Shamanspace by Steve Aylett Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Shamanspace
Book Review: Fantastic!
Summary: 5 Stars
I recently reread this book and loved it. I didn't like it the first time. But I felt like I was missing something and gave it another shot. I'm glad I did.
It seems like I have to be in a particular mood to enjoy an Aylett book, and this one more than the others. It's drastically different from his other work: no jokes on every page, no over the top wackiness. This is a serious book and it reads like a modernized version of an epic poem. I would really like to read another book of this kind from Aylett. The prose is marvelous.
Book Review: Insanity Unleashed
Summary: 5 Stars
A psychedelic romp through the etheric soul of eternity, `Shamanspace' reads like a recipe for a psychotic episode of mass proportions. At long last we have proof that God exists and the race is on to take revenge on the supreme maker of life, death, and cheap whiskey. The edgeman Alix is the favored to win as he sidesteps through time and space on his quest to drive the bullet home. God is the target, Alix is the gun, and the stakes are high as the very existence of humanity perches on the cusp of oblivion. Steve Aylett has created a masterwork of speculative fiction written in a hybrid English perhaps best described as Cyberspeak. The book is fast paced and unrelenting and it keeps the reader riveted right to the last page. Read this book and prepare to be dazzled and dazed and altered on a cellular level. `Shamanspace' isn't so much taken in through the eyes as it is injected into the veins. This book is a drug delivered on a dirty needle. It will leave you mind-blown and wasted and craving still more.Book Review: Lightspeed Amber Spyglass
Summary: 4 Stars
My (limited) understanding of what transpires within Shamanspace goes (something) like this: there is a God (who resembles a titanic black insect floundered on its back at the centre of an infinite nerve net, fiddling a million legs amid the ferocious stench of vomit and scorching wires), and there are forces at work (opposing forces known as the Prevail and the Internecine) who wish to destroy God (by entering his ethereal body like an ethereal virus and detonating his ethereal heart). Aylett explains (in the epilogue, after the trip is over, as you come down): The splinter group known as the Prevail formed by those who considered that god was a thing separate from its works, and that the universe would persist after gods assassination began a series of splinter skirmishes against the Internecine (or, as they began to call us, the ashers) which soon became a full cult war . . .
The book begins with Melody and Sig (a kind of teacher and pupil) discovering Alix (a mythical, semi-legendary being now white-haired and golden-eyed) in an abandoned (house?). Alix tells them how he got there over the course of the novel: basically, there was an attempt upon his life, he fled to Paris (or rather he valved to Paris, spilling like hot metal across what William Gibson would probably call nodal points) where there was a second attempt on his life (a mad chase across the city, endless valving and spuming and blurring, phantoms spilling in and out of gutters and grouting); he is captured, betrayed, freed and escapes to make his attempt upon the life of God. I dont think he succeeds (but Im willing to be convinced otherwise).
As with William Gibson, it is not always clear what is going on (you cling to the words, despite the fact that the words sound like metal bees clunking against the insides of your bucket head), and there are times when you lose yourself (the book spirals up and away into some abstract place, rehearsing the relationship between hot air and smoke) yet still you read.
Im not entirely certain as to why (but maybe its because this is a reading experience you do not control, this is reading experience as intoxicant, reading experince as trip).
If the idea of a trip in the company of Burroughs or Gibson (or Chris Morris, at times) in which you are propelled through the action of The Amber Spyglass at lightspeed doesnt fill you with terror, this is the (book?) for you.
Book Review: Mind blowing?
Summary: 1 Stars
If by "mind blowing" other reviewers meant that this book will make your brain want to spew chunks because it is so bad, then yes. It is mind blowing.There is nothing unearthly, mystical, or genius about this little book. It is a collection of posturings and pseudo-poetic drivel.
There is no great imagery or prose in it. Just self-conscious phrases attempting to sound cool by being nearly completely obscure.
The book isn't worth the calories wasted by the act of picking it up.
Book Review: Verbal flotsam
Summary: 1 Stars
For the past year, I had come across Steve Aylett's name several times; it had been crossreferenced with the names of authors about whom I'm particularly avid, such as Ballard and Ellis. This prompted me to pick up SHAMANSPACE. What a bitter disappointment. It is shameful that I invested money and time in this drivel---121 pages of nothing, in BIG PRINT so that your grandmother could read it.Even at 121 pages, in LARGE PRINT, the book is too long.
I have no problem with linguistic expansion or inventive/neologistic writing, but this is mere verbal waste: one empty, meaningless sentence follows another, with no connection between them. The surrealistic experiments (SOLUBLE FISH, THE MAGNETIC FIELDS) had a formal consistency to them; this "book" has none. In other words, it doesn't follow the logic of the world, but neither does it even have an INTERNAL LOGIC.
The prose poetry is lifeless, graceless, and bad; Alett dispenses with the usual cliches and invents his own, which are infinitely more insipid.
SHAMANSPACE resembles the "work" of Mark Leyner without the humor or occasional cleverness (I do not say this to praise Leyner, who is nearly as execrable a writer). If any good could come from this trifle, it will be an enhanced feeling of self-confidence on the part of ordinary readers who will now be emboldened to publish their laundry lists.
A complete throwaway.
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