sholio: (Books)
Sholio ([personal profile] sholio) wrote 2009-02-17 02:57 am (UTC)

I wouldn't spend this much time figuring out what was wrong with the book for me if it had been an utter failure - I'll keep buying Bear's books. Interesting though flawed is better than smug routine, after all.

Oh, certainly. Actually, flawed but interesting makes for some of the best discussions -- the next book that I'll be writing up is probably Kindred, a book I adored and have nothing but praise for, which makes me a little nervous about actually finding enough to say. I love picking over a promising but flawed canon; it's very fascinating. Something that is just bad -- there would be nothing to say about it.

I've been reading science fiction for almost thirty years (that's a scary thought) and I can say it's the character interaction and world building that bring me back for a reread ten years later, because one decade's mind blowing new idea is the next's ho-hum.

It's going on 25 years for me, and yeah, me too. SF (especially the sort I grew up on, Farmer and Niven and Bradbury and such) is a literature of ideas, and a lot of times character falls a distant second to those ideas, but the books that I've kept through all my moves, that I keep re-reading, are my happy place because of their vivid characters and fascinating worlds that I can fall into.

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