Book Review: HellSans by Ever Dundas

HellSans
by Ever Dundas (Dundas)

HellSans has a lot going on, but the first thing you’ll notice is that there are two options for where to start reading. The book as a whole is divided into three parts labeled:

 

• Part One or Two: Icho
• Part One or Two: Jane
• Part Three: HellSans

I opted to start with the Jane narrative which follows the protagonist, Jane, the billionaire head of a personal assistant robotics company who is having a very bad day. As you might guess, the other option is to follow the other protagonist, Icho, who is secretly working on a cure for HellSans Allergy and is also having a very bad day. Not for sensitive readers.

 

The titular “HellSans” is a typeface which produces euphoric “bliss” effects in most people who look at it. It is, of course, used heavily by government and news agencies. Some people are immune to this effect. Still others have a severe allergic reaction to seeing or even visualizing in the typeface. This has led to social ostracization to the point where allergic people are not legally considered human. The personal assistance robots are free to kill them. So, as you might imagine, there’s a lot of political analogy and satire happening in this book.

 

This all might have made for a fine sci-fi novel, but once you’ve gotten through both of the first parts and into the final section, this book gets bold. There’s metatexual play and the stakes change dramatically. I was left with as much appreciation for what HellSans *does* as I did for how it told the story.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks, or Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin.)

 

( publisher’s official HellSans web site ) | ( official Ever Dundas page on the Scottish Book Trust web site )

 

Recommended by Garren H.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Book Review: Typeset in the Future: Typography and Design in Science Fiction Movies by Dave Addey

Typeset in the Future: Typography and Design in Science Fiction Movies

by Dave Addey (not in library collection — I suggest requesting it via the library’s InterLibrary Loan service)

 

Author Dave Addey started Typeset in the Future as a website (https://typesetinthefuture.com/), and has migrated much of that site’s content to this impressive book — all about the use of specific fonts/typesets to innately establish a futuristic science fiction setting in motion pictures. Addey targets seven specific science fiction films to use as prime examples: 2001: A Space Odyssey; Blade Runner; Star Trek: The Motion Picture; Alien; Total Recall; Wall-E; and Moon. This site and this book aim to answer the question — When you see an image from a movie, featuring text or signage or identifying markers in some way, what fonts make you immediately recognize that the scene is set in the future?

 

Each film gets its own in-depth exploration in this book, examining the iconic fonts used in on-screen graphics, signage, paperwork, vehicle name graphics, and more. But that’s not all — Addey has extensive sidebar articles about the history of various fonts, the people who created them or for whom they were named, and much more. What could have been an extremely dry and technical topic is brought to life in vivid detail, Addey’s passionate enthusiasm for his subject matter is abundant, and his sarcastic and snarky sense of humor shines through in his lengthy commentaries. This book is jam-packed with graphics — zoomed-in close-ups of moments from each film, in which a particular font can be identified — reproductions of entire font families to illustrate a point — photos of props from the films, with distinctive text/markings on them in recognizable fonts, etc. Each chapter ends with him interviewing someone associated with the typography and/or production or set design of the film that was just dissected. Personally, I found these interviews to be among the most interesting information provided in this book.

 

Sadly, the libraries have not ordered Typeset in the Future: Typography and Design in Science Fiction Movies for our local collection — if you’re interested enough to track this one down, I encourage you to pursue it as a request through our InterLibrary Loan service, where for a small service fee, we can get borrow it on your behalf from another library elsewhere in the country. I loved this book, and highly recommend it. I only subtract a single point in my review score because Addey occasionally goes off on tangents that seem only vaguely related to the main focus of the book. But sometimes, even those are fun!

[If you enjoy looking at the history and specific use of fonts, you may also wish to try Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield, Culture & Typography: How Culture Affects Typography by Nikki Villagomez or The Evolution of Type: A Graphic Guide to 100 Landmark Typefaces: Examining Letters From Metal Type to Open Type by Tony Seddon. Books about the making of these films are also out there to track down, which touch on some of the same topics.]

[ official Typeset in the Future book page on the official Typeset in the Future web site ]

 

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Services

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!