"You're not here. Try to remember this."
Once I read these first two lines, I knew that the ride written before me would be a bumpy one, indeed - but never did I expect to be plunged through the needle-eye of a cosmic syringe into...madness, it seemed. I was so confounded and impressed by the imagery of the prologue that I read it aloud to friends (which very nearly resulted in a horrific traffic accident) so that I would not be alone in my speculations. We discussed the possibilites of hyperspace and the hallucinatins of a schizophrenic; we discussed the maybes of a miniature universe. But that was all before the talking dinosaurs and weed walked into the picture.
What I first found most striking about this book was the sense of duality that Ken MacLeod provided in plot and details. In the basest level, the chapters alternate from deep future to near future, with the main characters being, respectively, Nth-great-grandson and Nth-great-grandfather. On the deeper levels of plot, the grandfather, Matt Cairns, sets in motion the gears of human space exploration, while the grandson, Gregor Cairns (whose name is crafted from the beauty of irony) is a result of said human space exploration. Gregor and Matt's roles in the book can be further expounded, but we'll save that for later.
To further that sense of duality, Cosmonaut Keep shows us a future with dinosaurs (talking and otherwise), trilobytes, and space-faring krakens; it offers multiple genres of fiction (a breadth of sci-fi, a smattering of spy-thriller, a plate-full of political speculation, a smidge of romance, and a heap of cyberpunk); two love interests per main character; and what I consider to be most profound, because of its extreme likelihood, is the fact that Gregor's future society of man seems to be less technologically advanced than that of Matt's post-modern society. Within that fact, even, is another duality, in that Gregor's future has limited access to the uber-tech of the past - Nova Babylonia versus Mingulay.
But what I found most refreshing was the casual use of marijuana throughout the book. Not many authors would think to make this kind of popular cultural phenomenon into an integral part of their novel, let alone one of the few themes to tie future and future-future together.
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6 comments:
LOL...I found it extremly funny that maijuana was used by nearly every one at any and all social gatherings....and it seems to me that Gregor's story has way more in it then Matt's, which could be intresting in future reads.
the lack of tech in the future kinda puzzled me. i mean, if you have a steam engine, you cant then NOT have a steam engine. that fact really bugs, me, but hopefully after i write this i will get to a part in the book where its explained how that happens.
its very common to lost writing why cant you lost tech in the same way. stop teaching it then it will stop existing after a few hundred years
Good call on the pot, and maybe an insight to the original Cosmonauts.
Pot Smoking Hippies. It's all coming together.
A traffic accident? LOL, I'll be sure and remember what not to read to people driving. Reading the prologue had me thinking of the Matrix myself. It is interesting in the way that the two stories tie together, especially in the sense that Matt and Gregor will not eventually meet through time travel which would be necessary most of the time for such a thing. It doesn't surprise me that future tech was lost, after all we all tend to outsource our brains to computers these days that we've forgotten so many of the basic computing skills we used to rely on. For example, I wrote an entire website with old-fashioned HTML coding before, how many of you can honestly say that you've done the same or that you even can? Even I can't do it now, don't remember how, but I don't have to because there are programs that can do the hard stuff for me. That's what I'm saying though, it would be so easy to forget all the high tech stuff just by losing all our data and computers in some kind of accident so the distant future aspect of this story not having it makes sense. I admire Macleod's daring in including pot as such a casual thing here, the more it annoys the establishment and those that support it the better I say.
Who is this in the real world? I want to run up and hug you for not being so "FOMG" at the pot smoking and thinking about it contextually and not freaking out. You wrote really well on a lot of the topics i agree with about the book.
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