SF/very good tale of aliens taking over Earth for no apparent reason & the resistance forces that have no affect.

I left a review on Silverberg's Face of the Waters page. I basically said that I didn't like the book but I wasn't quite ready to give up on him. So this was the next attempt. Now I can say, I'm ready to give up. I'm done Robert, I'm done.

( )

I have mixed feelings about this author and hence this book. This author is well known and I've been meaning to read him for quite awhile and he came strongly recommended to me by a new friend. I saw this book in a bookstore this past weekend and picked it up. I started reading it a day or so ago, but didn't get very far before I gave up in frustration. But I didn't give up for the usual reasons. It's not that the writing was that bad or it was that boring. It's about huge, squid-like aliens who invade Earth, including ones that invade L.A., setting off a series of monster forest fires that are so bad, they could incinerate the entire SoCal area and pretty much leave nothing left. It sounds a little overly dramatic, but I can live with that.

No, the thing that stopped me 40 pages in is that I got seriously pissed off at Silverberg. See, he went to great lengths to trash L.A. repeatedly at every opportunity imaginable. It's ugly, grim, disgusting, dirty, sinful, trashy, full of stupid and bizarre people, etc, etc., and he goes on and on about it and he won't shut the fuck up about it! I don't know if I've seen that much hatred for L.A. in a long time. It pisses me off because while I've moved 28 times and have lived in the US and Canada and seven states and while I have lived in four cities for 10+ years each, Los Angeles is one of those cities and it's my favorite city I have ever lived in and I consider it my home, or at least my spiritual home though I no longer live there. I know it's not the greatest city in the world and like every city, it has its problems, but it also has some awesome things that virtually no other city has to offer. Where else can you go water skiing and snow skiing on the same day? Talk about a great, year round temperate climate! I could go on and on for paragraphs, but I'm not L.A.'s tourist board, so I won't. But I'm going to show my own snobbery. The only people I've ever seen this kind of disdain for L.A. have been New Yorkers and people from San Francisco and sure enough, when I looked up Silverberg's bio, he was born and brought up in New York City, so he's part of NYC's elite, believing obviously that NYC is the greatest city to ever grace the earth, as so many of them do, and that L.A. is full of superficial airheads who know nothing and are worthless. And, surprise! He then moved to San Francisco, which is full of people who look down on L.A. because they are culturally and artistically superior to L.A. and SoCal's "Little Mexico." I can't tell you how many times while living there I saw articles and editorials arguing that NoCal should vote to secede from SoCal and form its own state and leave SoCal to the invading Mexicans. Racist snobs. So, it comes as no surprise to me that Silverberg thinks poorly of L.A., although I still don't know where his outright hatred of it comes from. But it's disgusting and I couldn't take it anymore, so I decided to stop reading before my blood pressure went through the roof. Who knows? Maybe it's a good book. I doubt it, because its rating on Goodreads is only a 3.45, so obviously most people consider it mediocre, even though its cover trumpets the notion that it's his "epic masterpiece." I'll still read these two books recommended to me by my new friend, but I have to say, this was a disappointment and I'm not impressed and if this is typical of his work, I won't have much good to say about him. Two stars, because outside of the L.A. bashing, it had potential. But definitely not recommended. ( )

It had been years since I read any Silverberg. This one was good, not great. I did find myself cheering for the humans though! ( )

This is my first novel by Silverberg, and it doesn't make me want to grab another book by him.

In this novel, set in the near future, aliens of greatly superior force and inscrutable motives invade and occupy Earth. The story mostly follows one family, the Carmichaels of Southern California, over five decades as they cope and resist. I rather liked that the eldest males in the line were named "Anson"--Heinlein's middle name. Nice homage that.

Early on the Carmichael patriarch, "The Colonel," reflects that the invasion brings to mind Wells' The War of the Worlds and expresses his frustration Wells resorted at the end to a deus ex machina and never really answered the question as to how to overcome an overwhelmingly superior force. Ironic that. Silverberg in this book makes (not) answering that question his theme.

The characters of the Carmichael clan are likable enough and Silverberg's style is readable, but there just wasn't anything here I found imaginative or thought-provoking or caused me to connect with the characters in a way that made me care overmuch. Too many important events happened off the page. The chapters are very episodic in feel with years between the the end of one and the start of another. (I've read several portions of this novel first appeared as short stories, which might explain that.)

Moreover, I found how a lot of the plot developed inexplicable or implausible--in terms of actions of the humans and aliens both. For instance, there's utter anarchy and things are reverting to savagery, the infrastructure has crumbled, there's plague--but apparently still a functioning internet?

The ending, although I could see it fitting a novel that can be seen as the anti-Independence Day, felt like an anti-climatic cheat after such a long sprawl of a book--over 400 pages. Had that resolution come at the end of a short story or novella, I might have seen the ending as satisfying, but at this epic length it's not enough of a payoff for a long novel more slow-moving than a L.A. traffic jam. ( )