Reviews for XVI Brazilian Symposium on Computer Graphics and Image Processing

The average rating for XVI Brazilian Symposium on Computer Graphics and Image Processing based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-09-24 00:00:00 Nathan Kroll This unruly anthology of self-consciously transgressive fiction came out in 1989 and... it shows. In some good ways'there's so much enthusiasm! Collage art and poetry and short stories and autobiographical essays... such a wide range of content! Explicit sex and violence and scatological musings, sometimes all in the same paragraph! And the editors at Autonomedia managed to pull in a number of big names for their project, such as J.G. Ballard; Philip Jose Farmer; and Robert Anton Wilson, as well as names that would become much bigger later, like William Gibson; Richard Kadrey and Bruce Sterling). However, Semiotext(e) SF also shows its age in some not-so-good ways. The proofreading was obviously done by hand, for example, and in one case was actively painful. And... well, many of the boundaries that its authors were determined to cross have been erased, or at least have faded, in the decades since its publication. The determination'indeed, the editorial ukase'to break decorum often gets in the way of the stories being told. In fact, I rather bogged down while rereading this anthology... it took me quite awhile to finish it. Even so, there are some bits of brilliance sparkling amid the detritus, such as Bruce Sterling's much-anthologized "We See Things Differently" (which for me echoes the work of Norman Spinrad, another self-consciously transgressive author, though one not represented herein). And this bit I liked, from Richard Kadrey's "Genocide":As each wave of technology is released, it must be accompanied by a demand for new skills, new language. Consumers must constantly update their ways of thinking, always questioning their understanding of the world. Going back to old ways, old technology is forbidden. There is no past, no present, only an endless future of inadequacy. It makes no difference if the technologies presented are beneficient or even functional. It is advisable, however, that they go fast, make a lot of noise and come in a variety of decorator colors. The short piece "I Was A Teenage Genetic Engineer" by Denise Angela Shawl (aka Celeste Oatmeal at the time, and more recently writing as Nisi Shawl) was also interesting'one of the few pieces identifiably by a female author (Rachael Pollack contributes another, "Burning Sky"). But for the most part Semiotext(e) SF is full of stories by writers who were apparently, at least at the time, still just excited to be typing four-letter words... and if you're still excited by reading those words (IN SPAAACE), then maybe you'll get more out of this volume than I did, the second time around.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-07-03 00:00:00 Karen Andes What a disappointment this book turned out to be, particularly considering the awesome reputations and writings of its three editors, Rudy Rucker, Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), and Robert Anton Wilson. While a few of the stories were really thought-provoking or well written (four- or five-star material), they were few and far between, buried beneath an avalanche of dross. Far too many of the authors in this book mistook stories about fucking for cutting edge, "transgressive" science fiction, and sadly, the editors apparently went along with this misidentification. An overwhelming number of 1-2 page hypershort stories, craptastic "poems," and shitty black-and-white, 3rd- or 4th-generation, photocopy-quality collages serve to hide the good stuff and render it less than memorable. Only two stories really stand out, "We See Things Differently," by Bruce Sterling, and "Rapture in Space," by Rudy Rucker, and it wouldn't surprise me if these two stories were widely anthologized elsewhere. It also chapped my ass to see so many friggin' typos, particularly in a book published by Columbia University.