Customer Reviews

When We Were Real

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

 

 

I finished "When We Were Real" (WWWR) a few hours ago after several hours of non-stop reading. I am still thinking about it. Another reviewer compared WWWR to the classic "Forever War", which is indeed a book which came to mind as I read. Against a background of war and wanderings, both novels consider what happens to sentient people when they are separated by vast distances and spans of time. In WWWR, the technology and the settings are well-plotted and believable, but the book seems to me to be primarily an exploration of the implications of semi-immortality more than anything else. What happens to relationships, fights, and the development of sequential families when such events are teased out over centuries rather than months and years? And how much loss can we bear as our hurts accumulate while our blessings seemingly remain in short supply? The author thankfully does not try to rationalise his decision: it's a dirty world but love, somehow, will save us - shades of Auden's "We must love another or die". Other themes that the author brings up indirectly are what it means to (non)human and the place of corporate organisations in society. I found this to be a convincing, often moving, very human SF novel centered around a believably flawed and troubled man moving through a pan-galactic society irrevocably fragmented by time. Well worth the read.

Seeing the other favorable reviews already posted here, this book obviously works for some people. I guess it all depends on what you look for in a science fiction book. It left me cold. Barton's writing style was too terse and austere for me - often starting a paragraph with a sentence fragment, and blowing through scenes with too little detail (unless there is anything sexual in it, which he never fails to mention). There was too much of the weird and surreal for my tastes, and I felt too emotionally distanced from the characters, especially the protagonist, to care much what happens to them. There were a lot of good ideas in here, but not all of them work well together and the presentation left a lot to be desired.

This was an interesting read, the first of this author's works I've picked up. There were a number of great scenes in this book but they seemed disjointed, with the characters floating between them in a happenstance way. I wish the author had put more effort into the plot and less into describing the genitalia of the female characters.

This a typical Barton novel. Mercenaries and kinky alien sex, but with a conscience, as only Barton can write. I personally liked When Heaven Fell better. Don't get me wrong- I think William Barton is one of the finest science fiction writers publishing today. This novel is definitely worth reading and far better than most of the stuff published today, but in many ways this novel rehashes When Heaven Fell without the neat story line in When Heaven Fell.

Barton is a poet of despair. And here he gives us Darius and Violet, lovers with a story complicated by slavery, death, and guilt.

Darius Murphy is a refugee from an oppressive matriarchy on a decaying orbital colony. After signing up with Standard ARM, one of the most powerful of the corporations that rule man, he meets Violet. She is something of a fox - literally. An animal-human chimera, she is an optimod and property of Standard ARM.

While an ARM soldier, Violet is killed, and Murphy wanders human space meeting interstellar hoboes, becomes a military adviser to rebels against the corporate order and suffers rape both literal and economic before rejoining Standard ARM where he'll help kill millions. And suddenly he is confronted with a choice, a gamble to cease being what he is ...

This is a war novel and a novel of the small bits of sex and simple love that are all that seem meaningful and real in the horrors of Murphy's life. And it is a novel about people constricted and controlled by an economic and political order. But governments, unlike the laws of physics, can be changed. While the novel is sympathetically and effectively narrated by Murphy - Barton is a master of books narrated by not very likeable people, it doesn't give absolution to Murphy or the others who perpetuate corporate tyranny. The many rebellions Murphy fights in - on both sides - may be futile or they may plant the seeds for successful ones.

The novel does have a couple of odd moments. The foxy lady Violet seems too much a pun. And the ludicrous Himerans, introduced in the first chapter, suggest jokes about machines birthing other machines. But these seem more a nod to Cordwainer Smith, to whom the book is dedicated, than attempts at humor. Barton is most definitely not a humorous writer and doesn't try.

With his earlier When Heaven Fell and Acts of Conscience, this makes a sort of trilogy of exploitation, novels with characters locked into slavery by alien overlords or their biology or human tyranny.

Somewhere about halfway through this book became a real slog for me. The author's stylistic use of brief sentence fragments really started to get distracting and seemed to be a cover-up for lack of substance. Also, despite the passage of many years the narrator never seemed to evolve beyond callow.

Follows is what I wrote to a friend (keep in mind that the context is genre fiction, not great literature. Though, perhaps, Barton may grow beyond genre fiction. He has something to say.):

Another book by William Barton, a science-fiction writer that has astonished me before. I think I mentioned that a previous book was strangely really good but with a taint of pulp sex stuff. This was was sexual and sensual, but more, um, adult or restrained. Which is good, because the story went more smoothly. He still seems like he doesn't quite know how to transcend writing pulpy stuff. BUT. But, the thing is, each of the three books I've read have a way of being simultaneously four things a) not bad character studies (not good, though, he specializes in characters that themselves don't know who they are, and so...); b) some quite original, reasonable postulated future societies; c) there is satire in there somewhere, he's straddling a line, I think, and that's why there's a pulpy feel to his work; and finally, most importantly to me; d) you, the reader are stunned by the casual way in which he describes (and the protagonist does not recognize) the horror and amorailty of this world that is, really, in some scary way, not so different from our own (morally), and then when you've maybe given up on all hope of feeling justice being done, you share in the protagonist's epiphany, the awakening of moral conscience (the first and acclaimed book he wrote was "Acts of Conscience"), in what you've now experienced, from the inside, as a complex, easy to-go-along-with abhorrent cultural norm. This book, as in AoC, speculates a future where corporations are completely unrestrained by any idea of morality or justice -- just legality. And profit. Is our world so different, you might ask?

I'm not going to bother outlining the book for you. If you have read Barton's previous works and were not repulsed by them for their blatant honesty, you'll find more of the same here - great plotting, wonderful insight, deep characterization. I've always empathized with Barton's characters because they are so flawed. On top of that, his characters always end up learning something, end up much different then when the book starts out.

If you like sci-fi - moreover, GOOD, WELL-WRITTEN sci-fi, buy this book. Read it. Then go out and read ALL of Barton's stuff. You'll not be disappointed. Ya get Melville and Clarke in one neat package.

Great stuff, this.

I like Wm. Barton's solo-authored novels very much, and don't know why he isn't a bigger name. He deserves a wide audience. If you haven't tried him yet, this one's a good place to start.

I have read five or six of Barton's (and co-authored) books, all were great, but this is my favorite so far. He writes in a very intense emotional and physical style, I find myself saying to myself as I read, yes, this is how it really is! This is adult science fiction, not the superficial fluff such as Arthur C. Clarke writes. If you are not easily offended by the 'adult' content this book contains, you should like it, the book was a page turner for me.