At last

[threemonkeys]

Finally finished Absolution Gap by Alastair Reynolds. This is the book that has been taking me so long to get through. But even though it is 660 odd pages of small print and densely written prose, it hasn't been the book's fault that I have taken so long. The problem is my ability to concentrate. The book is a good one. It may well be Reynold's best to date. Certainly it is the most coherent all the way through which I appreciate - if it hadn't been, I almost certainly would not have finished it. I am going to have to try something lighter for the next one though. I need a break from the transhuman.

Comments

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

Padding books with activity that does not progress the story is a widespread problem with modern genre writing. Too many authors and publishers are looking to produce fat series books and so bloat their work. I agree that Reynolds is certainly guilty of this too.

One of the reasons I thought that this was Reynold's best book yet was that this one actually has a lot more story development than the previous ones.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

I mean "Reynolds' best book"

Gotta watch your grammar these days - there be pedants about.

[mashugenah.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I'd attribute such mercenary motives to them. I think they just want to show the entire scope of their imagination, rather than just the "good bits". Of course, there are series, like the Night's Dawn Trilogy where every single scrap of side-plot turns out to be relevant to the main one... but even so a lot of that was eminently cuttable and not very exciting.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

I'm sure it varies from author to author. Gene Wolfe's work has miniscule plot and yet full of excursions which make up the flow of the book and I make no mercenary accusations against him at all. Of course there are also plenty of authors who produce work where plot isn't the point of what is being written.

I believe that the mercenary motives come primarily from the publishers. Their experience is that fat books in series make more money for them. They will therefore pressure their writers into this mould or by their buying habits tend to select for writers who write this way. Writers in turn will respond by writing this way in order to get published. Darwinian evolution at work in the publishing industry.

[mashugenah.livejournal.com]

SF is the last bastion of the plot-driven book as a mainstay. :) I think they're being influenced by the Tom Clancy and Fred Forsyths of the world, whose "spy" genre naturally lends itself to labrynthine diversions.

Generally though, SF used to be about exploring an idea or technology potential. Reading Reynolds, in particular, I get the feeling more like they're writing realist political fiction which just happens to be set in the far future. In about 1898 the american patents office said that everything which was going to be invented had been. I think a lot of Modern SF believes this statement: everything that's going to be imagined, has been.

Some things make this "necessity" a virtue. Babylno 5, for example, could have been set in any time period and worked with some modifications; but the SF feel gave it that slight distance from direct political commentary, while not removing the rug of familiarity that allows you to focus on the important bit: the politics.

I guess that was another reason I found Reynolds tedious. I didn't see any plot device or bit of technology that I couldn't find something approximately the same from Star Trek.

The only hard SF author impressing me right now is probably Charles Sheffield. I do like Peter Hamilton, but even he tends to get a bit off topic and intricate.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

Reynolds like most others publishing in this space these days is modern space opera - not what I would call tradiional hard SF at all - just possessing some of its trappings. I.e. space opera does not have, as you say, technology driven plots. Hard SF can be difficult to pin down however as these quotes (http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~templer/tm9.htm) illustrate.

Sheffield was (http://www.sfwa.org/News/sheffield.htm) one the last of the tradional hard SF authors around and I greatly admired his work. A couple of much beloved dinosaurs still survive in Jack Williamson and Fred Pohl but there are not many others who write hard SF. Nancy Kress (Sheffield's wife) and Jack McDevitt are the only ones which, to my mind, come close.

I don't like Hamilton - I think he writes horror novels set in a space opera setting and it does not work for me.