liskantope:

My brief, vague, scattered review of Almost Nowhere

Welp, I finished it, all 1079 pages of it. (Really 1077 pages with the first and last essentially acting as a front and back cover.) As the book is of an unwieldy length and I don’t have much time or brainpower at the moment, this post is going to comment on just some aspects of it. Also, as I never managed to gain anything close to mastery of exactly how the plot worked, most of this is going to be vague and avoid discussions of the plot events, character decisions or traits, or anything that specific really. I think a couple of people wrote spoilery reviews; I don’t feel very capable of this (nor of giving a very good description of the novel to someone else at a level of concreteness that they would reasonable expect.)

So, I would say no concrete spoilers to follow, and only a couple of quite vague ones.

Keep reading

Thank you for this. Some (spoiler-free) reactions:

I think this is ultimately why I stuck with Almost Nowhere despite struggling to follow many aspects of the plot (while I lost too much motivation only a dozen or so chapters into HPMoR): I felt like I was being taken somewhere and was able to enjoy where it was taking me. The whole novel felt like a slightly surreal dream and an escape to a far vaster space than the one I inhabit in real life.

This is exactly what I was aiming for, so it’s good to hear I hit the mark! A lot of my favorite books feel this way, and it’s an effect I strive to produce in my own writing.

Almost Nowhere is the most cerebral fiction-writing I’ve ever read […]

Almost Nowhere, on the other hand, took me on a vast, sweeping journey, where an even greater proportion [relative to HPMoR] of the scenes carry a colder, more dispassionately intellectual ambience, where moments of raw emotional intimacy are rather few and far between but are far better written when they do occur.

While I don’t exactly find this reaction surprising, it’s interestingly different from how the book feels to me.

There’s a lot of emotion in AN. Some of the pivotal plot points involve emotionally-driven decisions; we spend a lot of time watching the characters and wallowing in their angsts and anxieties; and in the later parts of the story there’s simply a lot of ranting, rhapsodizing, emotional dialogue of all kinds.

But I might have a distorted impression of how much this shapes the feel of the story for ordinary readers, for reasons like:

• I have the luxury of totally understanding what’s happening when it happens, which the reader generally doesn’t (and shouldn’t). If a scene doesn’t entirely make sense except in light of later information, that takes you out of the moment.
• The story contains a lot of descriptions of emotion, but that’s not the same thing as emotional immediacy for the reader. Like everything else in AN, this stuff is always partially hidden behind some sort of smokescreen; you’re always made to feel like you’re peering in on something alien, something we can’t take at face value, something that is “not for us” (as the refrain in the book goes).

And I made this connection the most during Part 2 of Almost Nowhere, recalling that the fictional novel TNC is explained to have a sort of middle “lucid section” made of vignettes which mostly consist of coherent dialog but in which the characters have different relationships than they did at the outset (i.e. in TNC the two main characters who were siblings now appear to be married). I felt sort of drawn toward experiencing the journey that TNC would take me along, particularly the middle lucid section part just consisting of little dialog scenes, and I felt like in a way I got some version of that through Part 2 of Almost Nowhere.

That’s pretty cool! I had not made that connection before. Glad I could give you an unexpectedly “reading TNC”-like experience.

The idea that we eventually get to see the characters get together and write the book that we are now reading doesn’t seem original to this work of fiction, but I can’t think precisely where I’ve seen it anywhere else, and it was fun. Rob’s ability, as shown (to a milder extent) in The Northern Caves to be able to speak and write in very distinct character voices is impressive and maximally showcased here.

Thanks.

Although it wasn’t my only reference point, all of the talking-to-the-reader stuff in AN was most directly inspired by the Terra Ignota series. Of particular note is the fact that I read the final book in that series in late 2021, right around the time I started getting serious about AN and dramatically increased my writing pace. As a result, that book heavily influenced AN in a lot of ways.

Azad was a pleasure to read and I had to enjoy the scenes where he was present or narrating

It’s funny, Azad has been very divisive.

I’ve heard multiple people say Azad was their favorite character. And I’ve heard multiple other people – roughly the same number of people, I think – say he’s their least favorite element of the book, in some cases even having trouble finishing it specifically because they hated him so much.

(In a way, this is the most flattering outcome from my perspective. If no one loathed Azad except some of his fellow characters, I would be worried I didn’t make him loathe-able enough.)

Verbal brain noise: “Vast Active Nasal Irrigation System”

A sense of humor and the ability to avoid overreaction are useful guidance techniques during displays of innocent mischief — a level one mistaken behavior.

The author of this book is an atypical Type A (see Chapter 25 (^_~) He started out as an aeronautical engineer, was diverted by World War II to becoming an electrical engineer. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a specialty in vacuum tubes in 1948, the year Bell Labs announced the transistor; hence, he graduated technically obsolete (^_^).

We find that pizzas usually come with “accompanying pizzas”.

It was as though they were symbolically feasting upon, communally devouring, a massive spiritual baked potato.

inthefallofasparrow:

tvguts:

i know i’m biased because i’m 12 at heart and i think everything he does is funny but my little brother put together a last-minute “time traveler” costume for halloween which comprised solely of this homemade WW3 draft card and i think every single aspect of it is absolutely fucking hilarious

(via frozensoba)

KOSMOAUTIKON creates a new linguistic codex to project a new advance in the human Genome. A new linguistic structure must always prepare the way for any human advance. I had to remove your planet and then your bones.