Book Review!
Dec. 2nd, 2007 02:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xyzzysqrlThe Electric Church, by Jeff Somers.
It is the GODDAMN FUTURE. New York sucks. The world sucks. You are either rich or you are meat, wandering the streets doing whatever you can to live. In this chaos, there's the police (who can do whatever they want), there's the criminals (by default, pretty much everybody older than 12) and there's the Monks.
The Monks are cyborgs. A digital religion, their schtick is "Hey. Why not live forever? Let me show you an endless trail of sunsets." The problem is that if you are alone on the street with these monks, they edge towards you, gently hem you in, and then convert aggressively. As in, they happily shoot you and remove your brain, and the next day there's N+1 Monks on the street.
But then... what if they're doing that because they're right, and you CAN live forever that way? What if stopping them is exactly the wrong thing to do? Even if it is, how do you fight a small army of latex-masked eternally smiling people who are extremely heavily armed?
This book sets up a number of philosophical and religious questions. Then it carefully steps past them so it can get on with the business of shooting people in the head. There's a LOT of shooting people in the head in this book. There's also a lot of drinking, swearing, a psychic, -two- psychotic police chiefs, and a twitchy technical guy who speaks in the third person a lot.
I actually quite liked it. It's a growly, snarly action-movie of a book that's more concerned with being Gritty than anything else, but I enjoyed it enough to read all the way through. Albeit, I enjoyed it in a way that had me feeling slight guilt, but EVERYTHING makes me feel slight guilt because I am like that. So what the hell, I liked this book.
This would be a really decent movie starring Will Smith and Rutger Hauer. Let me put it that way.
It is the GODDAMN FUTURE. New York sucks. The world sucks. You are either rich or you are meat, wandering the streets doing whatever you can to live. In this chaos, there's the police (who can do whatever they want), there's the criminals (by default, pretty much everybody older than 12) and there's the Monks.
The Monks are cyborgs. A digital religion, their schtick is "Hey. Why not live forever? Let me show you an endless trail of sunsets." The problem is that if you are alone on the street with these monks, they edge towards you, gently hem you in, and then convert aggressively. As in, they happily shoot you and remove your brain, and the next day there's N+1 Monks on the street.
But then... what if they're doing that because they're right, and you CAN live forever that way? What if stopping them is exactly the wrong thing to do? Even if it is, how do you fight a small army of latex-masked eternally smiling people who are extremely heavily armed?
This book sets up a number of philosophical and religious questions. Then it carefully steps past them so it can get on with the business of shooting people in the head. There's a LOT of shooting people in the head in this book. There's also a lot of drinking, swearing, a psychic, -two- psychotic police chiefs, and a twitchy technical guy who speaks in the third person a lot.
I actually quite liked it. It's a growly, snarly action-movie of a book that's more concerned with being Gritty than anything else, but I enjoyed it enough to read all the way through. Albeit, I enjoyed it in a way that had me feeling slight guilt, but EVERYTHING makes me feel slight guilt because I am like that. So what the hell, I liked this book.
This would be a really decent movie starring Will Smith and Rutger Hauer. Let me put it that way.
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no subject
Date: 2007-12-02 08:44 am (UTC)Also, is this a prose novel, or a graphic novel?
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Date: 2007-12-02 08:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-02 05:06 pm (UTC)Remember when that Godzilla movie came out, it had Matthew Broderick and Hank Azaria in it? And it took place in NYC? I seriously remember thinking, "Wow, why would anyone move to New York? Look at those poor people in Long Island and NYC; they can't get out." Then I moved to Long Island and that came back to bite me in the butt (so to speak).
I just want to know why NYC is the scene for all these horrible things that means blowing up the state (you know...where I live) or for the whole planet or something. NYC has already been destroyed about 78,000 times by my estimation.
End really long pointless comment.
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