Re-reading this.
All the stories are pretty good but the one about the human slave clone working in mcdonalds in a corpocratic north korea far in the future is pretty wild.
Agreed, one of my favorite books. The Bone Clocks by the same author is also interesting.
Do not watch the movie.
I started watching it once just after I read the book for the first time years and years ago, I think I turned it off after 5 mins.
Fair enough.
I will say, the movie version of Letters from Zedelghem is actually pretty good (also, Hugo Weaving as the devil in Sloosha's Crossing is hilarious). But because they didn't keep the nested structure, all those scenes are mixed up with all the other scenes, so you have to watch everything to see the decent stuff, it's not worth it.
i personally really love the movie. I think there are a lot of questionable choices, but I'm pretty much full on critical support for the wachowskis.
the music is fantastic, and while it's sorta a clusterfuck on first viewing, i really like the ideas of reusing the cast throughout the different stories.
Oh yeah, there's definitely some good ideas in the movie, and like I said in my other comment, the movie version of Letters from Zedelghem is actually quite good. I really like the idea of reusing the same cast, but jesus fuck that makeup was horrible even when it wasn't racist.
The execution was just muddy, though. Having the actors return implies a connection between their characters, but only Tom Hanks and Hugo Weaving actually have coherent metacharacters in that sense (in that Weaving was always a villain and Hanks had an actual redemption arc when you view the stories chronologically)- the rest were just muddled and incoherent. I always support directors who try new things, and the Warchowskis in particular, but it just did not work for me this time.
Sonmi 451's story is so good that once I finished it I didn't care about finishing the rest of the book.
yeah i've felt the same, the book definitely peaks halfway through, the sloosha's crossing bit is a struggle to get through with it written in that sort of pidgin dialect too.
that is the stock cyberpunk setting, yes.
based on the labor disputes and capitalist atrocities occurring outside the reach any government the EIC's , the first modern corporations, thought was legitimate. right down to the abundance of peope with katanas kicking the shit out of people with guns (a lot of samurai came to be mercenaries), wholly owned corporate subsidiary states, and horrific cartoonishly evil labor abuses.
i just got that cos they refer to the 'juche' as the highest members of the corporate pyramid (i think), it could just be both koreas combined, it never fully fleshes out the world really.
in the book for sure. I am sad removed so Robert's story was nice for me too.
also i love the music from the movie.
