Customer Reviews

The Rainbow Cadenza: A Novel in Logosata Form

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I do not understand why this book is out of print! I read A Rainbow Cadenza (a winner if the Prometheus Award) about 10 years ago and have always remembered it and recommend it as one of the best science fiction books I have encountered. I am also scared that many of the trends Schulman warns about in the book are coming true. The book is centered on Joan Darris, a lasergraphic composer and performer - holographic laser art has replaced music as the pre-eminent form of entertainment on Earth - and her struggles for freedom and artistic expression. Partially due to the ability of parents to select the sex of their children, males outnumber females 7 to 1 on Earth, and tax breaks for male children have not eased the problem any. The adage "Make Love, Not War" has been taken to its ultimately logical, but ridiculous conclusion: females are drafted into sexual service. Despite her budding talent, Joan is drafted. Schulman combines the concepts of the draft, lynchings, sexual slavery, sex selection of babies, the moral implications of cloning with holographic laser art in an intelligent, entertaining, thought-provoking and well-written book. Even though he is criticizing such aspects of our society, some of his sci-fi examples are becoming all too real. Scientists just announced parents can choose the sex of their baby and cloning is well underway. If you can find this book anywhere, read it and you will not be disappointed.

I want to add few points because some people here are letting their emotions get better of their brains. One, a young witch was angry at the portrait of Wicca saying that's not how Wicca is supposed to be practiced. That is exactly J. Neil Schulman's point.

In most religions throughout history, the common people who practiced their faith tends to be nice, well-behaved people who just want to live in peace. That includes a lot of Christians. But when the state's power structure decided to adopt such a religion because so many people have high opinion of it it begins to corrupt it. The Wicca in the novel is not the Wicca as is today. First of all, the novel Wicca's is the majority relgion and the one the state use as its mask of violence. When a state decided to support a religion, most people will join it for social status, not out or deep beliefs. That's the case with Christianity 300AD. When that happened Wicca become corrupted and independence are stamped out, much like the Gnostics of Church. Most of evil in Christian history happened when it was the state religion. Same thing will happen to any other religion regardless of its origins. That's was one major theme of this book: how the power to stoap on an individual's life and person can corrupt society as a whole.

People who don't get it are just not really reading it. They're just nitpicking. Now, I think that the author should has bring up some history to make his theme a bit stronger. But that's a small weakness in one incredilbe emotional work.

J. Neil Schulman has done a masterful job of extrapolating from trends (good, bad, and just plain strange) in our current cultures. If you want to know what the future might feel like - from the inside - THE RAINBOW CADENZA will take you there. Warning: you may never see the present in the same way again!

An exciting look into a dystopian future that both shocks and enlightens. Startling social change coupled with brilliant technological innovations transform society in this troubling vision of the 22nd century.

Joan Darris, the musician using laser light who is Neil Schulman's protagonist in this novel, is one of the most richly limned and fascinating female leads in any novel. Her quest for individuality and resistance to oppressions - societal and personal - are the backbone of the story.

That it takes place about 200 years in the future is almost beside the point, for we need people like Darris now ... and we have them now, in and out of literature. (She compares to Dagny Taggart in Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged.")

Yet Schulman's extrapolation of trends in technology, religion, sociology, and State control ends up being extremely helpful to his characterizations. Darris and her friends and enemies wouldn't be nearly so compelling if they were contrasted to a more or less contemporary background.

No, this is not "libertarian propaganda," as other reviewers have insisted. Politics, both tolerable and twisted (and wickedly and constantly satirized), is only a small portion of the story. Most of it involves the heroic Darris challenging, dealing with, and ultimately defeating the base impulses of the leaders of her society, and with most of that being in artistic, not political, terms.

It is, however, anti-authoritarian to its core, and makes a host of issues that impinge on politics - from conscription to the judiciary to sound money to sexual freedom - affect its story line and the efforts of the characters to build a working life for themselves.

Schulman adds potent and provocative afterwords about some of the topics of the novel, but they're just that, and are not relied upon by the novel itself. Certainly not in any sense comparable to Orwell's afterword about Newspeak in "Nineteen Eighty-four."

You will have a compelling and unforgettable experience in letting this world wrap around you. One of advanced technology, transformed religious norms, sexuality that transcends societal distortions, and the indomitable spirit of Joan Darris.

I have an important caveat about the "Pulpless" edition, however. (In both printed and eBook form.) It was converted by OCR from a previous edition - and it has prominent typos on every page, especially if the original hardcover and paperback versions are taken as the standard. A few of them greatly alter the meaning of key passages.

I approached the author about this having happened, and he was more or less indifferent to it - quite surprising, given that he published the "Pulpless" version himself.

I'd strongly urge you to buy the 1986 Avon paperback, still available through Amazon Marketplace (The Rainbow Cadenza: A Novel in Vistata Form). It actually had a proofreader, and it uses a stylized and dramatic painting as its far better cover art.

Or that you buy this edition, but send the author (you'll find links to him in the book) a note asking that he have the text repaired. You would be missing a superb reading experience if you forego it, even in this flawed form.

The Rainbow Cadenza was the first - and last - science fiction based book I bought over 20 years ago and it took me 6 or 7 attempts to get past the first couple of chapters. Without wishing to appear shallow the reason I bought it was because I was in a bookshop about to go on a long coach journey across Australia, I was drawn to the cover and it was a silly cheap price. It still remains the best book I have ever read, I'm not a professional critic or expert on Wicca but it remains very important to me.

An intriguing novel but fatally flawed. The author forgot his main character about two-thirds into the main plot. After she is finally trapped by her sister Vera, and ultimately by her new husband, we see Joan succumb to her losses -- or appear to -- but the reader knows nothing of how she feels in the interim.

The helix house rumbles and collapses at the wedding, but the reader doesn't have a clue as to the cause being Joan herself at all.

Joan does "overcome" in the end, and she does learn to play a beautiful laser-graphic music, but it is a soundless victory. Joan appears resurrected, in the end, as a winner, but her absent or non-witnessed struggle to win and overcome cheats the reader of her final glorification in the reader's eyes. To use Jay Neil Schulman's words, the reader stops witnessing Joan "wetting her pants" while she schemes to achieve her goal. Thus, the final award is hollow, "mythic."

The first two-thirds of the book are challenging and gripping. The author sets up character struggles and character opposition very clearly and dramatically, between Vera and Joan in particular. Vera is memorable as a kind of mirror-opposite of Any Rand's Dagny Taggart. She is psychologically powerfully portrayed. The hero in Joan is a much more linear, one-dimensional character, flat -- in comparison to Vera especially. In terms of plot or plotting, Schulman is excellent, dramatic, tight, lightning-quick. He presents the reader with all the essentials of a great story, builds the tension well, and provides equally dramatic climaxes to most of his chapters -- except, of course, the last.

A small flaw but one still palpable is the one scene that is introduced in the last third of the novel with the musician-preacher and Joan and the accompanying dialogue between the two of them concerning the philosophy of Ayn Rand contrasted to the philosophy of C. S. Lewis.

Giving the author the benefit of the doubt here that the purpose of this scene was to illustrate synthesis between the line or thesis of Ayn Rand and the circle or antithesis of C. S. Lewis, the essentials between the two philosophers' philosophies are undistributed, recklessly distinguished, so that an unphilosophical reader cannot possibly detect what the actual point is being made through this dialogue. The dialogue has all the sound and fury of pure intellectual bull, totally lacking in enough specificity to make the dialogue a rewarding moment of insight.

This scene creates a narrative drag to the quick momentum of the novel since the dialogue serves no actual purpose in the forward movement of the story as a whole. It was more like an undistinguished interruption in the plot. With this scene, this reader felt that the author expressed more confidence in his abilities to do battle with Ayn Rand's atheism than he had actual ability in proving his argument, his point of view. The author's own brouhaha, thus, outweighs his intellectual acumen to make a point and make it clearly.

Returning to the main flaw of the novel once more, Joan loses every battle she engages in -- for the first two-thirds of the story, as already stated. She even loses the court custody of her own mother to her father and her sister Vera. Joan is used and abused throughout the story. It is not until all the enemy's weapons are all in one basket, that is, until they are in the powerful hands of her husband, that Joan is able to use the laser (hence, rainbow cadenza). Sadly, the author provides no reason why the use of the laser could not have been used earlier in the story, when the opposition was the greatest between herself and her sister Vera. All the tools of weaponry to fight were available to Joan much earlier in the story. This could have been a better novel, a shorter novel than it actually is.

The last third of the novel begins with a whole new purpose and a whole new struggle, and Joan's primary purpose or goal changes. There's a lot of telling here and no showing as one might expect from an expert novelist. The reader is forced merely to surmise that what Joan is saying in these last pages must be true even since the reader knows that she has failed in most of her struggles throughout most of this story.

Interestingly, it is not until Joan is "converted" that she's actually able to wage war against her sister. Why therefore was all this nay-saying about religion in prior episodes?

"Rainbow Cadenza" is an American Libertarian feuiillton. It is that odd genre known as Libertarian science fiction as well.

The online dictionary's third entry under it's definition of 'epiphany' reads thus: "a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience." This definition is an extremely accurate description of my personal reaction to reading this book.

As any lifelong book-reader knows, many of our reading choices are supplied to us by fellow readers; usually in the form of the volume itself, generally, as a 'pass-a-long'. This was my exposure to "The Rainbow Cadenza". A gift from a respected literary-minded friend and fellow philosophical 'quester' whose opinion's regarding books I usually valued, accompanied by her only direct reference to it's content upon placing it my hands; "You simply have to read this book!"

"This book", 27 years hence, remains among the most memorable readings of my life. It literally was life-changing for me. It was both the catharsis for a thorough perusal and re-invigoration of my quest for a personal religious philosophy and eventually, the primary reason I choose to physically pursue a lifelong desire to perform music. "The Rainbow Cadenza" is solely responsible that the instrument I chose to learn was the synthesizer.

So that any readers of this review may require further insight into my taste with regard to 'life-changing' literature I will mention one other book that had a similar impact upon me. That book was Richard Bach's "Illusions".

A previous reader gave a decent plot synopsis, so I won't repeat that and will get right on to my review:

The point of this book seems to be that any taxation at all is wrong, that any rules by any government are wrong, that all government wants to do is take your money and send you to war, and that everything would be all hunky dory if the government just got out of the way. While the utopian ideal of a society where everyone is equal and gets along well with everyone else and everything works perfectly without any government interference is very nice, it's not practical or realistic. Utopia isn't possible. I forced myself to finish this book despite frustrating propagandizing. Some scenes appeared to be designed just to espouse Libertarian philosophy.

The reason I gave it two stars as opposed to one is the interesting use of laser art as a new art form. Schulman does a great job of describing the way the art is performed and the complex culture that develops around it, from high society performances in auditoriums (much like classical music and symphonies) to pop culture gigs in bars (much like pop music and garage bands).

I also felt that Schulman didn't understand women very well, and his protagonist was two dimensional and unbelievable. Her views are sexist while pretending to be feminist (in that very Heinlein way) and she was completely annoying.

If you're a Libertarian, you probably would like this book, but I don't like books that are thinly veiled propaganda, even when I agree with their point of view. It detracts from the story and is bad literature in my opinion. The award this book won was the Prometheus award solely to acknoweldge Libertarian science fiction. Interestingly, of the 50 or so award winners over the years, only one has been a woman.

Yes, its an interesting, creative, thought provoking book. The problem is that it portrays the Wiccan religion as an authoritarian means of oppression, which is ridiculous to the point I would have laughed out loud if I had not been so disgusted. Ive been a Wiccan for 18+ years, and I have found Wiccans to be the most independent people I have ever met, who often have a real suspicion of authority, coercion and control. The idea of Wicca as an organized sanctioned state religion is also silly, as Wiccans tend to prefer small autonomous groups - just getting a couple of these groups to cooperate for a large festival can sometimes be a daunting task because of the level of independence displayed- think of herding cats. Also, sex in the Wiccan view is sacred and should NEVER be forced or coerced. Forced sex is *obscene* and an insult to the Goddess. I dont care what they did in the ( Patriarchal ) ancient world, modern Wiccans would find the idea of forced prostitution to be appalling. I was present at a gathering where a newcomer voiced a similar view in a discussion, and he was shunned for the rest of the gathering. Wiccans revere females, I cannot concieve of a supposedly Wiccan state religion limited the number of female births and oppressing those who are born!
Im sorry an otherwise thoughtful and well written book was ruined by this basic lack of understanding of a minority religion- and the author claims to have talked to Witches? Whoever he talked to is probably foaming at the mouth at having their teachings so distorted.