Incompetnce
Apr. 23rd, 2005 07:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
threemonkeysJust a fact of life. One week you complain about somebody doing something. The next week you complain about somebody doing the opposite.
A while back I suggested Larry Niven was diluting his talent by all the collaborations he took part in. In the case of Rob Grant we have a case where collaboration (with Doug Naylor of course) made for something that was much greater than the sum of the individual part.
So we come to Incompetnce*, his latest solo work. A comic hard boiled detective story set in a near future where the notion that you must not discriminate in your hiring practices has gone so far that incompetence is not a reason to fire somebody. So you have pilots who can't fly, cops with anger management issues, mechanics who don't know how to fix cars and so on.
So, is it funny? Well not really. Grant does not manage to sell the weirdness of the whole situation. It isn't quite real and it isn't quite bizarre either. It does have a few chuckles however and is most certainly funnier and better thought out than his previous book - Colony.
If I want to read about PC policies gone too far then I will read Kage Baker's more recent work. The only problem - Baker makes it real and scary.
*(Oh yes - the spelling is deliberate)
A while back I suggested Larry Niven was diluting his talent by all the collaborations he took part in. In the case of Rob Grant we have a case where collaboration (with Doug Naylor of course) made for something that was much greater than the sum of the individual part.
So we come to Incompetnce*, his latest solo work. A comic hard boiled detective story set in a near future where the notion that you must not discriminate in your hiring practices has gone so far that incompetence is not a reason to fire somebody. So you have pilots who can't fly, cops with anger management issues, mechanics who don't know how to fix cars and so on.
So, is it funny? Well not really. Grant does not manage to sell the weirdness of the whole situation. It isn't quite real and it isn't quite bizarre either. It does have a few chuckles however and is most certainly funnier and better thought out than his previous book - Colony.
If I want to read about PC policies gone too far then I will read Kage Baker's more recent work. The only problem - Baker makes it real and scary.
*(Oh yes - the spelling is deliberate)