I should have liked this book. I thought I’d like it. The Culture is a very cool construct, and Iain Banks is a talented writer with or without the middle initial.
But I didn’t like the book. For a number of reasons.
My biggest problem was my dislike of the protagonist. I’m sure I wasn’t supposed to like him, as the protag is fighting on the wrong side, but still, the book is an adventure story. If I don’t like the protag, I’m not going to care whether he wins or loses. And if I don’t care whether the protag wins or loses, why am I reading an adventure story? Especially one that’s twice as long as typical adventure fiction? It didn’t help when the protag blasted his way out of a refugee ship killing unknowable numbers of innocents in the process without blinking an eye, either, especially as the character wasn’t portrayed as particularly bloodthirsty anywhere else in the book.
I’ve read three books by Banks now. I really enjoyed parts of all of them, but none of them really satisfied me. Each one was just too detached for my taste. The worlds are marvelous, the writing generally superb, but ultimately? Meh.
Pretentious. Pompous. Overwritten.
Boring.
At least the first five pages. I couldn’t get into Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter any farther .
I used to like literature. I did. I was a lit major in college. Read everything I could get my hands on. Didn’t like all of it, obviously, or I wouldn’t be the reader I am today, but I liked a lot. Faulkner. Austen. Flaubert. Twain.
But there is something so patronizing about most modern literature. I’d rather read Conan, and I’m not much of a Conan fan. Take this sentence from the second page of the book:
“Why, you might ask, would a man give up a promising literary career–there were some good notices–to become a sportswriter?”
That’s the modern literary worldview in a nutshell. How could anything possibly compete with the wonderfulness of a literary career? Really. Personally, I can think of many reasons why a man might give up a promising literary career (or a woman, but that’s an entirely separate complaint about this sort of writing - note that Ford didn’t write, “…would someone give up a promising literary career...” he’s only addressing men).
The modern literary type can’t imagine anything as sublime as literature. Which is the problem right there.
It’s a failure of imagination.
What everyone else who didn’t like it said. All movies are now video games.
To read this rant, you need to go to SFNovelists.
This should have been great. Man, what an idea. I mean think of the cool science fiction fun you could have with shipwrecked aliens on Earth, and they breed, so Earth ghettoizes them, and then, really, what are you going to do when they start competing with an overcrowded earth for resources? Very, very cool.
But no. That’s not where District 9 runs with it. Instead we have to belabor an already obvious metaphor by sticking the aliens in an already apartheid South Africa, and all the humans have to be venal brutal militarists, and the hero is an oblivious moron who’s as racist as everyone else till he has a catharsis for no reason at all at the end of the movie and helps the aliens get away. Oh, and the Blair Witch thing at the beginning and the end was really, really annoying. What, you’re not a good enough writer to work the exposition into the story?
But it was SF, and some of it was pretty cool, especially the smart alien.
Why is it so many American holiday and children’s movies have endings that reek of false sentimentality? I have nothing against sentimentality - I weep at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life and A Charlie Brown Christmas. But those are movies where most of the people involved actually believed in the sentiment they created. The people who made Elf and the Jim Carrey version of How The Grinch Stole Christmas don’t.
And it shows.
I thought the first half was hilarious. I love crazy Will Ferrell. But then they had to have the message, and reform the scrooge figure, and it was all just going through the motions without any of the spontaneous sweetness of the beginning. It was false, and it was dull, and it showed.
Bah, humbug.
A classic Paul Krugman column in the NYTimes today. He complains that the mismanagement of the AIG bailout is contributing to the continued downturn in the economy because it means the country has lost trust in its financial officials. This is complete hogwash. The continued economic downturn has nothing to do with a lack of confidence in the government and everything to do with an eight year orgy of debt and consumerism that has to be gotten through before things can get better, like losing the ten pounds you gain over the holidays before you feel like yourself again. Krugman is simply using this to bash the administration into doing what he wants them to do - which is more fiscal stimulus. He’s been ranting about more fiscal stimulus for months.
This is the trouble with Krugman. He may have been a good economist once, but now he’s a columnist with a big ego who wants to be right all the time. He’ll twist anything to fit his opinion du jour. He may well be right about the need for fiscal stimulus, though he knows as well as any economist that fiscal stimulus has a twelve to eighteen month drag before it starts to have an effect (which means we’re only starting to feel the effects of the stimulus now). And he’s right about the mismanagement of the AIG bailout, where AIG’s creditors inexcusably got one hundred cents on the dollar at taxpayer expense. But the two have nothing to do with one another. Krugman knows that. But he’d much rather play stern schoolmarm than be honest.
I could have watched Charlie Stross interview Krugman at WFC this summer, be decided to eat Duck-In-A-Can instead. An excellent decision.
And I didn’t even have to watch it.
And here I am, ostensibly a writer of YA. Bah, humbug.
I actually don’t read much YA, but I just finished Little Brother so YA is on my mind. I didn’t much like the book, not so much because of the book itself but because it’s YA. I know, I know, YA is the hot thing right now, but that still doesn’t mean I have to like it.
The main reason I don’t like YA is because of the way it’s often written. It’s just not to my taste. The POVs are generally too tight; the narrators are too often Mary Sues; the issues are far too simplified; the adults are all idiots. Even more importantly, I have a built-in bias that makes me wince at the word YA. When I grew up in the ’60s you went from children’s books to adult books whenever you were ready. For most readers that was about the time they hit adolescence. YA at the time was a new marketing niche being promoted as books with adult themes written for teens who weren’t yet ready (or able) to read adult books.
Needless to say, as a teenager I turned my nose up at the idea of reading anything that was described as being written for teens not yet ready to read something harder.
I don’t really have anything against YA per se. Hey, the more books people like, the better. But most of the techniques I don’t like in YA are the sorts of techniques used to make books easier to read and more accessible. Which means that, unless the writer is really, really good, books written with those techniques often end up being simplistic and banal. In Little Brother, for example, the interpretation of the Declaration of Indepence given in the book is one that literally justifies all acts of defiance against the government as being justifiable, which is, of course an impossible simplification. But it’s just the sort of impossible simplification that finds it’s way into a lot of YA.
Which is why I don’t like YA.
We’ve watched the first four episodes so far, and the pace is glacial. Which leads me to conclude that I’m just not that into vampires. Which in turn raises the question of why I like Buffy so much. But my wife figured that out. Buffy isn’t really a vampire show, it’s a superhero show, and I love superheroes.
Besides, I’m not so sure that what I’ve seen of True Blood qualifies as a vampire show. More like softcore porn, if you ask me. And if it’s softcore porn I’m looking for, I’m much more likely to dust off my old copy of The Cheerleaders starring the immortal Stephanie Fondue, than I am to turn on Showtime or HBO or whatever premium channel True Blood is on.
I’m just not into vampires.
