A hybrid of Gene Wolfe’s “wtf is going on here” style and William Gibson’s “wtf is going on here” style: a pre-internet cyberpunk with incredibly futuristic social organization.
I’ve recently discovered that progression fantasy books are crack to me
I want to paint flowers all over my body now (but that’s it, I swear)
It’s like The Road except instead of dying everyone ends up in The Handmaids Tale.
There is scorn at the bottom of DFW’s writing. Scorn because he is more conscious than the people around him, and this makes him excluded.
"Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of site, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by time."
A clever juxtaposition that highlights how excellently humans are able to normalize things that are anything but
A candid peek into a side of America that I had only ever seen in YouTube videos - mostly those involving people with too-small shirts screaming in Walmarts, waving 2L bottles of soda over their heads as their waist-high children look on in terror.
I have always treated your ethnicity as something novel about you, and nothing more. Until this book, I never appreciated the weight that you must carry as you move through an apathetic world.
This was a highly relevant book for me, but not because it is about a global pandemic…