From /tmp/sf.4146 Tue Aug 9 02:12:01 1994 Xref: liuida rec.arts.sf.reviews:625 rec.arts.sf.written:71069 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews,rec.arts.sf.written Path: liuida!sunic!pipex!howland.reston.ans.net!usc!nic-nac.CSU.net!charnel.ecst.csuchico.edu!csusac!csus.edu!netcom.com!postmodern.com!not-for-mail From: schulman@michael.nmr.upmc.edu (Christina Schulman) Subject: _Wildlife_ by James Patrick Kelly Message-ID: <30eg1t$3n0@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu> Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Sender: mcb@postmodern.com (Michael C. Berch) Organization: St. Dismas Infirmary for the Incurably Informed Date: Mon, 25 Jul 1994 23:29:45 GMT Approved: mcb@postmodern.com (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Lines: 65 _Wildlife_ by James Patrick Kelly _Wildlife_ has a wonderful cover, a crisp collage of bright images, including a spaceship, a ravelling DNA double helix, and the Statue of Liberty, all of which are relevant to the story. Unfortunately, the cover is the most likable thing about the book. As the story opens, video journalist Wynne Cage is escaping from a space station where she accompanied a data thief who has just stolen WILDLIFE, a collection of data which may or may not be the key to true artificial intelligence. From this less-than-original start, the novel keeps sinking even deeper into a morass of cliches about sex, drugs, and AI. The first section of the book is from Wynne's point of view, and covers her escape, her developing love affair with the twisted man who commissioned the raid, and her loathing for herself and her father. The second section takes place several years earlier, and is told from the point of view of her father, Tony Cage, a rich and famous designer of recreational drugs. The third section jumps forward almost a hundred years and centers on the Wynne's son Peter, and the fourth and final section centers on Wynne again, except that by this time there are several of her. All this skipping around in time gives an overview of the social and technological changes over a century, although the society viewed is primarily that of the filthy rich. ("My dear Wynne, money only gets filthy if you let the grubs handle it.") The central theme in _Wildlife_ is the conflict between parents and children, with the added weirdness that the Cages are all clones of their "parents," give or take the gender. The parents alienate their children by attempting to control them, and the children turn around and exact terrible revenge, which rapidly grows tiresome. I'm not even going to touch all the various sorts of cages and wombs throughout the book. Kelly also explores the question of where humanity begins and ends, although he doesn't say anything particularly original. Kelly isn't actually a bad writer, as such. His prose isn't bad, and every now and then he turns out a wonderful phrase that's wasted on a book this unpleasant. ("Getting him to talk about himself is like moving a refrigerator.") He does have an irritating habit of dropping in didactic little passages about subjects like Stonehenge and Neptune. Kelly is trying -- trying so hard that it's painful to watch -- to write a novel that has depths beyond the usual straightforward cyberpunk angst and adventure. This is certainly commendable, and I'd like to see more authors try this, but somewhere in the process of assembling his themes and symbols and crises of identity, he ended up with a novel about unlikable people doing unpleasant things to one another with fairly meaningless and cliched results. Reading _Wildlife_ is like watching flies pull the wings off of each other. Avoid. %A Kelly, James Patrick %T Wildlife %I Tor %C New York %D February 1994 %G ISBN 0-312-85578-8 %P 299 pp. %O hardback, US $21.95 -- Christina Schulman Pittsburgh NMR Institute schulman@michael.nmr.upmc.edu From rec.arts.sf.reviews Sun Feb 4 16:04:55 1996 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Path: news.ifm.liu.se!fizban.solace.mh.se!paladin.american.edu!gatech!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.kei.com!uhog.mit.edu!news!nobody From: wohleber@blarg.net (Curt Wohleber) Subject: Review of Wildlife by James Patrick Kelly Message-ID: <4erb1e$tnb@animal.blarg.net> Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Keywords: author= Curt Wohleber Sender: news@media.mit.edu (USENET News System) Organization: Arkham Convention & Visitors Bureau Date: Thu, 1 Feb 1996 21:36:09 GMT Approved: wex@media.mit.edu (Alan Wexelblat) Lines: 43 Wildlife by James Patrick Kelly Reviewed by Curt Wohleber, Copyright 1996 Curt Wohleber James Patrick Kelly's _Wildlife_ abounds with weirdness: 22nd century technology allows people to mutate themselves into dinosaurs, star-spanning spacecraft or 3/4-scale replicas of the Statue of Liberty. But if you're looking for cyberpunk thrills a la William Gibson or Bruce Sterling, be warned that _Wildlife_ is oddly genteel, reading like something a less prolix John Updike might write if he lived in 2126. Kelly's jaded characters may undergo genetic transforms and attend bizarre virtual reality parties, but they also hang out in shopping malls and 7-11s and exhibit no more decadence and anomie than the L.A. rich kids of Bret Easton Ellis' _Less Than Zero_. _Wildlife_ is actually four connected novellas. The oldest section, originally titled "Solstice," first appeared in _Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine" in 1985 and showed up a year later in Bruce Sterling's _Mirrorshades_ anthology, which along with William Gibson's _Neuromancer_ forms the core of the cyberpunk canon. After a slam-bang opening involving a data-thief and the multimedia journalist covering his escapades, _Wildlife_ settles down into a chronicle of a dysfunctional family of clones: wealthy drug designer Tony Cage, his "daughter" Wynne and her "son" Peter--as in Peter Pan--whom Wynne keeps artificially stuck at a biological age of 11. Amid a world undergoing wrenching changes, the Cages are relentlessly inward focused (the Cages are "caged," get it?) and, except for Peter, rather nasty. And even Peter irritates on occasion, too disaffected to even react to death threats from a shadowy corporate operatives. His redemption boils down to a fairly conventional coming-of-age story. Elsewhere, salvation appears in the form of a high-tech Buddhism, computer-aided _satori_. The Cages are simply different incarnations of the same individual, the jealous and narcissistic Peter Cage, which is perhaps why I found _Wildlife_ claustrophobic despite a narrative that stretches across a century and to the edge of the solar system. %T Wildlife %A James Patrick Kelly %C New York %D 1994 %I Tor Curt Wohleber | wohleber@blarg.net | 314.442.5777 Columbia, Missouri | http://www.blarg.net/~wohleber From rec.arts.sf.reviews Thu Jun 25 13:40:04 1998 Path: news.ifm.liu.se!news.lth.se!feed1.news.luth.se!luth.se!Cabal.CESspool!news-feed.inet.tele.dk!bofh.vszbr.cz!europa.clark.net!192.148.253.68!netnews.com!eecs-usenet-02.mit.edu!ai-lab!news.media.mit.edu!not-for-mail From: agapow@latcs1.cs.latrobe.edu.au (p-m agapow) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: Review: "Think Like A Dinosaur" by James Patrick Kelly Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 24 Jun 1998 15:16:45 -0400 Organization: Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Biologists Lines: 73 Approved: wex@media.mit.edu Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: tinbergen.media.mit.edu X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.3/Emacs 19.34 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:1943 "Think Like A Dinosaur" by James Patrick Kelly A Postview, copyright 1998 p-m agapow A short story collection, including: "Mr Boy," where a deliberately stunted boy has to cope with his transhuman mother and an tenacious investigator chasing down a security intrusion; "Breakaway, Backdown," when a recruit hears about the true cost of going into space; "Pogrom," depicting a world where a few privileged old are the envy of the young and unemployed. It is de rigueur for collections to have a foreword by some respected authority who at length praises the author and tells you how lucky you are. It is less usual for these forewords to actually be informative and interesting, which is the case for John Kessel's introduction to "Think Like A Dinosaur." For my money, he gets it exactly right when dissecting Kelly's stories and career, with the collection as an apt illustration of his theses. Irritatingly and strangely, he assumes you have already read the stories. Caveat lector. Kelly regularly garners praise and award nominations, but has a relatively low profile. As Kessel points out, Kelly has yet to break with a major novel. His recent "Wildlife," although interesting, is more a collection of good bits than a good whole. Short fiction may get you praise but not mass-market fame. To this I might add that Kelly is not a stylist. You never know that you're reading a Kelly story, the way you can pick one from William Gibson, Connie Willis or Iain Banks. That's just not his style. It is this point that may scare people away from "Think Like A Dinosaur." While the book opens with the hard-headed SF title piece, this rubs shoulders with "Heroics" (about a middle-aged father beset with self-doubt) which is in no telling way a work of genre. This is not a snobby "it ain't SF, it ain't good" stance, just recognition that Kelly is reluctant to play the same trick twice. In cases like this, expectations are easy to disappoint. Having said this, "Think Like a Dinosaur" is very good. The title piece presents a precarious scenario that ranks with "The Cold Equations." Our narrator is faced with a nasty situation in which he has no choice but to think like a dinosaur. In this case, the dinosaurs are not primitive creatures but aliens far advanced from us. "The First Law of Thermodynamics" is by contrast (and against its title) remote from any taste of science, following a group of tripping students in the heights of the 60s. Without being nostalgic, it draws a remarkably evocative picture of the period. Zig-zagging again, we end up in "Itsy-bitsy Spider," a touching picture of a daughter confronting a once-neglectful father who has since descended into a senile old age, sustained only by technology. "Rat," should also be mentioned, solely for its scenario of a drug- smuggling intelligent rat. Intriguing, but I just didn't get this one. The book ends in "Mr Boy," set in Kelly's oft-trod world of widespread body modification and genetic engineering. In a previous review, I described this setting as "wonderfully sick," adrift with children shaped as dinosaurs and one parent as a building (to wit, a .75 scale replica of the Statue of Liberty). It's sassy, creative and a lot of fun. Regretfully, the mix of styles, the non-SF content, and the high price of this hardback will work against this book. People should adjust the ratings accordingly. But it otherwise comes highly recommended and I hope Kelly gets another novel or collection out soon; there must be enough stories for it. [***/interesting] and arthouse cinema on the Sid and Nancy scale. %A James Patrick Kelly %T Think Like A Dinosaur %I Golden Gryphon Press %C Illinois %D 1997 %P 275pp %G ISBN 0-9655901-94 %O hardback, Aus$27.95 Paul-Michael Agapow (agapow@computer.org), La Trobe Uni, Infocalypse "There is no adventure, there is no romance, there is only trouble and desire."