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Dec 2016
7:03am, 22 Dec 2016
88,484 posts
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GregP
Love the fact that Kindle let me check the 'palp' count. In case you didn't know, the book features super-evolved spiders. The spider equivalent of a 'p*ssing competition' is 'measuring legs', I am given to understand.
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Dec 2016
7:15am, 22 Dec 2016
27,191 posts
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McGoohan
Super evolved spiders? Sounds like it's set in my kitchen then.
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Dec 2016
8:37am, 22 Dec 2016
88,486 posts
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GregP
The initial set up is nice. An accelerated evolution drug is dropped on a planet to cause apes to evolve into humans but it 'takes' with the spiders instead. They eventually harness ants instead of, basically, electricity - ants cover everything from messaging to imaging. Nice idea, massively overblown and overdeveloped across 600 pages.
Meanwhile the humans have rendered earth inhabitable so 500,000 people wander off on an ark spaceship to look for a new planet. Again, nice idea, although descriptions of said ark ship seem to imply that walking from one end to another is no big deal. I'd have thought it would have needed to be quite big, though.
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Dec 2016
9:11am, 24 Dec 2016
88,619 posts
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GregP
The Reality Dysfunction
====
In spite of warnings both here and ITRW I've bee looking forward to this. But sometimes things are not meant to be.
On page 16, a planet is destroyed by fifteen cluster bombs. The timeline at the back so one can keep track of what is going on says it was twelve. This REALLY annoyed me.
Then on page 27 two spaceships mate. I'd been warned that there was 'a lot of sex', but spaceships mating is just a line that should ever, ever be crossed. Ever.
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Dec 2016
9:19am, 24 Dec 2016
19,546 posts
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Diogenes
I saw a chap reading TPoG on the tube yesterday, the exact same edition I read. I wanted to say to him "it's good, isn't it?" which I guess is a ringing endorsement of a lasting appreciation.
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Dec 2016
12:08pm, 27 Dec 2016
27,250 posts
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McGoohan
Just finished The Watchmaker of Filigree Street.
I was very hopeful of liking it at first. Sounded right up my avenue. By the end I hated it.
A BIT SPOILERY AHEAD
Problems? I thought the storytelling was barely coherent in parts. For one thing, she has no idea how to write 'action'. Sometimes a huge event is described (e.g. bombs going off) in a paragraph and then you get several pages of Basil Exposition style discussion that explains little except how people might think or feel. The bit where Grace's father comes to Thaniel to have it out with him is the opening sentence of a chapter, then we're off on a several page streak of Thaniel and Mori talking round and round in circles.
For a book set in Victorian London (and Oxford and Japan) there was no sense of place either, just an airy-fairy vagueness to everything.
Then there's its weird 'style'. It almost feels like a sort of YA thing at the start with a very coy gay subtext. Then a derailing lurch in style about two-thirds through when she decides, Hell yeah, we're going to drag the subtext out into the open.
And then there are the loose ends. We start off with a bunch of stuff about Irish Nationalists. You get Grace going to a Suffragist meeting. Then those are dropped. The Irish thing only pops up when we need a bomb Maguffin to push the plot along.
SPOILERINESS OVER
Sorry Greppers. Not my *most* hated book of the year but not far off.
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Dec 2016
4:30pm, 27 Dec 2016
88,636 posts
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GregP
I'll give you the 'oh sod it, we're going overt about the gay thing' wasn't exactly subtly done. I loved the book but can find very little in your review to argue with.
Back at TRD, I've got over my shock at breeding spaceships. In a 'hard SF' context it does, once I got my head round it, make sense.
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Dec 2016
10:50pm, 27 Dec 2016
27,256 posts
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McGoohan
Just looked that up. Blimey Charlie: 1232 pages and it's only the first of three. Mind you he does keep each one to under 1300 (just).
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Dec 2016
11:02am, 31 Dec 2016
7,101 posts
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Seven Little Nemos a-swimming
More TWOFS spoilers ahead!!!
********************************
That's a really interesting review, McG. I had similar reservations to you about the book but I ended up enjoying it. I think the story and the way she wrote swept me along. I think that if I re-read it though there would be massive plot holes and it wouldn't stand up to much scrutiny.
The one thing I disagree with you though is in the description of London. I found this worked for me especially the Underground in the age of steam. Maybe it's because I work near Whitehall and use some of the tube lines described.
My major reservation with the book was the idea of your fate being predestined. I couldn't see Thaniel ending up with Mori as a 100% happy ending as did he really have a choice? If you looked at it from a different angle it was almost stalker-ish. But maybe the author intended this.
Of course the real tragedy was poor Katsu... *sobs*
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Dec 2016
11:20am, 31 Dec 2016
19,666 posts
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Diogenes
Later, when iron the laptop rather than the phone, I shall add TWoFS to the sidebar
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Acts of Minor Dissent
Sep 2024