I am a jaded SF reader with a degree in philosophy so I have to say The This scratched all my itches extremely well. Yes, it's a difficult read, and those are very much not in style right now, but having come off reading Travis Baldree as an award winner I was really pleased to have come across Adam Roberts.
Here are two brilliant little side ideas I have not seen in other reviews:Roberts uses two "cutouts"--men with no serious connections to anyone else, who won't be missed--in his story. SF often uses one, but he needed two. One protagonist is a fellow "orphaned" in his mid-twenties with his parents' death. Roberts notes that it's a hard time to lose parents. I've known people in this position and can say this is not acknowledged enough. So Rich (real name Alan, lots of play on this) is kind of drifting through life as a low-rent writer. Roberts captures the little elements of his life so well--preparing a microwave dinner and forgetting to eat it, and noting the careful place setting in a sad way. A perfect capture of a moment.
He also has an extended segment where Rich is reading an interview of a psychologist who argues for the importance of people being together. He says that to be present to each other we must *smell* each other, even if that is subliminal. I have believed this ever since social media and remote meetings took off, and have seen very little on it.
But of course Roberts' big project here is to tell a Hegelian story, and I believe he does so very successfully. This does not mean that at the end of it you will understand Hegel's dialectic, even though Roberts references it directly at the end. Rather, the story arc and how the plots come together is distinctly Hegelian. I would say he has to have understood Hegel much better than most who read it (certainly better than me) in order to pull this off.
This got shortlisted for some minor award, but generally speaking there's not much reward for writing deeply thoughtful work now. I am glad I came across this.
No comments:
Post a Comment