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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. And The Saga Of The Seven Suns or whatever was just unadulterated crap. Kevin J. Anderson is the Spot Goes To Town of sci-fi -- worthless on a literary sense and aimed at people with undeveloped tastes... but so damned easy to read the only real investment is the cash used to buy the book. An easy way to waste a bit of time so long as you don't try to get involved in the plot/characters.
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Jul 27, 2009 16:03
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Paul Kemp posted: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." Oh definitely, there was more wrong with it than just a tacked-on ending. But the same elements that made it interesting to read (i.e easy to read, just action movie-style sci fi) also let you pass over the gratuitous rape/'sensibilities shock' just as easily. I don't think even teenage boys would have been excited by the hamhanded and Heinleinian way he approached sex. As it was, he created an interesting world with interesting conflicts and butchered it with some weird metaphysical possessed/religious theme and gross pornography. Still, excruciatingly easy to read, so I find it hard to complain about what is essentially some fun freebie sci-fi. A lot of sci-fi authors would have pulled a lot worse a job.
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Aug 1, 2009 16:31
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