Life During Wartime

It's going to be very hard to describe this work as anything other than genius.

Almost from the very start, I found myself slowing down and being dragged into the hellish nightmare of war and such densely imaginative prose that I discovered that there was nothing left for me except to become completely submerged and try to breathe the canned air that Shepard provided. I became Mingolla. I began seeing patterns in the very fabric of reality that might help me survive his life. I became paranoid. I grasped at any and all straws. I grasped at Debora, who was just as fucked as me.

What really blew me away was the way the stories appeared like bulletholes ripping spaces in the mist, swirling and leaving deep impressions that made a whole that show more was much, much grander than trying to survive the feuding families that had torn apart South and Middle America, or even coming to grips with the immense implications of so much mindfuckery. I loved the stories within stories within stories. We were treated with a dive within the mind's labyrinth, the Mayan king on one hand and the ghost of the conquistador on the other, laughing in insane merriment as they drove a whole world into an excess of dissolution and hate, marked mainly by the burning embers of obsessive hope and love.

My god, what an intense and immensely crazy ride this was. Rabbit-hole crazy. And I had no choice except to fall deep within its labyrinth. It's a mark of a truly fantastic tale when it grabs me so tight and surprises me with tears, anguish, hope, disillusionment, anger, more anger, a seething cauldron of anger, and finally, love. Is it real love? Hell if I know. Remember, I've become Mingolla. Maybe he's right. Maybe the world is completely insane and the only thing we can do is cling to each other, making whatever damn sense we can of the moment as we change with each other, and pray that we can hold a sense of the eventual and far-off understanding for safe-keeping, and that we still retain that last tiny ray of hope after we've arrived.

So damn beautiful. This novel is poetry. It should never be entered into without knowing the risks.

It's an important and brilliant piece of literature. Period. It deserves your complete attention, kiddies. This is no fluff. This is no popcorn. This can be, potentially, life-changing.

I've always hated war. I've never even particularly enjoyed the best that movies or other fiction have provided. But here's the brutal truth: While I hate war, this novel has shown me a special kind of horrible beauty that I'm unlikely to ever forget.

Like the mad-painter and his gorgeous murals that he'd booby-trap to destroy any potential admirer, and destroy the work itself in the process. It's crazy. It's also one hell of a statement of Art.

Shepard's own conversation in the field of literature is more of a gigantic fuck-you to all the writers out there who think they've ever gotten close to telling a Truth. This guy can WRITE, damn it, but whatever he touches, circles, and swoops-in to illuminate, he then shells with artillery.

Fucking amazing shit.

I remember this author from the Eighties being a part of the cyberpunk movement, but that characterization is completely unfair and not worth setting up. He's got maybe a few connections, the seeding of tech and immense discomfort, but beyond this, we've got a masterpiece of storytelling that goes beyond most pigeonholing. He's a force of nature.

I'm never forgetting this work. show less

If one can imagine Coppola's Apocalypse Now, dressed up in a sci-fi garb and with the level of insanity cranked up, that's the best way I can think of describing Life During Wartime. It is a(n almost) plotless, unpredictable, ethereal nightmare that nonetheless paces itself well (at least during its beginnings) and sucks you deep into the allure of its horror.

There's some really nice writing, and I think it was originally published under the label of "literary fiction"; which is interesting because I think the genre elements really swallow it as the book goes on, and in a way that even made me cringe a bit. I did like quite a lot about Life During Wartime - initially I was drawn to its trippy, war-time atmosphere - but I was less keen show more when more plot entered the scene and it almost began to feel like a sophisticated, adult X-Men. The more it drifted into its themes of psychological warfare the more disinterested I became, because I just didn't find the whole "war within a war" element compelling at all. I also thought the development of the romance was poor, especially as the main character just seems like a moody git who wants to screw anything that walks (the forced eroticism gets tedious). Funnily enough, by the end it almost seemed like a core theme of the book was "love" and that it was perhaps intended as some kind of romance novel in part. That didn't really work for me either.

Not a bad book, and possibly worth reading, but ultimately it felt a bit messy and unsatisfying. Joe Haldeman does much better with "military sci-fi meets romance" with his novel, The Forever War. show less

I came to this book with high expectations and on the whole I was not disappointed. Over ten years ago I was very impressed with Shepard's 'The Golden,' a dark tale of the baroque imagination, probably the best vampire story since Stoker's Dracula (sorry Anne Rice). Since then I have not read any more of his writings until 'Life During Wartime,' an earlier novel, now published in the SF Masterworks series.

Influenced by the Vietnam War and the film Apocalypse Now, this too is on the dark side. The setting is a future conflict in Central America between the US and left-wing insurgents where the primary although secretive method of combat is psychic warfare. The young protagonist like Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now struggles to come to show more terms with the insanity of war on a journey through a surreal jungle environment. There are wonderful set-pieces-platoons gone AWOL hooked on aggression enhancing drugs with their own peculiar religion, a defective psychic who controls swarms of butterflies and a prison straight out of a Renaissance depiction of hell, amongst others. There is an erotically charged love story too to add to the mix.

But 'Life During Wartime' is not totally successful. The core SF idea behind it, of a conspiratorial elite of mind manipulators, is a rather unoriginal even corny one. It is only Lucius Shepard's luminous writing talent that transcends this limitation. show less

The Vietnam War transposed to Guatemala and set in an unspecified future or parallel time when drugs and ESP are used to create the ultimate warriors in an endless war of competing illusions. A little disappointing that in the end, his lush mythology doesn't really transcend the classic American pulp ideal of One Strong Man and One Beautiful Woman Against the World. On the plus side, this man can really write, and I love genre authors who can do that. And his Central America is one I recognize as physically and psychically real, an "imaginary garden with real toads in it."

Gritty and cinematic, this is War. I guess I'd call it Heinlein's Troopers on acid or something like that. The jungle is like another character – it’s just downright oppressive, and even made it difficult to read the book at times. I found myself wondering if Shepard was any fun to read because this novelistic war game can get tedious after while. However, there is a certain very visceral immediacy about him that I can admire.

A kind of SF version of 'Apocalypse Now', with the same miasmic feel, this is bleak, unsettling, graphically violent and sexual, and intelligent. While the overarching plot framework is weak at times, the book shines when it's focusing on the minds and societies destroyed by war.

After starting it a number of times I finally finished this book. And note here that it is not the book I'm looking for. I keep being deceived by the description of a man drawn into a conflict by a psychic woman. That is one interpretation of what passes for a plot in this book. What a conflict of private families mapped onto an international conflict adds to a discussion on the effects of war, I can't say.
Episodic, angry, descriptive, but not satisfying.