The Fortunate Fall

I don't believe it.

I just realized that I haven't updated my top ten book list in my own mind for almost a decade. I certainly haven't modified my top three in over 25 years.

What I have just read has just supplanted number three. Perhaps even number two.

For the moment, I feel like it might have supplanted number one.

I cried like a baby when I closed the book, and even now I can't believe what I just read. It was lyrical and it unpacked with a density of a rushing locomotive. It was full of heart and soul, and it was smart, smart, smart in its choices.

It is a double tragedy. Raphael Carter, as far as I can tell, never wrote another novel. I will likely be a lifelong devotee to this novel, and I'll be rereading it soon. I'm already show more missing it and I just finished it.

Maybe it's a triple tragedy, because the book is out of print. I was lucky enough to find it used. As far as I can tell, the novel is the greatest unknown mystery of the world. So few people even know about it. Hell, I need to shout out its praises to the world and not let this beautiful work ever be forgotten. And yet, it is. I only picked it up because Jo Walton praised it from her mountaintop as a work that should not be forgotten, and I can't thank her enough.

What is the novel, you ask? It's the soul of humanity as sung from the soul of the last whale. It's the redemption and utter loss of ghost girls and cyborgs. It's the chains that we bind ourselves with, whether in our heart or our minds or everyone else. It's hope. It's horror.

It's recalling, for me, the most heartbreaking moments of V for Vendetta, a movie I've seen a dozen times so that it brings me to tears. It takes the best traditions of cyberpunk and pushes it through the meat grinder, showing us what despair can lie behind the eyes of telepresence ratings.

It's about same-sex true-love and mind rape.

Too much for a novel of 288 pages? Hell no. The writing carries it all and a lot more, effortlessly. This is what I want to make when I grow up.

And it hurts, almost unbearably, that so few people will ever have the chance to experience this novel. If there is justice in the world, then everyone would have the chance to cry over it.

288 stars out of 5. show less

Two centuries from now, after the genocidal reign of the biotech-enhanced Guardians and the huge population displacements generated by the mind-controlling Army that stopped them, the world outside of Africa is heavily regulated against any deviance. Maya, a “camera”—a reporter who lets her viewers share her consciousness as she reports—stumbles into a potentially deadly encounter with a survivor of the Guardians, and her own past, which has been ripped from her by the suppressant chip inside her. There’s an awful lot of worldbuilding whizzing by—I probably could have read a whole book about rich, technologically advanced, free Africa and its three (or maybe four) Kings—but ultimately the book is about compromise, and show more being compromised, and people working to stop horrors by accepting other horrors. show less

_Maya is a “camera” who broadcasts, not only what she sees, but also what she feels, to billions worldwide. And she just found something worth sharing._

After really enjoying Reed’s short story *The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For*, I was looking forward to reading this novel, originally published in the 90s. The edition I read included a laudatory foreword by Jo Walton, an author whose opinion I respect, and in retrospect probably raised my expectations a little _too_ high.

Though full of fascinating ideas, and doesn’t read like an old-fashioned relic, it isn’t really my type of sci-fi. Still an interesting book, and Reed wrote some shockingly prescient things. Sadly, not the good kind.

Also, I either prefer Reed’s show more shorter fiction, or perhaps her newer work. For me, it just didn’t rise to the level of _The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For_, in either writing or world-building. That said, I’m looking forward to the novel she’s publishing this year. show less

3 and a half stars. originally published in 1996, but it feels very 21st century in its writing and its concerns. lots of good ideas here, and a great backstory of a possible dystopian future, where AI Guardians first meddle with the human population, and then the virus of the Army causes localized genocide on the way to redistributing the remainder of the population, so Africa becomes a new Cradle of Civilization - a lot of this resonated scarily with where we've got to now. but it's kind of a maddening text to navigate: though it contains some fine writing, it's repetitive too, and ultimately the whole thing kinda falls apart into an endless series of didactic arguments about personality, cohesion, change, and the nature of love that show more caused me to keep falling asleep. still, a keeper. show less

Before I saw Donnie Darko, I heard a snippet of a review of it that went something like "you walk away feeling not as if the film failed you but as if you failed it." That's kind of how I feel about this book full of philosophy and cyberpunk and resistance and did I mention philosophy? But, wow, was it a good read.

Caveat: The 18-year-old science shows its age, but not in any way that interferes with the story too much.

Speculative far sci-fi. The story really carries you along, a real page turner. Rather grim, about the 'trueness' we loose when we experience things second hand, electronically. Recommended.

OK. I'm giving this a 2.5 star rating now because while I didn't actually enjoy it, I think it deserves another try, maybe when I'm in a different mood.

Very dense sci-fi technology with a world view and a military history that are only explained in little pieces. Some of the science verges on fantasy (His-Majesty-In-Chains), and it is sometimes hard to follow.

I had the feeling that an important point was being made about the nature of the soul, the nature of the brain and how/if the two differ, but the lack of explanations until the end and a writing style that seemed to circle in on itself, kept me from really "getting it." That said, I do think there was something more there than the basic story and I will try again another time.