Word: bladed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...some legible or at least imaginable way, figures. Great Ursa, 1987, suggests a woman giving birth. The wooden trunk of Giver, 1992, is shaped like an enormous hand. The metal beak of Sroka, 1992, juts at you like the ramming prow of an ancient galley, while the big blade of steel that splits the body of Winged Trunk, 1989, could be read either as a weapon that has given the body its deathblow or as a protective shield. Sometimes the metal fittings read as shells or tusks, sometimes as prostheses and sometimes as primitive tools from a remote past haunted...
Films like Blade Runner handle atmospherics of this kind easily. It takes a gifted sleight-of-mind artist to work such phantasmagorical effects in a novel without fuddling or exasperating the reader. Erickson manages the trick expertly. But why the priestly Gestapo of "Church Central" in this alternate America? Because Jefferson was an anticlerical deist for whom a theocratic nation would have been a shaming defeat? Maybe, but trying to decode word-for- word meaning here won't illuminate much. Aeonopolis, the author tells us, is almost impossible to leave: thus a waking nightmare of reason paralyzed, of civility blood...
...that physicists may soon construct a theory that would unite all the forces of nature into one mathematical equation suitable for a T shirt, a so-called theory of everything, he declaims alarmingly that it could be used to predict that "a particular snowflake would fall on a particular blade of grass or that you would be reading this now." Never mind that such deterministic ambitions died long ago with the discovery of quantum uncertainty. Faced with that prospect, who would not reach for the candles and tarot cards...
...business that makes videos of weddings. Makes, in fact, seamlessly joyous videos of weddings often awkward and sour, which is an art, and one she is good at. But her hobbies, shoplifting clothes from Bergdorf and ingesting methamphetamine, which she does quite often from the tip of her jackknife blade, don't foretell a long and happy life. She is a diabetic, in addition, and her meth addiction worsens a deteriorating eye condition whose far end is blindness...
...Magazine, for example, sung in an arid yet passionate rasp, Edwards muses on how literary works have been replaced on people's bookshelves by visually slick magazines featuring everything "from the absurd to the obscene." The haunting, slow-tempo Yellow Brown recalls the cyberpunk film Blade Runner; synthesizer bass notes drip like fat raindrops, and the sounds of droning machinery resonate. Edwards laments ecological destruction caused by technology: "In the city air, in all our seas, you can see every other color bleed into/ Yellow brown. There's nothing to save us from ourselves...