John Scalzi
Science fiction
This is the sequel to Lock In. If you liked that, you should read this. If you haven't read Lock In but like John Scalzi, go ahead and read it. (There's actually a spoiler for Lock In buried in this one.)
Does that sound kinda . . . tepid? I enjoyed reading this book--I bought it in hardcover the day it came out, and buzzed through it in an afternoon--but it's not a major work even within the Scalzi oeuvre. The chief problems are:
- It's overly complex for no particular reason. (At a certain point in the exposition, I felt little Xes forming in my eyes.)
- More importantly, it doesn't really take advantage of the world that Scalzi sets up. The initial idea is great--a sport that appeals to Americans because it's even more violent than football. The plot that develops, however, could be set in any professional sports league. With no more than cosmetic changes, you could turn it into a novel about present-day soccer, or basketball, or water polo, or whatever.
- The last quarter of the novel reads like a rush job. It's almost pure dialog, to the exclusion of plot or character development. It's good dialog, but John Scalzi's dialog resembles itself to a remarkable degree, and it gets repetitive.
- A major plot point is pretty obvious from early on. It's not as major as similar case in Lock In, where . . . SPOILER FOR LOCK IN COMING AT YOU . . . the whole plot is built around the gimmick of YES HERE IS THE SPOILER "the solution would be obvious if only X were technically possible, only we know that X isn't technically possible, only it turns out that it is." But there's a certain amount of waiting around for the other shoe to drop.
Here's an insightful take from my much-missed pal "B.S." For what it's worth, I didn't read it until after I'd composed the above.
What a coincidence :)
ReplyDeleteShocking, innit?
Delete