Be Careful, Pay Attention: Not Everything Is At It Seems.

Be careful, pay attention: not everything is at it seems.

Book Review: The Father Thing, Philip K. Dick

My Review in a Tweet:

In retrospective, I felt like I read it more like a chore, trying to read all five volumes this year. It has some good stories that left me thinking about the implicancies, but it was mostly filled with basic or uninteresting science fiction stories.

Complete Commentary:

I'm back! I just finished the third volume of Philip K. Dick's short stories, "The Father-Thing". I have to say, from the get-go, that it was probably the weakest one so far, with lower lows and not so great highs.

The more frequent topics and themes on this anthology are:

Ideologies and their radical extremes: from absolute polarization of society to political opinions taken to their most extreme realization, the author critizices and explores different ideas of his time, some of them being direct comments on recent publications.

Humanity and evolution: what will it be of humans in the future? The fate Philip K Dick envisions for us is rather dark or depressive in most of his stories.

Technology and humanity as a trait: Our relationship with technology is an evergreen topic in science-fiction, but in this anthology, it has a withered quality.

Clash of civilizations and classes

I'll make a short commentary for every short story, already ranking them from the one I liked the most to the one I liked the least:

Upon the Dull Earth: I realized while ordering up the stories that this was the one I liked the most and not the next one on the list. It feels more like a fantasy short story, but the ending is closer to a (cosmic?) horror tale.

The Golden Man: fantastic pace, fantastic ending.

Shell Game: the absolute paranoia of this colony and the TWIST. Loved it.

Sales Pitch: PKD said many people didn't like this story's ending and that he agreed with them. I disagree with both, the ending is great, but maybe because we like more cynical stories nowadays.

The Hanging Stranger: I love the ending, more themes of paranoia.

The Last of the Masters: it's unusual to read about anarchy, but it was very interesting, specially on the efforts to preserve some kind of hierarchy and burocracy.

Foster, You're Dead!: amazing satire, still relevant today.

War Veteran: I would really like to see this story adapted in a movie or series, it has great potential as a political intrigue/thriller.

A World of Talent: I rank it this high because of how convoluted and complicated the mutants' powers were. The plot itself dragged a bit too much.

Strange Eden: I like the ethereal feel of the story and the kind of "cautious tale" of the ending.

To Serve the Master

Fair Game

Pay for the Printer: I feel like we are headed this way with automated production and the lack of appreciation for manual crafts.

The Turning Wheel

Tony and the Beetles: relevant in today's political landscape.

Exhibit Piece: I despise the nostalgic feeling present in science fiction stories that imagine such a disastrous future that anything is preferred than that present, even flawed pasts. Even then, it's well narrated.

Null-O.

The Chromium Fence: I liked this satire as a valid commentary on today's need to always "pick a side", how pointing out valid critics to either viewpoint is considered as expressing symphaty for the other one. I disliked the ending, it felt like an easy way out.

The Eyes Have It: I liked it because it was fun, but I put it lower on the list because it feels very out of place in this anthology.

The Father-Thing: I liked better the author's explanation of this story, not the story itself.

Psi-man Heal My Child!: after reading A World of Talent, it felt very repetitive and unnecessarily complicated.

The Crawlers: pretty uninteresting.

Overall, I would give this book a:

6/10.

My other 2023 readings.

Book Review: The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss

My Review in a Tweet:

I haven't been this enraptured, this mesmerized, this captivated by a book in years, and I don't say that lightly. It's great on every aspect you could think of, and then some other you couldn't even conjure. Can't believe I neglected it for so long. Highly recommended if you like fantasty of any kind.

My Full Review:

I had it sitting on my bookshelves for months before I decided to start reading this book. It felt menacing, despite it being the pocket edition. The sheer volume, the brickness of it felt like a challenge I hadn't the courage to face.

But once I did, I realized the real danger was being unable to let it go: I was prisoner of the author, being held by his marvelous ability to thread the story of Kvothe in seamless chapters, that natural the flow of the story felt, you couldn't even tell where he jumped from present to past and back.

The vivid images still dance in my mind hours after I finished reading the book. I rushed past the other reviews I had pending so I could write this one because I neded to talk about it. My copy of the book was a present from a friend so I texted her inmediately, but that didn't suffice, I had to write longer than all caps screaming to each other.

The rich world the author builds feels vast and mysterious, with a lot of hidden things lurking just beneaht the surface waiting for both the writer and the reader to discover them. I really hope (haven't looked it up yet) that there are books in the vein of the Silmarillion and Tom Bombadil where the myths and tales of this universe are further expanded.

The prose of Rothfuss is so elegant, filled with clever descriptions and unexpected analogies that not even the most fictitious elements of his story remain ungraspable to the reader.

The characters are so diverse and interesting: each and every one of them leaves a perdurable memory, no matter how brief and casual their impact and presence on the story is.

Kvothe is our main character, but he gets to be a narrator of his own story whenever we dive into his past, becoming a somewhat unreliable narrator. The whole book feels like that: we as readers submerging in the story narrated by Kvothe himself, gasping for air during the interlusions where the omniscient narrator takes the job back to move the story in the present time.

A wonderful work of worldbuilding, characterization and narration only hindered by the bittersweet taste of finishing the book eager for more. I hope to get my hands on the sequel soon, but I probably should let this world rest a little before diving in it again.

9/10.

My other 2023 Readings.

Book Review: El Juguete Rabioso, Roberto Arlt

My Review in a Tweet:

It felt like reading The Catcher in the Rye but from Argentina, tinged with the economic and social issues of the early 20th century. Silvio Astier is a boy too old to be called a man and a man too young to be called a boy (no mistake made there).

My Full Review:

I read this book because of a sack of small reasons: it was short, I was one book shy from 30 in 2023, I wanted another argentinean author on my list and I had a physical copy of it.

El Juguete Rabioso (literally: The Rabid Toy) is the first novel of Roberto Arlt and, according to the copy I read, one of the founding books of the modern novel in our country. Commonly given as a mandatory reading in high school, I often saw this book here and there, postponing it indefinitively.

Now that I have finally read it, I think Arlt's place in our literary pantheon of writers is rightfully earned. The short novel is a quick glimpse into the life of Silvio Drodman Astier, a poor young boy from Buenos Aires, living in Floresta (at least from the second part on), fighting to stay out of the street and help his mother and sister.

The problem is, Silvio is too smart, too culturally cultivated for any of the jobs he can get as a poor boy from Floresta. He struggles with a feeling of entitlement to a better life in contrast with a sense of defeat while facing the circunstances he lives in.

The novel is carefully written, with a mix of refined language and old local slang that reflects on the dual nature of the character: a street rat at worst, a curious and smart young man at best.

His inner monologues are some of the best and most interesting parts, as his feelings of guilt, resentment and fear clash against each other.

The secondary characters function as common figures of Argentina's society from the early 20th century, when inmigration and poverty were high and people struggled to stay afloat. Their jobs, their cultural background, their relationships with one another highlight Silvio's own characteristics.

7/10.

My Other 2023 Readings.

Is this a comfortable POV for you?

Book Review: Ultimate X-Men, Mark Millar, Adam and Andy Kubert.

My Review in a Tweet:

I like how corny Marvel comics are. Being so cuddled by the MCU, it felt refreshing to see many characters just existing there and moving the plot by acting rather than being, like they didn't need to justify their existence for a greater plot and could just inhabit the universe.

Full Review:

Being primarily an MCU enjoyer (I wouldn´t call myself a fan now), seeing the plot of the Sentinels as the first thing in this comic book was jarring, as I was expecting a more introductory story before anything like that. It is an early story anyway, as the X-Men as a group are barely getting started in Men of Tomorrow. Scott Summers/Cyclops serves as the founding leader of the team under the tutelage of Charles Xavier as a group of mutants who seek to discourage the U.S. Government from implementing the Sentinels program, protect other mutants and impede Magento from recruiting them to his side.

The hard-cover book includes a second story arc, Return to X-Weapon, where Wolverine takes center stage and fights to rescue his newfound team after nearly betraying them in the previous story.

I rescued that panel in particular because it was hilarious to me for some reason (Quicksilver complains to Scarlet Witch that Magneto said that his superspeed mutation was effeminate).

Both story arcs were neatly written, with not much time to spare on developing the mutants, but maybe it's commonplace on issues dedicated to a team rather than to an specific character. Magneto and Xavier, as well as Wraith, have their time to shine and expose their views. I was delighted to see Nightcrawler on this, so half an extra point for that.

Overall, an amicable reading, not too deep, fun for moments. The artstyle is a bit underwhelming and there aren't many interesting compositions, but besides that, enjoyable.

6.5/10.

My Other 2023 Readings.