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Book Group - Sept 2014 - The Humans -Discussion thread

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McGoohan Sep 2014 10:06pm, 29 Sep 2014 12,696 posts	Quote Pin McGoohan Second thoughts: 1. It’s Gershwin and Holst in my edition so I assume either they had some corrections in a subsequent edition or it was a poor transfer to Kindle. 2. I didn’t feel he captured the communicating with the home planet very well. In fact it seemed ripped off of ‘Mork calling Orson’ from Mork and Mindy or The Big Giant Head from Third Rock From The Sun. I had no clear idea of who they were at all. 3. It doesn’t say ‘science fiction’ anywhere on the cover or in the Author Notes. There’s this general snobbishness in the literary world. If a proper author writes a sci-fi book, then it’s not really sci-fi. If it’s a sci-fi book, say it’s a sci-fi book. (See also Will Self’s “Book of Dave” which is basically a rewrite of “A Canticle For Leibowitz” by Walter M Miller)
Oysterboy Sep 2014 10:11pm, 29 Sep 2014 9,990 posts	Quote Pin Oysterboy You're bang on about Mork and Mindy, hadn't thought of that!
McGoohan Sep 2014 10:12pm, 29 Sep 2014 12,699 posts	Quote Pin McGoohan I'm trying to recall if someone refers to Mork from Ork in the book now...
Pestomum Sep 2014 10:22pm, 29 Sep 2014 5,753 posts	Quote Pin Pestomum I did not like this book at all. I've got little patience for books where the author is trying so very hard to be clever and self referential and, like, cool. He lost me with a reference in the preface to things that humans do including "writing a semi autobiographical novel". He never got me back.
Dooogs Sep 2014 10:23pm, 29 Sep 2014 4,429 posts	Quote Pin Dooogs Ooh, must read 'Canticle' then - I loved The Book of Dave. 'Proper authors' writing sci-fi - I think Margaret Atwood gets tetchy about genre too, even though it's obviously sci-fi.
Diogenes Sep 2014 10:25pm, 29 Sep 2014 7,463 posts	Quote Pin Diogenes Your writing lists, you've been infected. So, did he really have powers, or was he just psychotic? If the latter did he really save Gulliver when he fell from the roof, or did he figuratively pull him back from the brink? How did he hurt the football thug? Would he have known how to create a Facebook virus? If the Vonnodorians were really so advanced they wouldn't have had to send one ill-prepared man to eliminate Andrew Martin, they could have done something much less complicated and more effective. And how did he die, we aren't told that. Moreover, they would know that Isobel and Gulliver lived on, and carried on until they were dead. I don't mind believing in aliens, or having a mentally ill protagonist, but the plot doesn't hang together either way. The more I think about it, the more I think that the only person who believed Andrew Martin was an alien was the very human Andrew Martin, he had the full K-Pax.
Diogenes Sep 2014 10:26pm, 29 Sep 2014 7,464 posts	Quote Pin Diogenes you're
Diogenes Sep 2014 10:29pm, 29 Sep 2014 7,465 posts	Quote Pin Diogenes The book I read before The Humans was The Blind Assassin. That's something from a completely different league. It tells you much more about what it is to be human, without you even noticing.
Elsie Too Sep 2014 10:31pm, 29 Sep 2014 1,355 posts	Quote Pin Elsie Too I've just seen that this thread had started and just read all 8 pages. Some really interesting points discussed. I started, like many, not really liking it but there was one point where it clicked. It was this paragraph " human life, I realised, got progressively worse as you got older, by the sound of things. You arrived, with baby feet and hands and infinite happiness, and then the happiness slowly evaporated as your feet and hands grew bigger. And then, from the teenage years onwards, happiness was something you could lose your grip of, and once it started to slip it gained mass. It was as if the knowledge that it could slip was the thing that made it more difficult to hold, no matter how big your feet and hands were." It was at this stage that I wondered if the split of people liking and disliking this book would be at least in part dependant if they had suffered depression at any stage and just got what he was talking about because they had been there. I agree about the editing and did find it hard to get into but pretty easy reading from this stage on. I quite liked the list and the prime numbers.
Elsie Too Sep 2014 10:35pm, 29 Sep 2014 1,356 posts	Quote Pin Elsie Too Diogenes, I hadn't thought about the character in the book being psychotic I guess because I was just reading the book as a book about an alien but thinking about the way the author may have been dealing with depression.