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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Quick Tolstory, June 15, 2010
This review is from: Android Karenina (Quirk Classic) (Paperback)
My taste in books runs to the ilk of Cold Mountain. I haven't read one single vampire book. I never read the Harry Potter Books and I never could get into fantasy books--including the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings! I guess I'm just a snob! When I began reading Ben H. Winters' mash-up of Android Karenina, my hopes were not high for a quick, light or funny read. Oddly enough, it was all three. Mash-ups are the latest thing in the literary world, mixing classics with new world monsters and demons. It's not really all that new; the music world has been doing it for ages. Mad Magazine used to rewrite the comics "as written by", If Al Capp wrote Brenda Starr and such like.
Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is the original high maintenance drama queen. She falls in love with a dashing soldier, deserts her husband and child for him and complains when he doesn't dote on her every minute of the day. We all know that Russian novels tend to have a gazillion characters, so what does Winters do? He adds more!
The author introduces us to the world of Groznium, which is the essential ingredient for the new classes of robots. There are Class I robots acting as toys, candles and self-extinguishing ashtrays. Class II robots perform the functions of domestics, train drivers and miners. Upon reaching their majority, the upper classes receive a Class III, a beloved-companion robot. That robot is part alter ego, part Jiminy Cricket, part personal valet/maid. They provide a memory bank and communication, as well as protect, groom, mimic, nudge and commiserate with their human counterparts. Eventually, we meet the humanoid Class IV robot, the ubiquitous "toy soldiers".
Count Vronsky's Class III is shaped like a wolf; Anna's is sveltely shaped but still robotic. Anna's husband, Alexei, has a robot that takes form as a partial face, a la Phantom of the Opera. It is quite clear from the beginning that the face will be not only urging but also dictating Karenin's actions. Alexei is extremely important in the Higher Branches of the Ministry of Robotics. He controls all the robots and protects the populace from the UnConSkia terrorists, former state scientists who threaten Russian's utopian way of life.
The true marvel of this mash-up is the way the author flips the events thoroughly and seamlessly from Czarist Russia to something more akin to 1984. The religious enthusiasts are now Xenotheologists who believe "They will come for us in three ways" and those ways are in the form of hellhounds to delight any fan of Star Wars sand creatures. Vronsky's English stallion, Frou Frou, becomes an exterior, a sort of suit of armor, for the cull--a steeplechase in which the contestants must eliminate each other. Anna will still destroy herself, not under a train, but beneath the Grav, which runs on an electrical force across a magnetic field. Ben H.Winters, playwright, librettist and author of the immensely popular Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters connects all of Tolstoy's dots in the cleverly bizarre world he has created and he transforms a Russian novel into a reasonably demented work of science fiction.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
From an unsullied (or perhaps ignorant) perspective..., June 21, 2010
This review is from: Android Karenina (Quirk Classic) (Paperback)
I have to admit, I am remiss in my knowledge of Russian literature. To wit: I've never read 'Anna Karenina.' So what happens when the science-historical-fiction version 'Android Karenina' comes out? Dive right in, of course!
I wasn't sure what to expect. Even the previous Quirk Classics I'd read - 'Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters' and 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies' - didn't really prepare me for this. I knew the Jane Austen source material of the other two, but I didn't know Tolstoy.
I thought 'Android Karenina' might be funny, based on the others. Injecting zombies and ninjas into Austen's romances of culture was a wacky move, and at first blush adding robots and aliens into Tolstoy's tale of 19-century industrializing Russia would seem to be too. In the end it wasn't funny, but somehow it works.
'Android Karenina' is an alternate-history version of Russia seen through the lens of a vague sort of steampunk science, where the mysterious element of groznium makes advanced technology possible, everything from clean and efficient anti-gravity trains to simple mechanical aides (Class I robots) to semi-intelligent robotic companions (Class III robots). Interleaved with the science-fiction elements is a complex tale of romance and political intrigue involving multiple characters, locations, and walks of life across industrialized and robotically-enhanced Russia. From the dashing Count Vronsky to the sinister Alexei Karenin and his metallic, intelligent Face. From the honorable Levin to the tragic, yet strong, Anna Karenina and her beloved-companion, Android Karenina. From the simple Class Ones to the mythical Honored Guests, who will appear to humanity in three ways. All have their tale to tell, all are represented fairly, all will have their effect on the others, and with a satisfying, even surprising conclusion.
Is the symbolism of class structure and technology and oppression a little heavy-handed at times? To be sure, it is. Conflicts which might have been rendered with subtlety and nuance are made overt and obvious here, as giant robot armored suits battle for superior rank and metallic worms lurk beneath the ground, to appear in times of strife. But I'm sure that's the point - to take the finer themes of the original work and poke them to see where they hurt. To brings what's under the surface to new light, to give us a new way to look at an old story.
I haven't read 'Anna Karenina,' so perhaps I am a poor judge of the humor or the worth or the value of this book. What I know is that 'Android Karenina' was a tale well-told, and I enjoyed it. The additions of new elements - robots and technology and aliens - were done with care and integrated well. From my perspective, I now find it hard to imagine the same story told without those elements. And that, to me, means they took this one a little more seriously than the others. This one didn't strike my funny bone so much, but it did at times excite the imagination.
But that's me.
What's next for Quirk Classics? 'War and Peace and Werewolves,' perhaps? 'Of Mice and Magic?' Whatever it is, I'll definitely be watching with interest.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Delightful Read, Anna Karenina as Steampunk (sorta), August 24, 2010
This review is from: Android Karenina (Quirk Classic) (Paperback)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Just for the record: I have never read Anna Karenina, or the prior Quirk publication of some fame, Pride & Prejudice & Zombies.
This is a big book, 538 pages with a handful of illustrations. It is too large a tome to spend a lot of time in this forum to go over plot, so I made a challenge to myself. How can I sum up this seven part effort, where any one part is greater in size than many books published today, in a single sentence. Here we go... Android Karenina details lives of Anna Karenina and her sister-in-law Kitty, their men, their families, and their beloved class three robots in an alternate-world Russia of the late 1800's where a wonderful metal called groznium has allowed society to make machines of incredible capacity, centering on the effects of Anna's betrayal of her powerful, and power mad, half-mechanized husband Alexei Alexandrovich when she chooses her lover, Vronsky, over her duty to family.
When I got Android Karenina for review I was skeptical. I pre-anticipated a sci-fi story wedged into a Tolstoy romance and did not foresee anything working well in that admixture, but Ben H. Winters surprised me with a really enjoyable collision of the worlds. In fact, I was enjoying the myriad of robots, the religious faith in aliens, the descriptions of "beloved companion" class three robots like the name sake Android Karenina so much that when the book fell too deeply into the lamentations and joyful reverence about love and loving, I started to miss them greatly. His efforts to keep many sci-fi things vague, like Groznium (we don't know why the metal is so good at making machines, it just is), Smokers (just like in Star Wars, they shoot rays and never seem to run out of ammo), the Moon Cannon (its how you get to the moon base, or the Venus orbiter - it just gets you there, no time for details), or how a little robot can have a reactor inside it that is so hot it can melt bigger robots but yet not melt itself. A sense of humor is required to enjoy this version of Anna Karenina, much as the publisher's name (Quirk) implies.
For me this mandate is summed up in the very first line of the book, which for the Tolstoy only version is so famous I knew it without knowing it came from Tolstoy: "Functioning robots are all alike; every malfunctioning robot malfunctions in its own way." If you find that brings a slight smile to your lips, you are ready for Android Karenina. There is a familiarity in almost all of the sci-fi elements, feeling almost borrowed from popular movies and placed in a really unexpected setting, that I think will serve well if you are trying to get younger male minds (not too young, this book has some grim moments - say 13+) to read literature without thinking they are reading literature.
I was particularly fond of the way Winter's handled Tolstoy's complicated Russian names. It is explained in a foreword that such names have four parts, the given name, the father derived middle name, the family name, and the nick name. Tolstoy bounces around all these names so much that it takes a while to understand that "Stepan", "Oblonsky", "Arkadyich", Stepan Arkadyich", "Stepan Oblonsky", "Arkadyich Oblonsky" and "Stiva" are all the same guy, Anna's brother, Stepan Arkadyich Oblonsky. His class three robot is called "Little Stiva". All class threes are custom built for one person, and should they outlive that person they become "junkers". How to treat these machines that share such emotional weight with their owners is a key part of the story, summed up in a phrase "The Robot Question". All machines of Groznium design, however, have three names as well - starting with their class. This makes for great fun while reading Android Karenina meeting such "things" as a II/Porter/7e62 or using a I/butterchurn/19.
The last two parts of the seven part book are shakey - suddenly we are rushing when we never rushed before - but the overall effect of this blending of Sci-Fi and Lit should appeal to anyone fond of robot stories, those into the steam-punk world (substitute Groznium for the steam), and any Tolstoy fan with a sense of humor. A very delightful read.
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