Plowing the Dark: Amazon.de: Richard Powers: Englische Bücher

Amazon.co.uk

In Plowing the Dark, Richard Powers returns to the richly promising realm of cyber-invention, one of our age's few remaining frontiers and a siren call to restless intellects. No one who enjoyed his remarkable breakthrough novel, Galatea 2.2, will be surprised by this. Here, an old friend recruits a disillusioned New York artist named Adie Klarpol to work on "the Cavern". TeraSys, a Seattle-based company, is building this virtual environment at great expense in the hope that it will lower its enormous tax liability as well as, in the long run, provide the template for all such virtual playrooms. "Millions of dollars of funding," Adie's friend Steve tells her when she arrives on the job, "and nobody around this dump can draw worth squat." Suitably impressed by the Cavern's programming, and slowly absorbing its dazzling capacity to project vivid and convincing illusions, she sets herself the task of creating a faithful 3-D version of Rousseau's Dream. Her painstaking efforts in the Realization Lab are aided by a host of supporting characters, one of whom, Spider Lim, proves so sensitive that he gets a bruise from bumping into one of Adie's virtual tree branches. And when the central female figure appears among the foliage, Lim is irresistibly drawn in, marvelling that

their first successful leaf, twirling in the Cavern darkness, had led to this--this pale, lentil body turning in his mind's dark. This scapular profile, these tow-line braids. Her hips fell somewhere on the Limaçon of Pascal. The squares of her breasts' abscissas and ordinates summed to an integer. This was the math of women, a field he'd given up studying, female equations whose complexities had long ago surpassed his ability to differentiate.

Powers' lush language corresponds to Adie's vision of Rousseau's jungle, and in turn to Rousseau's own ecstatic vision. Yet there is also something elegiac in the author's lavish descriptions of the Cavern's miracles, as if he were offering a late, last flowering of words before the cultural ascendancy of the image. Great, quotable chunks weight every page. Even readers fond of extravagant prose may find Powers's verbal persistence wearying, though it suggests that there are still contradictions and subtleties of mind that no image can track. --Regina Marler, Amazon.com -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verf�gbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

Amazon.com

No one who enjoyed Richard Powers's remarkable breakthrough novel, Galatea 2.2, will be surprised that he has returned to the richly promising realm of cyber-invention, one of our age's few remaining frontiers and a siren call to restless intellects. In Plowing the Dark, an old friend recruits a disillusioned New York artist named Adie Klarpol to work on "the Cavern." TeraSys, a Seattle-based company, is building this virtual environment at great expense in the hope that it will lower its enormous tax liability as well as, in the long run, provide the template for all such virtual playrooms. "Millions of dollars of funding," Adie's friend Steve tells her when she arrives on the job, "and nobody around this dump can draw worth squat." Suitably impressed by the Cavern's programming, and slowly absorbing its dazzling capacity to project vivid and convincing illusions, she sets herself the task of creating a faithful 3-D version of Rousseau's Dream. Her painstaking efforts in the Realization Lab are aided by a host of supporting characters, one of whom, Spider Lim, proves so sensitive that he gets a bruise from bumping into one of Adie's virtual tree branches. And when the central female figure appears among the foliage, Lim is irresistibly drawn in, marveling that

their first successful leaf, twirling in the Cavern darkness, had led to this--this pale, lentil body turning in his mind's dark. This scapular profile, these tow-line braids. Her hips fell somewhere on the Limaçon of Pascal. The squares of her breasts' abscissas and ordinates summed to an integer. This was the math of women, a field he'd given up studying, female equations whose complexities had long ago surpassed his ability to differentiate.

Powers's lush language corresponds to Adie's vision of Rousseau's jungle, and in turn to Rousseau's own ecstatic vision. Yet there is also something elegiac in the author's lavish descriptions of the Cavern's miracles, as if he were offering a late, last flowering of words before the cultural ascendancy of the image. Great, quotable chunks weight every page. Even readers fond of extravagant prose may find Powers's verbal persistence wearying, though it argues that there are still contradictions and subtleties of mind that no image can track. --Regina Marler -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verf�gbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

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The most gifted contemporary fiction writer 12. Juli 2000

Von Ein Kunde

Format:Gebundene Ausgabe

After completing Plowing the Dark, I marvel at Richard Powers' range of knowledge & use of language. As he does so successfully in his previous six novels, Powers challenges the reader with dense, powerful prose that requires some serious effort. However, as in Plowing the Dark, the effort is richly rewarded by a writer who uses dazzling language to draw the reader into two seemingly unrelated stories. I will not soon forget the richly drawn experiences of the major characters & the power of the human imagination.

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I waited several days prior to writing about this book. 1. Juli 2000

Von taking a rest

I don't think it matters how long you wait, general thoughts are the best people seem to do with this Author. This is the first book of his I have read, and I agree with those that say it is unlike anything they have read before.

I have never read prose that is so frenetic in it's pace, and to make the experience more interesting, each sentence is so engorged with words, that are carefully even artfully chosen, that dense does not begin to describe this Author's use of language. Once you become accustomed to the pace and richness of what he writes, he becomes readable. Umberto Eco comes to mind, but this Author is not as burdensome, you participate as a reader more quickly. I also love Mr. Eco's work; I just never find the reading comfortable.

His knowledge of his material is encyclopedic. He creates characters that are as unique and varied and sometimes eccentric, as any other Author I have read. And what does he create with this?

There is a group building "The Cavern", think of it as a very early Beta version of the Holodeck on The Enterprise. This is not a place for recreation; their goals are varied and constantly evolving. This room of no time, that is supposed to eventually be the perfect VR World, the perfect forecaster of whatever you like. Or for others an apocalyptic place, it's potential too horrible to imagine.

All of this plays with another story in the background that superficially could not be less related, and this is probably the genius of the book. There are a number of Authors writing that try to be clever and original, they fail with the former as they lack the latter. Their stories don't hold up because you know the end, halfway or even less into the book. This time even when you think you know, even after the end has revealed itself, the book stays with you and you continue to sort out the dozens of thoughts and philosophies, that the characters from Countries as different as Armenia, and Ireland, and Korea bring to the story.

The book pulls all of your emotional strings, and most of your moral and ethical ones as well. If you find yourself immersed in this Author's writing you are in for one very enigmatic, puzzling, fantastical ride.

Good luck!

Overly Dramatic Characters Detract from Story 5. Juli 2000

Von J.P. Dowd

I found that the story while interesting was full of people who had no concept of perspective. Each character was full of "If I do this wrong then humanity will change for the worse", "I have to work hard to create the future in my vision".

How often do people working on special projects ever feel that their personal contributions will affect humanity's use of some technology?

Some editorial reviews remarked about the brilliant characters hatching ideas, you may find that the ideas aren't really all that brilliant and the characters are self-involved savants (at best, I'd consider them morons). Each one seems to be striving for martyrdom.

If it were a real story then maybe there would be some interest in the characters, but as it stands the characters seem to be overly gothic and flat.