30 Days of Book Talk discussion

What is a book built around a really cool idea? Does the execution live up to the concept?

I am going to think on my answer to this one, but in the meanwhile, let’s hear yours!

The Plot Against America of Philip Roth comes to mind, alternative history which is really chilling to read and well executed in my view. Also a lot of scifi has great concepts but often chews off too much. I liked the Three Body Problem of Liu Cixin from an idea’s point of view but the execution lacked for instance, and that was a Hugo award winner. And finally: Stephen King in the Dark Tower serie really blew me away with all the multiverses, western and fantasy elements packed into it.

For me the coolest idea ever was the fictional idea of "book-jumping". :)

I'd so much love to possess this superpower. And for me the ideal book or rather series is the Thursday Next series, by Jasper Fforde. The first book to kickstart it all is The Eyre Affair.
It has a kick-ass literary detective, Thursday Next in a parallel universe, where the UK and Russia are still at war about the Crimea and where the novel Jane Eyre has a different ending (Jane decides to go with St John Rivers to India).

But the most vicious and cunning criminal of all times snatches Jane Eyre from the book and holds her hostage for ransom.

Thursday Next comes to the rescue but it has literary consequences for the end of that Jane Eyre novel.

This is a crazy book, but I loved it. It's full of literary references that you might enjoy.

Fforde developed the concept of the BookWorld even further in the next books and you get to meet well known as well as more obscure literary characters in different roles. E.g: Miss Havisham becomes Thursday's mentor in the bookworld, Hamlet comes to our world for therapy to stop being a "dithering twit" etc.

It's crazy, but awesome... and I love it. ;)

The other literary concept, while maybe not "cool" and certainly not original, but I still love it is a kind of "religion/philosophy" developed by Sharon Shinn in her "Elemental Blessings" fantasy series.

From her website: "Everyone in the country of Welce is affiliated with one of the five elements: air, water, fire, wood, and earth. Each element is associated with eight blessings, and every individual is graced at birth with three of these blessings, which offer them guidance and direction for their entire lives. Unless they cannot read the message behind their blessings…unless they reject their blessings…unless the blessing coins they draw are mysterious and blank…"

http://www.sharonshinn.net/images/PDF...

I like the idea behind Eric Frank Russell's Sinister Barrier, where you're safe from the malevolent, telepathic aliens that live among us...as long as you don't start thinking about them. Ignorance is bliss: once you know of them, you are in danger.

The Glamour by Christopher Priest, and You're All Alone by Fritz Leiber, both feature a variation on invisibility: the idea of people who are not so much invisible, but just beyond the realm of perception of the naked eye. They sort of "blend in", or are so good at being unnoticeable that your eye simply doesn't pick up on the fact that they are right next to you. Leiber and Priest both wrote very different novels (and in fact, the Leiber novel got modified in different editions to include more sexual content; it also goes by the name The Sinful Ones).

I feel like this classic fits the bill: Brave New World
It's such an interesting concept, but as a novel the execution falls a bit short.

I'm actually struggling with this one myself because I feel like I ought to have some favorites with really cool concepts, but the ones that come to mind mostly fall short in terms of execution. Settings that try to be too clever often seem to wind up full of holes, or the author has great ideas but not so great characterization.

I did love When She Woke, which revolves in part around the idea of criminal justice moving from sending people to prison to temporarily turning their skin different colors (red, green, etc.) coded by crime, and then releasing them. The concept was probably the thing I liked least about the book though, because the author seemed to assume that prison is a good default and so criticized the skin dye idea on the notion that social exclusion sucks - without apparently thinking about how much the dehumanization of prison sucks. I did love the characters though and it was an exciting plot and deals with women's health issues.

Recently I was disappointed by The Black Tides of Heaven, which has the premise that everybody gets to decide what their gender will be at whatever age they're ready to do so.... but then it doesn't explore how people make those decisions or the effect any of this has on society, so it was a whole lot of "what's the point?" for me.

“Every Heart a Doorway”. I want my own portal door to a world with infinite time to read ALL the books. I love portal fantasy. Also, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”, as it’s the first portal fantasy I ever read and it has the nostalgia going for it.

Oh, I could come up with so many choices for this one. It's hard to narrow it down.

One of my favorite books of the last ten years is Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which takes a look at what spiders might be like if they evolved intelligence. Humans have gone to the stars and one particular planet has been terraformed and seeded with animals from Earth in an experiment in evolution by artificially increasing the intelligence of apes (think David Brin's Uplift books). Everything goes go pear-shaped on Earth and the colonies so the experiment is left to it's own devices. The process with the apes never works so the experiment works on spiders instead. You follow both spiders and humans over time until a rather dramatic conclusion.

I'll have some more later!

Benjamin wrote: "Oh, I could come up with so many choices for this one. It's hard to narrow it down.

One of my favorite books of the last ten years is Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which..."

Yes!! Such a cool concept. I loved reading about how a spider society could evolve, even though in real life I hate spiders!

I bought this Tchaikovsky book for my husband based on a trusted GR friend's review. Seems I should read it myself. :)