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Finished TC&TC. It was good. Characters were always his weakest link but it seems that in this book first-person perspective coupled with his writing have managed to overcome this flaw of his. The last act didn't quite live up to the buildup of the first two, but I didn't mind.
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Jun 9, 2009 03:31
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Ballsworthy posted:I think the big problem with the ending was just his inexperience with the detective novel. If you separate out the book into a detective aspect and a surreal aspect, the surreal aspect, unsurprisingly, flourishes towards the end "Schrodinger's pedestrian" was awesome, while the detective aspect suffers. Seriously, a five-page, Mike Hammer-esque conversation with the villain? Honestly, I thought that the Orciny stuff would've actually made a more interesting book if it didn't turn out to be fake. Also, I was kind of disappointed in what the Breach turned out to be. As in, some assholes with advanced weaponry thugging people around to make them pretend that half of their city doesn't exist for what basically is their own amusement. Yeah, it's a hyperbole, but if the split was a bit more, uh, supernatural in its origin it wouldn't look so ridiculous. As it stands, I just can't imagine anyone actually bothering to stay in the city.
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Jun 10, 2009 19:55
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Pompous Rhombus posted:I just got The City and The City from the library - the hardback had a waiting list but luckily nobody seemed interested in the audiobook. Really enjoying it so far, but maybe that's because it kept me entertained through two hours of stripping wallpaper this morning Yeah, he went for first person, slightly hardboiled narrative voice. I thank him for it.
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Jun 21, 2009 19:58
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For anyone interested, the reader is pretty good; not amazing, but not bad either.
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qbert posted:Perdido Street Station is probably one of the best sci-fi/fantasy novels I've read in years. I immediately read that and The Scar a few years ago and got about halfway through Iron Council before stopping for some reason I can't recall. I've been meaning to pick it up again and finish it for ages...I don't know what's been stopping me. I think his mastery and use of prose is one of the best in the genre. I stopped reading Iron Council because people lugging a train around by pulling up the tracks behind it and laying them in front of it for no reason whatsoever that I can discern was effing ridiculous.
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Sep 9, 2009 11:50
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I thought that IC was a failure from a storytelling perspective. I've listened to an interview with him recently and the interviewer asked him why does he think the readers generally prefer The Scar to Iron Council. His answer? "I have no idea why, the prose in IC is so much better than TS and I've made much improvement as a stylist between those two books and I have no idea why would someone pick TS over IC because the prose is better in the latter." Way to miss the point, dude.
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Oct 22, 2011 00:39
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