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galaxybanjo's review against another edition
4.0
第40回星雲賞（日本長編部門）、第30回日本SF大賞受賞、2010年フィリップ・K・ディック賞特別賞などを受賞した国産SFの傑作。劇場アニメでは（恐らく2時間の枠内に収めるために）多くのディテールやシナリオが割愛されており、先に劇場版だけを観た身としては原作を読むまで「普通？」程度の評価だったが、原作を読んでようやく数々の称賛の根拠が理解できるようになった気がする。
本作で特に素晴らしく描かれているのは個人の人間性の価値と社会のリソースとしての個人の価値を紐解く描写であり、著者は物語を通して我々が現代社会において自ずと抱いている感情を見事に言語化している。
また、物語のクライマックスも非常に美しく描かれており、個人的には映画よりも原作で文字としてインプットされた時の衝撃の方が何倍も強く心に刺さった。
強いてダメ出しをするなら、世界観の一部にはやや信じがたい描写も幾つかあるが、これらに関しては「SF」作品としての許容範囲内であると思うので、リアリズムに対して極めて神経質でない限りは終始面白く読める筈だ。
本作で特に素晴らしく描かれているのは個人の人間性の価値と社会のリソースとしての個人の価値を紐解く描写であり、著者は物語を通して我々が現代社会において自ずと抱いている感情を見事に言語化している。
また、物語のクライマックスも非常に美しく描かれており、個人的には映画よりも原作で文字としてインプットされた時の衝撃の方が何倍も強く心に刺さった。
強いてダメ出しをするなら、世界観の一部にはやや信じがたい描写も幾つかあるが、これらに関しては「SF」作品としての許容範囲内であると思うので、リアリズムに対して極めて神経質でない限りは終始面白く読める筈だ。
mollysticks's review
3.0
I really enjoyed the etml in this book, nice touch. Also, I don't know if I would want to live in that world,
Quick read with little plot but a cool world. I think the author being in the hospital, dying of cancer while writing this novel adds to the meaning of the book.
Spoiler
as hard as some hardships are, without them I wouldn't feel the extreme highs in my life?Quick read with little plot but a cool world. I think the author being in the hospital, dying of cancer while writing this novel adds to the meaning of the book.
aunt13soc1al's review
5.0
This is truly an amazing book. It's a full book, plenty of action, great characters, and a unique style. It's written as though you're experiencing it from a computer in that it is full of HTML and it uses that to its advantage. The reader is given emotions and insight through the tags and this helps to really bring the book to life. I'm sorry I put it off on my TBR pile for so long.
In more ways than one, this book makes a lot of valid points about our society and where its potential lies. It is not hard to see the potential of the WHO of Tuan's world coming to a reality in our not so distant future. I feel I would be like Tuan and break out of society's mold, putting myself out there into potentially dangerous situations for the possibility of securing alcohol or tobacco, vices we take for granted today, just to feel different.
But there is also a part of me that desires what the WHO offers, a way to maintain your existence without having to make all the decisions yourself. The computers tell you what to eat, monitor your vitals, never getting sick, and while that can be good for a while, I wonder if people could really exist like that for any long term period of time. Perhaps if, as Tuan's predecessors experienced, something extremely horrible happens and it is the way found to prevent it happening again.
I suggest you pick this up if you enjoy a good dystopian novel. It is truly amazing and I was looking forward to reading more of the author's work when I finished. Alas, when I read the small blurb at the end about the author, I learned that he passed away a few years ago, and that this was the only book. If nothing else it is a book to read and savor as there will be no more to come. And if that's not enough of a selling point for you, it has received rave reviews and won a number of awards. It's just that good.
In more ways than one, this book makes a lot of valid points about our society and where its potential lies. It is not hard to see the potential of the WHO of Tuan's world coming to a reality in our not so distant future. I feel I would be like Tuan and break out of society's mold, putting myself out there into potentially dangerous situations for the possibility of securing alcohol or tobacco, vices we take for granted today, just to feel different.
But there is also a part of me that desires what the WHO offers, a way to maintain your existence without having to make all the decisions yourself. The computers tell you what to eat, monitor your vitals, never getting sick, and while that can be good for a while, I wonder if people could really exist like that for any long term period of time. Perhaps if, as Tuan's predecessors experienced, something extremely horrible happens and it is the way found to prevent it happening again.
I suggest you pick this up if you enjoy a good dystopian novel. It is truly amazing and I was looking forward to reading more of the author's work when I finished. Alas, when I read the small blurb at the end about the author, I learned that he passed away a few years ago, and that this was the only book. If nothing else it is a book to read and savor as there will be no more to come. And if that's not enough of a selling point for you, it has received rave reviews and won a number of awards. It's just that good.
gabbyyyyy's review
challenging
dark
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicide attempt, Suicidal thoughts, and Suicide
Moderate: Medical content, Mental illness, and War
Minor: Eating disorder, Sexual assault, Trafficking, and Rape
emjay24's review
4.0
Harmony is a little hard to read at first, because it's written in a sort of html code, but it's actually an emotion code, so that the reader can feel the emotions as they're narrated in the book. Huh? you say... you learn about it later, one of the innovations that people have in this future. Yes, it's the future, and a sort of utopia where everything is almost perfect, and the main character feels chafed by that. she sets out to solve a string of suicides, almost unheard of in this time, and uncovers something pretty chilling. the whole thing was very creepy, i love japanese books, the ones i've read have all had this creepy sort of way about them. it's not horror, it's more science fiction, but if you think about it too much, and its implications, it will certainly keep you awake at night. Loved it!
tomwright's review
2.0
This book reminded me of Starship Troopers. More of a manifesto than a plot-driven story.
Confusing, although I felt like I understood a lot of the points made.
Confusing, although I felt like I understood a lot of the points made.
hanibee_'s review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.75
blert's review
5.0
This just contains some quotes that made an impression on me while reading. Obviously, there's very heavy spoilers.
People who made decisions created an atmosphere.
Scientists had always been bad at this. That was because the facts could be dry and were often complex; yet by necessity the truth
must be plain enough to withstand repeated inquiry, all of which made it unappealing.
Okay, people were allowed to grieve, fine. If one of my friends died, I’d grieve. But to sit back and judge someone else’s choice, someone completely unrelated to you—to talk about “public property” and “resource
awareness” when someone just died to justify giving someone’s life a cold look? That was what I called arrogance, and I wanted no part of it. Miach would have thought the same thing. Rather, Miach did think
that. But not the rest of the world.
The only reason the suicides weren’t punished was because they were
dead.
Beyond the admedistration’s reach. Finally
Suicide was an offense punishable by disdain. Even if it wasn’t technically a legal offense. I remembered Miach telling us how the Catholics buried their suicides in the middle of a crossroads as punishment for betraying God.
Admedistrative society, lifeist society, hadn’t quite figured out how to
treat suicides yet. The gravediggers wanted to know if they were victims or
perpetrators. So, uh, ma’am? Should we just go ahead and dig this hole in the crossroads here, just to be safe?
"And because we possess a hyperbolic value system, we make illogical decisions and take precipitate actions. When a chance to profit
presents itself clearly before our eyes, we erroneously believe its value to be much greater than it actually is. There is an ongoing survival game between the agents of short-term desire and long-term desire, and we call this game will."
"The pain we feel the moment we prick our finger with a needle is nothing more than another agent trying to leave an impression and get selected. The hyperbolic time axis in this case is very short, making it easier
for the pain to be chosen.” I frowned. How could pain be chosen? “But you can’t accept or deny pain,” I said.
“Actually, you can. Surely you have heard stories of people who are so focused on some activity that they only realize their finger or arm has been cut off some seconds after the fact. This is because the pain competed with, yet failed to overcome, the hold that activity had on their consciousness.”
“I see.”
“That is why we understand pain to be a subjective experience. For a physical sensation, it is highly dependent on environmental factors to determine whether or not it is selected and to what degree. That is why there is no absolute scale to measure pain."
Humanity had always gone out of its way to suppress nature. We built cities, built societies, built systems. All of these revealed an overriding human desire to take the
unpredictable elements of nature and place them within a predictable, controllable framework. In order to live through an
age of nuclear fallout and plagues, we had striven to conquer the last remaining vestiges of nature within us, and had largely
succeeded. We installed medicules in our bodies and linked up to health supervision servers. We thoroughly rid our society of
lifestyle habits that were bad for our health. Our victory was complete, with the exception of old age, of course. Wasn’t the brain also part of the body? What possible reason
could there be not to control it as well? I lost my conviction and sat down on the sandy riverbank. My gaze wandered off down the
river. In the distance, I saw several young boys playing with a dog.
If that dog had a will of its own, then how could we say our souls are any more valuable than the soul of that dog?
If the feedback web reached perfect harmony and all decisions could be made without any
conflict and all actions taken clearly, what would that mean? It would mean nothing less than “I” was on the line.
“You killed consciousness.”
For someone whose every desire was self-evident, there was no need to make decisions. If their feedback web worked on clear, logical values, no will was needed to choose between one thing or the other. Consciousness was no longer required
“We announced our findings to the other researchers and investors in the working group, that perfect harmony invariably meant the absence of consciousness. That consciousness was indeed only a mechanism for choosing between the various agents of desire teeming in our subconscious,the result of conflicts that required conscious thought to resolve, and the acting upon those conflicts. These choices were obvious to a perfectly harmonious will, thereby removing the need for a will to determine actions. We were chasing after the perfect human but ended up killing consciousness, for it was no longer needed.”
It was ironic. Our souls were nothing more than the product of a hyperbolic evaluation system we had developed over the course of our evolution. Perfect humans didn’t need souls.
“What happens when you lose your consciousness? Do you just sit
there all day in your chair, drooling?”
“Nothing of the sort. You go shopping, you eat, you enjoy entertainment—you merely no longer have to make decisions what to do at
any given time because everything is self-evident. It’s the difference between having to make choices and having it all be obvious to you. That’s all it is. That’s what divides the world of the consciousness and the world
without. People have absolutely no problem living without consciousness or will, Tuan. They live their lives as normal. People can be born, grow old, and die without consciousness. Consciousness has very little to do with culture, really. From the outside, it’s nearly impossible to tell whether someone has a consciousness or is merely acting as though they did. However, because their system of values is fashioned to be in perfect
harmony with society, there are far fewer suicides, and the kinds of stress we find in our admedistrative society disappear completely.”
Something about the way his eyes looked through me made my finger pause, motionless, on the trigger. Here, beneath the rapidly darkening Iraq sky, I was about to kill someone for the first time in my life. Right here, in this very moment. I was making the same decision that had been forced on
billions of people across the world.
This would free me from having to make that choice in a few days, I realized. It felt like cheating. The guy was begging me to do it, and I would even be avenging my father’s death. You couldn’t make up a better
rationale than that. I steadied my grip on the gun and felt intense selfloathing.A thought occurred to me. Why had my brain developed this function it was expressing now? In what environment would self-loathing give me
an evolutionary advantage?
I pulled the trigger.
“I realized that’s what we had to do. There are tens of thousands of girls and boys killing themselves in the world right now. Adults too. We can never remove the barbarism of nature from ourselves completely. We can’t forget
that before we are little admedistrative collectives, before we are part of a
system or network of relationships, we are animals, plain and simple—a patchwork assortment of functions and logic and emotion all tied together into a bundle.”
“So you thought that if people were dying because they couldn’t get used to this world—”
“Yes. That we should give up being human in the first place.”
"The old folks think the end of consciousness is a kind of death. Even though there had been a minority living in the Caucasus mountains for thousands of years without anything like a consciousness. As long as a mature system is in place, there is no need for conscious
decisions. We have a sufficiently mutually beneficial system, we have software to tell us how to live, we’ve outsourced everything possible, so what need have we of consciousness? The problem isn’t our consciousness, it’s the pain that our having a consciousness brings us when we are forced
to regulate ourselves for health or for the community.”
People who made decisions created an atmosphere.
Scientists had always been bad at this. That was because the facts could be dry and were often complex; yet by necessity the truth
must be plain enough to withstand repeated inquiry, all of which made it unappealing.
Okay, people were allowed to grieve, fine. If one of my friends died, I’d grieve. But to sit back and judge someone else’s choice, someone completely unrelated to you—to talk about “public property” and “resource
awareness” when someone just died to justify giving someone’s life a cold look? That was what I called arrogance, and I wanted no part of it. Miach would have thought the same thing. Rather, Miach did think
that. But not the rest of the world.
The only reason the suicides weren’t punished was because they were
dead.
Beyond the admedistration’s reach. Finally
Suicide was an offense punishable by disdain. Even if it wasn’t technically a legal offense. I remembered Miach telling us how the Catholics buried their suicides in the middle of a crossroads as punishment for betraying God.
Admedistrative society, lifeist society, hadn’t quite figured out how to
treat suicides yet. The gravediggers wanted to know if they were victims or
perpetrators. So, uh, ma’am? Should we just go ahead and dig this hole in the crossroads here, just to be safe?
"And because we possess a hyperbolic value system, we make illogical decisions and take precipitate actions. When a chance to profit
presents itself clearly before our eyes, we erroneously believe its value to be much greater than it actually is. There is an ongoing survival game between the agents of short-term desire and long-term desire, and we call this game will."
"The pain we feel the moment we prick our finger with a needle is nothing more than another agent trying to leave an impression and get selected. The hyperbolic time axis in this case is very short, making it easier
for the pain to be chosen.” I frowned. How could pain be chosen? “But you can’t accept or deny pain,” I said.
“Actually, you can. Surely you have heard stories of people who are so focused on some activity that they only realize their finger or arm has been cut off some seconds after the fact. This is because the pain competed with, yet failed to overcome, the hold that activity had on their consciousness.”
“I see.”
“That is why we understand pain to be a subjective experience. For a physical sensation, it is highly dependent on environmental factors to determine whether or not it is selected and to what degree. That is why there is no absolute scale to measure pain."
Humanity had always gone out of its way to suppress nature. We built cities, built societies, built systems. All of these revealed an overriding human desire to take the
unpredictable elements of nature and place them within a predictable, controllable framework. In order to live through an
age of nuclear fallout and plagues, we had striven to conquer the last remaining vestiges of nature within us, and had largely
succeeded. We installed medicules in our bodies and linked up to health supervision servers. We thoroughly rid our society of
lifestyle habits that were bad for our health. Our victory was complete, with the exception of old age, of course. Wasn’t the brain also part of the body? What possible reason
could there be not to control it as well? I lost my conviction and sat down on the sandy riverbank. My gaze wandered off down the
river. In the distance, I saw several young boys playing with a dog.
If that dog had a will of its own, then how could we say our souls are any more valuable than the soul of that dog?
If the feedback web reached perfect harmony and all decisions could be made without any
conflict and all actions taken clearly, what would that mean? It would mean nothing less than “I” was on the line.
“You killed consciousness.”
For someone whose every desire was self-evident, there was no need to make decisions. If their feedback web worked on clear, logical values, no will was needed to choose between one thing or the other. Consciousness was no longer required
“We announced our findings to the other researchers and investors in the working group, that perfect harmony invariably meant the absence of consciousness. That consciousness was indeed only a mechanism for choosing between the various agents of desire teeming in our subconscious,the result of conflicts that required conscious thought to resolve, and the acting upon those conflicts. These choices were obvious to a perfectly harmonious will, thereby removing the need for a will to determine actions. We were chasing after the perfect human but ended up killing consciousness, for it was no longer needed.”
It was ironic. Our souls were nothing more than the product of a hyperbolic evaluation system we had developed over the course of our evolution. Perfect humans didn’t need souls.
“What happens when you lose your consciousness? Do you just sit
there all day in your chair, drooling?”
“Nothing of the sort. You go shopping, you eat, you enjoy entertainment—you merely no longer have to make decisions what to do at
any given time because everything is self-evident. It’s the difference between having to make choices and having it all be obvious to you. That’s all it is. That’s what divides the world of the consciousness and the world
without. People have absolutely no problem living without consciousness or will, Tuan. They live their lives as normal. People can be born, grow old, and die without consciousness. Consciousness has very little to do with culture, really. From the outside, it’s nearly impossible to tell whether someone has a consciousness or is merely acting as though they did. However, because their system of values is fashioned to be in perfect
harmony with society, there are far fewer suicides, and the kinds of stress we find in our admedistrative society disappear completely.”
Something about the way his eyes looked through me made my finger pause, motionless, on the trigger. Here, beneath the rapidly darkening Iraq sky, I was about to kill someone for the first time in my life. Right here, in this very moment. I was making the same decision that had been forced on
billions of people across the world.
This would free me from having to make that choice in a few days, I realized. It felt like cheating. The guy was begging me to do it, and I would even be avenging my father’s death. You couldn’t make up a better
rationale than that. I steadied my grip on the gun and felt intense selfloathing.A thought occurred to me. Why had my brain developed this function it was expressing now? In what environment would self-loathing give me
an evolutionary advantage?
I pulled the trigger.
“I realized that’s what we had to do. There are tens of thousands of girls and boys killing themselves in the world right now. Adults too. We can never remove the barbarism of nature from ourselves completely. We can’t forget
that before we are little admedistrative collectives, before we are part of a
system or network of relationships, we are animals, plain and simple—a patchwork assortment of functions and logic and emotion all tied together into a bundle.”
“So you thought that if people were dying because they couldn’t get used to this world—”
“Yes. That we should give up being human in the first place.”
"The old folks think the end of consciousness is a kind of death. Even though there had been a minority living in the Caucasus mountains for thousands of years without anything like a consciousness. As long as a mature system is in place, there is no need for conscious
decisions. We have a sufficiently mutually beneficial system, we have software to tell us how to live, we’ve outsourced everything possible, so what need have we of consciousness? The problem isn’t our consciousness, it’s the pain that our having a consciousness brings us when we are forced
to regulate ourselves for health or for the community.”
vangluss's review
4.0
I consider this novel a dark, uncompromising damnation of the caring industry of the 21th century. The plot gets put aside in favor of the themes. This isn't a bad thing and manages not to harm the quality of the book. Harmony reads like a (much too sanitized) PKD book in the most unsettling way possible.