<nettime> Fw: blood electric

[Kenji Siratori <white-b@d4.dion.ne.jp>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Mazey"
To: "'Kenji Siratori'"
Subject: blood electric


Blood Electric is a cyberpunk style sf story written by Kenji Siratori. It
is a difficult but rewarding book. The difficulty lies within Kenji's
original prose style. This is not so much a book written in English but a
book written in a new language, a Meta-English where words no longer carry
meaning but become almost symbolic in use and the over all mental
impression a sentence creates is more crucial than the way that sentence is
put together. The effect of this is one of an outline being drawn for the
reader around the story. The reader can fill in the gaps if they dare.
The rewarding aspect of the book is its slow but tangible development
towards a conclusion. Although the book doesn't officially finish, I
developed a sense of relieved understanding towards the end that certainly
wasn't present at the beginning. The first page states in huge letters that
"This Machine Kills" but the machine is more than mechanical in its
constant struggle towards life. The machine has an organic element to its
growth and the prose reflects this development, becoming more coherent as
the story unfolds, as it reveals more and more about the Adam doll and
Retro Adam and the roles they both play within the machine.
Blood Electric is a book I was inclined to dislike when I first picked it
up. I changed my mind when I realised I had been reading it for three hours
with out a break. Because of its challenging style and content the book
demands that the reader make sense of it, it almost dares you to walk away
and it is very hard to put down. I think that is the best test of any book.
Despite the complicated prose and the dark subject matter it is one of
those books that won't be ignored easily.
James Joyce once wrote a book called Finnegan's Wake. I saw on TV recently
that there is a society in New York that meet once a month to examine his
deeply complex stream of consciousness prose. I think they had been meeting
for seven years and they are still only on page seventy something. I would
not be surprised if Blood Electric created a similar type of dedicated,
die-hard fan base who are willing to take the book apart line by line in
order to extract every last drop of meaning from its pages.
This book will have an immediate appeal to few people, but I think it
should be read widely by a variety of readers. Not because I think everyone
will enjoy it but just so they will have something to say when it gets
mentioned in conversation. You can almost guarantee it will be.


Steve & Lesley Mazey


The Eternal Night Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Fiction Web Site
http://www.eternalnight.co.uk


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