3.0
The Continent of Lies
ByPublisher Description
A dystopian tale about mass-entertainment-turned-toxic from the award-winning author of Towing Jehovah—perfect for Philip K. Dick fans.
Cutting-edge virtual reality has emerged as a popular, albeit controversial, source of amusement. Devouring a cephapple or “dreambean” allows the eater to become the primary player in a preprogrammed narrative: love story, historical spectacle, horror thriller—this medium encompasses all genres. Our protagonist, Quinjin, is a professional dreambean critic, rating the hallucinogenic adventures hidden within these remarkable fruits.
But something has gone terribly wrong. An anonymous “dreamweaver” has created a cephapple that, by transporting its users to the core of an inescapable nightmare, drives them stark raving mad—just the sort of ammunition the anti-dreambean movement needs to get the technology banned. Quinjin is hired to find the source of the poison and eradicate it. But the reviewer’s heroic quest becomes highly personal when the person he most cares about—his teenage daughter—eats the forbidden fruit and lapses into a coma.
Dark and satiric, The Continent of Lies is a bravura demonstration of the bold originality that has won James Morrow two Nebula Awards, two World Fantasy Awards, and the Prix Utopia.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities3 Reviews
3.0
“2.5 stars, https://reviews.metaphorosis.com/?post_type=rcno_review&p=1867&preview=true""
Decades ago, I read This is the Way the World Begins, by J.T. McIntosh, which I quite liked, mainly on the strength of the characterization. More recently, I saw an opportunity to download some free books, including This Is the Way the World Ends, by James Morrow. Aged as I am, I confused the names, and thought, "This must be a sequel, or I remembered the title wrong." I downloaded a bunch of James Morrow books. All unsuspecting, I started in on this one.
Obviously, it wasn't what I was expecting. McIntosh and Morrow have different styles. Equally obviously, different doesn't mean bad. The book kept my interest, though I wish it had been stronger. Overall, it reminded me of a Jack Vance mystery, with its baroque atmosphere and odd characters. Unfortunately, while Vance pulls that off through whimsy, verbal acrobatics, and no real pretense at depth for supporting characters, The Continent of Lies tended to bog down in its own conceits. I followed along, but was neither drawn in enough by the environment to be swept away, nor engaged enough by the characters to follow in their wake.
The protagonist is engaging enough, though his backstory consists of only a few layers, and his interactions with other characters are hindered by those characters' shallowness. The plot is plenty baroque, and interesting in its own way, though it dispenses a little too readily with reality and logic, without humor to paper over the cracks. The tone is dry, but too clever for its own good without being funny.
Some of the settings, while gothic and extreme, aren't as clearly described as they might be, and the mechanics are sometimes vague. At least one of the subquests feels like a long and fairly pointless detour. While there are hints of the Odyssey mixed in, Morrow never really makes enough of it to matter. While the dream apples (cephapples/dreambeans, if you want to be correct) are intended to take the user through a carefully designed dream setting, Morrow seems to forget some of that when it comes to the resolution, creating a need for props and tools that were otherwise unmentioned. More worryingly, the creation of the dangerous fruit is strikingly simple - something that Morrow acknowledges late, and which undermines the story as a whole. The title is clever, but has little to do with the plot.
Overall, the book was interesting, but came across as a less charming Vance.”
Eva
Created over 16 years agoShare
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Gina Ruiz
Created about 17 years agoShare
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About James Morrow
Born in 1947, James Morrow has been writing fiction ever since he, as a seven-year-old living in the Philadelphia suburbs, dictated “The Story of the Dog Family” to his mother, who dutifully typed it up and bound the pages with yarn. This three-page, six-chapter fantasy is still in the author’s private archives. Upon reaching adulthood, Jim produced nine novels of speculative fiction, including the critically acclaimed Godhead Trilogy. He has won the World Fantasy Award (for Only Begotten Daughter and Towing Jehovah), the Nebula Award (for “Bible Stories for Adults, No. 17: The Deluge” and the novella City of Truth), and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (for the novella Shambling Towards Hiroshima). A fulltime fiction writer, Jim makes his home in State College, Pennsylvania, with his wife, his son, an enigmatic sheepdog, and a loopy beagle. He is hard at work on a novel about Darwinism and its discontents.
Other books by James Morrow
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