seekingferret | (no subject)

Further misadventures in The Dark Between the Stars. Anderson is narrating a frantic three page evacuation scene on a mining platform on a gas giant, because he doesn't seem to have the attention span for scenes of any longer length. The family evacuating has a two year old son, Rex, who is scooped up by his grandfather, Del, when the evacuation starts. Then, when they clamber aboard their escape ship, Rex's father Patrick passes him to Rex's teenaged sister, Shareen because Patrick needs to pilot the ship. Del is then described as fussing over Shareen, who decides to pass Rex back to Del in order to go and help her father and mother at the helm. Anderson does not describe what this help consists of.

So basically, in the span of three pages, Anderson forgets where the toddler is twice. This book is miserably sloppy.

In Jim Butcher news, I'm nearly finished with book 3 of the Dresden Files, which is the one I quit on a decade ago. It turns out that the secret is to listen to James Marsters read the audiobooks- he is a masterful Harry Dresden, and manages to make what remain pedestrian and awkwardly shaped books into occasionally quite compelling adventures. Still not sure if that's enough to get me through 12 more of them. Possibly if they actually do get better, and possibly if they get better the way SG-1 got better in Season 4- the writing wasn't much improved, but the weight of continuity had somehow accumulated enough that the stories were automatically deeper and richer and more nuanced because of three seasons of context.

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Thank you for reading Dark Between the Stars so that I don't have to feel guilty about skipping it entirely on the basis of KJA's Star Wars tie-ins being impressively bad even for Star Wars tie-ins. ^_^

And yeah, I got through Dresden Files entirely in audiobooks, as I think a fair number of the fandom did. I would not be surprised if that was a large part of the appeal. (On the other hand if you like weight of continuity, they do accumulate weight of continuity pretty quickly once you get toward the middle of the series.)

Eh, I'm not totally down on the KJA Star Wars books. The Jedi Academy Trilogy is mediocre, and it's telling that Michael Stackpole had to write a book to retcon the hell out of it, but it has some interesting Jedi training stuff. I think the Moesta/KJA Young Jedi Knights books are quite effective at being what they are, and they were one of my first gateways into the world of SFF. I think I've read at least 15 KJA novels in my life, and I've disliked some, but I've definitely enjoyed others. Which is what makes his Puppy nomination so infuriating... We Worldcon people, we're the people who compulsively read SF, good and bad, obscure and common, popular and esoteric. Do they really think we overlooked Kevin J. Anderson when we submitted our nominations because we had never read him?

I quite liked the Jedi Academy trilogy when I first read it (and it's certainly not the WORST Star Wars tie-ins I've read) but I've had trouble even getting through re-reads. (Especially now that I can just read Stackpole instead when I get to that point in a re-read.) Darksaber was the first SW book I ever read that I actively disliked, though, and I was still a teenager who liked pretty much anything with spaceships when I read it, and his SW short stories were pretty bad.

...I blame my continuing fondness for YJK on the fact that he had a cowriter for those. :P

He must being doing something right, though, or his stuff wouldn't keep selling (and checking out at the library.) I was considering giving the Hugo nom a try just to see what he's been doing lately, but it wasn't going to go above No Award regardless, so based on your liveblogging I think I probably don't need to worry that this one is dramatically better than the others I've read by him. (It's going to be a crunch for me to get through Goblin Emperor + The Three-Body Problem + the short works in time to vote as it is.)

About the only interesting thing I'll say for TDBTS is that it satisfies an itch that YJK does- being set 20 years after the Saga of the Seven Suns, it tells you what happens to the children of the heroes of that series. Of course, I haven't read Sage of the Seven Suns, and therefore have no attachment to the parents. Also, he takes too long catching up on all the characters and their children, and nothing happens in those chapters of catching up. But it's kind of gratifying anyway, because you get to see a sort of vision of what KJA might have done with YJK without marching orders from TPTB at Bantam, and it's a lot more complex than I'd expect. Some people are childless and happy, others are childless and unhappy. Some have children they're proud of, some have children who embarrass them or hate them. There's a whole lot of interesting family dynamics, and I bet some of them are even more interesting if you'd read the previous 7 book saga.

I started reading Dresden Files at book 8 or so, and I think that's actually a necessity. By that point, the weight of the world has accumulated enough to feel interesting, at least to me. There are all sorts of groups, each with complicated internal and external politics, and the characters in each are vivid enough to carry the pulp. (Plus that's the book where Karen Murphy is on vacation with Kincaid, so Dresden spends slightly less time moping over their non-relationship than usual; and I read it to get over a breakup, so I was super biased). I do think that it is totally reasonable to skip ahead.

That said, I really didn't like Skin Game. It takes all the bullshit that was not great in the earlier Dresden books and essentially makes it worse. I can rant about this (and a friend actually did a re-read to compare), but I'll wait until (if) you get that far.

I do think that it is totally reasonable to skip ahead.

Ha, if only I were a reasonable person. :P

The books do seem to be getting better... Even though there's a lot of clumsy in Book 3, it's much better than Book 1. And Thomas in particular seems like a refugee from a much better book.