This book does have a plot, but I think it's more effective to just lay the pieces out: Terra killed over a thousand people seven years ago, and now she's locked in her strange, inexpressible visions on a prison colony; a musician who reads minds sometimes; a cop looking for someone who can explain the unspeakably horrible; a curious scientist with a machine that can project thoughts, who takes it upon himself to wonder if Terra might be sane after all.So I keep reading McKillip, because -- well, I don't actually know why, except that every second or third book is strange in an engrossing way, not just in an opaque way. This is that book, only more so. It's kind of about what sanity is, kind of about language, kind of about symbology more broadly, kind of about forgiveness. It's an intense, mysterious little mechanism that got into my head and did unmeasurable, odd things in there. I don't generally like opaque books, and this one isn't quite that . . . exactly. It's doing a whole lot of things; a few too many, actually, and I don't just say that because I didn't get it all. But McKillip managed such richness in writing and image, spun out on a thread of unspooling momentum, that I enjoyed the hell out of watching this book do it's thing, even though I don't entirely know what that was.I suspect, though I can be convinced otherwise, that this book will be the best of McKillip for me, and everything else will be disappointingly impenetrable. But it was totally worth picking through her catalog to find it.
Terra Viridian sees visions she can't explain. Years after she's locked away, someone else begins to see what she sees—a beautiful, enthralling vision—but he knows he sounds just as insane when tries to describe it.Fool's Run is kind of like that. Patricia A. McKillip hits all the notes she was born to sing: her writing is at times gorgeous and ethereal, at times starkly human. The universe she's imagined is worth a trip. But try to describe the plot of this book, especially the ending, and you'll feel crazy.Sometimes, reading McKillip, the climax of the plot seems like a mountain peak shrouded in mist: you're a little hazy on what's going on. When it works, it feels like magic, disappearing when you try and get a closer look; when it doesn't work, you feel a bit cheated.I felt a bit cheated.
What do You think about Fool's Run (1988)?
It was fascinating to read Patricia McKillip doing sci-fi. And, as always, her writing was fascinating and almost painfully insightful. This is the first McKillip book that left me feeling unsatisfied, though. She didn't quite manage to make the world seem complete. I dislike it when authors introduce a concept (in this case, an alien) that is unfamiliar or implausible to both the reader and the characters, and then don't give it a reason for having been there. I wanted to know more about the less important characters (including the alien). The dialogue, however, was incredible, and some day I will probably go back to read it again, to see if some of the explanations I felt cheated of were hidden in the symbolism.
—MA
Probably about a 2.5 stars... this book was well written but I wasn't super into the plot, there were a lot of characters and not enough time to get to know each one as much as I would have liked, and at times it was extremely confusing. The story was interesting at a surface level but once you actually were reading each chapter sometimes it was hard to follow. The ending also only kind of wraps things up, like I'm still not sure why this vision was so important in the first place.That said, McKillip is an amazing author and I have adored the other book of hers that I read, so I suspect this one is a bit of an outlier.
—Caitlin (Ayashi)
As expected, McKillip's lush dreamy prose is here, but in a science fiction setting, rather than a fantasy setting. At first, that kind of threw me, but once I'd immersed myself in the sheer poetry of her language, it didn't bother me so much. One of the things that McKillip does, I think, is create tiny "mysteries" or puzzles for her characters to solve and then she fully involves you in the dialogue created as those puzzles are solved. It can sometimes be confusing, but there's something very real about it too. I didn't get a really strong sense of resolution in this novel (I think because there's another volume to follow -- I'll have to look it up -- it's called Moon Flash, perhaps, or something like that?). In the end, the mystery, the puzzle, was still too ambiguous for me.
—Audrey
