Tricia SullivanBesprekingen

Wow. There's thinking outside the box and there's 'What's a box and why would I need one?' Tricia Sullivan's imagination is delightfully unbridled. If you can jump in and not worry about falling and just trust that everything will work out, you're in for a great time with 'Occupy Me'

You know those science fiction books that are about inter-planetary wars with human colonies spread out through space, travelling through the endless void in thin vulnerable metal boxes that they still insist on using to try to kill one another? Well, this isn't one of those books. 'Occupy Me' makes those books seem like they're a lazy translation of late seventeenth century pirates dressed in space suits and armed with mythical 'energy weapons', taking no account of how big the universe is or how it really works.

'Occupy Me' takes a different, more numbers-based view of life, the universe and the nature of causality. No, it's not one of those 'Look! Physics can be fun' nerdy books or one of those 'Let's science the shit out of this' uber-competent male scientist books. 'Occupy Me' does something unique, in my experience. It gets across the vastness of space and time, our limited, overly-linear view of causality and our inability truly to think in geological timeframes while building a compelling action-packed thriller filled with relatable people.

What made the book work for me was that although the core of the plot involved concepts that stretched my imagination - chains of events that are aeons long, a view of reality as essentially malleable if you can only read the code it's written in, and the difficulty of sustaining a sense of purpose and identity in the face of entropy - it was made accessible and engaging by the nature of Pearl, the main protagonist in the story.

Pearl doesn't know who she is, what she is or why she's here. She does know that she has an instinct-deep need to fix broken things, including people, and that part of her, an important part, is not just missing but has been stolen from her. Pearl is a delight. Her curiosity-driven journey from ignorance to mind-blowing comprehension as she tries to get her component back and go home powers the book. Pearl works her way from squatting in a junkyard where she throws cars around to keep in shape, to working as an agent of the Resistance (although she's not clear what they are resisting) to falling in love with her Resistance handler, destroying a passenger jet in mid-flight while working as a flight attendant, to becoming a wanted terrorist engaged in a covert struggle with a ruthless billionaire and the equally ruthless oil company that he used to work for and which is now trying to track him down. Did I mention that she also has wings (although they're not always physically present), an affinity with Doberman guard dogs that makes them behave like puppies and the ability to alter people's thoughts and moods?

Yeah, well, this isn't an easy book to summarise. And I haven't even talked about the guy who stole the component that Pearl is searching for or why he stole it or how there seems to be more than one of him using the same body or that the component is in a briefcase that isn't a briefcase but some kind of portal which, amongst other things, occasionally releases a not very happy dinosaur upon his enemies.

I had a wonderful time with this book. I liked Pearl. The ideas, especially the scale of the ideas, were intoxicating. The story was exciting.

But - like anything really original - to get the most out of it, you have to put your assumptions and preconceptions to one side and give yourself up to the experience.

I think that's easier to do if you listen to the audiobook version of 'Occupy Me'. It has two narrators, one for Pearl and one for the man who stole from her. Penelope Rawlins gives an outstanding performance as Pearl who, for reasons I never really understood, has a strong Long Island accent. Dugald Bruce-Lockhart counterbalances Pearl's extravagance with a more sober performance for his character

I found the ending of this rather unsatisfying, but I seem to have enjoyed the journey more than most of the other reviewers to date. While a significant chunk of the story takes place in virtual reality, it felt more akin to Hal Clement than William Gibson to me. In fact, as I read the middle half of this book, I couldn't help imagining that the trangendered ghost of Hal Clement had been sentenced to eternity in the appropriate circle of Dante's Inferno, with their only hope of redemption being to produce a story that manages to be the perfect simulteneous pastiche of both Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and J.G. Ballard's The Day of Creation, and that this resulting book came close, but wasn't quite perfect enough to bring redemption.½

Chaos theory and causality; time travel and Hilbert space. And a pterosaur. You really have to pay attention to this one!

Too dark and messy for me right now.

Awful. I liked the main character and what I could gather about the story but the writing is not good enough to tempt me to engage my brain - and so the plot was clear as mud. I do suspect the plot might have been clear as mud even if I did engage my brain.

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3422081.html

I felt there was a good book in here trying to get out. It's a feminist take on human colonisation of an alien planet, spoiled by the annoyingly lazy and passive character of the protagonist, and by various dream sequences which aren't really all that descriptive and don't take the plot further. I found it rather hard to engage with, frankly, and perhaps it is a novel that demands more effort from the reader than I was in the mood to give.

Near future SF about mind control using light that goes wrong. Not too bad but a bit long.

sort of a local more-sf version of a zombie apocalypse, with an added AI aspect, and way too much exposition required in the denouement, which is never a good sign. mostly, it just seemed more shallow than i'd expect of this writer.

3 and a half stars. very interesting book, by a writer i really like. two worlds collide in this one, the very real world of Muay Thai boxing (17-year-old Jade's specialty), and a more evanescent supernatural one, a Thai forest inhabited by immortal animal spirits that is being used for nefarious purposes by an evil man, till it is claimed by a half-spirit 12-year-old child (Mya) who can move from one dimension to another. the two worlds don't entirely work next to each other - Jade's real world is so specific and her voice is so strong it overtakes the narrative and renders the other world too fragile to quite come alive - but that forest is nonetheless fascinating (especially when it appears in New Jersey), the combination is ambitious, and i was really engaged by Jade's point of view and by her whole story. the whole thing might make a terrific coming of age TV series, with lots of boxing and detecting action (catching the bad guy isn't easy) and a fantastic otherworld to enter and explore.½

3 and a half stars. third book of the trilogy called Everien, this whole set is an unusual fantasy, written under a pseudonym (presumably to distinguish it from her powerful sf genre work) by the writer Tricia Sullivan. the trilogy seems to have been written as one book, and then chopped into three roughly equal parts for publication, so that the finales of the first two books, arbitrarily set, are not written as such, which does not, let's say, encourage the reader to persevere. and the trilogy subject matter, time paradoxes, are not exactly a common theme in fantasy. as a result, reading the series can be confusing, and the fact that the landscape, the characters, and the plot are continually changing under the weight of chaotic time as it is engineered by a host of forces does not make it an easy read. Glen Cook's Black Company and Steven Erikson's Malazan books are the only books i can think of that have used time as a chaotic force in similar ways, and neither of them have made it the central conceit.

i would not say the trilogy necessarily works right through, because it is not always coherent, and it needs to be read as a single whole. but i advise persevering just the same. for one thing it is interesting as a minor sidelight to Sullivan's major standalone sf works, all of which are important. for another it features some interesting and well differentiated female characters, acted on by two male characters over time who are really archetypes, because they are portrayed as the inverse of one another. thirdly, there's a lot that's pretty original along the way: a primitive clan culture, a decadent empire, an upstart interim king, a sentient bird culture specializing in communications, and a secret alien cult, all trying to seize power by co-opting an advanced but long-dead civilization that tried to codify magic. what with the chaos, all these elements begin to intersect, and as they act, destabilize the world, which becomes stratified into strips of land belonging to different times and places, which can only be traversed by a kind of bone magic.½

don't start this one until you've read Double Vision: the two books appear to be a single work chopped into two parts before publication., and there is no recap or indication in the text that they are related. it's about memory, and the properties of music. how we need to be tied to the world we're in, and how we are continually making and remaking that world as we go - folding space, winding time, owning our ground. living.

Tricia Sullivan is always interesting. but this is a minor work; it doesn't quite fire on all cylinders. and frankly Cookie Orbach's everyday life here seems to have more going for it than the sf plot stuff. and it ends practically in mid-sentence. there's a sequel (Sound Mind), though, i haven't read yet: could it be a much longer novel, not meant to be chopped in half? stay tuned.½

I wanted to like this one more, but it was a bit of a slog. Cookie Orbach reports on her visions of a off-planetary adventure to a company that sells the information. How real are her visions? How crazy is she? I was never really sure and her "real" life was more interesting than her crazy war fantasy life which often didn't make sense. Points for having a majority of female characters though.

a psychedelic adventure story that starts with a briefcase and maintains a manic pace, owes a lot to chaos theory, extends from the beginning of time to the far future, involves a lot of tinkering with creation by a lot of entities who really shouldn't, and is told in a mixture of first, second, and third person voice. it's not what you'd call a shallow read, if that's what you look for, but it has some great characters, a lot of riotously original ideas, and i kind of loved it. you might compare it to Charles Stross's Laundry Files, or Rudy Rucker's Ware series, but it's really its own thing. rave on, Tricia Sullivan.

3.5/5 stars.

It was a bit shambolic but had some interesting ideas.

silly premise, talking dolphins, ha

I picked this up in the fabulous London Lonely Planet bookstore. Sullivan was writing about a girl who has wings in an alternate reality. I write about a girl who has wings in an alternate reality. I felt quite unoriginal.
However, I’m relieved to see we’ve both followed our own divergent paths. Tricia Sullivan and I like similar music; she posted about a wonderful song featuring Elizabeth Fraser from the Cocteau Twins. But we do not think in a similar fashion.
Her writing emits from a fresh, intense place in her soul. The plot, such as it is, isn’t a surprise. People and entities battle for control of the universe. But there isn’t any contrivance in the unfolding of events, though there is coincidence. Conceptually, the novel is a lofty mixture of physics, which she is now studying, and poetry. I don’t always follow what Sullivan means, but I’m convinced she knows.
The story, described simply, is about an angel from another dimension, who is working for a group called The Resistance, which tries to make life better in small ways. But the Resistance aren’t who they seem to be, and Pearl, the angel, is an enigma in her own right, a huge, compassionate entity who doesn’t know her own origin.
The more you read about the main characters in this book, a doctor who is possessed by a murderous entity that may actually be trying to save the world, and an angel who was created out of “extinct animals and nano-libraries”, the less you actually know them. You can observe and anticipate their behavior, but understanding who is part of what is a complex and non-rational process.
This short excerpt can prepare you “I didn’t recognize myself. Never again the same. In my brain a thicket of dendrites were standing on end in dark and terrible welcome.”
Read it, and your dendrite will hop to attention as well.

Great concept, its definitely not a quick simple read, But with time to persevere its definitely worth a read.

hmm. kinda silly, on the whole, what with the broad caricatures. but given the subject matter, interesting all the same.½

Good book. I've never read Tricia Sullivan before and am now likely to check out more of her work in the future. This particular novel was a little chaotic in places and veered into some strange areas, what with the inter-dimensional metaphysics; The dinosaur oil-ghosts; The evil corporate villains; The prehistoric creatures that manifest from a suitcase; Oh, and a middle-aged lesbian angel with invisible wings that blaze into substance in stressful situations... This is definitely not mundane science fiction!

Plot-wise, not everything made sense to me, but I enjoyed the characters, (even if their motivations were a bit unclear at times). I also enjoyed the interspersions of humour scattered throughout. The humour and pace made it easy to suspend disbelief and just go along turning pages. At the end, I found myself entertained more often than not and therefore give this a solid 7 out of 10 rating.

Recommended for fans of science fiction delivered in a bit of an experimental style.

(I received a copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review)½

An alien saves a human but gets stuck in the body it inhabits...

This book has two different halves that have nothing to do with each other. One half is awesome, the other isn't.

The one that's awesome is about Jade, an MMA fighter that goes to Thailand for some training (and to avoid a possible arrest after beating up an MMA fame whore). Holy cow, let me repeat that. A book about a girl American Mixed Martial Artist who travels half a world away to the land of Muay Thai for further training and a chance at a title shot. Doesn't that sound awesome? Doesn't that sound like no other book you've ever heard before? It did to me.

But the other half has nothing to do with this. It's about a girl who can teleport through plants who's being exploited by some rich white guy holed up in Thailand to deliver drugs and human traffic to various parts of the world undetected. It's not even the same genre as the Jade story. It's a dark fantasy with Thai mythology and beliefs about reincarnation and ghost/spirits and animals. Not what I came in for. And neither character has any relation to the other, either in spirit or plot. They just... meet... at the end.

I would so love this book if this part was excised. Each half has nothing to do with each other, it feels like it was shoehorned in to increase length. I just want to hear about Jade. I care about Jade. I'm interested in Jade. Not some girl who can walk through walls and the old rich white guy "big bad". I can go to X-Men for that. The tonal difference is too jarring. That keeps this book from being one of the best I've read.

Two worlds, mysteriously connected. There's the world of Sun and her girl gang, shopping for cosmetics, until—well, read it yourself. And there's the world of Meniscus, a male human clone used for medical research, in a feminist society where the most of the male population was killed by a plague.

The mystery got me hooked, and I've even read some chapters twice to find more clues. (Because of EFL, I tend to overlook some subtleties anyway, even more so when a chapter is written in Femalese. KrayZglu is the soe-eyed one, right?) It's Bonus Gift Day at Estée Lauder.

Procreation is a recurring theme in this book, e.g. the evolutionary benefits of sex. Non-FYOS.½