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I love Hand's fantasy and mystery/thrillers, but vaguely recalled bouncing off her science fiction and feeling that it was impenetrable and had a hallucinatory quality that I didn't like. Having run through most of those genres by her, I thought I'd give her SF another try. I didn't bounce off this one, but though it wasn't impenetrable, it certainly was difficult to penetrate. Also, it had a hallucinatory quality that I didn't like.
Glimmering is near-future SF with an odd history. It was first published in 1997 and was unsettlingly accurate about a number of things that came to pass in the 2000s. Hand then revised it in 2021, apparently to correct some scientific errors and give it a more hopeful ending. (Having read the revised edition, if that's the hopeful ending, then the original one probably ends with everyone dead.)
An environmental accident that I guess is more scientifically plausible than whatever the original cause was creates the Glimmering, a fiery rainbow sky like a permanent aurora. This blocks a lot of sunlight so plants don't grow well. Meanwhile, everything is in a slow slide into dystopia, with pandemics and terrorism and uncertain electricity and so forth.
The main characters are Jack, a gay man who has AIDS (Hand did not predict modern anti-virals, so in the books it's a terminal condition) who is given something that's supposedly a cure, and Trip, a young man of indeterminate but very repressed sexuality who's become a megastar evangelical Christian singer. Their plotlines are completely separate for most of the book, and only intersect at all toward the end. I liked Jack and was pretty engaged with his storyline; he lives with grandmother and a housekeeper, he has friends and relatives, he has relatable problems and desires. I did not care about Trip and his creepy sexual encounter with a weird teenage refugee girl.
For most of the book, Jack takes the drug and finds that most of his symptoms improve, though he sees strange visions and continues to lose weight. Trip has sex, freaks out, takes drugs, freaks out, does other things, freaks out... I did not care about Trip.
The climax and ending go full hallucinatory. I'm cutting for spoilers but maybe what I write won't be spoilery because I'm not sure how much of it actually happened or what it meant.
( Read more... )
I could see what Hand was doing here. The themes are ones I like: a small-scale, slow-moving apocalypse; how people deal with mortality and love in the midst of both a global apocalypse and the small, personal apocalypses of their lives. But the book felt jumbled and incoherent, and it didn't make me terribly enthused about seeking out more of Hand's science fiction. (There's an SF trilogy she wrote a while back, and reviews often use the word "hallucinatory.")
Of her remaining novels I haven't read yet, one is Black Light (dark fantasy or horror) and one is Hokuloa Road, a mystery thriller. These sound much more up my alley.
Glimmering is near-future SF with an odd history. It was first published in 1997 and was unsettlingly accurate about a number of things that came to pass in the 2000s. Hand then revised it in 2021, apparently to correct some scientific errors and give it a more hopeful ending. (Having read the revised edition, if that's the hopeful ending, then the original one probably ends with everyone dead.)
An environmental accident that I guess is more scientifically plausible than whatever the original cause was creates the Glimmering, a fiery rainbow sky like a permanent aurora. This blocks a lot of sunlight so plants don't grow well. Meanwhile, everything is in a slow slide into dystopia, with pandemics and terrorism and uncertain electricity and so forth.
The main characters are Jack, a gay man who has AIDS (Hand did not predict modern anti-virals, so in the books it's a terminal condition) who is given something that's supposedly a cure, and Trip, a young man of indeterminate but very repressed sexuality who's become a megastar evangelical Christian singer. Their plotlines are completely separate for most of the book, and only intersect at all toward the end. I liked Jack and was pretty engaged with his storyline; he lives with grandmother and a housekeeper, he has friends and relatives, he has relatable problems and desires. I did not care about Trip and his creepy sexual encounter with a weird teenage refugee girl.
For most of the book, Jack takes the drug and finds that most of his symptoms improve, though he sees strange visions and continues to lose weight. Trip has sex, freaks out, takes drugs, freaks out, does other things, freaks out... I did not care about Trip.
The climax and ending go full hallucinatory. I'm cutting for spoilers but maybe what I write won't be spoilery because I'm not sure how much of it actually happened or what it meant.
( Read more... )
I could see what Hand was doing here. The themes are ones I like: a small-scale, slow-moving apocalypse; how people deal with mortality and love in the midst of both a global apocalypse and the small, personal apocalypses of their lives. But the book felt jumbled and incoherent, and it didn't make me terribly enthused about seeking out more of Hand's science fiction. (There's an SF trilogy she wrote a while back, and reviews often use the word "hallucinatory.")
Of her remaining novels I haven't read yet, one is Black Light (dark fantasy or horror) and one is Hokuloa Road, a mystery thriller. These sound much more up my alley.
