Reviews and Comments

I'm not sure how far Gladman's fantastic Ravickian worlding has spread betond smaller literary, artistic, critical conclaves. She reached me by way of Lucy Ives' article on the "weak novel" (after listening to Ives on a BISR's podcast paneling the same topic). (I've since bought almost every book Ives mentions in this article; I'm on a rapid tour of postmodern anti-novels.)

I'm curious who would fancy this book. I loved it. But I love a good ontological drift through space-time. Are we meant to be reading the artifactual record of the protagonist's survey? Nope. Maybe? This isn't the same kind of world-inhabiting, context-laden ethnography that frequents the beginnings of book parts and chapters in sci-fi and fantasy volumes. Well, perhaps it is a long opener as the first of many books.

What feels most real is that Gladman's text is constantly in question.

Dorothy (the publisher) leaves far too much margin.

The story can hardly get going since getting past "Hello" is nearly impossible. It's some kind of language issue. But also architectural, since the built world is in some kind of crisis or revolution. Something really bad is happening on Ravicka, and we don't get enough for a complete analysis. What's maddening is that the locals seem to brush it off. But it's not a total wash in the yellow. There are wonderfully concrete and vivid moments of the Ravickian world. It's not simply abstract for abstract's fancy. There are stakes here for Gladman. That's what makes this anti-novel of sorts hard to dismiss. We oscillate between a strong foothold and floatation. Personally I find it seductive-enough.

Is Ravicka even a faraway planet at all? Could other worlds be close, not worlds away?

There are also gestures that feel fresh and exciting, partly because they are given so much room. Is this record incomplete? Were parts intentionally left out? Were they lost? Did they never happen? Sex with strangers. Music is important. Underground civilizations. Dancing is important to speak. Writhing to speak. Unlikely inter-species/cultural collaborations. Going to and waking from sleep. Sleep is important. Obvious love lost, longing. A book that de-centers the written and spoken word, somehow, while concerned with it and the slippage of translation; including awkward encounters with native speakers and their disinterest. Gladman's person is put through tenderness and saddening separation with every encounter.

This is a small book that you cannot breeze through. But it is pleasure book bound.

Reproduced from Bookwyrm

Bax evades a typically satisfying narrative arc for recondite reprints of medical texts and war-time dispatches/memoir peppered among a minor smatter of pro forma obligations to a novel about people surviving large-scale tragedy. But readers should consider this as a book at play with the conventional. Albeit a spirited one. All aboard.

I suspect this is will be either a quick read for you, or you'll drop it quickly into the gift bin. When the story pokes through the fog of secondary material, you enjoin the nerved doings of hospital staff aboard a large vessel skirting the edge of some broad-spectrum of disaster. The healing process for the ship's patients, the interpersonal affairs of the staff, an encounter with counter-cultural politicos that attempt to take the ship as a commune.

Aspects of this world on the verge will feel familiar to the overwhelm of our the early 21st century. This makes the Hospital Ship more timeless than not. It's impossible to determine if the catastrophe(s) are manmade or other, viral, psychological, climate, war, .... A world in crises, multiple, unknowable crises converging -- autism in children, mass crucifixions, general depopulation.

Scenes of sex and sexuality are numbered in this book. The fleshiness, cigarette smoking, feels well-situated to the 70s. Some second wave feminism woven through; although I felt it was oddly (perhaps lazily) retrofitted in the form of Sheila's brief, monochromatic biography. Kinda shoved in there. I'm not convinced Bax was pushing the subject of women's lib radically, at least any more radically than mainstream Leftism of the time. But maybe that's part of the play -- what is the correct rousing politics in the face of amorphous, multi-faced threat.

The fleshiness ages ok, although a bit trite and verging on cringey because the character perspective is always cis-dude. Was the narration of a Vietnamese prostitute healing, with literal sex, a former Wall St. banker stuck in a psychological malaise a refreshing take? prosaic? satire? for the times? I'm not enough of a comp lit scholar to understand the context. How, Euan, the main character, erratically responds to the process of intimacy and sex working it's magic is fun. Especially as the book explores his difficulty with achieving lasting, satisfying sex and love with Sheila.

Overall enough intrigue as an example of early postmodern sci-fi, still-relevant themes, certainly a romp of prose. But not for everyone, I suppose.

Reproduced from Bookwyrm