There was very little science fiction in this book. Sure, science fiction-y things were mentioned but while reading it I just felt like the author had just spewed verbal vomit all over the pages. I thought the first story was science fiction but the other two parts...well, I'm not sure what they were supposed to be...it was more like "here, I have all these ideas...all these thoughts drifting in my mind and I'll try to arrange them in some kind of order..." Good thing this was free (library book...

All that Iunderstand of this book is that it is a story of dystopian fiction set just after the Civil War, secession "happily occurred" and that gave birth to two matriarchy.The remainder is so full of metastructures, stories that come into other stories, made on purpose misspellings that make the reading difficult, to the point to be completely incomprehensible.Let me be clear, I am not opposed to meta-narrative, indeed, often providing pieces of literature really intriguing, but honestly here

I am so confused, I have no idea if I liked this or not. I think I did? But I also think I missed a lot of things. Probably going to have to mark this as one to re-read soon...On another note, I think there's a very good chance that the author of this book may be a distant cousin of my father's, as his side of the Park family was also involved in the Civil War and lived in Virginia.

"It occurs to me that every memoirist and every historian should begin by reminding their readers that the mere act of writing something down, of organizing something in a line of words, involves a clear betrayal of the truth." -- All Those Vanished Engines by Paul Park (Pg. 173)Of the novels I've reviewed in the last year, this is by far one of the most difficult. All Those Vanished Engines (2014) by Paul Park is not your typical SF novel. It is layered, divergent, and postmodern. If I were to

Perfect for fans of William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, or J. G. Ballard--by which I mean that the narrative involves a semi-fictional version of the author, multiple stories within stories (all of which affect the tenuous reality of the plot), unreliable narrators, and a hyper-sexualized male gaze regarding any female character. I am not a fan of those authors, and I did not enjoy this book, but clearly I am not its target audience.I received a free ARC of this book as part of a giveaway offe...

An astonishing, brilliant, challenging meditation on memory, reality and imagination, the three engines that drive us or through which we drive, cobbling together our visions of ourselves and our families and the world. In the past a girl writes a story about a boy in the future, or is the boy in the future telling a story about a girl in the past? Their strange adventures intertwine like a moebius strip, one of the best technical achievements of such I've seen outside comics. An interview with

“It’s all meta-fiction, all the time.”“I always warned students against complexity for its own sake, and to consider the virtues of the simple story, simply told.”These two quotes sum up what I found both fascinating and frustrating about this short novel of three inter-linked meta-narratives by Paul Park. On the one hand, Park rather dazzlingly conveys not only the potential of the written word, but the plasticity of the novel format itself.We are so habituated to traditional narrative formats

reviews.metaphorosis.com 2 starsAlternate past and alternate future mingle with a proto-memoir by Paul Park.I first encountered Paul Park via The Starbridge Chronicles, a brilliant SF trilogy that was somewhat opaque, even difficult. I followed that to Celestis (disappointing), and The Gospel of Corax (very good, if surprising in nature). When his subsequent series A Princess of Roumania came out, I bought it right away - excited to at last see another Park novel, and about Romania, which I know...

In my life, I have hated two books enough to want to destroy them. Paul Park's "All Those Vanished Engines" is definitely the one I wish to destroy most. I have never hated a book so badly in my life. I made it through 2 of the 3 sections and part of the 3rd. Ever more appalling, each section is so overlayered and filled with the names of characters who either MIGHT be real or aren't even in the book (most of whom are neither relatable nor likeable) that I ceased to give a damn who any of them w...

I am left with one question after reading Paul Park's tripartite novella, All Those Vanished Engines. That question is "What the fuck?" All my other questions about this strange book can be summed up in that one useful phrase...Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration.

I never know where books that are ambiguously experimental sit on the spectrum. All Those Vanished Engines is one of those strange books that pulls from real life and from alt-history/science fiction to provide a strange tale overall that doesn't always work for a lot of reasons.On one story we have a post-Civil War situation with the North and South split. The second a more modern post-World War II tale with a lot of references to Second Life, the third act a futuristic alien tale, all tied tog...

2.5 of 5 stars at The BiblioSanctum http://bibliosanctum.com/2014/12/05/b...All Those Vanished Engines was a real doozy to read and rate, as you would expect of meta-fiction. I admit I’m quite inexperienced when it comes books that use it as a literary device, and my feelings for this book remain rather mixed. On the one hand, the ideas and themes in here intrigued me and I found the execution of those themes to be quite clever. That interest alone fueled me throughout the novel, but on the flip...

I read a review that indicated this book was pompous and pretentiously unreadable. 50 pages in and I had to concede that that was an accurate review. I could give many examples of why I thought it sucked but I won't waste any time: Either the author, publisher, and editor were all wasted or I was. I'm sober, straight, and sane so I'll let you make the call while I add Paul Park's Civil War reconstruction deconstruction to the list of books I'd use as digital toilet paper.

Experimental meta-fiction gets old fast

I’m just not smart enough for what was happening here. I didn’t understand or follow it.

Great hard sci-fi. Wonderfully imagined meta-meta-fiction. I'll be looking for more by Paul Park.

This is one of those cases of a whole being less than the sum of its parts.There is some good writing here. I've had Park's 'Princess of Roumania' on by TBR for a while now, and I'm not revising my plans to read it.However, this is very explicitly not in the vein of Park's other novels. It's more of a piece of writing *about* his novels (and a number of other things). It's metafiction that explores the differences between (and the intersection of) reality, memory, and imagination.It's an ambitio...

1.5/5Mon avis en FrançaisMy English reviewI was hesitant to start this novel and it is true that the reviews were very mixed and it made me anxious. But I think you always have to try a novel by yourself to see how the story really is. The synopsis is rather vague so it’s pretty difficult to really know what will happen here.I did not know Paul Park or his other series but it’s true that even if the idea is really intriguing and interesting for its originality, I struggled to get into the story....

I heard an interview with John Crowley recently (through which I discovered this book) where he discussed what was essentially a catch 22 in science fiction and fantasy writing which was that expectations tended to be quite rigid in the forms so that someone like himself or Paul Park, who are writing in a way that could expand the genres, tend to be dismissed. It can't grow because it hasn't grown.Charles Stross wrote something similar recently about how the idea of real world building has stagn...

As a work of postmodern fiction, "All Those Vanished Engines" has a plot twisted in on itself and layered on top of itself, full of self-referential winks and dream-like asides. Is it science fiction? If pressed, I would call it classic magical realism. The reader is never quite sure how much of the weird stuff has actually happened and how much has been created, dreamed, or hallucinated by the narrator(s). The story is told in three parts. Names, places, and events weave in and out of these par...