I enjoyed this book a lot, but don’t trust me. I’m over 25, way over. Still, I just wish I had read it when it first came out, when the geeky parts were fresh. That’s the trouble with near future sci-fi, pieces of it go stale rather quickly. The opinions of a teenage hero about things like Domino’s pizza could lose the sympathies of some readers despite grounding the story in the reality of everyday life. Info dumps were a necessary evil in order to explain the cleverness of M1k3y’s hacks, but the simplistic summary of the sixties decade made me laugh. I remember those days. Really. So why does Orwell’s 1984 remain relevant today despite the changes? It has none of the realistic details of Little Brother, and it has only two sides, Winston and Big Brother. Doctorow’s book has a third entity, the terrorists, and for them he has no real answer.
Marcus, a.k.a "w1n5t0n," is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school's intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.
But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they're…
If this publicity starts November 1, you’d better read this book IMMEDIATELY, before the election. They say history repeats itself. They say the world is coming to an end. Lockwood has written a near-future fiction which just happens to have a huge echo today. The most fascinating feature of the book is the number of political events bizarrely similar to today, from executive orders, to Supreme Court vacancies, to cutting off debate in the Senate, to riots in the streets of New York. I enjoyed the purple prose such as, “wiser heads were shaken in contradiction, for they had watched the sowing of the wind of unreason, and knew only too well that the whirlwind of folly must be reaped in due season.” The story is short, and ends abruptly, so finish it before you go out to vote! Lockwood also wrote a series of children’s books whose main character is Baron Trump, but he is not the “last president” in apocalyptic tale.
"...The entire East Side of New York City is in a state of uproar. Mobs of vast size are organizing under the lead of anarchists and socialists, and threaten to plunder and despoil the houses of the rich who have wronged and oppressed them for so many years." --From The Last President, 1896
1900, or The Last President, by INGERSOLL LOCKWOOD, is a surrealistic 1896 novel, where Americans are protesting a corrupt election process while the president's hometown of New York City is fearing the collapse of the republic after the transition of presidential power. If this reminds you of…
I spent weeks wandering through Lord Dunsany’s writings. This quote, from Idle Days on the Yann illustrates what you have to look forward to: “... find my way by strange means back to those hazy fields that all poets know, wherein stand small mysterious cottages through whose windows, looking westwards, you may see the fields of men, and looking eastwards see glittering elfin mountains, tipped with snow, going range on range into the region of Myth, and beyond it into the kingdom of Fantasy, which pertain to the Lands of Dream.” However, this collection is repetitive so perhaps just sample “Tales of War” for very moving and disturbing descriptions of the horrors of World War I, and “Time and the Gods” for perspective on what is important in life. If you enjoy “dancing on the reflections of the stars on the water”, then you will want to read them all.
This is a first contact story, a tale of imagination versus reality. Martin Godfrey is a science fiction writer, familiar with those figments of the imagination, born outside the quarantine of everyday consciousness, called chimera. He has given them refuge in his novels. How can it hurt? He has let them wander through his daydreams. But chimera seldom come alone. They are difficult to control or contain. They can change your life if you are not careful.
When Martin returns from a science fiction convention with a real alien Khymera hiding in his car, reality strikes with a vengeance. He gives her refuge in his home, while trying to continue his daily routines and seeking his own refuge in the creation of a new novel. There is romance caught up in the butterfly effect of events racing toward an apocalypse. There are lies, deceptions, and misconceptions that have consequences.
