A Good Grim Ride

Books recently read. Book the Second –

Jack Faust by Michael Swanwick. Lesson to be learned? The truth is neither freeing nor beautiful? Human beings are greedy awful creatures and always have been? There’s more profit to be had in war than in knowledge?

This is the third Swanwick novel I’ve read (Vacuum Flowers and The Iron Dragon’s Daughter were the others) and each book is enjoyable to me more for the ride of the story than its conclusion. In this one, Johan Faustus is offered the secrets of the universe by Mephistopholes so long as Faustus listens to what the demon says. And so Faustus ends up bringing 20th Century technology to the plague and superstition ridden 16th Century. Entertaining reading for those days when you can only see the bad side of humanity.