Less than long
Apr. 17th, 2005 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
threemonkeysIt was a productive weekend. I got lots of work done around the garden and I read two collections of short works.
There was a time for a few years before cyberpunk hit that Larry Niven was the big name in hard SF. Nobody could touch him because he wrote SF that was smart, fun and sexy and above all easy to read. His great virtue as a writer was the clarity of the thinking in his writing. And he also never let his politics intrude into his work.
But over time his star has waned. He likes to write in collaboration and that may have been his undoing. He has worked with many who have less talent than he has and this has diluted the quality of what has been produced under his name. There is also the impact that his close association with the poisonous Jerry Pournelle has had on the perception many fans have had of him. His books are hardly even sold in New Zealand anymore.
Scatterbrain is a collection of novel extracts, short stories and essays from more recent years. Niven has always written short stories. They are how he thinks. Therefore there is some good stuff in here including stories about old favourites. But some of it is pretty ordinary - especially the stories done in collaboration with others. Overall it is something for the established fan really.
Harry Turtledove does not write so much short fiction. In fact his work is so much not short fiction that he can't usually fit one story in less than 600 pages and more often several 600 page volumes. Harry seems to work under the "don't use 100 words when 1000 will do the same job". As Counting Up, Counting Down shows, he carries this attitude over into short stories too.
You have to be careful picking a Turtledove novels. While the stories are good, they do not move very quickly and some will put you to sleep. There is none of that in the short stories in this collection. Overblown they may be, but because they still aren't all that long you can get through a story before your interest wanes. Pretty good really.
There was a time for a few years before cyberpunk hit that Larry Niven was the big name in hard SF. Nobody could touch him because he wrote SF that was smart, fun and sexy and above all easy to read. His great virtue as a writer was the clarity of the thinking in his writing. And he also never let his politics intrude into his work.
But over time his star has waned. He likes to write in collaboration and that may have been his undoing. He has worked with many who have less talent than he has and this has diluted the quality of what has been produced under his name. There is also the impact that his close association with the poisonous Jerry Pournelle has had on the perception many fans have had of him. His books are hardly even sold in New Zealand anymore.
Scatterbrain is a collection of novel extracts, short stories and essays from more recent years. Niven has always written short stories. They are how he thinks. Therefore there is some good stuff in here including stories about old favourites. But some of it is pretty ordinary - especially the stories done in collaboration with others. Overall it is something for the established fan really.
Harry Turtledove does not write so much short fiction. In fact his work is so much not short fiction that he can't usually fit one story in less than 600 pages and more often several 600 page volumes. Harry seems to work under the "don't use 100 words when 1000 will do the same job". As Counting Up, Counting Down shows, he carries this attitude over into short stories too.
You have to be careful picking a Turtledove novels. While the stories are good, they do not move very quickly and some will put you to sleep. There is none of that in the short stories in this collection. Overblown they may be, but because they still aren't all that long you can get through a story before your interest wanes. Pretty good really.