Short, Sharp Shock [Import] [Paperback]

Kim Stanley Robinson (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Voyager; New Ed edition (June 5, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0006510787
• ISBN-13: 978-0006510789
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,535,468 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kim Stanley Robinson is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. He is the author of eleven previous books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed Fifty Degrees Below, Forty Signs of Rain, The Years of Rice and Salt, and Antarctica--for which he was sent to the Antarctic by the U.S. National Science Foundation as part of their Antarctic Artists and Writers' Program. He lives in Davis, California.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Kafkaish Gulliver's Travels, August 3, 2002

By 

Mark S. Millman (Point Roberts, WA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Short, Sharp Shock (Mass Market Paperback)

I read red-green-blue mars and I put it in the category of big fat sci-fi series suitable for very long airplane trips. I love sci-fi but rgb got pretty boring by the time blue was published. I got the distinct impression that Robinson wished he could finish his contract and get on with writing something important. I think that SSS may be that book.

Short, Sharp Shock is a great book but if you didn't like Kafka, you couldn't plough through all of Gulliver's Travels, and you think that Jean Paul Sartre is an idiot then you will probably have difficulty with SSS. One of the other reviews refered to the forced style of the prose -- sometimes it is, just like Swift, Robinson occasionally falls into the trap, for a few pages, of trying to "tell us something". But apart from these occasional pedantic lapses the book is profound.

Robinson successfully explores the temporal nature of personal existance. "It might be that events more than a few months gone would always be nothing more than broken and fleeting images, images like those that fled from the mind each morning upon waking, fragments of dreams too powerful to face. The past was a dream." The past is nothing but a dream state, a memory that becomes less and less relevant to the present. What Robinson's principal character discovers about the intrinsically uncertain future follows from his discovery that he doesn't need his past.

It's an existential, meaningful, very symbolic book. Unless you classify Kafka as scifi then it isn't scifi and it certainly isn't rgb. I loved SSS and plan to read it again soon.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Extreme Story Inspres Extreme Opinions, May 26, 2002

By 

Mitchell Small (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Short, Sharp Shock (Mass Market Paperback)

If you scan the other reviews posted here, you will see they are cleanly divided: you will either love this story or you will hate it.

I admit it, I'm a fan of Robinson's writing, but I'm, not one to praise a book because I like the author. I'm in the "Love it" camp with this one. Robinson plants the hook, and plants it deep, with the opening paragraph. What follows next is an undulating story of undying pair bonding. At times the story is very reminiscent of various myths, at others it is a unique fantasy tale. Woven into this tale is a wonderful parable.

If you've read other Robinson stories, you will find this one of the most lyrical tales he's told to date. It is distinctly different from his hard-core Sci-Fi offerings, like the Mars trilogy, and different still from his entertaining stories like "Escape Form Katmandu".

If you like pure fantasy, read it. If you enjoy metal gymnastics, read it. If you like things clearly spelled out for you, avoid it. If you thought classical mythology was a bore in school, avoid it.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mysterious, captivating, and ultimately mind-boggling..., June 24, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: A Short, Sharp Shock (Mass Market Paperback)

"A Short, Sharp Shock" is quite different from any of Robinson's novels, or for that matter from any of his short stories that I remember. It's as good as anything else he's written, but in a totally different direction.

Robinson creates a world of mythology, of peculiar yet compelling visions. The story can only be said to be elliptical, orbiting far out into mysterious lands and lives, before hurtling back to its starting point in a particularly thought-provoking way. If all this sounds vague and atmospheric, I'm sorry, but this is not the kind of book that can be described by simply condensing its plot.

That plot focuses on an amnesiac character who finds himself abruptly thrust into a peculiar world, a thin strip of land surrounded by an untravelled ocean. As he travels along through this evocative landscape, he interacts with a cast of memorable persons most of whom are not clearly friends nor enemies, but all of whom provoke some kind of response in the protagonist (and in the reader). The meaning of this journey starts out simple -- a search for someone who might be his partner, and who was kidnapped by a band of local thugs -- and with every page, it becomes more complex. By the end, the journey has become a metaphorical strand tying together cosmology, love and hate, cultural diversity, parallel universes, the unrecoverable loss of memories, and I don't know what all else.

No review can adequately describe this story; it's too complicated and yet too simple. I *wholeheartedly* recommend it.