Thanks
I get a number of book recommendations here, the last being the excellent THE MARTIAN, and equally there's books to be avoided.
This appears to be one of them for which I may be eternally grateful.
Carry On Cosmonaut: Willful Child is a poor taste Star Trek parody
Anyone who’s read Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen, a searingly bleak and intricate fantasy series, will be bitterly disappointed with Willful Child (and yes, pedants, that is how he spells it). Starship Enterprise Instead of a blistering and fascinating foray into sci-fi, Erikson does a limp, lacklustre job of …
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Monday 20th October 2014 22:33 GMT Vic
Re: Picard?
Picard? I must have missed those episodes.
I cna only think of one such episode[1], and that was the whole crew losing it, not Picard being off-colour...
Vic.
[1] Yes, I did have to look it up :-)
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Saturday 18th October 2014 15:09 GMT Fibbles
Overrated
Am I the only only one who thinks Steven Erikson is massively overrated? After struggling through the 10 main books of the Malazan series it's obvious that he's a brilliant crafter of worlds but by god is he in desperate need of an editor. He makes some interesting points in his books but then he insists on retreading that same point from the perspective of four or five more characters all in succession until I just want to scream at the book "OK, I fucking get it!".
Also, would it kill him to throw in some more proper nouns? I realise that in real life when people converse that we're not constantly using each others names but in a book it becomes increasingly difficult to figure out who is saying what.
The Malazan books seem to suffer from what I can only term 'philosopher syndrome'. Essentially every character, regardless of age or education seems to be able to soliloquise eloquently on the deepest meanings of life, the universe and everything as if they were some wizened sage. Obviously every character should be capable of some level of insight but when they become so blatantly a mouthpiece for the author then I just lose any suspension of disbelief I once had.
And finally, 'dissembling' and 'precipitously' are nice words but that doesn't mean you have to use them every other sentence. Buy a thesaurus.
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Sunday 19th October 2014 00:20 GMT Fibbles
Re: Overrated
As I said, he is a brilliant crafter of worlds. The peoples he describes are richly detailed each with their own customs and history. This is mostly what kept me reading, though there was also the nagging thought that "I've come this far, I may as well finish" each time he released a new book.
I just think his ability to create a cohesive narrative is severely lacking. He has good ideas and then he writes and writes and writes, ad infinitum. There's no consideration for pacing or whether he's repeating himself or even if what he's writing makes an interesting story arc. He puts words on a page and, presumably, when his manuscript is so large that his word processor keeps crashing, he publishes it as a book. That doesn't mean the book is a well rounded story.
Don't get me wrong, Erikson has written some stories I enjoyed thoroughly. The book that introduced Karsa Orlong (I forget its title,) was particularly good. I've never read a book before or since that has conveyed the idiosyncrasies of tribal life in a warrior culture quite so vividly.
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Monday 20th October 2014 08:21 GMT Gavin McMenemy
Re: Overrated
I've heard Steven talk and I think he's an intelligent likable guy. But I fear he's trapped in the mammoth doorstopper fantasy cul-de-sac. I think fine world detail is great so long as the story you use it in is equally compelling.
By the way, I am not criticising you for having stayed the course. All I'm saying is that he's just an author who is not for me.
ps. MANY MANY authors need a good editor. He really isn't alone there. There are a few big names, especially in fantasy, who appear to have "outgrown" good editing...
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Monday 20th October 2014 13:04 GMT breakfast
Re: Overrated
I haven't read outside the Malazan series, but I don't think his intention with those was to create a cohesive narrative- it was a tapestry of stories that pretty much managed to keep me interested throughout. Very much ideas-fiction, rather than story oriented, though. Perhaps like some sci-fi in that respect.
Although I enjoyed them, I haven't been driven to pick up any of his other work. Given that this one seems to be a distillation of his most irritating qualities, I guess I won't be getting this either.
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Saturday 18th October 2014 16:08 GMT Henry Wertz 1
Flip beat me to it...
Flip beat me to it, I was just going to say, one minor critique but Picard was if anything overly "PC". I swear if an alien ship showed up and started firing on their ship, he'd want to have a dialogue with his crew to figure out what the alien's point of view was to make them fire, rather than raising shields, firing back to disable weapons THEN worrying about that. I couldn't see him seducing a crew member in a million years. Minor point I suppose.
Back on topic... sheesh, the book doesn't sound good!
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Monday 20th October 2014 07:55 GMT Phil O'Sophical
Re: Flip beat me to it...
Picard was such an insecure, self-doubting wimp that I never understood how he made it much beyond lieutenant, never mind to starship captain. As to romantic encounters, he's the sort of guy who was probably a virgin on his wedding night, and still turned off the lights before he got undressed.
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Sunday 19th October 2014 10:08 GMT David Given
Re: I'm old - as I've never heard of him.
Absolutely. I've done NaNoWriMo four times. Actually got a completed and terribly bad novel out of it, which is now up on my website. (The other three times I completed the word count but didn't actually finish the story; I must get round to doing so as they're actually not too bad.)
I can strongly recommend it. As Terry Pratchett said, writing is the most fun you can have on your own, and the feeling of accomplishment after you're finished and look back at what you've achieved is awesome. See http://nanowrimo.org.
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Friday 5th June 2015 12:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Didn't Futurama already do that character...
As I read the review I thought exactly the same thing... the author tries to make the book sound bad, but then describes more or less exactly the life and adventures of Zap(p?) Brannigan, probably the funniest thing about futurama, and funny for exactly the same reasons that the author seems to dislike these books...
So are the books OTT bad = good, or just bad? I may have to read them now as I'm confused....
As Zap would have said: "It's.... velour"
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Wednesday 22nd October 2014 07:12 GMT Vociferous
Can parodies in book form be funny?
It just occurs to me I've never read a funny parody. The closest I can think of, is Terry Pratchett's discworld novels, but they are their own self-contained universe. Men At Arms, for instance, isn't a parody of noir detective stories, it's a noir detective story set in a slapstick world -- there's a difference.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
