{"id":1824,"date":"2013-10-21T17:19:31","date_gmt":"2013-10-22T01:19:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1824"},"modified":"2013-10-21T17:19:31","modified_gmt":"2013-10-22T01:19:31","slug":"review-channel-sk1n","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1824","title":{"rendered":"Review: Channel Sk1n"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I think what Jeff Noon is trying to pull off in <em>Channel Sk1n<\/em> is admirable, but his execution didn&#8217;t work for me.\u00a0 This is a near-futurish SF novel set in a world (a UK, really) with obsessive ubiquitous media and reality TV gone to allegorical levels.\u00a0 In it, a young pre-fab pop star is infected with a media eating virus while the record exec who made her is watching his daughter destroy herself on the most popular reality show.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s a fine premise for an SF novel.\u00a0 The execution left me unsatisfied for a couple reasons.\u00a0 First the descriptions of everything read like lyrics.\u00a0 I understand that the POV character is a pop diva, and would think that way.\u00a0 I like the idea of describing a world that way.\u00a0 In practice, however, I felt like the proceedings were rendered episodic and obscure by it.\u00a0 One of the reasons poetry can say a lot with a few words is that those words trigger associations with common experience.\u00a0 That&#8217;s much harder to tap in a world that&#8217;s close but not quite the same.<\/p>\n<p>Secondly, the world feels like its constructed as an allegory.\u00a0 That can work, of course, but when the allegory is this bald-faced &#8211; pop-star-maker&#8217;s daughter signs up to go mad on national TV to get his attention &#8211; I need something out of the ordinary to make it palatable.\u00a0 The other part of the allegory that I find off is that all kinds of technology is thrown around that isn&#8217;t different in kind from what is in the world today, but it all has different names.\u00a0 I think that hurts the allegory by removing the world further from ours, and the poetic descriptions by blocking associations.<\/p>\n<p>Overall, I found <em>Channel Sk1n<\/em> ambitious, but unsuccessful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I think what Jeff Noon is trying to pull off in Channel Sk1n is admirable, but his execution didn&#8217;t work for me.\u00a0 This is a near-futurish SF novel set in a world (a UK, really) with obsessive ubiquitous media and reality TV gone to allegorical levels.\u00a0 In it, a young pre-fab pop star is infected [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1824"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1824\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1825,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1824\/revisions\/1825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}