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Off to Barnes & Noble today, to use a gift card to buy Joe Hill's NOS4A2 and Kate Atkinson's Life After Life.
Almost done with Matt Ruff's The Mirage, which owes a large debt to both Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle and Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet (and Robert Harris' Fatherland and Jo Walters' Farthing, for that matter). Mirage isn't quite as good as any of those, but it's still a fascinating idea for an Alternate Universe -- on 11/9/2001, the Tigris and Euphrates twin towers of the World Trade Center in Baghdad are attacked by passenger jets, skyjacked by Christian fundamentalists from a fractured America. Ruff throws everything but the kitchen sink into the mix -- Timothy McVeigh, David Koresh, a Green Zone around Washington, DC, Saddam Hussein, the United Arab States, detectives and Federal agents and crimelords on all sides looking for the truth, and on and on and on, and it's just too much of a muchness. But it's still a rip-roaring tale.
Almost done with Matt Ruff's The Mirage, which owes a large debt to both Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle and Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet (and Robert Harris' Fatherland and Jo Walters' Farthing, for that matter). Mirage isn't quite as good as any of those, but it's still a fascinating idea for an Alternate Universe -- on 11/9/2001, the Tigris and Euphrates twin towers of the World Trade Center in Baghdad are attacked by passenger jets, skyjacked by Christian fundamentalists from a fractured America. Ruff throws everything but the kitchen sink into the mix -- Timothy McVeigh, David Koresh, a Green Zone around Washington, DC, Saddam Hussein, the United Arab States, detectives and Federal agents and crimelords on all sides looking for the truth, and on and on and on, and it's just too much of a muchness. But it's still a rip-roaring tale.