G. H. Lewis
Autor/a de Arthur and the Argonauts
Sobre l'autor
Obres de G. H. Lewis
Etiquetat
Coneixement comú
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Membres
Ressenyes
Estadístiques
- Obres
- 1
- Membres
- 5
- Popularitat
- #1,360,914
- Valoració
- 2.7
- Ressenyes
- 2
- ISBN
- 1
It is not a science fiction novel so, hopefully, the publisher markets it and book sellers and librarians shelve it in a way that makes that fairly clear. I'm afraid G. H. Lewis has made all of their jobs very difficult with this mostly unclassifiable thing. Or maybe I'm just overthinking it all a bit too much. Certainly it contains some small elements of science fiction; namely artificial intelligence, space travel and a generation ship. But those elements are not the main focus of this story and they mostly fade into the background. This is a story about a naive and good-natured young man named Arthur Pifflethorpe who has a tendency to fall in love a bit too hard, and who boards a generation ship full of 5000 colonists headed for an extremely distant extra-solar planet and falls in love with the beautiful, popular, actress/singer/influencer daughter of the billionaire, Musk-like "genius" who built the ship. The military leaders on this ship misguidedly decide to stamp out all love and sex among the colonists, relying instead on in-vitro fertilization and an artificial intelligence named Al (in a bit-too-on-the-nose nod to 2001) to determine the best reproductive matches. This is a story about love, psychology, authoritarianism, and human nature.
Lewis does this strange thing, many times throughout the text, where they speculate, using third-person narration, about the thought processes behind a character's actions. Honestly, the closest thing I could think of to compare it to was the old-school "Rocky and Bullwinkle" voice-over narration, but not as comical. It comes off as an omniscient narrator playing coy with their audience. It's very weird, and feels like it shouldn't actually work, but somehow it still does anyway.
The other thing I wanted to mention was subversion of expectation, and this will enter spoiler territory, so warning...
There are expectations in stories like these that horrifying disaster is always just around the corner and that main characters are going to die. Lewis even mentions these expectations directly in the text. "Human beings are primed to see disaster. So devoted are we to seeking it out that we fashion our histories into sequences of tragedies strung out like pearls to be cherished in devoted remembrances. Thus arises terror of a future in which we see only a sequence of opportunities for everything to go horribly wrong." This observation feels wise and true. But Lewis subverts our expectations beautifully, in a way that doesn't feel terribly cheap or contrived. Your mileage may vary. it worked for me, but I have always been a sucker for a happy ending.
I did enjoy this novel quite a bit, even though I didn't think I was going to initially while only several chapters in. There is a very slight hint of early-Heinlein-teenagers-in-space-adventure vibe to this novel, and that's a good thing, really. I would recommend it to readers of literary fiction, perhaps not to readers of ONLY science fiction, and certainly not to readers of ONLY HARD science fiction.… (més)