Too quickly and incompletely, for now, because I'm under time
constraints:
1) it's written with a wonderful eloquence and economy 2)
every single character, as the critic James Blish once
pointed out and as you almost do, is functional but insane 3)
it's hilarious 4) it's poignant in that it deals with the
only immortality we have being in the memories of those who
love us 5) it has an immediacy that was something Budrys
wasn't quite alone in honing in 1950s sf, but was among the
most successful proponents of. 6) structurally it's kind of
nifty that the passage through the Death Machine can be seen
to recapitulate the novel as a whole
Sorry you didn't care for it much...you quote my rec...an
English professor I once leant it to was distressed, noting,
"It just seems like another hardboiled novel to me."
Meanwhile, having leant it to novelist A. A. Attanasio in
1984, he was struck by how modern it still seemed. TM
-----Original Message----- From: William Denton Sent: Monday,
January 05, 2004 11:47 PM
Someone recommend this as a noirish SF novel:
Algis Budrys, ROGUE MOON (1959) (aka THE DEATH
MACHINE (2001);
Turned out I'd had a copy sitting in my to-be-read pillar for
about three years, so I got out it last month and read it. I
can see why it was suggested, but I found it only
middling.
[...] Much of the book is about death and madness, and though
it involves trips to the moon, it feels very claustrophobic
and constrained. I hope anyone who's read it will speak up
about why they like it, because I never did get a real grip
on it and I wouldn't rate it as high as many people do.
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