target acquired

four rich kids on a yacht encounter some pirates. a shark and a horrifyingly tortured and raped corpse make surprise appearances.



the kids and the remaining pirate find a beautiful and mysterious island. and so our tale truly begins...



this book is vile. if you like vile, you should read this book. I highly recommend it!

if you like the human body - and other sorts of bodies - to be viewed as pieces of meat to be fucked with, carcasses-to-be, then this is also your book. have fun with it!



there are surely some books that get written just to see if they could, well, be written. not to play with language or share ideas or tell a good story or scare you or amuse you or excite you or take you to a different place. books that exist just because. I haven't come across many books like that but I think this is one of them. it didn't scare me or amuse me or excite me. it did disgust me though. but you know, I can get disgusted by looking at a pile of vomit or shit. why would I want to do that? "disgust" in horror is one thing, an often valuable thing, an often important part of creating a feeling of horror, particularly body-based horror. but being disgusted just to be disgusted, for no other reason? that's not interesting to me. that's



being bored and disgusted at the same time is not a great feeling. and it is certainly not a feeling of being challenged. I would have liked to have been challenged. instead it was all just pointlessly repulsive. the attempts at humor were eye-rolling. why not just take a picture of a bucket of vomit or shit instead.

it is hard for me to understand the purpose of this endeavor. should the creation of simultaneous feelings of boredom and disgust be the goal of a writer - or any kind of artist?



I noticed Richard Laymon and Ed Lee mentioned somewhere on this book, as if Gargoyle Girls is a crazy combination of those writers. as if. Ed Lee can create disgust but he has a vision attached to that disgust; his horrific and hallucinatory panoramas are the disgusting visions of an actual artist. Richard Laymon can create an atmosphere of creepy sexual perversion; the thing is, Laymon knows how to actually create "an atmosphere". he is also a professional who knows a thing or two about building an exciting narrative. this book is no child of Laymon & Lee.

but there was something that did stand out. something extra special and extra repulsive.



one of the supporting characters is given a backstory involving his strong ability with numbers, his bright future, then a tragic accident, brain damage, a loss of his talent, a dwindling away of that bright future. sad, huh? it was an intriguing backstory - and certainly designed to create some sort of sympathy for the guy. a three-dimensional character of sorts! but as far as that goes, in a story like this one, I prefer the unreal cartoon characters of [b:The Sex Beast of Scurvy Island|10962533|The Sex Beast of Scurvy Island|Andersen Prunty|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1327875422s/10962533.jpg|15880297]. why create a sympathetic backstory when your intent is to do absolutely nothing with that story, when you plan to visit the most repugnant and viciously sadistic of tortures on that character? not only do you want to disgust and bore me, apparently you want to depress me too. that's like pulling wings off of a fly, legs off of a spider. what's the point?

girlfriend,

"How do you do," Ethan began politely. "I represent the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization of the Planet Athos. If I may, I'd like to tell you about the pioneering opportunities for settlement still available there--"

The sudden dead silence of his audience was interrupted by a large worker in green coveralls.

"Athos? The Planet of the Fags? You on the level?"

was Bujold on the level when she wrote this? sad to say, this book is sort of a mess. although it does have the genial tone, fast pace, (semi-)amusing banter, bursts of action, and (attempted) emotional depth of other Vorkosigan Saga novels... it really doesn't work. it feels half-baked and, even worse, just rather silly and easily dismissed. ah well. can't win 'em all, Bujold.

so the planet Athos was founded by some fanatical religious dudes who thought women were the root of all evil. there are certainly plenty of equivalents in our world's history - and hey, right here in the modern world too! - and so that basic idea could have been an, ahem, fertile concept. but it charges right to the brink of HUH? WHAT? when we learn that millennia later, Athos has remained a planet of men only, men who fear women as evil's spawn and who procreate by importing ovaries and doing various reproductive science-y type things that I barely understood or cared about. all in all, Athos is a peaceful and pleasant planet full of what appears to be a bunch of sweet simpletons. but something goes wrong with the latest shipment of female parts and so the shy but apparently attractive Dr. Ethan Urquhart must brave the big scary galaxy full of women to track down a new shipment. while out and about, Ethan finds himself caught right in the middle of nefarious activities involving the lovely mercenary Ellie Quinn, space station administrators, humorless military types, a telepath on the run, and - egads! - some threatening flirtation from various women.

basic questions about sexuality remain unanswered or irritatingly ambiguous. on a planet of men, what happens to the heterosexuals? although I imagine a world of men only (ugh) may perhaps be appealing to some gay gents, I would think that basic sexuality would make this an unendurable prospect for the heteros stuck there. like a gay man forced to live in a lesbian sorority for the rest of his life. is Bujold saying sexuality is based on nurture, not nature? sorta sounds like it, because there is a whole planet of men who seem perfectly fine without the fairer sex. Athos is such a happy place... has the heterosexuality just been nurtured out of 9 out of 10 men? how in the world are they happy without any women whatsoever?

Athos is only the background, as most of the novel takes place on Kline Station. unfortunately, squarely in the foreground is Dr. Ethan. he is surely one of the most vapid, uninteresting, passive, whiny, basically useless "heroes" I've had to deal with in a sci-fi actioneer. hey, I just made that word up! "actioneer", I like the ring of that. anyway, I really missed this series' usual protagonist Miles. Ethan was an exceedingly poor substitute.

"manifestations of love are ritualistic" and the same goes for honor.

great actor with a sad ending. but honestly this book gave me the creeps. a slow kinda creep, but a creeping creepiness that eventually put me right off the book and the narrator. there's one image in there that stuck with me and I really wish that image would go away. yuck! but I have to admire the honesty on display. ok, one more star for you, why not.

the kid was 16 when he wrote this. 16! so despite being all hand-wringy and clunky and gay = sad, you get an extra star just for being written by a 16-year old. good job, book, and good job Kenneth Martin! color me impressed.

got lost in all the lovely words, loved getting lost. minor note but major emotions. narrative glides down perfect prose pathways and through poetic passages to different destinations, into one mind and out of another, into many minds, past future past future, man. who knows where the next road goes, probably somewhere bad, tragedy and bloodshed and murder and all kinds of fucked up and twisted emotions, but it all reads so pretty. can I understand such things? I don't know but I can try. this is a history of sorts; it also feels like a beautiful bad dream, my favorite kind.

from English* to Tagalog to Hungarian to Esperanto to Chinese... and back to English again!

It is quite a challenge in front of me, I also played its ideas. Children's Literature in the tradition of Alice in Wonderland, but not for me. I do not usually a fan of fun and good times and random stupidity, I'm not really a fan of word games. I like the rules and logic of literature and children's literature is no exception. Almost stimulate me whiny, uninteresting characters. It really grated. But then I began to grow novels. This is not due to the energetic "fun" on the screen - this is due to the obvious intellectual authors. A moment later, his idea really started to penetrate. They got under my skin, I like that. Despite the antipathy witticisms, continuous commentary language, and more seductive. In this book the nature and power of words, how they are formed and evolve, flexibility and a variety of messages, then you can include some challenging ideas. Oh, Miéville, but convinced. Opposite.

"The thing is," Deeba said, eyeing Mr. Speaker, "you could only make words do what you want if it was just you deciding what they mean. But it isn't. It's everyone else, too. Which means you might want to give them orders, but you aren't in control. No one is."

I really like: half ghost boy half. There Nice description. However, accidentally hitting my dear and courageous six legged baby named Bear utterling Diskin (toilet drowned in the river!) And a permanent bus driver Rosa (starve yourself trapped in another dimension of the room!) expected death brutal death. .. I can not say I did not see it appreciate children's book. Death was no accident and death of children's literature in places, but I think there must be some care and attention when it happens. These deaths feel cheap. Fortunately, despite the anger, what happened to the two, has been a very cute Curdle, development distract me, warm my heart.

thank you, Google Translate!

so erotic that I couldn't even finish it. erotic-1, mark-0

I read this book, learned a lot, and decided to do the exact opposite. what is the opposite of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind exactly? I dunno. Crazy Expert Mind?

it's so goofy and cute and unpredictable but sometimes I have a real hard time enjoying goofy and cute and unpredictable.