Ben
I enjoyed Ready Player One, and was curious as to read what Cline wrote next, whether he could keep up the pace of nerdy retro observations.
Well, he can, but it doesn't make much sense outside of that particularly contrived world.
In Armada, it feels forced and purposeless. I wasn't interested in the characters, and I wasn't particularly sympathetic for their plight. I felt the romance was iffy and the twists were unsurprising. It's a shame, because if it was his first novel I'd probably have enjoyed it more.
Where I could overlook the problems in Ready Player One because of the enormous amount of fun it was, Armada actually make me think less of RPO.
Ella Minnow Pea is a contrived fantasy set on an island of people who delight in flowery language. It features a small, old-fashioned courtship during what I would more likely describe as “a plague of letters”.
It's fun and diverting. It's not difficult to read even when, about three-quarters through, it switches to using homophones instead of restricting words themselves.
The pace never rises above a gentle saunter. Don't think of it as some great literary achievement, but enjoy it for what it is.
Even though this was published in the 1970s, the stories collected here are all from a couple of decades before. There's some really good stuff, provided you forgive the period - almost every story has the heroes puffing away at well-packed pipes and rolling along like John Wayne - and it holds together well. The theme of “deep space” is a little vague, but you get what you expect: no stories about the future of Earth here.
The opener is by Chad Oliver, called Blood's a River, and is prefaced by a note about his professorship in anthropology. Makes sense; it's a very anthropological story. It's pretty good, too.
The stand-out story for me was Noise by Jack Vance, a lovely little atmospheric piece which reminded me of William Hope Hodgeson - or perhaps even a bit of Poe.
Damon Knight has an excellent story in Ticket to Anywhere. Gordon R. Dickson, with Lulungomeena set in the Dorsai universe, has another.
There's a Harlan Ellison story in here, too, Life Hutch. It reads a bit more like an episode of Outer Limits than a self-contained story, and the ending is a little weak.
What most of these stories have in common is that they're atomic-age one-trickers. They tend to be set-up slowly only to have their endings rushed, and to our modern minds they're not at all capable of surprising us. But if you like the genre - and I do, oh I do - this is a very pleasing collection indeed.
Interesting. The language is very curious, and almost all the expressions seem to be particular to England from about 1950 to 1980 - which perhaps isn't that surprising. It's written like a told story, almost conversationally. I can't say I liked it very much, but I certainly didn't hate it and can see why children might love it.
Gruesome and merciless, this is all slime and snails.
Started off thinking this was a bit weak, but it got a lot better. 4 stars because he took the metafiction further than I thought he could without everything collapsing.
I'm about 15 pages from the end of this book and I'm giving up.
It's written badly. It's constructed of short (2-4 page) chapters which all follow exactly the same progression. It's full of patronising little scientific titbits where Clarke tells some convenient dimwitted stooge something the reader needs to know. It's clumsy in its building of suspence and it's clumsy in its introduction of characters. The characters don't so much feel fleshed-out as built to meet a quota. In fact, that's exactly what this reads like, a book written to meet a contractual obligation or for a quick buck.
I think I like military science fiction. But it's so hard to tell, because a lot of it isn't very good.What I mean here is that The Lost Fleet isn't very good. It's not awful, it's all-round better than [b:Into the Black 12971820 Into the Black (Odyssey One, #1) Evan Currie https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1334235177l/12971820.SY75.jpg 16237035] (by Evan Currie, and which I reviewed before) for example, and yet in individual ways its so much worse.The characters are all the same. The bad apples are cardboard cut-out people with no personality apart from the will to be the villains.It needs an editor to point out the language problems. Phrases with annoying repetition, like “He could see that the ship had once been a good-looking ship, but...” just set my teeth on edge.People glower and scowl a lot, which is apparently the MSF way of showing emotion.The protagonist is constantly exhausted, which has an in-universe explanation, but is really a lazy way of replacing conflict with an inner struggle. In one paragraph, his effective second-in-command goes from “glowering” to “glowing” because he compliments her. It's like people are really primitive state machines or something.The premise is interesting: it's an interstellar case of impostor syndrome. I mean, it's definitely explored, I'm just not sure that repeating thoughts about how he can't live up to people's expectations is a fulfilling exploration.Then there are Big Space Battles and I have a problem with them.I mentioned [b:Into the Black 12971820 Into the Black (Odyssey One, #1) Evan Currie https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1334235177l/12971820.SY75.jpg 16237035] earlier because I see a lot of similarities between the books, but what Currie does well is his presentation of the mechanics of warfare over large distances. Campbell tries to make things trickier by factoring in light-speed delays where one side can't tell what the other is doing for minutes at a time, and that's... reasonable. It's actually pretty smart.It would work if his premise - that both sides have no concept of formations or tactics whatsoever - wasn't so preposterous. It would work if his strategy wasn't “attack from the sides rather than head-on”. It would work, but it doesn't, because everything feels like a muddle stretched over several pages.There are a couple of fairly clumsy hints that we're going to be seeing Mysterious Aliens in the sequels. A bit of conclusion-jumping by an otherwise unseen team of engineers gets revisited near the end with the protagonist musing to himself over whether aliens could be real. Hmm.
There's a love story in here, and I know, I know it's not aimed at me, but I can't help feeling that it will disappoint, because it's mostly unnecessary to the plot. Well, I'm clearly not the target audience, and I knew that, but it read to me like the author was occasionally tacking on emotions to otherwise flat characters. The only character with any depth at all is the protagonist, Daphne, and that's possibly because about one in three chapters are from her point of view, first-person. That said, she's interesting enough, in a confused adolescent sort of way.
I also didn't like some of the repetitive phrasing. For instance, early on the phrase “pink, watery blood” (I think) comes up about three times in the space of a couple of pages. It lets down what is otherwise quite smartly written.
Given that, what we have is a reasonable fantasy story in a great setting. The background observations, the scenery and the construction of the demon city are all good. The world Yovanoff builds is better than the sum of its parts.