And thanks to authors releasing their own works under various licenses, ebook reading is not just for the classics (I refer, of course, to my own recent reading of Dracula). I won't bore you much more with descriptions of the exact medium on which I consume any particular book ("the paper was a delightfully robust stock…") but I'm happy to report that once again Stanza on iPhone was a perfectly adequate novel-delivery-system.
Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede lives at the wacky adventure/magic realism end of science fiction, where the alien intelligences behind the events of the novel might as well be angels and demons for all the light scifi veneer of robots and so on. But that's fine, because the story's a subtle interweaving of a meditation on American music of the twentieth century, and of the life of a single mother and her son, and the aforementioned wacky adventure, sparked when Buddy Holly appears on every television in the world, speaking seemingly from the surface of Ganymede (one of the moons and Jupiter) and telling everyone that for more information they should contact Oliver Vale, our humble protagonist. Any one of the elements might have fallen short for me, but the combination really captivated.
FuzzyCo grade: A
Comments
Folks should hurry up and read this. I just went to the IMDB site for the movie, and the short plot summary near the top has what I would call a fairly big spoiler in it. The trailer and various publicity will probably have even bigger ones.
Even if it's not much of a spoiler, I did prefer your review's lack of story arc description!
Posted by: Dan Telfer | August 31, 2009 7:38 PM