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So, if a scientific critique cannot be launched against this book, but a literary critique can - it must therefore be a novel!
Personally I still have no problem with Christopher Priest choosing the literary form of a travel journal to write what is actually about an invented planet, but as mentioned I am more responsive than I would have been to the idea that it's a potentially risky choice.
This conversation is wandering off the content of book itself, so if folks want it moderated let me know. But the author's name is Priest, so ...
@Apocryphal You're exactly right. But literary critique can be applied to any work, but the cost is ignoring the evaluation of any claims of the work to go beyond itself. Scientific critique, political, historical, etc. has to deal with this. Somehow we seem to have managed a lot of people in to thinking that such considerations are unimportant. I suppose this is the definition of hubris.
@RichardAbbott How would you describe this qualitative change?
I'm not suggesting that there is any kind of problem with Priest's book due to Priest. And I'm looking forward to enjoying it. But just as it's clear we have a problem with tobacco consumption (it produces more social costs than benefits, and does so assymetrically), and so its individual use is regulated (governed), I think we should start acknowledging that private intellectual pleasure might need to be combined with public discipline.
To your list I would add that we are seeing publishing of old news suddenly sweeping the actual contemporary from public attention. And efforts to reduce the meaning of freedom of speech into an absolute freedom to monologue regardless of consequences à la Syndrome in The Incredibles. Almost all published fictional output is a monologue that appears to be a dialogue, but those contrasting points of view are increasingly being used to silence actual voices seeking to speak, e.g. both sides of the discussions of cancel culture (and the fiction is that there are only two sides) seem to me to function as structures to prevent listening to any other sides - replacing choices with options. A gazetteer lays claim to completeness of a reality in ways that a narrative does not.
It would be nice to only have to deal with the content and audience of a book, but I think we are being thrust into having to consider the effects of their consumption as well, and so having to re-consider and re-assess the past in light of what has grown out of it. Governing and disciplining publishing, especially the intermingling of fictional and intimate forms with other genres, to ensure that it considers outcomes beyond profiting from the intended consumers (not audience).
I think the aside is interesting, and the point worth making, though should probably be taken to a new thread if people would like to continue it. More could be said about it (relevance to fake news media, Orson Welles War of the Worlds, and indeed whether we have a role in educating society or just talking about gaming (see my review of Player of Games by Herman Hesse), but it's relevance to The Islanders has been sufficiently explored, here.
I'm going to be completely honest in that I'm a week late to this, and I've reached my 'number of posts I can catch up on' limit, so apologies if I don't give anything other than my first thoughts here, and again if I've reiterated stuff that's already been said.
I too found the unreliable narrator annoying in the Introduction - "I don't know much about this, or this, or this, and nobody knows anything about this!" - well stop telling us about it then. I do usually skip introductions, even when they're in character, and I wished I'd done that here.
The first island did capture my interest - I like the vignette approach, and I'd be happy with it not fitting together - or fitting together - with everything else. In a strange way it reminded me a bit of how 13th Age seems to describe locations - especially in **13th Age Glorantha **- with a coy "maybe it's this, maybe it's that, it's up to you - here's what three people think of the king" that I find very much to my taste as a GM.
Glorantha has always been presented in that way. It's not so much a 'This is how things are' message to the GM, but a 'This is what people will tell you' to the player.
> Glorantha has always been presented in that way. It's not so much a 'This is how things are' message to the GM, but a 'This is what people will tell you' to the player.
That reminds me of a habit of speech in northern England, especially the north-east, where if you ask an older person "what's his name?", you're likely to get the reply "they call him Jack" (or whatever). Which for those of us with more pedantic frames of mind leaves us feeling, "yes, but what's his name?"...
When I first lived on the Island (PEI) everyone talked about Buddy down the road. It took me a few weeks to realise that there was no one named Buddy in town. I always thought this reticence had something to do respect for with the power of names.
Criminy. I'm late to the party. My impressions of the first two chapters.
General: this book has a lot of "aboutness" mixed with a lot of intentional abstraction.
I do not in any way find the world described here believable, but neither do I think that I am supposed to. I do NOT think Priest has any kind of map in his head, unless it is a narrative one. I feel like he spends a lot of time setting up a dreamy world in which anything he wants to write is possible and yet because of that nothing of an extreme nature is possible. I do not, for instance, expect to see an isle of dragons. It's not only the geography that is unbelievable, but also the people. I mean, a massive bunch of nations in conflict and they sail to what is basically Antarctica to fight? What actually protects the Archipelago from encroachment .... goodwill? Pfah.
I enjoyed this one as a kind of exercise and found it a bit like reading Stanislaw Lem, but without the humor. The delivery is a kind of deadpan monologue of the fantastic. Somehow it also reminded me of the book-that-shall-not-be-named. In that book (which happens to be about whaling), every other chapter is a kind of treatise. This feels like a treatises delivered in a travelogue style framework. (Ironically, traveling without traveling, right?) In this case it's about the nature of wind, and perhaps even more about the things that are changed by wind and how - all the evidence of wind's (or I should say winds') effects. @clash_bowley - this would have been good research for your "Master Windchime" character in Barsum.
@Ray_Otus said:
Yup, yup, yup! Absurdity alarm bells are ringing! Thought the same!
Ah! I loved that game! I wish it didn't die the standard play-by-post game death! It deserved far better!
>
I suspect that is definitely a common question among readers after the first chapter. I asked it of myself for sure. It was a lot of prose telling me nothing much that I could hold onto or that felt worth holding onto.
This. Yes. I sort of wanted more detail on the magnetic fluctuations or whatever that made mapping impossible, but of course I don't think Priest could give us that.
That's a great observation. Kammeston = incomplete, muddled, and wants to be liked. LOL. Perfect projection.