Stranger on Earth

The theme of the will to power is perhaps most succinctly expressed in “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery,” a crime thriller situated in 1970’s California involving Luisa Rey, a strong-headed journalist, and her attempt to expose a dodgy nuclear power plant. Seaboard Corporation is in itself a miniature version of the dominance hierarchy witnessed in humankind, where the strong and the crafty dispatch the weak to secure their future. The henchmen of Seaboard Corporation double-cross one another to keep the secret of the power plant safe. One of them, Alberto Grimaldi, ponders on the meaning of power: “Power.” What do we mean? “The ability to determine another man’s luck” … the will to power. This is the enigma at the core of the various destinies of men. What drives some to accrue power where the majority of their compatriots lose, mishandle, or eschew power? Is it addiction? Wealth? Survival? Natural selection? I propose these are all pretexts and results, not the root ca...

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) sets out to achieve two noble goals: to engage the reader in a discourse about human nature and historical continuity, and to entice him to reflect on his relation to the past, the present, and the future. This is no small feat for the Ghostwritten author, and for the reader it is both an incredible intellectual challenge and an irresistible invitation to view life from a perspective not altogether conventional. The new reader is instantly struck by the technically intricate structure of the work: six interlocking storylines, with five of them divided down the middle, separated halfway through the book by a “mirror” – the sixth story inventively entitled “Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After.” The novel begins with the Mutiny on the Bounty -inspired “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” proceeds at a breakneck pace to “Letters from Zedelghem” to “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery” to “The Ghastly Ordeal ...