Not Superman

[threemonkeys]

I have a sad little story for you readers of science fiction out there. Once upon a time there was a pretty good science fiction writer. He wasn't at the very top of his profession, but he was in Sturgeon's 10 percent. I for one greatly enjoyed his work. We cannot know for sure, but we can guess that someday he realised that he was never going to make it big from the sf mid-list. He also realised that the step from telling near future sf to hi-tech crime thrillers was not that big. So he started writing such books and got them published. We can assume they sold pretty well because he wrote another one and yet another one after that. To start with, they had a fair bit of the sf about them. You could tell that he wasn't letting go of his old habits and by extension his old readership. Smart thinking that. It certainly kept me reading his work - anyway, I like good crime thrillers. But now the time has come where those links to sf have been more or less severed. What is left is a rather shambolic mid level crime thriller. Not something I would ever read from a cold start. I guess I will have to stop reading this author. As I say, sad.

The author in question is Paul McAuley and the book which pushed me over the edge is Players. It is a fair effort I suppose, but it isn't great. In particular, the organisation of the book is very poor. It does have a gaming aspect which may lure a few people over from the sf realms but it isn't convincing and certainly not beyond the normal. Interestingly, this book gets good blurb by Michael Marshall - another author to whom the above tale could apply. I still have a book by Marshall on my to read shelf. I wonder if reading that will bring the same result as Players.