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Regarding the Brin's two Uplift trilogies, I agree that the first is much stronger than the second. However, if you're not a completist or have limited time for reading, you can easily skip Sundiver from the first trilogy. It does give you a bit of back story but nothing that isn't explained clearly in Startide Rising and The Uplift War. I'm not sure what order the former two are actually meant to be read in (IIRC they take place concurrently) but both of them are absolutely amazing and I can't recomend then highly enough. Startide Rising is probably my favorite SciFi book of all time. The second trilogy is very forgettable and I honestly don't remember much about it other than the big reveal at the end which wasn't really that big a deal either. Honestly I think I'd rather if they had never been written as Startide in particular would have been better off with the open ending that it had.
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Jul 14, 2009 23:02
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Fallom posted:Can you describe what the big reveal is? I started to reply and actually found that I couldn't. I apparently didn't even read the final book in the second trilogy. I'll have to check it out, maybe it redeems the first two. The big reveal that I remembered is that the humans on Jijo have been secretly breeding horses in contravention of their treaty with the centaur race and reveal them in order to fight the galactics. Come to think of it that may have even happened in the first book of the second trilogy. They just didn't make much of an impression on me and my memory of them is very hazy. It probably helps that when I read the first trilogy I was in early high school and tended to re-read books that I liked multiple times. I probably re-read Startide Rising four times in a two year period.
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Jul 15, 2009 23:11
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DriveMeCrazy posted:I liked the Night's Dawn trilogy on the whole, but the ending was somewhat inevitable. Hamilton spent so long building up the character of Quinn Dexter as infallible (as the other possessed got more human and less frightening) that he became near invincible.. and that required an even more improbable, powerful force to counter, until you're left with an "ugh" solution to wrap everything up. The problem was in having a singular character serve as the main driving conflict behind an entire book. It gets built up so much it becomes hard to bring it down within the confines of a linearly progressing novel. I hate to be a one-subject poster in this forum but I thought a lot more was wrong with this series than just the ending. I know that most SF is at least partially targeted to teenage boys but the amount of possessed sex, rape and torture in these books is really excessive IMO, and the Deus Ex Machina ending was made necessary not just by demon lord Quinn Dexter but by the fact that Hamilton had frayed the twenty or so plot threads so widely that he had no idea how to bring them back together into a cohesive ending and pretty obviously just said "gently caress it."
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Jul 29, 2009 23:38
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