![]() Moreau, and the motion picture Fitzcarraldo.įor a science fiction fan and speculative fiction writer like myself, the tropes in State of Wonder are easy to pick out. Singh’s journey becomes a mashup of Heart of Darkness, The Island of Dr. He was sent to Brazil by their pharmaceutical firm to urge another scientist, Annick Swenson, to speed up work on a treatment for infertility. The story concerns Marina Singh, a research scientist who learns of the death of a colleague in the Amazon rainforest. The irony of the sci-fi-ness in State of Wonder is Patchett’s own attitude toward technology. ![]() State of Wonder has so many science fiction elements that putting it anywhere else denies it a significant readership. ![]() After reading State of Wonder by Ann Patchett, winner of the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction in the same year for her novel Bel Canto, it was clear that the 2011 novel belonged on the shelf next to Fahrenheit 451 and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Genre gets mischievous when a literary novel is miscategorized. Most writers, though, acknowledge the need for publishers and bookstore owners to make book-finding and thus book-selling intuitive for the reader through categorization. ![]() ![]() They’d prefer to write above the petty differences among romance, mystery, fantasy, and dozens of other pigeonholes and sub-pigeonholes. Writers love to complain about the necessity of genre. Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder is really science fiction in disguise. ![]()
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