Reviews for Seven Story Mountain: The Union Campaign at Vicksburg

The average rating for Seven Story Mountain: The Union Campaign at Vicksburg based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-06-14 00:00:00 Josef Prime Welcoming the body horror genre, paired with a classical mad scientists´ approach towards progressive research methods and creating special forms of new life, Wells shows how secret living biological weapons programs were done in the good, old, elitist days. Luckily, science has evolved and today´s resident evil style chimeras are much more sophisticated and produced in hidden secret professional public private partnership military industrial complex hives. Wells puts a lot in this short one, human nature, ethics of science, evolution, culture, tradition, genetics, epigenetic, torture medicine, ironic innuendos towards the ideological waves of his time I may be just imagining or not understanding, some really good shock and wtf moments, and in general a realistic and early view on what genetic engineering will have still hidden in the cards held by tentacles, fingers, and whatever one doesn´t want to think of in detail. As I always tend to say, who controls biotechnology and nanotechnology in the future will rule earth, it´s comparable to guns, agriculture, writing, engines, etc. States without the key technologies will fade away and be forgotten in future history just as stone age tribes, sitting on dead, devasted earth while the new superpowers will first mine the solar system and later the rest of the galaxy. Hopefully, they will send subsidies and development aid to their primitive predecessors on the once blue planet. One could also see this as an allegory of how modern people of these days tended to look at animals and indigenous people, how all that racism and colonial megalomania provided the ground for fascism and white supremacy, and what weird dudes the people in the 19th and beginning 20th century must have been. Today they would be commuting between the psychiatric hospitals, prisons, and extremist groups´ and parties´ meetings. A few years ago I would have cited some of my favorite sci-fi authors or created some fictional news quotes, but thanks to CRISPR, biotechnology, and general technological singularity with many departments needed to play flying spaghetti monster, the science articles and research is coming closer and closer to a mixture of these old ideas and my beloved Resident evil series. It´s going to come, it will be done, and I will want to be or have a modified…hm. Eagle, bear, bonobo… Tricky, I ought choose wisely, because it might take a few months or even years to switch species, gender, age, personality, etc. again. Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:

Review # 2 was written on 2012-07-11 00:00:00 Daniel George This book stems from an idea that is at the same time thought-provoking, insane and very tangible. That is probably the reason why it is so scary. It is a classic of the victorian era, but for some reason probably not as famous as many other fictions of the “gothic” movement and indeed not as well known as a few other novels by H.G. Wells (such as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man or The War of the Worlds). But it definitely deserves to be read again today. The plot is rather simple: a castaway by the name of Prendick ends up on an uncharted island in the Pacific Ocean and meets the infamous Dr. Moreau and his assistant. Dr. Moreau is known for having practiced vivisection experiments some years before in London and, as a result, was excluded from the scientific community. Prendick later discovers that Moreau has been carrying on with his experiments and has created some monstrous beasts, while trying to turn animals into some wretched semblance of human beings. This discovery is planted and built up with some amount of suspense right from the first pages until it is fully exposed around the middle of the novel, in the chapter entitled “Doctor Moreau Explains”. The second part of the book is a nail-biting account of the catastrophic series of events that follow the dreadful discovery. Obviously, “The Island of Dr. Moreau” is in the same vein as Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem or Shelley’s Frankenstein (it can also evoke earlier figures like Shakespeare’s Prospero and Caliban in The Tempest, or even Shylock’s most famous lines in The Merchant of Venice). It is about the hubris of men attempting to imitate God and create a human being with the help of science. The result is invariably dreadful and deadly. Wells original treatment of this theme rests upon the idea of vivisectional experiments carried on animals in an isolate place: mammals are surgically and chemically modified to look and behave as much as humans as they possibly can. But the mental distress caused by this novel lies of the fact that these attempts are always cruel, disastrous and abortive. The Isserley of Under the Skin is a distant relative of Moreau's creatures. In some way, this book presages WWII’s Nazi’s “scientific” testings or even today's plausible out-of-line genetic engineering initiatives. Wells closes the book with these words: “the manufacture of monsters - an perhaps even quasi-human monsters - is within the possibilities of vivisection.” But, more deeply, perhaps, the horror lies in the fact that this fiction shows how feeble and unreal our human values are (including religious ones), and how easily men can fall back below animality.