science fiction Archives - Page 44 of 44

Cover of Cell

Cell
Stephen King
350 pages
published in 2006

I’m not a big horror fan, nor a big Stephen King fan either. The only books of his I liked was his Dark Tower series and even that I haven’t kept up with. Yet when I idly started to skim through Cell, I couldn’t put it down until I had finished it. Sandra, who is a Stephen King fan, says that this is what King does best: grip you by the throat and carry you along until the story’s over. He certainly managed to do that here, dragging you bodily to the finish despite the absurdities on the way.

Because, let’s be honest, Cell is not so much a good novel, as it is an exciting novel, one for which the inevitable movie treatment has already been written. Googling, it seems this was written as a homage to zombie horror movies, as well as novels like Richard Matheson’s I am Legend; Cell is in fact dedicated to George Romero and him. In that context it works about as well as the recent remake of Dawn of the Dead: it’s a fast paced but shallow adrenaline rush.

Cover of Souls in the Great Machine

Souls in the Great Machine
Sean McMullen
448 pages
published in 1999

Sean McMullen is an Australian science fiction writer, whose first books were only published there, with Souls in the Great Machine being the first one available in the rest of the world. Apparantely it’s a rewrite of two earlier McMullen novels, Voices In The Light and Mirrorsun Rising, which were of course only available in Australia. In any event, Souls in the Great Machine is the first novel (or indeed anything) I’ve read of McMullen, after the local science fiction bookstore had it and its sequel, The Miocene Arrow available cheap. Because of good reviews in Locus and elsewhere I thought I’d take a gamble.

On the whole I think Souls in the Great Machine was worth the gamble, though I had some caveats. The writing isn’t always as smooth as you would like and the overall plot is a bit …episodic shall we say, which may of course be a result of it having started as two separate books. The most bothersome aspect of McMullen’s writing however is his sudden and rather frequent switch of viewpoints. Usually even with authors who like to jump from character to character you still get a good sense of who the heroes of their stories are, but with this book there are several perspective shifs which abandon the character you thought was the protagonist for someone else entirely. This feels a bit sloppy, but is more than made up for by the inventiveness McMullen displays in his depiction of the world of Souls in the Great Machine.

science fiction

Cell – Stephen King

Souls in the Great Machine — Sean McMullen