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An amazing book by an amazing, underrated author. Highly recommended.
Thomas Pynchon's dead-on when he says Steve Erickson knows "the nocturnal side of reality." The action and imagery of Rubicon Beach--specifically the first part--is exquisitely dream-like. The passage about the water of a flooded, dystopian Los Angeles creating ever-changing music with the bombed-out buildings, and its presence and effects on the inhabitants, is one of the greatest images I've ever read. Rubicon Beach reminds me a little of Alan Garner's Red Shift, a novel as three stories, illu...
"I'm thirty-eight, thirty-nine," she heard the mathematician say with his usual imprecision concerning personal statistics. He pulled back from the light of the candle on the table as though to hide behind his dark Indianness in the darkness of the room. "I look in the mirror sometimes," he said, "and I think I'm fifty or fifty-five." He shook his head. "I don't know how I got so damned tired. When I was younger I despised anyone who gave up so easily, but that was when the world sang to me,
…I’d come to the geographical and temporal longitude where and when anything was possible, and that the accompanying latitude was in me: I was a walking latitude, finding its conjunction with the world’s last longitude… Some writers sit down at a typewriter and bleed. Others sit down and dream. Nothing to it. Steve Erickson casts his nets within far and wide, transmitting captured dreams through his fingertips out into the world at large. A web of shadow prisms infiltrate receptive frequencies w...
'Rubicon Beach' reminded me of those old point-and-click adventure games. Your character wakes up in his room and goes on to explore the world beyond, moving between the scenes- one more surreal than the other, chatting up pixelated characters rooted to their respective spots, programmed to look like they are doing anything but waiting there for you.Even though following the first anemic sub-chapters is a relatively familiar storyline, the whole book maintains that air of digital two-dimensional...
This was a strange, surreal book. What starts out as a sort of dystopian post-apocalyptic mystery... doesn't stay that way for long. Some mild plot spoilers follow if you want a sense of just how strange it can get.(view spoiler)[Soon there is a mysterious woman who may or may not exist outside the first character's mind, and hints at other worlds outside our own. The point of view switches to other characters, including aforementioned mysterious woman - revealing their backstory, and that they
Steve Erickson is my new favorite writer. Rubicon Beach walks the line between fantasy and reality, if there is, in fact, such a line. The three sections of the book take place in different times and settings, and with different characters. Or do they? I had to pull out a pen and paper to take notes as I read, trying keep track of the similarities and recurring themes. Erickson's surreal style may not appeal to everyone, but to me, it's pure bliss. Incidentally, this was not an easy book to find...
Wow-- I was impressed with this dystopic novel-- truly a unique and vivid addition to the genre.
I just re-read this novel after having read it at least twice in the 1980s. The first two sections are truly outstanding, but the last section was somewhat less powerful -- at least until the end. I just wasn't as emotionally engaged with the protagonist in that section of the book.One of the most memorable events was when Catherine crosses an imaginary border into America at the intersection of Wilshire and Vermont in Los Angeles. I'll have to head up there soon to make my own journey across th...
At first, let me quote Robert Ford's words from Westworld tv series: "I've always loved a good story. I believed that stories helped us to ennoble ourselves, to fix what was broken in us, and to help us become the people we dreamed of being. Lies that told a deeper truth." Rubicon Beach would much support the above statement in a very poetic, alluring and dreamy way. I would interpret the whole story as the narrative of a decaying mind, by an ageing man ("there is a number for everything"), whos...
I recently came upon an old notebook with a couple of pages of handwritten one- or two-line reviews I wrote of all the books I read in 1989 and 90. Most of them I remember, but this one...it's like I never read it. I wrote "Surreal & futuristic story Los Angeles." No indication of whether I liked it or not, and I can't imagine what reason I had for reading it. I was kind of past my earlier years of sci fi binges and I was in college, overwhelmed with set reading. Huh. I doubt I'll re-read it to
There is some beautiful prose in this book, and throughout it maintains a tinge of surreality that brings focus to the events. But the narrative is a headless chicken. I enjoyed the first part the most because then it still felt like there was a direction. That was subsequently lost, and the connections between the different events were either fleeting or deeply obscured to the point where I found it difficult to engage.I want to give it a higher rating for some of the beautiful scenes in it, bu...
Quit after chapter 1Of course chapter 1 is over 90 pages long and represents about 1/3 of this book. I gave it my best shot but ultimately I lost all interest in the story and the characters. Of the over 700 books I’ve read in the last few years and reviewed here, this is only the third I did not manage to make it to the end.I started chapter 2 hoping that things would be different; aside from changing the perspective towards one of the minor characters in the first chapter, nothing really chang...
