|
The writing in RPO reminds me of nothing so much as Fifty Shades. The events described in both works could, in themselves, be exciting/tense/erotic etc, but the actual words used to describe them are so unimaginative that it just comes out as "and then this thing happened, and then this happened and...". Now, in defense(!) of E.L. James, at least she actually describes the events taking place in Fifty Shades, while Cline just tells us it happened post-fact. What really bugs me is not only the constant nerd-culture references, but the fact that Cline rarely offers up anything more than the name of the thing he's referencing (and sometimes which movie or game it's from). Don't know what the hell a Zenith television looks like, or what a TRS-80 is? Congratulations, you have no way of visually parsing the scene. When Wade enters the Tomb of Horrors, Cline doesn't describe the things he encounters, he just goes "and once I was past the Orb of Annihilation I did..." and if you don't know what the hell an Orb of Annihilation is, you're just poo poo out of luck as a reader. William Gibson has this style where he writes about some strange, sci-fi thing - but since it's an everyday item to the characters in the story, he doesn't actually describe the thing until details become relevant for the story. Cline's like that, only he fails to realise that's what he's doing.
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2018 22:07
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 17:58 |
|
|
I can also understand Spielberg changing the key quests for the movie, because how the hell would you go about making an exciting scene out of "and then I played Space Invaders for six hours, and then I slavishly re-enacted an entire movie, and then I played Pac-Man"?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2018 08:41
|
|
|
Maybe it's just me being hypersensitive to bad writing, but... I don't think that the people who genuinely liked Ready Player One like or even understand books. It's the literary equivalent of watching a slideshow with pictures of guns and calling it a "fun-filled action movie".
|
|
#
¿
Apr 13, 2018 08:01
|
|