Easy Travel to Other Planets

I forget how I heard about this book, but it was described to me as a Sci-Fi novel in which a marine researcher has sex with a dolphin. I gleefully checked this out from the library, anticipating a bizarre, campy, and generally terrible novel. I was surprised by how quickly the author's voice won me over. This is a complex and surreal novel about intimacy, communication, mortality, and the end of the world. The characters are fascinating and the backdrop of war and disease adds a delicious element of chaos.

The central character, Melissa, is trying to teach a dolphin to talk. She's having some success, more than she knows, as the dolphin calmly seduces her on the eve of her project's end. Back in New York, Melissa's mother is dying of show more lung cancer and her boyfriend is cheating on her. She knows these things, but she refused to face them or talk about them to those who matter most to her. Meanwhile, her best friend Nicole is pregnant and planning to get an abortion. At the last minute, Nicole reconsiders even though she believes it will put her life in danger if her boyfriend finds out.

Throughout the action of the plot, a threat of war looms as various countries try to control Antarctica. Increasing incidents of "Information Sickness" has everyone on edge and there are rumors of a new emotion that some people are experiencing for the first time.

This is a very unique book, unlike any I've read before. It's haunting, beautiful, and creepy - like a dream. show less

There's a lot to like about the way this novel chronicles the interpersonal drama among a group of intellectuals and artists. The conversations are stylish, fragmentary, and mediated; the prose is compressed, with a cinematic sense of editing; a quasifuturistic theme (interspecies communication) provides ample opportunity for strange riffs; an atmosphere of geopolitical tension permeates obscurely at all times, threatening, at any moment, to condense into apocalypse—at its best, it recalls the energy and thrust of early DeLillo. At its worst, it reads like high-end erotica posing as lit: Mooney's attention to the sexuality of his [female] protagonist lurches towards the prurient at times (in the first thirty or so pages of the novel, show more she participates in three sex scenes, including one with a dolphin). show less

My husband told me about this book. He said he had started reading it when he was 16, but after the first chapter he couldn't finish it. Out of curiosity, we ordered it from Amazon and I started reading it. It's uneven. There's some nice writing, but mostly it's just...weird. The dolphin sex thing makes it hard to take seriously. I've only been able to get halfway through it, since it can't really hold my attention.