Wednesday, October 19, 2005

This List Sucks.

There's no way that Gibson's Neuromancer is a better novel than Frank Herbert's Dune, which appears nowhere. I've read Neuromancer, and frankly, it's a big so-what. And no Heinlein? I can see Starship Troopers not making the cut, but Stranger in a Strange Land was damn fine, as was Glory Road.

But the real travesty is the presence of Tropic of Cancer, a drunken Parisian tour diary masquerading as a novel. The thing is incoherent, pretentious, and worst of all, boring. It's like the guy skimmed Notes from the Underground and said "What someone oughta do is take this, stretch it out a bit, and throw in some more lively street slang, like the word for a woman's genitals. Especially the word for a woman's generals that rhymes with 'bunt'."

Someone do please explain why anyone would read this monument to banality when they could achieve the same effect instantaneously by hitting themselves on the head with it. Remember, keep the mouth open, and say "Wa" at the moment of impact.

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