{"id":2557,"date":"2018-03-18T13:44:10","date_gmt":"2018-03-18T21:44:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=2557"},"modified":"2018-03-18T13:44:10","modified_gmt":"2018-03-18T21:44:10","slug":"review-gnomon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=2557","title":{"rendered":"Review: Gnomon"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Gnomon<\/em> mashes up several genres &#8211; police procedural, technothriller, heist movie, historical fantasy, and a few others that are harder to name &#8211; into a sparkling oroboros of an SF masterwork.\u00a0 That is a genre that often shines a light onto today&#8217;s society by turning a knob past 11.\u00a0 Here, Nick Harkaway twists the knob of privacy and surveillance past the peg and we&#8217;re off to the races.<\/p>\n<p>He does a nice job building a world that&#8217;s believable enough to spark ideas and arguments without distracting overly much from those ideas.\u00a0 And the ideas and allusions start coming fast.\u00a0 The magic is that those genres and allusions spotlight the ideas in addition to obfuscating them.\u00a0 Ideological sounds ring out and randomly reverberate more deeply as <em>Gnomon<\/em> progresses.<\/p>\n<p><em>Gnomon<\/em> is rich with ideas inside and calls outside its universe; those ideas reverberate, rattle, and ultimately pervade the genres and entangled narratives that form it. Those narratives outline the ideas of self, democracy and representation, persuasion and coercion, and privacy.\u00a0 The multi-genre, multi-narrative style shows how these ideas dance with and tussle against one another. By wrapping them in various forms of story and literature, Harkaway makes them elemental.<\/p>\n<p>Now allusion and reverberation is all well and good, but if the story doesn&#8217;t engage people, it&#8217;s pointless.\u00a0 <em>Gnomon<\/em> is pointed.\u00a0 Each arc is propulsive on its own terms and spiced with the questions and tension of figuring out how it all connects to the others.<\/p>\n<p>Hardaway&#8217;s <em>Gnomon<\/em> was one of the best things I&#8217;ve read in a long time both for thinking and for fun.<\/p>\n<p>A must.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gnomon mashes up several genres &#8211; police procedural, technothriller, heist movie, historical fantasy, and a few others that are harder to name &#8211; into a sparkling oroboros of an SF masterwork.\u00a0 That is a genre that often shines a light onto today&#8217;s society by turning a knob past 11.\u00a0 Here, Nick Harkaway twists the knob [&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-2557","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\/2557","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=2557"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2563,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2557\/revisions\/2563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}