Page Count: 85,800
Expected Completion Date: Jan 10th, 2101
Book Count: 228
Title: Flashback
Author: Dan Simmons
Well again it's been quite some time since I've written anything. That being said I have finished a couple books in between, just didn't make the time to write anything up. Going to try to be better about this because it encourages me to read -- my reading levels recently have been dismal, look at my expected completion date, we're up to 2101! Completely unacceptable :(
This book had incredible potential for the genre but collapsed due to the author's decision to dive into topics that he either doesn't understand or chose to portray in a completely out of reality scope. So the general idea of this book was pretty simple, US domination over, a few other countries have taken over, parts of the US have chosen to found their own countries or have become part of another country/entity. Pretty straight forward fiction reading.
Then the story has another thing going on, this drug called Flashback where all these people take the drug to be able to have an out of body experience of their own past - pretty cool stuff. This drug ultimately ties into the story quite well as one of the countries involved with global domination was the creator of the drug (and a future version of the drug) and is using the drug to essentially subdue the world - particularly the United States populace.
All good up to this point, the story is straight forward, writing is pretty clean, the character development is well above par -- too bad this isn't where it ends.
So the author chooses to explain WHY/HOW the US failed and, guess who is to blame? Yeah everything falls into the arms of our current President, President Obama. The author is either a) delusional or b) just doesn't understand history -- it's okay, a lot of people don't. Assuming that the country is headed to this point at some point in the history - to say that our current President is even 10% to blame is just insane, President's for the past several decades have been making poor fiscal choices and equally hold the blame for everything that the author chooses to focus on - well, everything but one thing. Of course this neo-con Mr. Simmons chooses to say that military cuts (not even cuts! just slower growth) is partly to blame for this crazy future he creates. If our military expenses at the level of the next 10+ countries combined are not enough to protect ourselves and our interests, I think the question of poor management has to be addressed.
So the author states that this President (and only this one of course), created a fiscal disaster - Dan Simmons doesn't acknowledge that the first bail out was President Bush, that's sacrilege to a neo-con. Doesn't look at the 2 wars which have carried a pretty penny, etc... etc...
One more fun thing the author does is presents an impossible scenario - the US going bankrupt. Now there's quite a bit of econ behind this but basically, because the US debt is in US dollars, we cannot logically go bankrupt. We could in theory have hyper inflation but BY DEFINITION, bankruptsy is not possible given just the facts of the game, everyone accepts US dollars as the currency of our debt. So, if we owe, we can print - yes this could and does cause inflation - but this is DIFFERENT THAN BANKRUPTCY.
So the author should have stuck to what he knows, story telling, and avoided getting into the realm of real world blame, as he clearly lacks some basic foundational pieces of education for this.
The ending also could have been better - some tricky garbage that authors sometimes throw in to "make readers think" but....it fell flat here.
Without the blame part this was easy B+ material, the pages wasted on dumping blame on a single person - well that brought it down to a D
Up Next: Cloud Atlas
This book had incredible potential for the genre but collapsed due to the author's decision to dive into topics that he either doesn't understand or chose to portray in a completely out of reality scope. So the general idea of this book was pretty simple, US domination over, a few other countries have taken over, parts of the US have chosen to found their own countries or have become part of another country/entity. Pretty straight forward fiction reading.
Then the story has another thing going on, this drug called Flashback where all these people take the drug to be able to have an out of body experience of their own past - pretty cool stuff. This drug ultimately ties into the story quite well as one of the countries involved with global domination was the creator of the drug (and a future version of the drug) and is using the drug to essentially subdue the world - particularly the United States populace.
All good up to this point, the story is straight forward, writing is pretty clean, the character development is well above par -- too bad this isn't where it ends.
So the author chooses to explain WHY/HOW the US failed and, guess who is to blame? Yeah everything falls into the arms of our current President, President Obama. The author is either a) delusional or b) just doesn't understand history -- it's okay, a lot of people don't. Assuming that the country is headed to this point at some point in the history - to say that our current President is even 10% to blame is just insane, President's for the past several decades have been making poor fiscal choices and equally hold the blame for everything that the author chooses to focus on - well, everything but one thing. Of course this neo-con Mr. Simmons chooses to say that military cuts (not even cuts! just slower growth) is partly to blame for this crazy future he creates. If our military expenses at the level of the next 10+ countries combined are not enough to protect ourselves and our interests, I think the question of poor management has to be addressed.
So the author states that this President (and only this one of course), created a fiscal disaster - Dan Simmons doesn't acknowledge that the first bail out was President Bush, that's sacrilege to a neo-con. Doesn't look at the 2 wars which have carried a pretty penny, etc... etc...
One more fun thing the author does is presents an impossible scenario - the US going bankrupt. Now there's quite a bit of econ behind this but basically, because the US debt is in US dollars, we cannot logically go bankrupt. We could in theory have hyper inflation but BY DEFINITION, bankruptsy is not possible given just the facts of the game, everyone accepts US dollars as the currency of our debt. So, if we owe, we can print - yes this could and does cause inflation - but this is DIFFERENT THAN BANKRUPTCY.
So the author should have stuck to what he knows, story telling, and avoided getting into the realm of real world blame, as he clearly lacks some basic foundational pieces of education for this.
The ending also could have been better - some tricky garbage that authors sometimes throw in to "make readers think" but....it fell flat here.
Without the blame part this was easy B+ material, the pages wasted on dumping blame on a single person - well that brought it down to a D
Up Next: Cloud Atlas
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