by Luther Blissett
Medium
December 18th, 2016
This book is worth buying, or at least checking out from your library, for a couple reasons. It’s only $13 to start with; if you order directly from PM Press’s catalog, you could save up to five bucks on this. {questions about this? contact PM Press or request a catalog!} The second reason is the best reason I can offer for ever reading a book: After the first or second paragraph, I wasn’t sure if I would make it through the novella, Gypsy (it’s just over 90 pages), but I decided to give it a shot, relax, and suspend my disbelief — 30 pages later I looked up stunned: I was into the book. So, yes, the book, the characters, the concepts capture the imagination.
Perks of the book are that you can ride through some interesting and intense physics — this should make hard SF folks happy. I think it’s all accurate, but I’m not a science geek, so I can’t say. However, unlike Neal Stephenson, Scholz manages to integrate his riffs in a way that extend discourse a few paragraphs as opposed to a 20 pages. For readers like me, I appreciate integrating science into the storyline. Likable characters; interesting juxtapositions of characters and timelines; unexpected outcome.
In addition to Gypsy, there’s a great non-fiction gutting of the economic elite. It rocks. There are a couple of other shorter pieces, but it’s really Gypsy and “The United States of Impunity” that make this work.
Overall a really enjoyable book. Worth your cash.
