tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post6415194845921379169..comments2023-10-26T22:06:11.166+11:00Comments on Metamagician3000: The Plot Against AmericaRussell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-80678968972225672102007-12-27T09:45:00.000+11:002007-12-27T09:45:00.000+11:00Just finished! Spoilers follow.I found a grim iro...Just finished! Spoilers follow.<BR/><BR/>I found a grim irony in Roth's statement that Bobby Kennedy died in the same circumstances in the fictional world as in our own history. This statement enters the narrative on October 5, 1942 (p. 272 in my copy), when the Roth character is setting up the scene for Walter Winchell's assassination.<BR/><BR/><I>Though Presidents Lincoln and Garfield had been shot and killed in the second half of the nineteenth century and McKinley at the start of the twentieth, and though in 1933 FDR had survived an assassination attempt that had instead taken the life of his Democratic supporter Chicago's Mayor Cermak, it wasn't until twenty-six years after Winchell's assassination that a second presidential candidate would be gunned down — that was New York's Democratic senator Robert Kennedy, fatally shot in the head after winning his party's California primary on Tuesday, June 4, 1968.</I><BR/><BR/>This is, as far as I can recall, the first moment when Roth indicates that the course of his history is going to rejoin with ours — that "it's all going to be OK". Rather a bleak way to do so, I should think.Blake Staceyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13977394981287067289noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-28033519057075188302007-11-06T06:00:00.000+11:002007-11-06T06:00:00.000+11:00I enjoyed the novel well enough, but the ending wa...I enjoyed the novel well enough, but the ending was a huge deus ex machina that almost spoiled it for me. I think that's the main problem with the novel. I was willing to suspend disbelief on the point that reality returns eventually to normal, but not on the sudden and unbelievable way it does.Alejandrohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09286094437163724803noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-16550409713289486282007-11-05T12:00:00.000+11:002007-11-05T12:00:00.000+11:00I had slightly mixed feelings about it, which I ma...I had slightly mixed feelings about it, which I may find difficult to articulate. There was something a bit clumsy about the way the ending was handled - perhaps because the really crucial events took place in the narrator's absence, and he was only able to tell us about them, rather than really conveying the experience of them. <BR/><BR/><B>MORE SPOILERS</B><BR/><BR/>For a science fiction reader, there was also something odd about the whole set-up. There was little of what might happen after the events of the novel, though they would surely produce enormous deviations from our reality (people would be altered psychologically in all sorts of ways by living through the Lindbergh years, institutions could never be put back in quite the same way, different people would marry, different people would be born, etc.), but Roth didn't seem to want to go there. The novel seemed designed to make a very limited point, and though it was an enjoyable (if grim read), the logic of its own realism seemed to demand more of it. <BR/><BR/>Things seem to spring back to the reality we know - FDR dies in similar circumstances; we are told at one point that RFK was shot in what appear to be identical circumstances to his assassination in our world; etc.<BR/><BR/>All this feels wrong to me. I guess I'd have expected it to end on a note of mixed hope and foreboding after the bad guys' plot is defeated. What will now happen in this world that has experienced such events? I don't think you can write such a realistic novel while suspending realism about such things - but someone not immersed in science fiction might not feel this at all.Russell Blackfordhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-391060896062475342007-11-05T04:31:00.000+11:002007-11-05T04:31:00.000+11:00I'm gonna be doing some air travel in the next cou...I'm gonna be doing some air travel in the next couple months, so I figure I should pick up a few novels to read; I'll put this one on my list. I vaguely recall hearing about it in some random place before, perhaps while I was cleaning up lists of X, Y and Z in the byways of Wikipedia.<BR/><BR/>One thing which bothered me about the show <I>Sliders</I> was how the "point of divergence" for the alternate history of the week was always revealed before the first commercial break. This seems to be a common symptom of "alternate reality" fiction: the divergence points don't have to be puzzled out. Not being familiar with the length and breadth of science fiction, I'm sure there are important exceptions to this — I'm just reporting my casual observation.<BR/><BR/>This might be why I enjoyed Borges's "<A HREF="http://math.cofc.edu/kasman/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumber=mf495" REL="nofollow">Death and the Compass</A>" so much: rather than setting the story in a Buenos Aires of some alternate timeline (<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Manuel_de_Rosas" REL="nofollow">Rosas</A> never became dictator, <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sim%C3%B3n_Bol%C3%ADvar" REL="nofollow">BolĂvar</A> unified South America, or whatever), he built a dream city out of fractured pieces of culture.Blake Staceyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13977394981287067289noreply@blogger.com