Lord of All Things
Written by Andreas Eschbach
Narrated by Nick Podehl
4/5
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About this audiobook
Winner of the 2012 Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis for best German science fiction novel, Lord of All Things is also a story about love against all odds.
They are just children when they meet for the first time: Charlotte, daughter of the French ambassador, and Hiroshi, a laundress’s son. One day, Hiroshi declares that he has an idea that will change the world. An unprecedented idea of how to sweep away all differences between rich and poor.
When Hiroshi runs into Charlotte several years later, he is trying to build a brighter future through robotics. Determined to win Charlotte’s love, he resurrects his childhood dream, convinced that he can eradicate world poverty by pushing the limits of technology beyond imagination. But as Hiroshi circles ever closer to realizing his vision, he discovers that his utopian dream may contain the seeds of a nightmare—one that could obliterate life as we know it.
Crisscrossing the globe from Tokyo to the hallowed halls of MIT to desolate Arctic islands and Buenos Aires and beyond—far beyond—Lord of All Things explores not only the dizzying potential of technology but also its formidable dangers.
Andreas Eschbach
Andreas Eschbach studied aerospace engineering at the University of Stuttgart and later founded his own IT consulting company before becoming a full-time writer. Several of his novels, including The Jesus Video and One Trillion Dollars, became nationwide bestsellers in Germany. He has been awarded both the Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis, Germany’s most prestigious science fiction award for best science fiction novel, and the Deutscher Science Fiction Preis several times. The Carpetmakers, his only other book translated into English, was listed as one of the best science fiction books of 2005 by www.sfsite.com and recommended by Locus Magazine. In 2002, his novel Jesus Video was adapted for German television. He lives with his wife in Brittany, France.
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Reviews for Lord of All Things
99 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5“Lord of All Things” tells the story of Hiroshi Kato, who starts life out in poverty as fatherless child in Japan and grows up to become a technology maverick. It is also a love story of sorts, a tale of Hiroshi’s love for his childhood friend Charlotte Malroux. Charlotte is a French diplomat’s daughter with an unusual secret gift who grows up to become a... beautiful and educated professional traveler.
Through a fateful series of events that keep bringing Hiroshi and Charlotte together over the years, Hiroshi stumbles upon a technology that can theoretically put an end to poverty and starvation, among others things, and change the world as we know it. In practice however, this miraculous and controversial technology can also have alarming consequences more far-reaching than anything anyone could have imagined.
This book is more like a series of short books covering the lives of Hiroshi and Charlotte from childhood until somewhere in their 30's, but all the same it couldn't have been broken down into 4 or 5 books. Not many people would have been interested after the 1st or 2nd books which slowly set things up and introduce characters that will spring up again much later. Most of the juicy stuff happens at the end. Despite all that happened in this story, I think that with editing anywhere from 50-150 pages could have been left out and it still would have been fine. The translation itself came through well.
I must say I had to trudge through a lot of Charlotte’s story (and Brenda’s... and James'... and Bill’s for that matter). Charlotte was dull despite her special gift, even when around the robot obsessed, seemingly almost anorexic genius that is Hiroshi.
“Lord of All Things” includes insight on a lot scientific and historical info, some of which I probably never would have heard of otherwise. I like the way it is all explained to be able to be easily understood by characters in the book and the readers. The phrasing used made the information much less sleep-inducing than it could have been. It may be a sci-fi book but the theories introduced sound so plausible I think they might irreversibly influence the way I look at things now. Of course there are parts of the book I just had to take with a grain or two of salt, but still. It’s clear that Eschbach’s powers of writing lie in his ability to make science and technologies interesting, but not so with romance or intrapersonal communication (how many times did Charlotte think “What’s wrong with me?” when she was thinking about men?).
With all of that said, I don’t think I’ll ever read a single other Eschbach translation unless I see that it’s significantly shorter than this one, because if not then I’ll automatically assume it’s another one of those really intriguing yet you-have-to-trudge-through-a-lot-of-this-story books. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is not really a review, but an epiphany.
Spoiler alert: I just figured out a layer of meaning in Hiroshi's suicide. I didn't understand it fully until a day after I finished the book.
You remember of course that when Charlotte grasped the Japanese knife at the Island of Saints, she was overwhelmed with the painful memories of its owner's suicide. And you probably remember that when Hiroshi comes to visit Charlotte in Buenos Aires, Charlotte says she refuses to have any machine-made furniture in her apartment, because "a machine doesn't care if it builds a table or kills someone."
When Hiroshi kills himself, he orders the nanites to make a knife using the iron in his blood. (This should remind us of the scene when Hiroshi tries to make a magnet stick to the iron in his blood.) This knife is later given to Charlotte. We should expect her to feel nothing, as she did when she felt other nanite objects, like the scarf, since the object is machine-made. But because it is made of part of Hiroshi, she feels his love for her. It is an incredibly symbolic gesture: Hiroshi has given her something machine-made that is nonetheless imbued with human emotion. He has brought the two worlds together, just as he did by inviting the nanites into his brain. - Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED HERE?
Andreas Eschbach’s ‘The Carpet Makers’ impressed the hell out of me. I’ve been going around for a few years now, recommending it to all and sundry. I was wildly excited that he had a new book coming out in English, and bought it the very first time I saw it up for sale. I even recommended it to others before reading it myself. I hereby rescind that recommendation.
I would never in a thousand years have guessed that this book was by the same author. There’s no similarity. It’s definitely not an issue of translation, either – it’s a matter of content.
I feel like the book aims at being ‘a thinking man’s thriller’ – but it fails both at introducing new and fascinating philosophical concepts and at being thrilling.
Hiroshi is the half-Japanese son of a laundress working at the French embassy in Tokyo. He’s a precocious robotics genius whose skills lead him to befriending the ambassador’s young daughter, Charlotte. His situation leads to an early awareness of class differences and wealth disparity, which instills in him the ambition to someday eliminate poverty from the world. And he has a plan as to how to achieve this goal! (Don’t hold your breath though – the author is coy about what this idea is for over half of the book, and when it’s finally revealed, it’s quite underwhelming and unoriginal.)
After a slow and didactic exposition of these younger years, deus ex machina in the form of a previously-absent billionaire father allows Hiroshi to move to the United States, experience culture shock, and attend MIT.
Then, in a third section, an unlikely concatenation of coincidences causes Charlotte to be present at the discovery of what seems to be super-powerful alien technology – technology that Just Happens to look just like what Hiroshi, now an eccentric recluse, has been working on.
The first two parts of the book are slow-moving personal drama, mixed with occasional didactic insertions of Liberal Thoughts. The third part comes off more as an attempt at a Michael-Crichton-style thriller. In striking contrast to the didactic insertions, the actual subtext of the book is very, very conservative and offensively sexist. Charlotte, a main character, seemingly exists only to be Hiroshi’s Muse (explicitly stated). Without him, she wanders around lost and accomplishing nothing, looking enviously at the women around her who have become personally fulfilled by bearing children, doing housework (yes, really), and caring for their men.
The book features a number of different geographical and cultural locations. None of them are portrayed convincingly. I find myself doubting whether the author has ever visited Japan or the United States, let alone the Arctic. The Japanese and Louisianan settings were just nonexistent and neutral. The Boston setting – especially to someone who’s actually been on both the Harvard and MIT campuses plenty – is just flat-out wrong. I feel like the author did his research by watching some 1980s frat-house comedy movie. He also has the definite opinion that ANY woman enrolled at MIT or Harvard is there to “achieve her MRS. Degree” and once she catches the right husband, she’ll be happy. No one at these schools seems to put much thought or time into their studies.
The worst part (or maybe just a bit that epitomizes and illustrates the whole attitude of the book): Ok, there’s an Artic research expedition going on. Two men, two women. One of the men is taking photos for the media. He says: “Ladies! … Could you do something that looks like you’re working? From over here it looks like Adrian [the other guy] is doing everything and you two are just standing watching.” The ‘girls’ giggle and respond “Well, that’s what’s happening, isn’t it?” Then the guy directs them what to do so it *looks* like they’re competent researchers, for the press. Throughout the book, it’s like this. Men are the ‘doers.’ Charlotte has a special talent, but it’s just something she’s born with, not something she works at or uses effectively. Over 650 pages, this gets really aggravating.
I’m adding one star for a cool (and devastating) theory as to why, in a galaxy filled with planets, we’ve never been contacted by alien life. But that’s one worthwhile paragraph in a book that overall, is not worth the time. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Eschbach's Lord of All Things is a weave of nearly every major genre you could search out--though a science fiction novel at heart (at least by the end), it includes elements of romance, mystery, drama, horror, suspense, adventure, and even some small element of the supernatural. Probably, the book will lose some readers exactly because of this variety, but for many readers, I think it is exactly this variety that makes the book so impossible to walk away from. Perhaps because I read so little science fiction, this mix was especially effective for me, and might be most appealing to readers who have truly eclectic tastes...but one way or another, I'd expect any reader to find some entertainment here. And, importantly, the book is also a careful and believable exploration of day-to-day struggles--crazy as some of the events are, and extraordinary as some of the characters are, Eschbach never forgets that normal struggles and fears are at the base of any individual, and he does an admirable job of allowing those concerns to make his work all the more powerful and believable without ever losing the drive that comes from dipping into the genres noted above.Following the lives of a man and woman whose lives boomerang against each other time after time, and taking its seed from a young boy who lives in poverty and dreams of fixing the world and, most importantly, eliminating poverty, the novel is magnificent in scope. Moving across the globe and landing in such settings as Boston, Tokyo, Scotland, the Arctic, and Buenos Aires, as quickly as the novel moves, it never becomes tedious or predictable--or rather, when you think it might be predictable, Eschbach takes an unprecedented turn that, in hindsight, fits perfectly, even as much as readers wouldn't have seen it coming.On the whole, this is one of those works which, long as it is, can barely be put down for sleep once a reader has really begun, and there's something here for nearly everyone. True, it has some faults. Some scenes seem more tangent than necessity (especially in the first portion of the book), developing characters and motivations that only become clear much later and giving time to perhaps one too many subplots. And, really, only the two primary characters in the book are fully fleshed out and developed as much as one might hope for all of the characters. But, while some readers may end up seeing Eschbach as attempting too much...I have to say that I'll read anything else of his which I can find in translation. Whether you read this and become fascinated by the scientific drive, the politics of achievement, or the simple drama of living, there'll be something here to keep you involved.Absolutely recommended.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hiroshi und Charlotte freunden sich als Kinder in Japan an, verlieren sich dann aber aus den Augen. Erst als Studenten treffen sie sich zufällig wieder. Hiroshi ist ein ungemein begabter Techniker, Ingenieur, Erfinder und Computerfachmann, Charlotte hingegen interessiert sich für die menschliche Frühgeschichte und kann bei der Berührung von Gegenständen spüren, was ihr Besitzer empfand und dachte. Sie stehen sich nahe, doch eine Liebesgeschichte zwischen ihnen kommt aus verschiedenen Gründen nicht so richtig in Schwung. Doch als Charlotte auf einer Expedition mit einer ungewöhnlichen Maschine konfrontiert wird, muss sie sofort an Hoiroshis Arbeiten denken und schaltet ihn ein. Nun könnte Hiroshis Traum alle Menschen reich zu machen tatsächlich wahr werden.Wie schon beim Jesus-Video (das ich sehr mochte) muss man sich auf die Geschichte des Buches einlassen. Vieles klingt zu abgefahren, manches ist auch etwas zu viel Zufall und Vorbestimmtheit. Das müsste nicht sein. Aber die technische Handlung fand ich interessant und beeindruckend. Je näher sich das Buch dem Ende zuneigte, desto besser gefiel es mir. Alles gab durchaus Sinn, auch Hoiroshis Traum, alle reich zu machen und der Titel "Herr aller Dinge". Die Geschichte, die Hiroshi Charlotte am Ende erzählt, lässt einen durchaus länger grübeln.Die Personen mochte ich auch, da sie gut gezeichnet sind. Sie sind unerwartet dargestellt, da sich vieles nicht so entwickelt, wie vorhersehbar wäre. Gelesen ist das Hörbuch sehr gut.