Showing posts with label alternate history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alternate history. Show all posts

The Red Garden Review

The Red Garden
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The Red Garden ReviewThis story is pure Alice Hoffman magic. She begins the story in 1750 with the settlers who founded the town of Bearsville, MA (name changed to Blackwell in 1786). Every chapter moves the story to another time period concluding sometime in the 2000's. The book reads like a seamless book of short stories, each chapter informing and building on the previous. Hoffman has a gift for sharply focusing on the main character of each time period as she moves the story of this small mountain town along, revealing an inner truth.
Characters come to town, live, leave, die, wander, return but always carry the thread of the town with them. The characters are so beautifully written, it's hard to choose a favorite chapter/story. The two chapters I enjoyed most were "The Principles of Devotion", the story of a loyal dog living at the grave of his owner and the "Monster of Blackwell", a young man who separates himself from society and lives in the mountains outside Blackwell. These chapters are achingly beautiful.
The red garden refers to the founder's (Hallie Brady) garden where the soil is as red as blood and everything that grows in it is red. Perhaps a symbol of life and death; the connection we all have to nature and each other.
Hoffman doesn't go on and on with flowery prose; her writing is edited, beautiful and powerful. She always manages to capture the beauty of a moment and the setting of the story, infusing it with her understanding of humanity.
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Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of The 1960s / The Man in the High Castle / The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik (Library of America No. 173) Review

Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of The 1960s / The Man in the High Castle / The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep / Ubik (Library of America No. 173)
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Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of The 1960s / The Man in the High Castle / The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep / Ubik (Library of America No. 173) ReviewIn the 1960s, when he wrote these four novels, Philip K. Dick was not known, as he is today, as an acclaimed "literary" science-fiction writer and visionary who inspired many films. Since his death in 1982, his reputation has steadily soared, a little bit too late, and now this former genre journeyman toiling in obscurity has become the first sf author to be enshrined in a handsome omnibus volume in the esteemed Library of America series. Of course, I had to buy it even though I already owned multiple copies of all these novels. It is a genuine pleasure to read any of the LOA volumes, so lovingly produced they are. And this one especially so, compiled as it was by an author heavily influenced by Dick, Jonathan Lethem. You will never see a biographical chronology so interesting to read in its own right: we even learn that Timothy Leary called Dick during John and Yoko's bed-in and he put the famous pair on the phone to tell PKD that they wanted to film one of the four novels contained here, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Incidentally, Lethem's taste is impeccable. Though Dick wrote no fewer than 21 novels in the 1960s (plus a couple of dozen more before and after), these are without a doubt the four best: The Three Stigmata, The Man in the High Castle, Ubik, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? One could easily compile another such volume with four more extremely strong novels of this period: Clans of the Alphane Moon, Dr. Bloodmoney, Now Wait for Last Year, and Martian Time-Slip. However, the ones collected here are the ones I would pick, if I could have only four. They are all absolute classics and support many rereadings. I remember when in the 1970s, I encountered Three Stigmata for the first time and could not totally make sense of it, but I was intrigued. It was hallucinogenic, it was trippy, it was theological. A few years later I found myself seeking it out again, rereading with a passion, finally really "getting it," and then compulsively seeking out everything I could find by PKD. It took me years but I eventually tracked down every last out-of-print forgotten paperback. Since then all his works have been reprinted and made easily available. But my original "discovery" experience is why this LOA volume means so much to me now. The Man in the High Castle is perhaps the best alternate history ever written, a speculation on what life would have been like if the Germans and Japanese had won World War II. Ubik is a brilliant ontological quest into the very structure of reality. Do Androids Dream, the novel on which the film Blade Runner is based, is among other things a meditation on what it means to be human. These four novels have become like cornerstones in my own life's journey. For them to have been given this respectful and definitive publication is something that brings me a lot of pleasure, and would also, I think, have pleased Philip K. Dick.Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of The 1960s / The Man in the High Castle / The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep / Ubik (Library of America No. 173) Overview

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