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Written earlier this year:
I must begin with an extended rant about the immense horribleness of the edition I had. It was so badly edited and typeset that it genuinely made it almost impossible to read.
I got an edition of *The Gates Ajar* by General Books, which takes out-of-print books, scans them with a robot and then uses software to guess the characters. To guess them with, it claims, 99% accuracy.
If this is the case, then I would strongly suggest that 99% is not remotely in the ballpark of sufficient. It was virtually impossible to read a book which randomly dropped into gibberish, inserting numerals in the middle of the text. And it was oddly disjointed, so much so that I wonder if large parts were missing.
Indeed, I really do wonder if there is something missing because the book was referenced in a list of pre-1923 utopias and science fiction by women listed by the University of Penn. It doesn’t read like either to me.
It is about a woman whose brother dies, in the American civil war, and who goes into deep mourning. She finds the attempts of her neighbours at comforting her frustrating and their vision of Christianity stifling. Her widowed aunt comes to stay with her, with her cheering three year old child.
The aunt reimagines heaven as a gathering of all that is best of earth, friends and family together, talking, playing music, making gardens. This refocuses the narrator and gives her the strength to go on when her aunt also dies.
There’s definitely no SF and it’s not what I’d call a utopia - maybe it does envision an ideal society but it is in heaven.
So, my conclusions:
1, the technology for print on demand books scanned in by robots is not yet ripe. Maybe I will try again in a decade.
2, This is an interesting work, and the timing fits this work into the fade for seances after the mass deaths of the American civil war. Indeed, the two main characters speculate that the soldier boys in heaven came to greet the President when he was assassinated.
I must begin with an extended rant about the immense horribleness of the edition I had. It was so badly edited and typeset that it genuinely made it almost impossible to read.
I got an edition of *The Gates Ajar* by General Books, which takes out-of-print books, scans them with a robot and then uses software to guess the characters. To guess them with, it claims, 99% accuracy.
If this is the case, then I would strongly suggest that 99% is not remotely in the ballpark of sufficient. It was virtually impossible to read a book which randomly dropped into gibberish, inserting numerals in the middle of the text. And it was oddly disjointed, so much so that I wonder if large parts were missing.
Indeed, I really do wonder if there is something missing because the book was referenced in a list of pre-1923 utopias and science fiction by women listed by the University of Penn. It doesn’t read like either to me.
It is about a woman whose brother dies, in the American civil war, and who goes into deep mourning. She finds the attempts of her neighbours at comforting her frustrating and their vision of Christianity stifling. Her widowed aunt comes to stay with her, with her cheering three year old child.
The aunt reimagines heaven as a gathering of all that is best of earth, friends and family together, talking, playing music, making gardens. This refocuses the narrator and gives her the strength to go on when her aunt also dies.
There’s definitely no SF and it’s not what I’d call a utopia - maybe it does envision an ideal society but it is in heaven.
So, my conclusions:
1, the technology for print on demand books scanned in by robots is not yet ripe. Maybe I will try again in a decade.
2, This is an interesting work, and the timing fits this work into the fade for seances after the mass deaths of the American civil war. Indeed, the two main characters speculate that the soldier boys in heaven came to greet the President when he was assassinated.
