Galatea 2.2

I’m too old to be reading crap I don’t like, but, unable to sustain this sense of fury, I couldn’t THROW THE AWFUL BOOK IN THE BIN on Sunday evening, when on page 86 I decided to give it up. So, the yellowing futuristic novel with the intriguing cover sits awkwardly on my computer desk whilst I figure out if it’s going to make it onto my shelf AS A LESSON, or if it’s to be recycled with the newspapers. galatea.jpg
I blame Margaret Atwood for all of this. She’s the one who twenty years later took me back into the pseudo-sci-fi realm with books like Oryx and Crake, and The Handmaids’s Tale. Then there was David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. All imaginative books that led you somewhere new and unknown. Speaking of which I must buy Mitchell’s latest – the green one. A quick look at the reviews on Amazon show Powers to be “cerebral”, “dazzling” and “knowledgeable”. Unfortunately in my view, he was trying way too hard to be all the above and it showed in a crummy, overly controlled, self conscious plot. If I wanted regimented genre fiction, I’d read crime novels. I disappoint myself when I can’t find something to like about a writer who is obviously talented, but a man who strikes me as a more drawn-out, scientific version of David Foster Wallace deserves to be binned.