In Brother Carnival (Red Hen Press, 209 pages), a fiercely engaging literary work, Dennis Must plays with time and character, leading the reader into a special world of space and time, almost a quantum universe, where characters can be in two places at the same time–or can they? Laced with an intense investigation into the nature of divinity and deities, Brother Carnival weaves an impressive litany of human weakness into the warp-quest for the divine. These lines point to the nature of Our Problem: Continue reading
Monthly Archives: February 2019
Liam’s Going by Michael Joyce
Three Approaches to Liam’s Going
You find in your hands a work of great beauty, like Michael Joyce’s novel, Liam’s Going (McPherson, 207 pages). It makes you uneasy. You feel like one of those Trojan elders chirping the perilous beauty of Helen. Send her back. You warily mention to a friend that you have discovered a 21st century novel of great lyric beauty. Right, she says, a baby born with a beard. That kind of fiction went out with Virginia Woolf. What about Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood, you say.
OK, moments of lyricism, but very provisional and nervous. Continue reading
Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers
I happen to be contemplating these days how Artificial Intelligence (AI) differs from Biological Intelligence (BI), and so I finally took down Galatea 2.2 (FS&G, 329 pages) from my bookshelf where it has stood waiting for me for about fifteen years. I may have belatedly cracked the spine, but the pleasure of reading good science fiction only improves as its predictions either come to pass or not.
The main plot turns on a Turing Test. Can scientists train a neural network to pass a comprehensive literature exam? Continue reading
Dactyl Review 