2008 books

[peteryoung]

63) Ian Watson, The Embedding, 1973
Watson's debut is notable for its ambitious conceptual and linguistic speculations, combining high drama in the flooded Amazon basin, English children raised to communicate outside of normal language structures, and some aliens arriving in orbit with some bizarre and rather ghoulish trade suggestions involving their search for their own version of God. The Embedding is often a brutal book, populated with human monsters of all kinds. No one comes out looking good but Watson himself made everyone sit up and take notice, and this is still reckoned to be one of the most important British SF novels of the 1970s. I noticed several ideas in here revisited or borrowed a decade later by Suzette Haden Elgin in her strident Native Tongue but, all things considered, this is by far the better book.

Comments

[del-c.livejournal.com]

I had not realised The Embedding was his first book.

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

Native Tongue strident? I don't find it so. I used to think it was of its time, to an extent, but I fear now that it might be prophetic.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

I certainly found Elgin's radical feminism strident to the point of being shrill. I haven't read the sequels but I heard she toned it down because it was alienating male readers. In what way do you think it might be prophetic?

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

I guess that makes me a radical feminist then :)

As to prophesy, I just get bad feelings about the Texas Taliban and their Dominionist cohorts: even if by some miracle the DNC don't fuck up (again) and the vote for Obama/Biden exceeds the margin of internal adjustment in the voting machines, the US is so polarised that I fear things could get messy over there.