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Paul Levinson

Teoksen The Silk Code tekijä

36+ teosta 882 jäsentä 21 arvostelua 1 Favorited

Tietoja tekijästä

Paul Levinson, a former rock musician, lives in White Plains, New York.

Includes the name: Paul Levinson

Image credit: photo by Emon Hassan

Sarjat

Tekijän teokset

The Silk Code (1999) 185 kappaletta
The Plot to Save Socrates (2006) 149 kappaletta
The Consciousness Plague (2002) 102 kappaletta
Borrowed Tides (2001) 97 kappaletta
The Pixel Eye (2003) 50 kappaletta
New New Media (2009) 21 kappaletta
The Chronology Protection Case (2005) 16 kappaletta
Unburning Alexandria (2013) 13 kappaletta
Loose ends (novella) (2014) 7 kappaletta

Associated Works

The Hard SF Renaissance (2003) — Avustaja — 343 kappaletta
Year's Best SF 3 (1998) — Avustaja — 258 kappaletta
The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF (2013) — Avustaja — 167 kappaletta
The Best Time Travel Stories of All Time (2002) — Avustaja — 134 kappaletta
Black Mist (1997) — Avustaja — 85 kappaletta
Guardsmen of Tomorrow (2000) — Avustaja — 52 kappaletta
Star Colonies (2000) — Avustaja — 51 kappaletta
Xanadu 3 (1995) — Avustaja — 38 kappaletta
The Man from Krypton: A Closer Look at Superman (2006) — Avustaja — 32 kappaletta
Silicon Dreams (2001) — Avustaja — 31 kappaletta
Alias Assumed: Sex, Lies and SD-6 (2005) — Avustaja — 27 kappaletta
Robots through the Ages: A Science Fiction Anthology (2023) — Avustaja — 15 kappaletta
Future Media (2011) — Johdanto — 14 kappaletta
Altered States: a cyberpunk sci-fi anthology (2014) — Avustaja — 14 kappaletta
Swashbuckling Editor Stories (1993) — Avustaja — 10 kappaletta
Artificial Intelligence (Contemporary Issues Companion) (2007) — Avustaja — 5 kappaletta

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Jäseniä

Keskustelut

The Plot to Save Socrates, Historical Fiction (joulukuu 2012)

Kirja-arvosteluja

Paul Levinson's time-travel novel The Plot to Save Socrates is that tragic thing: a great concept let down by a middling execution. Time-travelling is always a crowd-pleaser, even if it's a genre that always teeters between the hokey and the convoluted, and Levinson's novel promises, on the face of it, to be a high-brow thriller revolving around the rescue of Socrates, one of the great minds of history, from his unjust death-sentence, when he was condemned to swallow poisonous hemlock for daring to speak against the orthodoxies of the Athenian democracy.

Unfortunately, despite some promise in the opening chapters – not least some successful mimicry of Plato's Socratic dialogues, where Socrates and a mysterious visitor debate the paradoxes of time-travel – the storytelling itself misfires. Characterisation is weak throughout: none of the main players have much in the way of motivation, for all that they leap to their feet to take their part, and those that become the villains of the piece have motives that remain completely inscrutable – in fact, the main villain and orchestrator is all but forgotten by the end. Sierra Waters, the closest we have to a protagonist, could have as her characterisation a post-it note that just says "sexy". The explanation for the time-travel basically amounts to "magical chairs" (pg. 231), and Levinson proves in multiple scenes that he can't write action to save his life. By the end, the novel has failed to avoid that common time-travel trap of "heads chasing tails" (pg. 265) and it degenerates into a hectic, harum-scarum mess, with the only resolutions proving underwhelming.

Some of which would be OK if the novel's promising ideas had been tackled. But we lose the thread of the plot to save Socrates – partly because of the characterisation and storytelling mentioned above, but also because it's never clear why the effort's being made on the elderly philosopher's behalf in the first place. Civilisation "has never fully recovered from the death of Socrates", Levinson writes on page 135, which is stretching it a bit, and besides which is an argument never fully explored in the book itself. Socrates' challenge in the novel – that "it will make no difference, to the present or the future of the world, if I die here or escape with you" (pg. 49) – is given a mundane plot-resolution answer rather than a thematic one that addresses the concepts of messing with history and saving a Great Man for posterity. Questions of fate, paradox and philosophy are raised by Levinson's scenario but never addressed, with the can being kicked down the street until there's no more street. The result is a promising high-concept thriller that is disappointingly unsuccessful, with its events "happen[ing] in a way that makes no impact, in which case we have wasted our time" (pg. 168).
… (lisätietoja)
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
MikeFutcher | 7 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Aug 14, 2022 |

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Tilastot

Teokset
36
Also by
20
Jäseniä
882
Suosituimmuussija
#29,046
Arvio (tähdet)
½ 3.5
Kirja-arvosteluja
21
ISBN:t
63
Kielet
1
Kuinka monen suosikki
1

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