Thursday, December 29, 2011
Presence, by Maureen McHugh
Presence is another story in Maureen McHugh's Mothers and Other Monsters collection, and I liked this one quite a bit. It's a very close and informed view of what it is like to deal with someone with Alzheimer's disease. The growth in this condition would be considered far more tragic if several other impending tragedies like global warming and such were not drowning it out. In this story it is possible to cure the disease, but at great monetary and personal cost--the recovered person is not really in any particular sense the same one. This happens in other conditions as well--see Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for how this transpires in personality disorders. Our identity is indeed fragile. 3 stars.
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The Man Who Saw Seconds, by Alexander Boldizar
I rarely give a book five stars and I did for this one. I did not do it because it is a perfect book. It has rough edges and incongruities. ...
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Shadow Christ is an awfully tough story to explain. It's sort of about playing with time, and religion, and deeper cultural commentary...
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There are some interesting theories out there on what Gene Wolfe's "The Ziggurat" short story means . Indeed, Wolfe is heavil...
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