bum ticker who fled the chaos of St. Petersburg to come to the London Metrozone and do postdoc work in physics. He hopes to lie low, do some good research and eventually make his carefully crafted lie of an existence bullet-proof. Then one day he sees a beautiful young woman about to be kidnapped and, in a moment of uncharacteristic charity, he saves her. She happens to be the daughter of the most powerful member of the Japanese diaspora who's looking to rebuild sunken Japan in VR. He's also the head of the largest crime syndicate in the London Metrozone. And while he's happy Samuil saved his daughter, the Russian mafia who were attempting to kidnap her are less than pleased. Further, Inspector Chain of the London police starts to take a keen and unwanted interest in Samuil.

Things get a little out-of-control after that.

Like I say, really good book in the cyberpunk genre. Nothing particularly new, but things are much more informed and influenced by existing technology and socio-political developments. How much relevance it will have in 5, 10, 20 years is hard to predict, but it's nice to see the genre stretching its legs. Samuil makes for a fun, mostly amoral protagonist.

This is the start of a three book series, but this volume ends at a good stopping point without leaving things hanging. Additionally, the books debuted in the UK so they'll be rapidly making their way over to the US. The second book is out now and the third will be out next month. So no waiting around if you like the first one.

The second book I finished today is Best American Short PLays 2008-2009 edited by Barbara Parisi. Pretty much is what you'd expect it to be. A curated sample of 1-act plays released in the time-frame indicated.

Because it's an anthology work, the quality ranges all over the place. For the most part they were ok. One of them, The Lovers and Other of Eugene O'Neil was pretty dire. The problem is that the play is 75-80% stage direction that explains to the nth degree how everything should be done on the stage and, even worse, explicitly spells out what Every Single Thing Means(TM) -- not that any of this meaning or symbolism is ever conveyed to the audience. I can see what the playwright was going for, but it's just tedious to wade through and I found it hard to believe that an audience would care much.

I was also surprised at how technically demanding many of the plays were. There was the assumption that many of the plays would make heavy use of A/V projections or complex set pieces -- whereas my theatrical upbringing assumes I've got a few black cubes...maybe.

But the lemons and the technical audacity were more than offset by III by Joe Salvatore. This play recounts the polyamorous relationship of Glenway Wescott, George Platt Lynes, and Monroe Wheeler -- artists working in the 20's and 30's who formed a complex homosexual triad. The difficulties of being gay and polyamorous in the 20's and 30's must have been formidable and the play uses the men's diaries and letters to one another as the core for the text.

This is one of the few plays around polyamory that I've ever read and is easily one of the best handled. I've always felt that the options for dealing with polyamory on the stage are limited. If the people involved do poly well, that really sucks out a lot of the drama. If they do it poorly...it's just people behaving badly. This play really touches at the core of trying to build a working relationship between more than two people and it doesn't shy away from either the joys or the difficulties of the process. Just an outstanding play and something I'd seriously like to run under the Theatre@First auspices (so I need to get out in front of the steering committee soon so it won't get lost). Ideally, I'd like to try and find a couple of other one-act plays surrounding unusual relationships and package them all together for an evening.

Anyway, there were a few other nice plays but III was the real standout here.

Finally, a pre-review, review -- the new Lapham's Quarterly is out on the stands. The topic is Work and it's been great reading so far. I'll have more on it soon, but you can probably just go ahead and pick it up next time you're in a bookstore.

later
Tom