Carlos Serv Serv itibaren Piparo, Trinidad ve Tobago
Sooooo ilginç - ve ben bile Chi kasabasında yaşamadım!
I’ve been reading all the hype lately of how great the 5th book in this series is...so...I broke down and purchased this one to start the series (even though I have way too many books in my TBR pile already). The story is amazing, fast, fun, sad at times...now only 4 more books to go….
Dammit, another cliffhanger ending.. On to book 3!
For some reason this took me forever to read. Though I enjoyed it a great deal. I think the strory takes a very long time to get going and initially the characters seem very two-dimensional and redolent of an 80's made for TV movie. However after a couple of hundred pages this book starts moving nicely, and as we expect from Greg Bear or his peers, the themes and scope of the book just get grander and grander. It develops into a very original concept involving alternate histories and futures, manipulation of space time, the future of personality augmentation and storage, not to mention a William Gibson like take on how an advanced civilisation would deal with a sea of digital information, some of which may be regarded as alive. If you like grand and reality warping space opera, in the vein of Iain M Banks or hard Sci-Fi such as Arthur C Clarke, this is an ideal example.
review of my first read and a second read 10 months later: VALIS is the most autobiographical novel PKD wrote. With Dick my favorite author and VALIS one of his most highly regarded novels I expected to love it. But the problem is that it isn't an autobiography. What happened to Dick in 1974 is fascinating, but there is where I'd recommend reading a biography or watching a documentary, rather than turning to VALIS. VALIS was just boring to me, failing to be true enough to be an autobiography and failing to have any merit to the fictional elements. I highly recommend Radio Free Albemuth based on the same occurrence that led to VALIS - the fiction in that novel was great and leads to an interesting novel while still giving the reader insight into the author and his unique experiences. =========================================================== I re-read this one 10 months later. Liked it more the second time knowing what to expect. I still like Radio Free Albemuth and recommend that if you are in the mood for a good Dick book. While both are autobiographical, VALIS to me still doesn't read like a great novel, I recommend this when you are a PKD fan looking to learn more about the man. I'm bumping this from 2-stars to 3.5 stars. I also recommend it as a second read for PKD fans. Whether you liked it the first time or not, this is definitely a work you will see in a different light when given a second read.
it was fun and very romantic but had some issues w/ it