[ABE.pm] OT: "Halting State" by Charles Stross

Walt Mankowski waltman at pobox.com
Mon Apr 7 11:23:09 PDT 2008


On Mon, Apr 07, 2008 at 01:36:32PM -0400, Faber J. Fedor wrote:
> On 07/04/08 19:26 +0200, Ricardo SIGNES wrote:
> > * "Faber J. Fedor" <faber at linuxnj.com> [2008-04-07T17:26:17]
> > > It has an interesting writing style as well.  Each chapter is written
> > > from the POV of the character who is mentioned in the chapter
> > > title; a chapter about Elaine will read "You roll out of bed..." and in
> > > a chapter about Jack, it'll read "You reach for your keyboard...". It
> > > may sound confusing, but it's not.
> > 
> > Er, that isn't POV, that's... second person narrative?
> 
> Not all of us were English majors. :-)
> 
> But yeah, it's an homage to some games called 'Adventure'. 

Wow.  I can see how that might work for a short story, but I think if
I had to read an entire book like that I'd be throwing it across the
room.

<rant>
Why do so many science fiction writes choose to be so "creative" in
their writing style?  I remember reading a novel by L.E. Modesitt
Jr. where each chapter was told in the first person from the point of
view of one of the five main characters.  Only...he wasn't so good at
characterization, so it was still hard to tell them all apart.

Then there was the novel by C.J, Cherryh which was written in what
appeared to be a normal 3rd person omniscient narrator style, only it
wasn't.  Each chapter was told from the point of view of one of the
main characters, some human, some alien.  It took me half the book to
realize that the narrator also had the same opinions and
misconceptions as whichever character was being featured.  So if
there's a paragraph of background text that says something like
"python was used to program the ship's battle computers" this might be
a fact, or it might just be what Captain Kirk thinks.  We might learn
10 chapters later in a Scotty chapter that the systems were, in fact,
written in perl (which would explain a lot, if you think about it).
It's fine that they can have different ideas of what's going on, but I
don't think it's too much to ask that the reader should be able to
judge fact from opinion.

It's my humble opinion that there are far more good ideas than good
novels in the world of science fiction.  I really wish more authors
would concentrate on mastering the basics of good writing style before
they decide to start breaking all the rules.
</rant>

> 
> > That's... well, that's just weird.  
> 
> I actually enjoyed it.  Granted, a few times I had to recheck the
> chapter title to remind myself who "you" was, but I liked the feel it
> gave to the narrative.
> 
> > I like Charlie Stross, though, so... I will put it on the list.
> 
> I'm going to check out more of his work because of this book.

Singularity Sky is wonderful.  Its sequel, Iron Sunrise, is less
wonderful, but still a lot better than most of the stuff out there.

Walt


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