Kathleen Ann GoonanRecensioni

Meh. The book is OK, but one thing I struggled with is that the science is butchered so badly. At some point we have one of the characters (in an infodump) exclaiming that "Solving this math problem is non-computational. Godel proved it so. No computer could possibly solve it! Not even our AI. Only a human can solve this!" In one paragraph, this betrays a misunderstanding of Godel's incompleteness theorem, of artificial intelligence, and of the nature of human intelligence. Sigh. I know I shouldn't get caught up in this, as the book's main theme lies in the characters and their interactions, not the pseudo-science underpinnings, but in a science fiction book, it's distracting. At one point during the infodump, our hero says "I don't understand." and the other character just responds with "maybe you will someday" and continues on. I felt a certain sympathy for our hero at that point...

Charming. A bit too cute, all inclusive and on the nose.

The first 60%: amazing and detailed worldbuilding with really original and fascinating ideas. No real story, to be honest, and the female MC is completely passive (in truth just a witness, never a real factor, always pushed around by others), but the sense of wonder more than makes for that. Loved it. The next 20%: endless and boring introspection and inner MC doubts, plus thick packets of infodump served exactly as infodump: the MC, and therefore the reader, simply receives episodes of explanations from the past. Still no story, too many unintersting and unidimensional SC, and too much jazz references, unfortunately (I love blues but really, really hate jazz)... At 80% i couldn't cope with the slugging boredom anymore and gave up. A hugely wasted opportunity of an amazing scifi world...

Three and a half stars.

It was an easier, more accessible read than [b:Queen City Jazz|597159|Queen City Jazz (Nanotech, #1)|Kathleen Ann Goonan|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1312056498s/597159.jpg|583815], but there were some structural similarities.
This feels like one of those books for which my opinion might change later; I'll have to see what persists and what fades over time.

This is the book that redeems all the books I've slogged through just because my book group was reading them. Because I slogged through this one, too, but it was worth it.

For the most part, I did not enjoy reading it. The beginning, with the neo-Shakers, was interesting and caught my attention; but our heroine leaves home relatively early, and there's a long section in the middle there where things get weird -- like, drug-trippy weird; and even though it's not drugs and there is a science fictional and integral-to-the-story reason for it, it felt a lot like the 70s New Wave SF that was heavily into drugs, which I actively disliked.

But when I was about 60% of the way through, I suddenly realized I was engaged with the story; I cared about the character; and I wanted to see how things would work out.

The book is at once a hero's journey, a coming-of-age story, a post-apocalypse story, a druggie vision quest story, and a story with some very interesting science fictional ideas, and I think it suffered by trying to do all of this at once. It also uses a storytelling strategy in which neither the viewpoint character nor the readers have any idea what is really going on, and everything is bewildering and confusing until gradually, in flashbacks, things start to become clear: in other words, the story is told backwards for much of the book. This seems to be an increasingly popular storytelling strategy which I find increasingly annoying, and I think I finally became engaged when I did because by that point I finally had enough of the backstory to start caring. I will say that the flashbacks are presented in a way that is perfectly integrated into the plot, which isn't always the case.

There were a lot of allusions to literature, music, and drama - I'm sure most of that went over my head as I'm not well enough read in the humanities. I suspect too that the author was deliberately attempting a literary version of jazz in this story, and I don't actually like jazz very much, which probably contributed to the slogging. A significant theme in the book was the relationship between life and art, and the temptation to value art more than life; this reminded me of [b:School of Light|567807|School of Light|Jody Lynn Nye|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1175871868s/567807.jpg|554876], although it's treated much more lightly (ahem) in that book.

There were also a lot of beautifully written sentences and paragraphs -- I kindle-highlighted a *lot* of passages in this book -- which makes me believe that the slogging was the result of an intentional stylistic choice that I don't enjoy, rather than an inability to write; and makes me want to read more by this author. Probably even the next book in this series, although not for a while yet: this one needs time to settle. It will be interesting to see if I like the "Blues" better than I did the "Jazz".

My biggest peeve: although the protagonist is a young woman, and although there are several other important women characters in the book, most of them turn out to be proxies for either the mother, or the wife, of the man whose fault everything is, and a great deal of time is spent on his relationships with them. So for a book with so many women, it weirdly feels like it's actually all about this one guy, his mom, and his girlfriend. Ugh.

There are some good meaty themes here, and some original ideas, both of which were interesting to read about and to think about. Despite how little I enjoyed reading this book, I'm extremely happy to have read it.

Published a year before Diamond Age this explores a seed mode of nano-based materialism infusing a mental programing throughout the Queen City. It is a fascinating "trip" through a technological dream/nightmare, and if the very structure of what is being relayed prevents it from being relayed smoothly, still there is enough scenery to squeeze you through to the end. And if you are a jazz loving American lit fan, well there's a bit more.½

If an author has gone to the effort to sit down and write a book, probably involving some or all of the following: blood, sweat tears and probably some alcohol, and produced a piece of work that they are proud of it doesn’t seem fair to slate a book because you don’t like it. This is why I not a fan of snarky reviews. In the case of this book, Light Music, I really couldn’t get along with it. It might have been me, but reading the few reviews that are out there makes me think I am not alone.

There were a few things wrong with it, the plot was barely visible in the writing the very disparate threads that didn’t seem to tie together at all and it really could have done with editing to within an inch of its life. It wasn’t totally dire, there are a few good ideas hiding amongst the voluminous writing; but neither was it good. That is a few hours of my life that I won’t get back. 1.5 Stars

Hawaiian mathamatical genius Cen figures out the Kaiulani Proofs that allow movement between different worlds in time. Good!

Girl leaves Neo-Quaker home w/ friend's body and saves friend and becomes queen bee.

sequel to In War Times, this one covers the children and grandchildren of Sam and Bette Dance. by now it's 1991, at least in Timestream 2. the third generation is young and precocious, and the enemy action less formidable, but the proliferating timelines and mutating nanotech devices of Eliani Hadntz make the worlds less stable to travel, particularly in the vicinity of the Dance family home. but Eliani's grand utopian plan involving empathy and education appears to be working. in some ways, it's about the elasticity of memory, how fluid it is when confronted with competing quantum histories, and how much family and communications matter in the distribution of space and time we navigate. altogether, the author doesn't devote as much time and glorious detail to the period as she does in the previous book set in 1945-1963, but it's lovely to get caught up on the Dance family and their interesting problems with living inside the lab experiment of creating a quantum world.

a highly unusual foray, set in 1941-1980, during which the American government acquires technology that through the application of biochemistry, complexity theory, game theory, and quantum computing strives to create and manage alternate timelines. the changing landscape takes us through the creation of bebop to the ending of WW2 to a revisit of the Kennedy assassination, and gradually creates a chaotic set of lightly-managed futures in which some people move across the world into differing Whens without really noticing, with individual memories adjusting to the changes in a process compared in detail to the creation of music. a truly original idea, and the minute detail of the story as time and space pass through the narrative, changing gradually into a different modern world, makes it work. highly recommended.

This one got off to a good start - I was ready to learn about this new world transformed and decimated by nanotech, but once Verity made it to the city, she just kept meandering around and it never got as interesting again.

This one got off to a good start - I was ready to learn about this new world transformed and decimated by nanotech, but once Verity made it to the city, she just kept meandering around and it never got as interesting again.

A holiday event changes a wealthy family

The latest installment of my intermittent quest to read novels set in my hometown of Cincinnati, the "Queen City" of the title. Of the ones I've read so far, this is definitely the most Cincinnati, down to the Roebling Suspension Bridge being featured on the back cover, and passages praising the beauty of Union Terminal. Part of my reason for reading novels set in my hometown was to access what I imagine people who live in New York City or Los Angeles experience all the time when consuming media, a feeling of familiarity. I will admit to a certain frisson when reading that the protagonist, Verity, grew up in Miamisburg (40 miles up the Great Miami from where I grew up), or travels to Lockland (where I worked for a year). Cincinnati also has a depth of history that renders it well-suited for Goonan's project here; near its end, the novel becomes about history and how we remember things, which is apt for a city some accuse of being too obsessed with its past. (It's hard for me to imagine that conservative Cincinnati could ever become the fourth city in America to vote to undergo nanotech enhancement, though; fifty-fourth seems more likely.)

I liked the protagonist, but aside from those aspects, much of this novel was frustratingly obscure. I'm not sure I really grasped what was going on except in the broadest of strokes, and I wasn't really encouraged to put the effort into figuring it out. Goonan clearly has a way with words, but that way is often confusing. There are three other books in this series, but this one was not engaging enough to incline me to read them given that the action moves away from Cincinnati.

Daydots store and replay memories. Elisabet and Daniel developed them together but then fell - out. Then Daniels seems to want to make up...

Rather flat tale of a new breed of humans going to the stars...

Too many unanswered questions, such as where did the ship go afterwards? Plus providing all animal full legal rights? This was a bit too distracting for me.

Mixes jazz, physics, world war II, espionage into a wonderful stew of alternate history. If the names Jimmie Lunceford, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie (oh come on you have to have heard of Dizzy!), and Thelonious Monk don't mean anything to you, read this book. And if you aren't then seized with a desire to go listen to some jazz, well then, there's not much hope for you. Check out this Spotify playlist of Jazz mentioned in the book: http://t.co/cMTXMGKTds

Goonan always does Hawaii well, also (read the Bones of Time if you have not).½

Amazing concepts, but somewhat poorly executed. And I know how odd that sounds, considering the awards and praise from big names this novel has gotten, but I didn't find the prose layered and complex. I found it unclear. I found Verity to be inconsistent in her reactions, and I also felt that Sphere was two-dimensional. I liked the hive concept, and the deep thinking about information, and the ways information is metaphorized. I just think it could have come in a cleaner package.

A doctor who gets to live longer from expensive technology struggles with her fathers grave news.

This is a wonderful novel. It starts with Sam Dance hearing about Pearl Harbour on the radio. He finds out that his brother, serving in the US Navy, was killed there.This sets off the main theme of the novel, a continual rumination on why things happen and how different outcomes would have been better.

Two elements are used to give form to this continual 'why' question. One is a device, which continually changes shape to allow it to blend with the surrounding technology, and the other is music, jazz in particular, which is used to illustrate the ability to create the new by changing elements on the fly.

The device is first given to Sam by Dr. Eliani Handtz, a Hungarian physicist who will pop up again in the novel. Handtz teaches physics, and in her meeting with Sam, introduces him to her own weird synthesis of physics and biology that she believes will lead to a better understanding of human nature, and end the human race's propensity for fratricidal warfare. The device initially resembles the AA gun radar aimer that Sam and his buddy Wink are working on. By the end of the book it has passed through a variety of forms, ending up as part of a board game in the Dance household. Along the way it has also been at crucial foci like Hiroshima and a concentration camp.To add spice, the major Intelligence agencies are also after the device...

This novel sounds rather sad and grim but the jazz motif acts as a liberator of good feelings. Sam and Wink are lucky in getting to see some of the great jazz musicians of the time, although the military police jail them for being in 'off limits' clubs. What they hear inspires them to start their their own band, first playing dance music at venues in England, then more cutting-edge material after D-Day takes them to a comfortable billet at a German cafe.

After the war Sam and Wink part but at a company reunion discover that they live in different realities. Wink's world inspires Sam to hunt out his current Handtz device, which he discovers his radical daughter has been using...

The only false note of the novel for me comes with its climax in the Sixties, which seems too pat and concentrates on one obvious event too much for hindsight to credit.

Why did this book wait five years for a paperback version?

Another one of Goonan's characteristically fascinating novels. Packed full of her intriguing ideas about the next stage of human evolution, boasting a great range of diverse characters and with a strong focus on the importance of stories, it was nevertheless a disjointed read. And while the bittersweetness of the climax was appropriate, it felt like a somewhat rushed finish, in which a lot of character threads just disappeared and we heard from other sources what had happened to them. Ultimately, a little disappointing.½

This is probably one of the worst books I have ever read. The main character is completely devoid of flaws, he is a handsome genius who is also approachable, funny, musically talented, popular, kind, with a strong sense of wrong and right; that is to say this character is extremely boring and I hated him about twenty pages in. The storytelling was consistently poor and in some points even unreadable. I don't think the author has a science background, the physics of her universe were described either in strictly philosophical terms instead of employing any actual science. The worst part is when she tries to use music theory to explain physics, it's a miserable failure. Skip this book.

A man haunted by the image of his sister throwing herself off a cliff in an effort to fly, becomes a zen monk, and is seemingly entranced himself by beings with wings...