Simon Ings

Titlul este înșelător, fiindcă Stalin apare extrem de puțin și indirect, iar cartea nu e de fapt despre savanți în general, ci aproape toată despre biologi/agronomi. Pe acea nișă, în schimb, chiar e captivantă, abordând mai puțin teoriile propriu-zise și mai degrabă oamenii și motivațiile lor, sorțile evident tragice și pe larg celebrul "război" Lisenko vs genetică (din nefericire câștigat politic de Lisenko, cu prețul morții de foame a milioane de sovietici și a distrugerii științei și economiei).… (lisätietoja)

An exhaustive and sometimes exhausting history of science in Russia, with some time spent on the period just before the Communist revolution, and at then end on how things did and didn't change under Khrushchev. Most of the focus is on biology, particularly genetics, and agriculture. Less time is spent on physics and the space program, perhaps because this area was somewhat less dominated by political factors. Like War and Peace, there are seemingly hundreds of character arcs to follow, but the story of Lysenko dominates. Though Ing says several times "I'm not an academic", the bibliography is 30 pages long and there are 28 pages of footnotes.

For me, the book opens well, establishing the nature of Russia government under the tsars and its relationship with science, and the transition to Communism, the tensions between Lenin and Stalin, and how central the challenges of feeding Russia were to everything. The book also ends well as Russia emerges from Stalinism, sort of, and makes an interesting case for how cybernetics provided an umbrella for the return of serious science in a variety of domains. The big middle of the book is a slog though. Though chapters are basically ordered temporally, there's a lot of jumping around in time as different people are introduced and followed. Worse, there are frequent transitions from one person to another, as the history hops from one thread to another to another. It's like a Charles Ives piece with many snippets of music but rarely any sustained arc. There are many quotes from various scientific debates, that consistently failed to help me understand the personal, philosophical, and political battles they were meant to illustrate.

So an A for effort and depth, and B for story telling.… (lisätietoja)

Posted on my blog : http://www.susanhatedliterature.net/2014/02/wolves/

I totally agree with that old saying “never judge a book by its cover”, but more often than not it is the cover that piques your interest. If it didn’t all books would look the same surely? Cover art is an important part of a book. It is the major thing I miss when buying ebooks. And the cover of Wolves is certainly an attention grabbing one. I first spotted it on Carl’s January Covers post and although I knew nothing about the book I picked it up when I spotted it in the library.

Wolves by Simon Ing

Wolves by Simon Ing (click through for a larger version)
It is a fantastic cover.

But while the cover might prompt you to pick up a book it is the story itself that is the really important thing. Otherwise I’d just buy cool looking postcards1 . I knew nothing about the story before I started reading, I hadn’t even glanced at the blurb apart from knowing that it was about augmented reality and set in the near future. So I’m not sure how much I should reveal.

Conrad narrates the story. It begins when an old friend contacts him after Conrad has been in an accident and his girlfriend has been seriously injured. Michael and he used to be best friends, but life happened and they drifted apart. The story often relives moments from Conrad’s past, when he and Michael used to go to school together. There are a couple of incidents revealed through the novel that offer an insight into why Conrad is the way he is. Because, to be honest, at the start of the novel I found him to be a dick. And he certainly has his dickish moments, and some of those actions are unforgivable, in my opinion, but he has issues. With a capital I S S U E S. It isn’t an excuse, but it made me somewhat more of a relate-able character. The problem is it comes out through the course of the story and I was tempted to give up before those incidents were revealed.

Luckily for me I didn’t give up on the book, because by the end is a hugely rewarding novel. It isn’t a sci-fi novel in the hard sense. It is set in the near future and the technological advances are only beginning, as are the problems that might, or might not, end up in The Fall of society, as Michael fears. But the science plays a hugely important part in the story, which is the story of Conrad growing up and becoming an adult, as well as solving the mysteries of his past. So you could describe this book as a coming of age novel, even though our protagonist is no teenager at the start of the book.

It is a huge pity that the start is so slow, but I don’t know how it could have been changed, because it all pays off so well in the end. But I can’t rate it any higher than an 82 even though the final third of the book was very much unput-downable. It is also a book that I think would really reward a reread. Hopefully at some stage I’ll get a chance to revisit Conrad and Michael and their world.… (lisätietoja)

The story in Wolves concerns two friends, Conrad and Michel, who often played doomsday games as children. Michel retains this outlook into adulthood, writing an apocalyptic novel and intent on building an ark to keep his family safe from the Fall his is convinced is coming. Conrad gets into advertising and from there into "augmented reality," a way of superimposing elements on the real world via special lenses. Conrad's mother, a woman with a history of psychological problems, died when he was fifteen, and he's never known whether it was suicide or might have been murder.

This book has been categorized by the publisher and other sources as science fiction, but despite the near-future technology that comes into play towards the end, it reads more like something A.M. Homes might have written, if she was English. I liked the writing and the parts of the novel, but the whole didn't quite come together for me. And I have no idea why it's called Wolves or why there is one on the cover. Still, I'd be interested in trying something else from this author.… (lisätietoja)