Word: novelizations
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Across the country, the pattern is much the same. This year's novel flu virus is hitting much sooner than normal, long before cold weather forces people inside, where viruses like to fester, and weeks before the official start of flu season on Oct. 4. The virus has been gobbling geographic terrain in recent weeks, with 26 states reporting widespread flu illness on Sept. 19, up from 21 states a week earlier and just four states at the beginning of August. (Read "What You Need to Know About the H1N1 Vaccine...
Midway through “Generosity,” Richard Powers’ stunning new novel, the charming businessman and geneticist Robert Kurton participates in a public debate with an unnamed novelist. The subject: genetic enhancement of human beings. The shy author begins, awkwardly reading from a prewritten speech. But his argument is complex, as Powers writes, “The writer’s thought is so dense that every clause tries to circle back for another try before plunging on.” Even the narration has trouble following the train of thought. Kurton takes stage, joking...
...futures call for alternative language. “1984” had Newspeak, “A Clockwork Orange” had Nadsat—each distorted, disorienting vocabulary a warning of possible ills. In “The Year of the Flood,” her most recent novel and the second in a series of three, Margaret Atwood similarly invents a dictionary for her post-apocalyptic world. But her words are amusing than ominous—the lexicon for a dystopian vision at once entertaining and insubstantial. Atwood’s way with words should come...
Cobwebs of conspiracy, visible only by glimpses of light filtered through the haze of pot smoke, bind fast the decadent and insular isle of Manhattan in Jonathan Lethem’s newest novel, “Chronic City.” The protagonist, Chase Insteadman—a former child star living off re-run residuals—serves as both one of a cohort of sleuths trying to untangle these webs and a vessel for the reader’s own desire to do the same. His seemingly infinite naïveté parallels our own; his paranoia...
...half or double hero in Surrogates, another cyborg epic from the writers and director of Terminator 3: Judgment Day, and based on a graphic novel. The movie imagines that, in day-to-day activity, lifelike robots have mostly replaced humans, who sit at home speaking for the droids and controlling their actions. It's a piquant premise for those of us who see Americans retreating to near-stasis in front of their computers, enjoying (or condemned to) a life no more than virtual. But the main story, in which humans and robots do battle for the future of the collective...