Bread and Circuses

[leahbobet]

Tonight appears to be a night for goofing off and budget-grade sybaritic luxury (eating clementines in a hot bath and tossing the peels carelessly into the water? Recommended), so I leave you with these few reviews to put you off my scent. Clever, no?

londonkds finds "Miles to Isengard" "grim but very readable."

Paul Raven at Velcro City Tourist Board generally says nice things about it:

This is a very interesting character piece wrapped around a dystopic near-future in the Southern States. The narrative has an almost hyper-real quality, possibly to enhance the sleep-deprived POV of the characters who are driving a stolen nuclear weapon to its (and their own) doom.

Its a story about rebellion and following the voice in your heart, the latter given emphasis by the actualising of the opposing voice in the form of the bomb itself, who the main character half-believes is talking to him, telling them that their efforts are futile. The bitter-sweet ending does little to suggest the bomb is lying, but their defiance in the face of inevitable capture and punishment is all the more poignant for that. A cautionary tale, albeit one that feels thematically a few decades late - which is not to say nuclear weapons are a solved problem, but their time in the fictional spotlight feels to have receded with the mid-eighties. Nonetheless, written with subtlety beneath the grit and country grammar, and much more moving than I expected thanks to a strong eye for detail.

And to complete the proof that so much depends on the reader, Lois Tilton at The Internet Review of Science Fiction seems lukewarm, though I admit I can't parse the tone of that last bit here:

The characters, however, are an ill-assorted group who never much differentiate themselves as individuals, outside of Sam, the narrator. The author never says which volcano is their destination, but if it is the most active, St Helens, I am not convinced that they could get a semi up the trail to the active vent. And the child soldier remains an enigma, seeming out of place. A world where there are checkpoints on the highways and bands of insurgents hiding in the national parks is not the same thing as a world where children are turned into orcs and sent into battle wired up to explode when they die. In a world like that, a factory making nukes doesn't seem like the worst evil.

Three-three-THREE reviews! Three different readings!

And now I shall return to goofing off.

ETA: And of course, the second I posted that, the notification for another one came in: Bugpowderdust finds it:

a close second to the Foster as story of the issue. It’s a story of a band of adventurers trying to destroy some seductive but nasty world-destroying technology by chucking it in a volcano, which I guess is where the LOTR reference in the title comes in, but this is a near future setting with our band of heroes barrelling along in a truck. It’s a well told story, with a nasty creeping paranoia that scratches at the inside of your skull.