Barely twenty four hours after I finished reading Dust (which I reviewed in a post now barely a day old) I finished yet another thick tome of a novel which I had been reading concurrently: the second book of the Hyperion Cantos.

There are no rules about all this reading books and writing reviews, are there? If there are, I’m willfully ignoring them, going to read and post whatever I want. I mean, hell, I’m usually reading five or six books at any given time, random opportunity, and always depending on my mood. Sometimes I’m vibing for some soft nature comedy while other days I’m grooving on a juicy apocalyptic allegory.

Similarly, there’s no rules that can’t say since I’m now apparently starting with a relatively clean slate with whatever novel I pick up later today, I can’t also clean off the ole review slate to go along with it. Thus, to round out the usual trio of reviews, I dug out a bonus pair of books that I had polished off and reviewed earlier in the year, pre this-blog-revival to add to the my list.

The Taking by Dean Koontz

If I asked an AI to write a paranormal thriller wrapped around a religious allegory and puffed up with so much flowery language that a poet would hold their hands up for a reprieve, there is a good chance the AI would spit out something very close to this book. I was feeling like I should do a survey. I have been writing a lot of paranormal science fiction lately, and like anyone who dabbles in anything it only makes sense to dip one’s toe into the pool of publicly available material that already exists in a category.  In researching the category of paranormal science fiction, I came up with Dean Koontz, so went to the used bookstore to hunt down a book or two. The story was something of a chaotic fever dream. The short chapters jumped from idea to idea, barely lingering on anything long enough to track the impact. Chekhov left a dozen guns at the scene and nary a one was fired. And the self-importance of humanity in the vastness of the universe that came gurgling out of these pages could only have been written by someone who was—wait for it—writing a science fiction take on the biblical flood. Zoinks! I should have seen that coming. Gah! I’m sure some people like this schlock but it wasn’t my jam.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

It had been a long time since I read 1Q84. And strictly speaking, I listened to it as a very excellent audiobook shortly after it came out fifteen years ago. I was a different person then, half my adulthood ago. I didn’t remember it. I mean, I thought I did. I thought I had an impression of the story, but I had convoluted bits of it in my mind and confused it with other things I must have read since or before or whenever. Murakami drops hints to his methodology in the story, and the surreality of the plot seems to sweep by and if you aren’t paying attention maybe you miss these things. I wrote a one pointthat this book seems like a descriptive stew pot with morsels of plot mixed in. It is, after all, as much a sensory experience reading this tome of an 1155 page novel as anything else. The author has one of his characters spend months reading slowly through Proust and reflecting on that experience, and I think that this book might be a kind of modern, surrealist response to Proust in some ways. (In fact, I reserved a copy of Proust from the library to poke my nose into that to see if I get the same vibe from weird translated French literature as I do from weird translated Japanese literature.) I don’t want to spoil the book by degorging the plot here though. It is a meditative slog through a closely parallel world from which the protagonists are seeking parallel escapes, each other, and understanding. And in all that, all those 1155 pages almost nothing happens and yet it is filled with life and action and heavy beats of human footsteps through time and reality. It’s worth your time to read this.

Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons

The sequel-slash-second book of the Hyperion Cantos takes off mere minutes after the first book ends, but is marked by a stylistic shift that would almost make them feel like completely different series if not for the rich characters we have been following. Where the opening novel is a book of “tales” and backstory as the key players make their way like set pieces to the larger game, this one is a more traditionally linear story jumping from and around the various perspectives of the original characters and a small cast of others as a complex galactic-scale mystery unfolds. Hyperion is a kind of cautionary tale about the yoke of technology around the neck of humanity, and the slow realization that the conveniences and advancements that have been offered by technological tools can often be mistaken for progress. Simmons, as much as he is an author of hard technological science fiction, might just have been waving a warning flag to a society on the cusp of an information age that was just arriving as these books were published. The highly advanced data networks and frightening artificial intelligences that are key players in the story have very clear and obvious analogs to our modern age, and in the context of a world shifting and changing under the influence of unrestrained social media and the exponential growth of systems that increasingly do our thinking and creative work for us is a message that Simmons was probably decades ahead of his time in offering.  I assume countless other science fiction authors have trod a similar path to shout an identical message into the void, and sadly it seems as though very few of us are listening.