 Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to another book review. Today we are continuing along with Dean Kunze's back catalogue. Another thing I need to note is we were me and Dealey who I'm doing my reread of Kunze's books with. We were tooling right along. We were about to go into House of Thunder when I realized looking back at his bibliography that I had not read Demon Seed. If I ever did read it, I don't remember a thing about it. It is also a movie. It also has a 1977 edition. This one is a 1997 rewrite. From what I understand is they are two completely different books. He says in the afterward back here that the original version of Demon Seed was made into a good film starring Julie Christie which is funny because he usually doesn't like movies based on his work. But the book itself was more of a clever idea than a novel, which I would say that's that about most of his books. Reading it recently, I winced so much that I began to develop the squinty-eyed look of Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti Western. I feel ya, Dean Kunze. I understand. Here is an entirely new version which I hope comes closer to fulfilling the promise of the novel's premise. Revisiting Demon Seed, I discovered that in addition to being a scary story, it was a rather scathing satire of a panoply of male attitudes. He uses panoply three times in the book also. It's just a weird word that he just keeps using over and over again. Although much else has changed, although much else has changed in this version, I've kept that satirical edge. Guys, I don't let us off any easier this time around than I did the first. And I'm going to cover that in the review because I've made some notes back here. First off, in the book, I don't know if these are slight spoilers. This book's been around forever, so if you have problems with spoilers, maybe you don't watch this review. I'm not going to just straight out tell you any plot points, but I am going to cover some themes and stuff that he talks about in the book. I just finished this book, so it's all fresh in my mind. Only took me two days to read it. It's only 150 pages, that's why. So as far as the theme, the there's one thing that he says early on in the book on page 42, I believe I made a note of it, is that the the computer system is obviously male. The computer in the book is obviously male because it was created by males. I had an issue with this right off the bat, simply because I mean, how many times have you seen a dude create something or name something? It's always female. I mean, there's a whole it's not a joke. It's tradition with boats that they name a boat after a woman and that women can't be fishermen kind of bullshit. There's a whole that's that whole thing. Whenever you see a guy talking about his truck, it's old girl or, you know, animals, even if they're not girls as old girl, it's they feminize everything. Dudes feminize everything. So I'm not entirely sure why the computer, other than to fit the purpose of the plot, it didn't fit. Now, before I go any farther into this, you may think, oh, God, this is another one that you didn't like. Why does it keep on reviewing books from Dane Concher? He doesn't like. I love this book. There's only certain elements that I did not like or that I thought were funny when they shouldn't have been. But I pretty much love this book. This book is brutal. It is pretty much well written pretty much because I'm going to point out some things as far as the writing is concerned. Also, if you're a writer, hang around for that. We're going to discuss some things that he does in this book that you should never do or that you should try not to do. And it's also funny that he left these things in in a rewrite. That that also struck me odd because usually this is the kind of stuff that you take out of future editions if you're going to be taking anything out. But it could also be said that he rewrote the entire book. So it was probably a it's not even really a rewrite as much as it's a reimagining of his idea. Another thing is let me bring let me look for my notes. Seventy two page 72. Let me go through here. Let me see. I think it's just a quote that I was talking about. Yeah. So that quote, we will go ahead and go into the stuff that I want to talk about with the writing, the bad writing or the overwriting. I hear a lot about how Coons never uses a superfluous words and how good he is in that regard. Coons is one of the biggest overwriters of all time. It may not seem that way, but a lot of the stuff that he puts in his books is filler. And in here, there's filler words, like, for instance, the very first line. Listen, there's no spoiler here. The very first line of chapter 22 is outside. Remember that word outside? The moon, the midnight moon floated high and silver in the cold black sea of space above. OK, two words there that have absolutely no use in the sentences outside and above. First off, of course, it's outside. You're talking about the moon. We're not talking about inside. We're talking about outside. Second thing is above. The sky is over you. The sky is always above, especially when you're talking about, you know, you're inside looking outside kind of deal. So two words right there could have been completely just erased from from the sentence and it would have been fine. The midnight moon floated high and silver in the cold black sea of space. So all you have to say, people know what you're talking about. Next, we have page 140 in my edition. And this is just this is just terrible, terrible writing period. Remember, I like this book, but with every good book, there's always criticism to be had or made or have you want to play. I even mentioned that it even has that word again, the penoply, the penoply of summer stars swelled brighter with the passing of the lunar disk. It's the moon. Just called the moon, the moon, never, never use, you know, stuff like that, the lunar disk. First off, lunar disk doesn't make any sense because the moon's not a disk. I mean, it may look two dimensional in the sky, but it's not. And it's just too many words to be used. It's just bad writing. Now, if you don't care about the writing at all, there's nothing, there's actually nothing wrong with this book. This book is fun. It's an engaging narrative. You're inside, I guess, not really the head. The point of view is from the computer program, the rogue AI in the story. And oddly enough, I just got through watching Upgrade, which kind of had the same plot to it. Not really, but it especially, I mean, one of the it's like a spoiler for Upgrade, so which was a pretty good movie, by the way. But the plot is great. It's a little bit predictable. I loved the character of Inos Schenck, which is, I thought, Kroence comes up with some, he's like Charles Dickens. He comes up with some wild ass names. But Inos Schenck, that character, I thought, was fantastic, brutal, terrific, a balancing between a not supernatural, but a intangible villain and a tangible villain. I always appreciate that, like in it, you have Pennywise and you have Henry Valorys, that kind of deal. Sorry, excuse me, that kind of deal. I've always, a long bit of fan of if you're going to have something supernatural or otherworldly or whatever it may be, always have a human villain along with it. And that's what they do well here. That's what he did well here. Also, another thing I actually loved was how left, that there is a complete ending. But there is certain elements of the final terror left to the reader's imagination. Now, it's not as 100 percent as like a bird box kind of deal where he doesn't explain anything. Even though I do, I have heard rumors that the sequel will actually talk about the monsters in bird box. I think it's called Mallory. But in this one, it's he hints at certain things. And it's some it's one of those things where it's not a cheat. It doesn't feel like a cheat that he's only hinting at it. And the reason why I say that is because there are certain elements that he has built up throughout with the title, with just discussing, you know, the AI, all that stuff that he has built up throughout. It gives you enough information that the reader can build their own hypothesis on what this final terror looks like. And I appreciated that quite a bit. I also liked that the I can't remember the guy's name. Maybe Henry, something like that. But Susan, the main character, and there's, I guess, one of her assistants or one of the people who work at the house. Their relationship is kind of it's not mentioned at all. What their relationship is, you only see her reaction. And that's when something clicked for me. I was I was bothered by the lack of character development for Susan and the lack of character development for everybody that, you know, it comes up in the book. But then I realized whose point of view we're in in this book. We're in this computer who wants to be human. We're not any human being's mind. So it fit that the character development would be so on the short end that we wouldn't get much character development because you're dealing with something that is as sociopathic as it can be, which is a computer program. It gives absolutely no fucks for anybody else. Other than some missteps with the writing, I really enjoyed this book. In fact, I would go as far as I would probably put it on my top 10 Dean Coons books. One of the main reasons for that is it's only 150 pages. And I've long said that Dean Coons at a certain length of novel is extremely good. And this is that length. Like if you took any number of his books, any of them and took away all the filler, all of the superfluous information, if you took all that away, you'd be left with a really good 150, 200 page book. I said the same thing about Shattered in my review for that one. I think Dean Coons, people say that he never overuses words or whatever. I strongly disagree. I feel that he has the most filler of any quick writer. So I'm not saying that he uses filler the most, but if we look at people like James Patterson, James Patterson has almost zero, zero filler. That's why his chapters are only one or two pages long because he just gets in, says what he has to say. Well, someone else does because someone else writes his books. But with Dean Coons, he tends to linger and to explain all the Boganville clients and all the Boganville, whatever they're called. And, you know, the weather and the structure of the house and what the architect's name was back in 1937 when the house was built or what style. He has a lot of that BS in his books and his books are not literary enough, unlike Stephen King's level, to get away with that because Stephen King has the narrative voice to get away with that BS information because it's like you're sitting there listening to a old friend or a father figure tell you a story. Whereas with Coons, you know you're reading a writer's work. It feels like a novel. It always, with Dean Coons, it always feels like writing. Sometimes it feels like great writing. Sometimes it feels like a chore, but it always feels like writing with Dean Coons. At least that's my opinion. I'm sure several of you would disagree with me down there in the doobly-doo. But have you read Demon Seed? If so, let me know what you thought of it down there in the doobly-doo. Up next for the retro reviews, we're going with the key to almost of the eyes of darkness. I already did that one. The key to midnight is the one we're doing next and me and Dealey will be reading the House of Thunder next month. So expect a new review for that one and we will continue on with the retro reviews also. But let me know what you thought of Demon Seed. If you have read it, whether you liked it, didn't like it, if you didn't like it, let me know why down there in the doobly-doo. But until next time, I have been E, you have been U. This has been another Dean Coons review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye.