Austrian Sci-fi just can´t go without including philosophy, innuendos, epic language, and refreshingly much nerdy edutainment info dumping.
Philosophy Austrian Sci-fi just can´t go without including philosophy, innuendos, epic language, and refreshingly much nerdy edutainment info dumping.
Philosophy and ethnology are in the parents´ house As so often, a professionally and occupationally ethnologist mother and philosophizing and writing father laid the foundation for a writing career that is strongly influenced by and filled with ideas about consciousness, identity, society, memory palaces, and techniques and salted and spiced with the AI main plotline.
Criticism and wit of the modern work environment, hierarchies, the madness of bureaucracy in universities and in general, how ideologies go mad towards forced mind upload or expanding out into space and many more, are combined with puns and subtle irony, although both decline towards the second half as Edelbauer gets more serious and focuses on the darkness of the story and generating suspense. That was a great decision, because it wouldn´t have been so thrilling without the grimmer tone towards the end. The edutainment part is bigger in the first 2 thirds too, boiling down many science history, with a focus on computers and AI, facts, philosophy, and morality concepts.
Who what where why Split multi personality, identity, mind uploads culminate in a big showdown unleashing the realization that nothing was what it seems, making innuendos to probably dozens of more or less famous media with similar constellations, or let's say grades of schizophrenia. Same with sci-fi, as some other reviewers mentioned, but I´ve watched far too few movies, and forgotten too much of the sci fi I´ve read, to get the full picture.
Big picture worldbuilding is the only deficit Without that, it would have been perfect, but whenever there are the descriptions of the kids´ show, how the outer world degenerated and fell to pieces, the incredibility overkill lets the reader lose momentum so that one has to get into the story again. There is a reason why there are close to no such dystopian descriptions in sci-fi, because they´re just too unrealistic. Cyberpunk yes, but Mad Max style steampunk down to stone age level with bodies and minds degenerating, not so much. One sees that these high fantasy sci-fi tropes just aren´t her thing, Edelbauer should have fully focused on the hive plot and just included one or 2 character related outer world revelations, then it would have been a 5 star.
Give her the Noble price But that´s complaining on a high level, I´m more than both parallelly happy and paralyzed to once find a European, even Austrian oh my gosh fainting, author who can live up to my expectations of combining science, characters, and (hive) world to an astonishing, mind penetrating experience. Of course, Handke got the Noble price for nothing except of being a perfect soporific that shouldn´t be overdosed for reasons of health, and a living pupil torture device, but that´s just how the sick ivory tower fringe pseudointellectual voodoo high brow so called quality literature European fantastic realism trash world rolls. Ridiculous.
Mario the lone bookwolf
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Books:
science-fiction-new
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