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I can't help it. I buy titles from secondhand stores or remainder bins just because the blurb looks vaguely interesting. I.e. I spend small amounts of my money on purchases with no research and no real knowledge of what the book will be like. I take the book home and put on my to-read shelf. Then the doubts set in. I wonder if the book is going to be any good. In the meantime, there are books by authors I know waiting to be read. As a result the to-read shelf fills up with these cheap on-spec purchases. Every so often I make an effort to clear out a few of these - preferably by reading them - or at least trying to read them. Unless they surprise me with unexpected quality, they usually pass without comment here. One raised an interesting question however.
Divergence by Tony Ballantyne is a bit of a train wreck really. Not content with starting this space opera off by 20 pages of a spaceship crew bickering stupidly amongst themselves, the next big chunk of the book is taken up with over elaborate back-story flashbacks. But it had the plot device of of an almost god-like AI manipulating people according to some ineffable plan to some result that the AI desires. It is the space opera equivalent of a prophecy myth in fantasy.
That is what got me thinking. Where have all the prophecy legends gone? They used to be everywhere. Now you hardly ever see one. I get why that might be - its hard to build up a decent threat when you know that the prophecy is going to see everybody right. Divergence suffered from that same lack of threat. So am I just reading the wrong fantasy books or has prophecy gone out of fashion?
Divergence by Tony Ballantyne is a bit of a train wreck really. Not content with starting this space opera off by 20 pages of a spaceship crew bickering stupidly amongst themselves, the next big chunk of the book is taken up with over elaborate back-story flashbacks. But it had the plot device of of an almost god-like AI manipulating people according to some ineffable plan to some result that the AI desires. It is the space opera equivalent of a prophecy myth in fantasy.
That is what got me thinking. Where have all the prophecy legends gone? They used to be everywhere. Now you hardly ever see one. I get why that might be - its hard to build up a decent threat when you know that the prophecy is going to see everybody right. Divergence suffered from that same lack of threat. So am I just reading the wrong fantasy books or has prophecy gone out of fashion?