Gray Matters: A Novel
3.5/5
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About this ebook
At twelve years old, Skeets Kalbfleischer is returning from a ski vacation when a lightning strike knocks his plane out of the sky, killing everyone else on board. Although his body is destroyed, a radical procedure preserves Skeets’s brain, which spends twenty-five years in a fish tank before mankind realizes the implications of his second life. A key to immortality has been found. Four centuries later, it has become commonplace for the minds of the dead to be preserved. While warehoused in a massive storage facility tended by robots, the brains pass time watching old film clips, learning about bees, and meditating their way to a higher state of being. But for the facility’s overseers, Skeets presents a problem. A twelve-year-old for all eternity, their most famous resident still wants to be a cowboy. To remedy this embarrassment, his handlers concoct a solution that will push humanity even farther past nature’s wildest dreams. This ebook features an illustrated biography of William Hjortsberg including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.
William Hjortsberg
William Hjortsberg (1941–2017) was an acclaimed author of novels and screenplays. Born in New York City, Hjortsberg’s first success came with Alp (1969), an offbeat story of an Alpine skiing village, which Hjortsberg’s friend Thomas McGuane called, “quite possibly the finest comic novel written in America.” In the 1970s, Hjortsberg wrote two science fiction novels, Gray Matters (1971) and Symbiography (1973), as well as Toro! Toro! Toro! (1974), a comic jab at the macho world of bullfighting. His best-known work is Falling Angel (1978), a hard-boiled occult mystery. In 1987 the book was adapted into a film titled Angel Heart, which starred Robert De Niro and Mickey Rourke. Hjortsberg’s work also includes Jubilee Hitchhiker (2012), a biography of Richard Brautigan, American writer and voice of 1960s counterculture.
Read more from William Hjortsberg
Nevermore: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Mañana: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Symbiography: A Novella Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for Gray Matters
26 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is the fourth book by Hjortsberg that I have read, and I realize they are all quite different. Falling Angel is mystery/horror noir; Manana is also a mystery and quite noirish as well, but Falling Angel deserves a genre of its own, so Manana is still quite different. Nevermore is--well, I read that long before I started reviewing everything I read on LibraryThing, so all I can remember is that it wasn't like Falling Angel and I didn't like it that much. Gray Matters, his second novel, from 1971, is a science fiction. After a slightly slow start, it draws you in and doesn't let go for its 159 pages. God, how I love short books! It takes place in the near future, when everyone's brains have been removed and placed in a depository where they are tended by machines. The story focuses on a few of the brains--a movie star, an astronaut, a boy killed in a plane crash, and a sculptor, who find various ways to escape the confines of their daily lives--which, guided by the machines and other brains acting as auditors, are supposed to be striving for obedience and perfection so they can move up the hierarchy and eventually be reborn. But that makes it sound like a rather philosophical treatise rather than a book filled with action and sex, which tend to dominate. While it isn't completely satisfying, it is all very entertaining and has some great moments. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys far out science fiction (or brain in a vat stories!)
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is a chilling futuristic tale of disembodied brains existing in a lab. Once read, you'll never forget the stories of Skeets Kalbfleischer and Obu Itubi.