Gazza Gibbo again, and yes I know I should have known better. I lasted for 250 pages, about half way through, before giving up. Before I actually say anything about the book, here is a curiously apposite quote from Lewis, in the Allegory of Love:The De Nuptiis, as is well known, became a text-book in the Middle Ages. Its encyclopaedic character made it invaluable for men who aimed at a universality in knowledge without being able, or perhaps willing, to return to the higher authorities. The fantastical 'babu' ornaments of the style were admired. The mixture of fable with grammatical or scientific doctrine was a damnosa hereditas which it bequeathed to the following centuries; Martianus, I take it, must bear the chief responsibility for Hawes' Tower of Doctrine and Spenser's House of Alma. He established a disastrous precedent for endlessness and form-lessness in literary work. Yet I cannot persuade myself that the Middle Ages were entirely unhappy in their choice of a master. Martianus may have been a bad fairy; but I think he had the fairy blood in him. His building is a palace without design; the passages are tortuous, the rooms disfigured with senseless gilding, ill-ventilated, and horribly crowded with knick-knacks. But the knick-knacks are very curious, very strange; and who will say at what point strangeness begins to turn into beauty? I must confess, too, that I am sufficiently of the author's kidney to enjoy the faint smell of the secular dust that lies upon them. At every moment we are reminded of something in the far past or something still to come. What is at hand may be dull; but we never lose faith in the richness of the collection as a whole. Anything may come next. We are 'pleased, like travellers, with seeing more', and we are not always disappointed. Among all these figurative woods and streams, these wheeling poles and pedantic rituals, these solemn processions and councils of the gods-gods that seem no bigger than marionettes, but stiff with gold and carved with Chinese curiosity-among all these, some at any rate suffer us to forget their doctrinal purpose, and breathe the air of wonderland.
Against Gravity is a bit like that, but without the touch of faerie or curiosity.
I gave it two stars on Goodreads, in a generous mood, perhaps for old times sake.
We meet Our Hero in Edinburgh, a refugee from a collapsed America, in a noire-ish atmosphere so typical of cyberpunkiness. He has perhaps-out-of-control enhancements growing within his body that have killed some of his friends, in a manner that will surprise or interest no-one. These were acquired during a formative period in some implausible USAnian prison complex in Venezuela of which we get flashbacks; meanwhile up in the sky is a cylindrical habitat which has apparently been taken over by nano-super-intelligences intent on building a wormhole to the Omega Point in the far future. Various characters are interested in Our Hero, who may or may not be ahllucinating some of them; and of course there's a giant evil megacorp, whose boss is like so mega-smart he got the Nobel Prize at age 21, FFS, that's less plausible than a wormhole to the future.
Various "adventures" happen but don't greatly advance the plot, and I don't buy scifi to read about people having fights in hotel rooms and falling from the windows, yawn. I think that if there's a story in there it badly needed excavation from the heap of refuse that had fallen onto it, to reveal the bones, if they exist.
