e-Book Radix download

I dislike dissing fellow authors, especially ones who write better than do like A.A. here, but at 200 pages in to this novel I was still hoping that the protagonist would die soon. You are supposed to feel that way, but it's a lot of hours of my life sunk into hatred. Also, the sheer amount of words used Humpty-Dumpty-style for imaginative but misleading and sometimes nonsensical purposes is off putting. The intro to the book - a terribly complete essay on the author's grand vision - left me cold going in: the author might consider adding it to the end instead for those folks who just couldn't get enough.

I suggest moving on to the author's brilliant work, "Last Legends of Earth" instead.

The central character, Sumner Kagan, is complex and maybe even a bit twisted, and the plot is downright bizarre. However, the action is varied and steady, and anything but predictable. Takes some patience, but it is a pretty good read.

Radix was recommended to me by a friend three years ago, and it took about four attempts to actually get past the first ten pages, but once I was past that hump, I was good to go. After much thinking, I have to say that Radix is definitely the most difficult book in my collection to recommend, as I cannot for the life of me think of what category it falls in. It’s not normal Sci-Fi, nor is it a traditional adventure. It has elements of space in it, and spiritual journeys. But there are just no words to describe the uniqueness of this book.

But why did I give it five stars? Well, because unlike most books I’ve read in the past few years, it actually had a profound impact on my life, and set off chain reactions of becoming more self-confident, interested in the world and some of the strangest dreams I’ve ever had. One of the hurdles one has to get past with this book is that Attanasio makes up a lot of words. And I mean A LOT. They are typically just two words strung together; skyfire, selfscan, and deepmind are some of them, but there are many others, he’s sort of like if Shakespeare frequently visited alternate dimensions. But they are all fairly self-explanatory. The only way I can do his style justice is to say that I have considered flying to Hawaii and marrying him, just because I’m curious what his vows would sound like. In fact, his made up words are used so effectively that some of them have literally entered my normal vocabulary, so I sometimes refer to meditations as “going into selfscan”, or if I need to think about something for a while, it “goes into the deepmind.” Obviously I have to be mindful of who I talk to, as to a normal person I would sound like I’m temporarily leaving reality, which is something you can expect to do a lot of when reading this book.

The pace of Radix is… indescribably erratic. If I were to chart if on a graph, with 0 being boring and 10 being engaging, the line would shoot wildly between 2, 7, 0, 15, -8, 4, 10^89, 1, -2993 and 59 within the same chapter. The graph could then be made into the world’s most exciting rollercoaster. So, there were times where I seriously considered abandoning the book, which is something I rarely do, and a few pages later I would be on the edge of my seat and even sweating with excitement. Based on this, it took me roughly, reading on and off, over a year to read it (the first half was done in 2015, then some earlier this year, and I finished the last few chapters over the course of a week.) That sudden spike of interest at the end was due to the shift in writing from boring descriptions of useless stuff to writing about concepts I could never envision, nor could any normal person. The stuff that’s contained in the last few chapters can be compared to experiencing all conceivable realities within the space of a few seconds – and that feeling continues until the very last word.

At one point where I considered giving up, when Sumner was at a military camp, I suddenly had the thought that Radix is Attanasio’s autobiography, which would account for the erratic pacing. So the nickname “Sugarat” was probably similar to one Attanasio had as a child, the meetings with Corby could be his waking up to his inner child and the military camp part was a very tough time in his life, though, having never met the guy, I can only speculate. With this in mind the book became wonderfully interesting again, as, even before starting a psychology degree, I was thoroughly analysing Attanasio. Diagnoses? A deeply humble being with an infinitely broad imagination who just wants to play.

It pains me that this book is so obscure, but at the same time I can’t really imagine how it could be popular either. I know his other works gradually get so obscure there aren’t even Amazon pages for them. During selfscan after the book, I noted to myself that if every book ever written were to be turned into a movie, I would petition that Radix be skipped, as there is absolutely no way to capture the beauty of Attanasio’s writing – even with a quantum computer.

Now that it has been a few months since I finished, and I have spent a lot of time in selfscan, I still am at a loss for words for how to end this review, or if it should have an end (or if it’s even conceivable in this universe for it to ever end.) I know I haven’t done the best job of describing it; in fact this review probably makes you want to read it even less, as I just make it sound like some alien artefact (which it very well may be.) It’s all well and good for me to say “try it out” or “browse the first few chapters”, but you really need to have the right mind set to handle Radix. My recommendation is to reach out to a friend (or friend of friend) and see if any of them have read it. They will certainly have endless stories to tell you about their experience with this book, how it affected them and why you should read it too.

So, take a (massive) step outside of your reading comfort zone, and get transported to the world of this book. In fact, real life may start seeming strange, and Radix as the true reality. But you’ll have to experience that for yourself.

The author is a genius and master oi the English Language. The prose is poetical at times, and fits the story line. This is a novel of transformation, in which the protagonist moves from an obese and mixed up youth to a man having surpassed human boundaries. Attanasio uses the term Radix to imply the origin on all things toward which the protagonist moves.

Over the years, most of my books have been given as gifts after reading them, but Radix is the ONLY sc-fi novel I keep in my library now-- a rare treasure that I loan to anyone in love with the genre.

one of the best sci-fi novels i've ever read. i think it rates right up there with dune.it's not often that a novel really makes you feel that your're in another place and time. i have recommended it to many people. i cannot recommend it more highly.

I loved this book, it's been a while since I was so thoroughly transported into the world of a book.

I have been reading SF for 50 years. I generally prefer fiction that poses interesting questions and new ways of thinking. I am no a "space opera" fan and this certainly is not in that category. But it is more metaphysical than I like and is extremely hard to follow in the last third of the book. It became a question of whether it was worth finishing the last 100 pages of the book but I completed it. Much has been made of how unlikable the main character is but that's the author's choice. The author uses a lot of descriptive terms in the prose but much of the terms are either archaic or completely made up. I make a game of checking many of the words with the Kindle dictionary function. After a while this gets tiresome. In the end, the book was just too tiresome.