The loooooong-delayed bookblog
Dec. 20th, 2006 07:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaEr, spoileriffic for everything, obviously.
City of Diamond
I made many ominous noises re: my vigorous objections to this book, but never managed to post. XD For that matter I think it's unfair because of how technical said objections are, whereas most readers would see plain serviceable prose, and also because these are the kind of mistakes I used to make and thus I'm over-sensitive. Basically I think the author is obsessed with showing-not-telling, but she goes about it in all the wrong ways and it drives me nuts. I wanted her to go ahead and infodump, succinctly, in third-person omniscient, and thereafter never bring up those points again under the assumption that I the reader am now aware of them. Instead she:
1) makes one of the characters write family letters (quoted in their entirety) so settings can be described in epistolary format and not in narration (clunkily - she is pants at epistolary).
2) introduces tertiary characters, complete with emotions and background information, for a single scene, never to be seen again, in order that they might think thoughts about one of the main characters that repeat what we have been told about him already (see 5).
3) artificially hijacks dialogue in order to highlight to the reader that what the other character just thought is misguided, but he doesn't know it and the reader does! (The reader already guessed the point in question.)
4) withholds information, because saints only know it would be unseemly to explain the worldbuilding all at once. /sarcasm However, since the plot kicks off at a leisurely pace, this adds up to long stretches where nothing is actually happening, neither explanation nor meaningful action.
5) repeats the same piece of information over and over, because obviously it's more convincing if said five times by five separate people, in earnest tones. (The author of Yukikaze does this too. It's fiction, not calling eyewitnesses at trial.)
Despite all the author's efforts at immediacy (because show-not-tell is about immediacy, really) one derives a clearer sense of what several of the main characters are supposed to be in conception than what they are, on the evidence of their actions (Will, Tal). Despite that the characters are eminently likeable. I wanted to re-write everything and make it 30% shorter but I would keep all the characters. XD I want to say she's good at voice but there's something about her overall use of language that flattens everything out to the same perspective plane, so uh. ^^;
I liked the book better as it progressed, but I pretty much expected to - at a certain point, good or bad exposition has to stop and events commence. And the worldbuilding itself is perfectly coherent and interesting, it's just the delivery that got to me.
Nova
As I read I realised this was one of the SF classics Terry Pratchett parodied in Dark Side of the Sun. XD The most important target, actually, given that he was doing Delany's prose style as well as his tropes (not that Pratchettian 'parody' is ever other than gentle and loving). Delany also repeats himself quite a lot but "poetically"in order to create a dappled, fragmentary surface of fine writing. I should link that essay ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rondaview scanned in. XD Anyhow I liked it, probably for the same reasons it's considered a cyberpunk precursor - the accumulated sensorial texture! The specificity! The drugs! Economics and sociology drive the plot and thematic development respectively, which effort I appreciate, but the actual explanations make me weep. Neural interfaces between man and conveyor belt reduce labour alienation? Galactic travel causes cultural development to stagnate? People still drink booze but they don't eat? Pull the other one, Chuck, it's got bells on.
I agree with the tarot cards, though, since that's the way I use them myself. XD
The funny thing is it's supposed to be a quest story, even the characters say so, but it's not. It's a Greek tragedy, with a single unified action, and motivation presented in lengthy flashbacks that may as well be soliloquies. The crew acts as chorus, individually striking though they might appear. There's a totally different strand of dialectic involving Katin and the Mouse as representatives of Apollonian vs. Dionysian in Arrrt which is meta-commentary on the plot, or nearly so.
As an addendum, let me admit something I probably shouldn't: Delany wrote this book when he was 25, and it was nominated for a Hugo. I'm 25, and I can very easily imagine myself writing this, what with the dodgy "science" and the verbose descriptions of fake architecture. Is that hubris? XD;;;
The Privilege of the Sword
Weeks of pondering lead to the following rare conclusion: this book could have stood to be longer. XD; Not so much that I loved it so much I didn't want it to end, but the extent of Katherine's (and Artemisia's) travails as they are described feel, if not like a prelude, then no more than two-thirds of the way through the development arc they would have had in Swordspoint-verse's nebulous 19th-century lit predecessors. That's not to mention the plot threads that are sketched in and left dangling (Lucius Perry! An entire essay on objectification correlated with psychological opacity. Also, Rose. WAIT WHAT MORE INFORMATION PLS). Sometimes you know it's time for the last word even if the resolution is messy but this wasn't one of those instances. To give the book the scope I'm envisaging would have turned it into a social panorama, for reals, as opposed to Swordspoint which is as tightly structured as a Wilde play - it's already got the social critique, in spades - but Kushner didn't want to do it, or maybe Alec didn't want to do it. He's sick of playing, he's taking all his marbles and going home to Richard, and there the story screeches to a stop. XD;;; It figures.
(Both sororial unit and I thought the denouement was hilarious, although I at least felt like a bad person for laughing. Problem is the final plot twists in Swordspoint were so awesome I weep a little whenever I reread it, thinking How long did it take her to come up with that, so I expected something similar this time around and was like "......Or there's always that option, yes." Also please don't kill me it sort of reminded me of the ending of Queer as Folk UK. Given which I think Kushner should have gone for snappy and dispensed with that coda nonsense.)
Randomness: I'm going to make a poll re: The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death. There is a character named Sabina! XD I have yet to encounter a fictional Sabina who wasn't an entirely disreputable adventuress. Michael Godwin is married and has a grown daughter which made me feel old, illogically as it's not as if I read Swordspoint the year it came out.
The Phoenix Guards
*signs up for Granado Espada closed beta* *plays musketeer* *rules world*
...Uh, speaking as someone who has The Three Musketeers more or less committed to memory, I LOL'd my way through it. I'm sure the author LOL'd his way through it too. I picture Brust trying to type and hitting all the wrong keys because he's laughing too hard. Proof that the authorial process is not always about disembowelling yourself with a spork; it cheers me up to think upon it. XD
This was one book I sincerely didn't want to end, although now I think I should read the Vlad Taltos series before its sequels as one is seemingly supposed to contextualize it in the manner of a historical romance (and the other series might explain the House beasties, though I gather a dzur is a sort of raptor and a tiassa is something like a lynx. I could google but there's no fun in that XD). Also pastiche aside Brust has very intelligent worldbuilding, and there's a lot Paarfi (who is win) takes for granted that's not as readily dismissible from another perspective, I think.
In other news, SSBB will be up later this evening. :)
City of Diamond
I made many ominous noises re: my vigorous objections to this book, but never managed to post. XD For that matter I think it's unfair because of how technical said objections are, whereas most readers would see plain serviceable prose, and also because these are the kind of mistakes I used to make and thus I'm over-sensitive. Basically I think the author is obsessed with showing-not-telling, but she goes about it in all the wrong ways and it drives me nuts. I wanted her to go ahead and infodump, succinctly, in third-person omniscient, and thereafter never bring up those points again under the assumption that I the reader am now aware of them. Instead she:
1) makes one of the characters write family letters (quoted in their entirety) so settings can be described in epistolary format and not in narration (clunkily - she is pants at epistolary).
2) introduces tertiary characters, complete with emotions and background information, for a single scene, never to be seen again, in order that they might think thoughts about one of the main characters that repeat what we have been told about him already (see 5).
3) artificially hijacks dialogue in order to highlight to the reader that what the other character just thought is misguided, but he doesn't know it and the reader does! (The reader already guessed the point in question.)
4) withholds information, because saints only know it would be unseemly to explain the worldbuilding all at once. /sarcasm However, since the plot kicks off at a leisurely pace, this adds up to long stretches where nothing is actually happening, neither explanation nor meaningful action.
5) repeats the same piece of information over and over, because obviously it's more convincing if said five times by five separate people, in earnest tones. (The author of Yukikaze does this too. It's fiction, not calling eyewitnesses at trial.)
Despite all the author's efforts at immediacy (because show-not-tell is about immediacy, really) one derives a clearer sense of what several of the main characters are supposed to be in conception than what they are, on the evidence of their actions (Will, Tal). Despite that the characters are eminently likeable. I wanted to re-write everything and make it 30% shorter but I would keep all the characters. XD I want to say she's good at voice but there's something about her overall use of language that flattens everything out to the same perspective plane, so uh. ^^;
I liked the book better as it progressed, but I pretty much expected to - at a certain point, good or bad exposition has to stop and events commence. And the worldbuilding itself is perfectly coherent and interesting, it's just the delivery that got to me.
Nova
As I read I realised this was one of the SF classics Terry Pratchett parodied in Dark Side of the Sun. XD The most important target, actually, given that he was doing Delany's prose style as well as his tropes (not that Pratchettian 'parody' is ever other than gentle and loving). Delany also repeats himself quite a lot but "poetically"
rondaview scanned in. XD Anyhow I liked it, probably for the same reasons it's considered a cyberpunk precursor - the accumulated sensorial texture! The specificity! The drugs! Economics and sociology drive the plot and thematic development respectively, which effort I appreciate, but the actual explanations make me weep. Neural interfaces between man and conveyor belt reduce labour alienation? Galactic travel causes cultural development to stagnate? People still drink booze but they don't eat? Pull the other one, Chuck, it's got bells on. I agree with the tarot cards, though, since that's the way I use them myself. XD
The funny thing is it's supposed to be a quest story, even the characters say so, but it's not. It's a Greek tragedy, with a single unified action, and motivation presented in lengthy flashbacks that may as well be soliloquies. The crew acts as chorus, individually striking though they might appear. There's a totally different strand of dialectic involving Katin and the Mouse as representatives of Apollonian vs. Dionysian in Arrrt which is meta-commentary on the plot, or nearly so.
As an addendum, let me admit something I probably shouldn't: Delany wrote this book when he was 25, and it was nominated for a Hugo. I'm 25, and I can very easily imagine myself writing this, what with the dodgy "science" and the verbose descriptions of fake architecture. Is that hubris? XD;;;
The Privilege of the Sword
Weeks of pondering lead to the following rare conclusion: this book could have stood to be longer. XD; Not so much that I loved it so much I didn't want it to end, but the extent of Katherine's (and Artemisia's) travails as they are described feel, if not like a prelude, then no more than two-thirds of the way through the development arc they would have had in Swordspoint-verse's nebulous 19th-century lit predecessors. That's not to mention the plot threads that are sketched in and left dangling (Lucius Perry! An entire essay on objectification correlated with psychological opacity. Also, Rose. WAIT WHAT MORE INFORMATION PLS). Sometimes you know it's time for the last word even if the resolution is messy but this wasn't one of those instances. To give the book the scope I'm envisaging would have turned it into a social panorama, for reals, as opposed to Swordspoint which is as tightly structured as a Wilde play - it's already got the social critique, in spades - but Kushner didn't want to do it, or maybe Alec didn't want to do it. He's sick of playing, he's taking all his marbles and going home to Richard, and there the story screeches to a stop. XD;;; It figures.
(Both sororial unit and I thought the denouement was hilarious, although I at least felt like a bad person for laughing. Problem is the final plot twists in Swordspoint were so awesome I weep a little whenever I reread it, thinking How long did it take her to come up with that, so I expected something similar this time around and was like "......Or there's always that option, yes." Also please don't kill me it sort of reminded me of the ending of Queer as Folk UK. Given which I think Kushner should have gone for snappy and dispensed with that coda nonsense.)
Randomness: I'm going to make a poll re: The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death. There is a character named Sabina! XD I have yet to encounter a fictional Sabina who wasn't an entirely disreputable adventuress. Michael Godwin is married and has a grown daughter which made me feel old, illogically as it's not as if I read Swordspoint the year it came out.
The Phoenix Guards
...Uh, speaking as someone who has The Three Musketeers more or less committed to memory, I LOL'd my way through it. I'm sure the author LOL'd his way through it too. I picture Brust trying to type and hitting all the wrong keys because he's laughing too hard. Proof that the authorial process is not always about disembowelling yourself with a spork; it cheers me up to think upon it. XD
This was one book I sincerely didn't want to end, although now I think I should read the Vlad Taltos series before its sequels as one is seemingly supposed to contextualize it in the manner of a historical romance (and the other series might explain the House beasties, though I gather a dzur is a sort of raptor and a tiassa is something like a lynx. I could google but there's no fun in that XD). Also pastiche aside Brust has very intelligent worldbuilding, and there's a lot Paarfi (who is win) takes for granted that's not as readily dismissible from another perspective, I think.
In other news, SSBB will be up later this evening. :)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-12-20 11:05 pm (UTC)iven which I think Kushner should have gone for snappy and dispensed with that coda nonsense.
THANK YOU! and HA! it's exactly what i said.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-20 11:34 pm (UTC)Brust is not only ace at worldbuilding, he has SUCH fun with it. He managed to name a major character after a Grateful Dead song (although this doesn't become obvious until Viscount).
no subject
Date: 2006-12-21 12:02 am (UTC)It's not like I don't identify with what he wants to do, because I have totally been there. But I'm the kind of critic who has no problems holding other people up to standards I know I couldn't meet myself, and Delany fails compared to the company he wants to join. XD; though to be fair, Fall of the Towers was written first (I think he was about 21?).
no subject
Date: 2006-12-21 12:37 am (UTC)A tiassa is a small winged lynx-like cat, IIRC. This used to be a role-playing scenario, so Brust and the people he RP'd with came up with a lot of critters for the houses (as I said, aren't Dragaera Houses a lot more fun than HP houses, in terms of sorting?). But yeeessss, er, it is a historical romance, but due to the lifespans of the Dragaerans, it's actually not that long ago (in terms of the Dragaeran lifespan), because the Vlad books in some ways seem to be a 'modern' analogue, because of the sort of language used (although in many ways 'current' Dragaera still has feudal aspects). In fact, Khaavren is still kicking in the current/Vlad timeline, although he doesn't really appear. Yeah, I would strongly advise reading the Vlad books, because the sequels to the Phoenix Guards give you the origin story of one of the major characters in the Vlad books, and I think the amusement factor is lessened if you haven't met him before. XD
no subject
Date: 2006-12-21 03:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-21 03:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-21 11:18 am (UTC)I ask for official permission to quote that paragraph. Cheered me up SO MUCH.
And yes, you really should read the Vlad books.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-21 02:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-21 05:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-21 05:29 pm (UTC)Basically I picked it up because I read the very beginning and liked the prose style. I haven't read any other books by Delany. But it would be charming if each succeeding book in his 60s run were better than the last. XD
no subject
Date: 2006-12-21 05:36 pm (UTC)I do plan on reading Zelazny in the near future.
Ah, I see... don't tell me, but I wonder if he's going to go through with some of the stuff later in Dumas' trilogy. XD (Then again Khaavren & co. are more likeable, if just as homicidal - Dumas' heroes can be total assholes at times.)
no subject
Date: 2006-12-21 05:40 pm (UTC)(Though for all I know she plans to. But with her track record...)
no subject
Date: 2006-12-21 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-21 05:59 pm (UTC)