![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
threemonkeysI was looking at the little pile of books I've read over the last week and my initial thought was what a diverse lot they were and yet I'd enjoyed reading all of them. Except I'm not that sure about diverse.
Neal Stephenson's Anathem is a huge book. Physically big but big talent too. It is stunning - a great set of characters and a gripping story. It could be an SF classic. However it does something that bugs me - it takes the weird and immensely counter-intuitive world of quantum physics and applies them to the macroscopic world. It is a fun thing to do and Stephenson has great gobs of surprisingly readable exposition to justify it but it does get under my skin for some reason. I'm happy to accept much more outlandish story devices than this but this one just gets under my skin. Hence, not classic, just very good.
By way of contrast, Horn by Peter M Ball is just 80 pages long and a fantasy - a hard-boiled detective fantasy. I've said before how hard the novella length is to package which means that you don't see that many about. Which is a pity because what happens is stories get inflated to make novel length and lose their focus. That focus is never lost in Horn.
Intermediate in length, almost exactly at the standard SF novel length, is Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams. It floats somewhere between hard SF and space opera with a bit of primitive world fantasy thrown in for good measure. Williams is one of those authors who moves about a bit in terms of the type of stories he tells. It is unusual for him to return to a type of story he has told before. Yet this time there are a lot of resonances back to a previous novel Aristoi. Deliberately so I suspect - the main character is called Aristide. It isn't the same book and doesn't seem to be written to exploit a particular commercial vein. I get the feeling that this is just an attempt to take a good idea and make it even better. I'm inclined to think that this was a successful attempt.
So no length diversity this time but World Shaker by Richard Harland is a YA steampunk adventure novel. Its a modern day "boys own" adventure set on a gigantic land machine. It really evokes the spirit of those old stories and yet it is its own thing. It really is a YA novel - if there are layers of deepe meaning I couldn't see them. But yet it is a great fun read for any age. So read it yourself before giving it to your 12 year old.
Diverse? All these books evoke their settings well and tell an adventure story in that setting. All those settings are "other". You don't have to read this genre to go to other places - but it helps.
Neal Stephenson's Anathem is a huge book. Physically big but big talent too. It is stunning - a great set of characters and a gripping story. It could be an SF classic. However it does something that bugs me - it takes the weird and immensely counter-intuitive world of quantum physics and applies them to the macroscopic world. It is a fun thing to do and Stephenson has great gobs of surprisingly readable exposition to justify it but it does get under my skin for some reason. I'm happy to accept much more outlandish story devices than this but this one just gets under my skin. Hence, not classic, just very good.
By way of contrast, Horn by Peter M Ball is just 80 pages long and a fantasy - a hard-boiled detective fantasy. I've said before how hard the novella length is to package which means that you don't see that many about. Which is a pity because what happens is stories get inflated to make novel length and lose their focus. That focus is never lost in Horn.
Intermediate in length, almost exactly at the standard SF novel length, is Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams. It floats somewhere between hard SF and space opera with a bit of primitive world fantasy thrown in for good measure. Williams is one of those authors who moves about a bit in terms of the type of stories he tells. It is unusual for him to return to a type of story he has told before. Yet this time there are a lot of resonances back to a previous novel Aristoi. Deliberately so I suspect - the main character is called Aristide. It isn't the same book and doesn't seem to be written to exploit a particular commercial vein. I get the feeling that this is just an attempt to take a good idea and make it even better. I'm inclined to think that this was a successful attempt.
So no length diversity this time but World Shaker by Richard Harland is a YA steampunk adventure novel. Its a modern day "boys own" adventure set on a gigantic land machine. It really evokes the spirit of those old stories and yet it is its own thing. It really is a YA novel - if there are layers of deepe meaning I couldn't see them. But yet it is a great fun read for any age. So read it yourself before giving it to your 12 year old.
Diverse? All these books evoke their settings well and tell an adventure story in that setting. All those settings are "other". You don't have to read this genre to go to other places - but it helps.