Quickie Review

[digitaldiscipline]

Poul Anderson, Harvest the Fire

Not knowing this was the third book in a series, I picked it up from the office library for lunch reading, thinking it could theoretically stand alone.

I have no idea what books came before or after, and will never find out, because it committed the cardinal sin of any writing, and this is even more damning for SF -- it was boring. There was a nonsensical computer-generated meeting with a historical author to open the book, which went nowhere and never had any later bearing on the story, and the characters were bland and tedious except when they were maddening or obtuse.

Action appears to be something the author has heard about, at some point, maybe from a friend of theirs.

Comments

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

I've never really dug Poul Anderson's long works, for pretty close to that reason. Asimov can handle off-screen action and make tedium interesting, but Anderson, not so much. His shorter stuff, being more compressed, is better.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

This seemed like it was a decent idea for a fifteen or twenty page short story that, for some reason, he made about ten times longer. The thing with Borges that opened it was almost like a short story he couldn't get published otherwise, so he stuffed it in there to make word count, or something.

[ruefullyamused.livejournal.com]

a) IMHO it takes something special to fuck up just about anything about Borges, even speculatively ;)

b) zomg, it sounds like my unauthorized bio they way you put it:

characters were bland and tedious except when they were maddening or obtuse.

*snerk*

In other news, I'll take your post at face value and skip that title if I run across it. Life's too short for bad reading.

[theonebob.livejournal.com]

Sounds like some of the later Frank Herbert Dune books where all the action would take place "off screen" and then the characters would have a meeting and talk about the action.

[smaugchow.livejournal.com]

That always drove me nuts about the Dune books. I felt like I needed a notebook and a slide rule to make sense of his stuff.