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A review by whalleyrulz
Gray Matters by William Hjortsberg
1.0
Imagine you're at an open mic night at a comedy club. The schedule is full of comedians, like yourself, who are putting in their dues, running through prepared acts, testing out what works and what doesn't. They're working on their craft, it's an industry they're all immersed in. Suddenly, from a table of drunks nobody has seen before, one guy swaggers up to the microphone and starts belching words about anal beads. His friends laugh louder than they have at anything else in the night, and he finishes his impromptu set and stumbles back to his group, proud of himself. You grit your teeth and go up next and do your act, it goes down well, and you find a table. Later, the drunk finds you and asks you how his set went and wasn't that shit so easy.
William Hjortsberg opens up his book with an introduction he wrote, that talks about his background in literary theory, and how reviews for Gray Matters say "oh no, he's committed science fiction." He's the drunk in the comedy bar; he's the nerd pretending to throw a football at a team practice. He wrote science fiction because he thought it would be funny, but never actually tells a joke. This is a book of half-baked ideas just sort of slurrying around a disjointed narrative, with vaguely scifi words thrown in to really lay it in that he's writing science fiction.
This book would not get published today.
I don't even know how to take this review seriously. A bunch of fairly shitty brains in jars, and then not brains in jars just because, do things for a bit. There's robots, because. It's a hundred and sixty pages that took me four days to read. I'm done with giving Hjortsberg any more of my time.
William Hjortsberg opens up his book with an introduction he wrote, that talks about his background in literary theory, and how reviews for Gray Matters say "oh no, he's committed science fiction." He's the drunk in the comedy bar; he's the nerd pretending to throw a football at a team practice. He wrote science fiction because he thought it would be funny, but never actually tells a joke. This is a book of half-baked ideas just sort of slurrying around a disjointed narrative, with vaguely scifi words thrown in to really lay it in that he's writing science fiction.
This book would not get published today.
I don't even know how to take this review seriously. A bunch of fairly shitty brains in jars, and then not brains in jars just because, do things for a bit. There's robots, because. It's a hundred and sixty pages that took me four days to read. I'm done with giving Hjortsberg any more of my time.