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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Must-Read for Philip K. Dick Fans, December 11, 2006
Sometimes I find myself reading the old Philip K. Dick books and thinking: Where did Dick get these ideas? Were they transmitted to him from an alien satellite brain (or Vast Active Living Intelligent System)? Who's picking up those transmissions now?
Here's the answer. Except for the 1990s references, this book could easily have been written by Dick himself. (There is a brief reference to Dick's DR. BLOODMONEY at a San Francisco cocktail party). This book bespeaks an enormous freedom of imagination: "something" has happened, nobody knows what (shades of Delany's DHALGREN), but afterwards some are "dreamers" able to construct oneiric "Fictitious Subjective Realities," and others are trapped in these FSRs. The narrator Chaos (or Everett) and his sidekick, the furry little girl Melinda, travel through a variety of these dreams, from the postapocalyptic wasteland of Hatfork, Wyoming, to the zombified media-slave suburbia of Vacaville, to the fog-shrouded Oedipal struggles of San Francisco. to the wars with the alien hives in LA.
This book is truly an explosion of creative promise, drawing out those threads first revealed in Lethem's short stories in CRANK! and elsewhere. I'm eager to pick up more old Lethem SF, before he caved to the exigencies of verbosity for mainstream acceptance.
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20 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Lethem Loves Mystery More Than Solutions, November 11, 2001
When I want a well-written book with a little imagination that I can knock off in a few hours, I pick up a book by Lethem. Amnesia Moon is my third, after Gun with Occasional Music and As She Climbed Across the Table. Compared to those two, I found Amnesia Moon superior in writing style and imagination. Lethem strings together his flights of imaginative fancy better than he did in Gun and has more of them than he did in Table. Also, despite the episodic nature of this story of an amnesiac who travels between alternate realities in a dreamlike odyessy, Lethem achieves a strong narrative flow to keep his audience reading. However, though he gives tantalizing hints as to the nature of the disaster that has turned the world into a patchwork of alternate societies with different pasts and rules, Lethem never commits to an answer. The solutions to the central mysteries our hero attempts to solve in his journey -- who he is, what happened, what his role in it was -- are promised, but Lethem reneges at the last moment. Where the answers are not important to the story, this does not bother me. (See K.W. Jeter's novel Farewell Horizontal for a strange setting that is never explained, and in which the lack of explanation is no detriment to the book.) But here, I got the sense Lethem would just plain rather be obscure -- or worse, that he could not think of a satisfying explanation and hoped that his failure to give us one would be written off as artistry. The journey to this unsatisfying ending is the best stuff of Lethem's I've read. I was completely absorbed by the story, enjoyed the characters, and loved his style. This would have been a four star book if he'd been able to follow through to the end.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is the world when you don't recognize it, June 30, 2006
Lethem gets a lot of credit from me for trying different scenarios in his novels. He doesn't do the same thing over and over again and I can admire that in a writer because it shows someone willing to take risks and stay away from their comfort zones. Watching someone attempt that, I can forgive the occasional misstep or misfire, because sometimes watching the author trying to put it all together right down before you on paper is enough. The process is fascinating to me, sometimes, even if it doesn't amount to anything. Is Lethem a science-fiction writer? Maybe, maybe not. He certainly uses the trappings of the genre to drape his stories in, without even really committing fully, taking the bits that he likes and casting the rest aside. Like Iain Banks, he shoots for a different target each time and takes a new approach. But unlike Banks, he doesn't sidetrack the more science-fictional work (like this one) into a pseudo-pseudonym like "Jonathan L Lethem", both this and the more "normal" stuff (ie Motherless Brooklyn) all fall under the same canopy. The setting makes the point and the point is what you're looking for, buried under the weirdness. In this case, the novel opens with an apparently post-nuclear war America recovering, taking us into a small town ruled by an overlord, one of the inhabitants is a man called Chaos. But just when you think the struggle is going to be one thing Lethem starts to turn it and basically say "Things are not meant to be this way" and has Chaos eject himself from the town, with furry girl Melinda in tow. What transpires then is a journey West, going constantly outward, trying to find what went wrong and if it really is wrong, how it can be fixed. And, if it can't be, what will happen next. Lethem uses the setting to make a comment on modern America and does the reader a service but not playing the surrealist landscape for laughs, for the most part he plays it straight and he plays it serious, this is the world they live in and it is no joke, even when the events seem to demand somebody laugh at them, at the pure absurdism of it all. By the time he gets to the third town and starts debating the nature of luck, you realize that the landscape may be more malleable than you previously thought it was and that Chaos (if that's who he is) isn't so much in it as a part of it. Throughout the novel Lethem seems to be shooting for a Philip Dick vibe, with the characters and the reader ultimately questioning the very nature of reality and its subjectivity and trying to determine how much we really know. What separates it is that Lethem's surrealism is more calculated, he's got a plan here and he's leading us, if not to a conclusion, to a point where we can make our own conclusions and debate how viable they are. In Dick's case, especially toward the end, I think he really believed it was happening, in some aspect of this world. Lethem is trying to make a point and Dick is showing us how he thought the world actually was and in that sense Lethem lacks some of that author's cascading intensity, the driving need to push through just one more veil to show you how things really are. Chaos goes to California and discovers things, which lead to more things. He gets some control over the things he learns and finds out that he may be powerless, or maybe all-powerful. The novel doesn't end neatly, in fact it really doesn't end at all, and one gets the sense that Lethem really had no idea how to wrap it up in a way that would be satisfying to everyone and instead just left it there dangling and let us write out own endings, or at least decide at which point to snip it off. In the end that makes the book a little less than it could be but the journey itself is interesting enough. And maybe the next one will be sharper, a little more incisive. But for the moment we have this and even if it doesn't succeed grandly like you hope it would, it's an attempt and if we don't give some credit for attempting, we'll never produce anything at all.
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