A Short, Sharp Shock

Short, Sharp Shock is a great book but if you didnt like Kafka, you couldnt plough through all of Gullivers Travels, and you think that Jean Paul Sartre is an idiot then you will probably have difficulty with SSS. One of the other reviews refered to the forced style of the prose -- sometimes it is, just like Swift, Robinson occasionally falls into the trap, for a few pages, of trying to "tell us something". But apart from these occasional pedantic lapses the book is profound.

Robinson successfully explores the temporal nature of personal existance. "It might be that events more than a few months gone would always be nothing more than broken and fleeting images, images like those that fled from the mind each morning upon waking, fragments of dreams too powerful to face. The past was a dream." The past is nothing but a dream state, a memory that becomes less and less relevant to the present. What Robinsons principal character discovers about the intrinsically uncertain future follows from his discovery that he doesnt need his past.

Its an existential, meaningful, very symbolic book. Unless you classify Kafka as scifi then it isnt scifi and it certainly isnt rgb. I loved SSS and plan to read it again soon.

Short, it certainly is, coming in at just 150 pages (plus 30 identical chapter title illustration pages). Sharp? Yes, I guess so, in the keen, striking, intelligent or even witty sense. And how about the shock? Well our mysterious and amnesic wanderer Thel certainly encounters plenty of these in his travels.

KSR has populated his spineworld (a kind of negative manifestation of Philip Jose Farmers Riverworld) with some of the most bizarre and evocative creations that the sci-fi/fantasy genre has ever spawned. From seaweed-folk to tree-people and the enigmatic facewomen, from people of rock/clay, to the profoundly disturbing eroticism of the Queen of Desire, all of the strange inhabitants conjured forth by KSR are players in a series of increasingly sumptious and dream-like tableaux (the almost Dali-esque homes of the shell-people being my personal favourite).

Many human archetypes are here - companion, lover, provider, bully, mage. Traditional characterisation is kept to a minimum though - and rightfully so; to do otherwise would have diluted this novels impact.

I devoured this book in a flurry of page-turning and many of its images will stay with me for a long time. I certainly got a few flashes of realisation long after reading certain chapters.

Someone compared this to Iain Banks (marvellous) "The Bridge". On a very superficial level I can appreciate that parallel being drawn, however, to me, Short Sharp Shock felt like a more profound and satisfying version of Coelhos "The Alchemist".

So what fundamental truths did I pick up from SSS?

....... no. Sorry. To share them with you would be perhaps to prejudice your enjoyment of this book, but, if you have an open mind and appreciate challenging works, enjoy it you certainly will!