science-fiction

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📚Read : I Am Legend

rw-book-cover

Metadata

  • Author: [[Richard Matheson]]
  • Full Title: I Am Legend
  • Category:
  • Date: 2022-03-14

Review

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve read and re-read this book. Not because it’s a huge number, but because I find it so compelling that just reading the first few pages carries me along for the first couple of chapters until I’m a significant fraction through this, admittedly short, book. And then I put it down again, without even placing a bookmark, and read something else. This time, I read it right through.

I first read/heard this book on [[Radio 4]] about ten years ago when the BBC basically broadcast the extraordinary audio-book, emphatically read by [[Robertson Dean]] in his growling, sonorous tones. I listened to most of the episodes in one go, sitting in my suitably atmospherically lit tenement kitchen in [[Ibrox]]. I’ve loved it ever since.

My recent re-read in March 2022 came immediately after I’d finished reading [[Ulysses]] for the first time. As you’d expect, that was an extremely difficult read and I needed a palate cleanser from a book I barely understood. More importantly, it was the first time I’d read it since the beginning of the pandemic – the book which deals with the loneliness and isolation that comes as a result of a global pandemic. Of vampires.

The book deals with the fantastical concept of vampires (albeit in a modern, scientifically-focused style), but treats the emotional turmoil and trauma experienced by the protagonist as a result of his isolation with a straight bat. And I’m not going to deny that these parts struck a chord with me on this re-read.

Over the pandemic, I’ve been very lucky in a lot of ways. Despite being posted overseas for the last 4 years, there’s a strong culture of support in the team. However, there were still periods when, except for on screens, I didn’t have a conversation with another person for weeks on end. The “being trapped in your own head-edness” of the novel resonated with me a lot, and I suspect it does/would with a lot of other people too.

I think it’s right to treat a work of fantasy like this seriously – books like this and science-fiction such as [[E.M. Forster]]’s [[The Machine Stops]] are perfectly constructed pieces of art which bear examination after the world’s recent encounter with forced (but necessary) isolation. The fantasy element provides just that little bit of speculative distance to provide some mental room to maneuver.

I suspect, as restrictions are eased and people return more and more to their pre-pandemic ways, that many people would take a lot from this book to usefully examine their own experience of the past two years.

Highlights

Emotion was a difficult thing to summon from the dead, though. He had spent it all and felt hollow now, without feeling. (Location 1845)

📕 Read Red Mars

 

Progress: ██████████ 100%
Rating: ★★★★★

Quotes

Frank’s French was worse than no French at all, like listening to someone attack the language with a hatchet. — location: 3324

Je me sens vu

Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.” — location: 4435

“The King asked his wise men for some single thing that would make him happy when he was sad, but sad when he was happy. They consulted and came back with a ring engraved with the message ‘This Too Will Pass.’” — location: 4709

“Maybe so. In any case, whole cultures were built around the idea of the gift, in Malaysia, in the American northwest, in many primitive cultures. In Arabia we gave water, or coffee. Food and shelter. And whatever you were given, you did not expect to keep, but gave it back again in your turn, hopefully with interest. You worked to be able to give more than you received. Now we think that this can be the basis for a reverent economics.” — location: 4718

This arrangement resembles the prehistoric way to live, and it therefore feels right to us, because our brains recognize it from three millions of years practicing it. In essence our brains grew to their current configuration in response to the realities of that life. So as a result people grow powerfully attached to that kind of life, when they get the chance to live it. It allows you to concentrate your attention on the real work, which means everything that is done to stay alive, or make things, or satisfy one’s curiosity, or play. That is Utopia, John, especially for primitives and scientists, which is to say everybody. — location: 5126

Most ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to people. — location: 5637

and so of course the so-called rich elite are in actuality poor as well, disengaged from real human work and therefore from real human accomplishment, parasitical in the most precise sense, and yet powerful too as parasites that have taken control can be, sucking the gifts of human work away from their rightful recipients which are the seven generations, and feeding on them while increasing the repressive powers that keep them in place!” — location: 5713

“It’s impossible!” Frank exclaimed. “We’re part of the world, we can’t escape it.” “Can’t we? It’s only the blue evening star, the world you speak of. This red world is the only real one for us, now.” — location: 6884