Banks or Hamilton?

[Connavar]

I have A Player of Games i plan to read and Hamilton i will read maybe never. Im really suspicious of big fat SF books. Old and modern SF authors of real quality can tell stories in 200-300 pages.

I enjoy serious SF too much to read big fat books for entertaiment....

 

[AE35Unit]

Both are good. I remember Player of Games as being significantly darker.

is the game player similar to the game-playing scene in Consider Phlebas? I didnt enjoy that part as much.

 

[Null_Zone]

Atered Carbon and Black Man are well worth picking up.

Wasn't too impressed with Black Man personally. The whole westeners are too soft, femanised and decedant to make decent soldiers speil is no better than those bitter individuals blaming women/immigrants for taking their jobs.

 

[Grunkins]

is the game player similar to the game-playing scene in Consider Phlebas? I didnt enjoy that part as much.

Nope, different. I thought that section of CP was slow too.

 

[AE35Unit]

Nope, different. I thought that section of CP was slow too.

Phew, its not just me then!

 

[kenpat]

I have A Player of Games i plan to read and Hamilton i will read maybe never. Im really suspicious of big fat SF books. Old and modern SF authors of real quality can tell stories in 200-300 pages.

I enjoy serious SF too much to read big fat books for entertaiment....

Gotta disagree with you there. Love getting into a long story, providing it holds my interest. Hamilton always does. I reckon The Nights Dawn trilogy is one of the best SF series I ever read. I also like the big fat later Honor Harrington books from David Weber.
I've recently finished Convergent Space by Jon-Paul Cleary and think he could have easily expanded it by several hundred pages.
If the story's good and well told then I believe the length is irrelevant.

 

[AE35Unit]

Gotta disagree with you there. Love getting into a long story, providing it holds my interest. Hamilton always does. I reckon The Nights Dawn trilogy is one of the best SF series I ever read. I also like the big fat later Honor Harrington books from David Weber.
I've recently finished Convergent Space by Jon-Paul Cleary and think he could have easily expanded it by several hundred pages.
If the story's good and well told then I believe the length is irrelevant.

hmmm I struggle with really big books. Hamiltons epic tomes are too much for me.

 

[Vertigo]

I've never understood the problem people have with long books. How is one well written 600 page book any harder to read than two well written 300 page books read back to back. If you view your reading experience as a continuous one then I don't see that it makes any difference. That said a badly written book, or just one that doesn't suit you, is always going to leave a worse impression than a short one where the pain doesn't last long .

Historically there have always been long and short books. The works of Charles Dickens are not exactly short, Bronte's Jane Eyre is around 500 pages. Most of Jules Verne's books that I have seen are between 300 and 400 pages long.

In the early part of the 20C to make a living as an author you had to churn out lots of books; no time to write really long ones. There are lots of gems amongst those books but also lots of duds (even from the same author) and, in my view, one of the things that suffered in the shorter books was a lack of description and explanation in favour of more action that sold better. I'm not knocking those books, some of them are masterpieces, but I think it completely wrong to praise them just because they were short. The problem is that we only tend to read the best from that era and that colours our judgement of it.

Modern authors seem to be moving back towards the longer books favoured in the past. This allows them to put in more description (not loved by all), create a bigger canvas (also not loved by all) and generally create a much fuller story experience. Sure that's not always going to be to everyone's taste but, again, criticising a book just because it is long is no better than praising one just because it is short.

Also remember that many of the SF authors that produced short classic books also wrote long ones; Heinlein would be a good example (though of course many criticised him for that).

Bottom line, if it's a good story, well told, then I don't mind how long or short it is.

 

[AE35Unit]

Vertigo, we're all different! And for me at least reading a book takes time, and for me time is a precious commodity. Years ago I could sit all day reading, and so follow the story easily. But these days my reading time is precious, and often Ill read a bit here, a bit there and hold the plot in my head till next time.
The thought of reading a huge 600 page book that might take me a couple if weeks, only to find theres two more in the series to read is very off putting! Plus I find it hard to follow plots at times.

 

[Vertigo]

Yes, I can accept that AE. I guess I didn't make my first point very well. I should probably have said I don't understand people criticising a book just because it is long. As you point out some like shorter books, some longer. Neither is right or wrong, just different preferences. However I do think it wrong to criticise a book just because it is long. If it is a long bad book with lots of padding then that should be the criticism not just its length.

 

[AE35Unit]

sometimes tho a book would be better if it were shorter, i.e. if certain parts were left out or not dwelt upon. An example is Neal Asher's Gridlinked. Great story but too much minutiae in parts.

 

[clovis-man]

sometimes tho a book would be better if it were shorter, i.e. if certain parts were left out or not dwelt upon. An example is Neal Asher's Gridlinked. Great story but too much minutiae in parts.

I'm with you, at least to some degree. Part of my Goodreads review (spoilers included):

The positive side of Gridlinked revolves around the author's ability to create interesting characters, set forth a compelling conflict among those characters and describe the action using descriptions of biology and technology that are almost sufficiently detailed to qualify as "Hard SF". However, in the end, Asher writes Space Operas. Which is fine because that's what I like.

On the negative side, for this novel, the author seems to intoduce a few too many elements (and perhaps characters) into the mix, causing some muddling of the story's outcome. But, in the end, this may have been the intent. I have yet to read the rest of the Ian Cormac novels, but it appears that some characters will resurface. Mika is one. But so too are Mr. Crane, the crazed robot and the dragon. It seems that the dragon's motives continue to be a mystery and, hopefully, that will be part of the fun.

However, the parsing of the tales into separate volumes allows one to rest in between segments of the overall drama. Sort of like eating a salami; just a slice at a time. Hamilton's penchant for doorstop sized "segments" is not my cup of tea.

 

[Vertigo]

Agree the story must warrant it's length, but that is often subjective. In the case of Gridlinked there is an argument for this, but as clovis-man points out, it is the first in a series of books and many of the elements are picked up again in later books. Whether Asher really handled this well, I'm not so sure. I enjoyed the book but I only really got a good handle on it (Dragon in particular) as the series moved on.

I also agree with Clovis-man's comment of giving you a rest between chunks. At one time I used to read series back to back, nowadays I often leave several months, even a year or more, between books in a series. This does mean that I sometimes have to skim through the latter parts of the previous book to get my head back into the story but I don't have a big problem with that.

 

[AE35Unit]

i still have a problem with big books!

 

[kenpat]

I must admit I try to wait till a trilogy is complete then buy all the books at once.
I was late into Asher, so after reading Gridlinked I was able to get the rest of the series.Then of course he started to fill in the universe with other books.
The only major series' I've had to buy ad hoc are Wheel of Time and Honor Harrington, both for obvious reasons.
I sometimes, in cynical mode, wonder if some authors just turn a series into a cash cow because they know people grow attached to the stories and characters.
I also love Alastair Reynold books, do people consider them long?

 

[Vertigo]

Fairly long I'd say! But I also like Reynolds.

Re your 'cynical mode' I think is probably often true but sometimes it works the other way. Some authors get trapped by their series popularity. Weber's Harrington is a case in point (though I don't think he is too bothered by it); he had originally planned to kill Honor off and continue with her children. But found himself unable to due to fan pressure as well as a number of other factors. Conan Doyle desperately wanted to kill off Holmes but the fans just wouldn't let him. So not a new phenomenon

 

[AE35Unit]

the cash cow thing- thats how I view fantasy since the 1980s!

 

[Null_Zone]

I've never understood the problem people have with long books. How is one well written 600 page book any harder to read than two well written 300 page books read back to back.

That's the problems, so many 600 page books are little more that 400 pages of padding to reach the audiance expecations of the genre.

 

[AndrewT]

I've never understood the problem people have with long books. How is one well written 600 page book any harder to read than two well written 300 page books read back to back. If you view your reading experience as a continuous one then I don't see that it makes any difference. That said a badly written book, or just one that doesn't suit you, is always going to leave a worse impression than a short one where the pain doesn't last long .

Historically there have always been long and short books. The works of Charles Dickens are not exactly short, Bronte's Jane Eyre is around 500 pages. Most of Jules Verne's books that I have seen are between 300 and 400 pages long.

In the early part of the 20C to make a living as an author you had to churn out lots of books; no time to write really long ones. There are lots of gems amongst those books but also lots of duds (even from the same author) and, in my view, one of the things that suffered in the shorter books was a lack of description and explanation in favour of more action that sold better. I'm not knocking those books, some of them are masterpieces, but I think it completely wrong to praise them just because they were short. The problem is that we only tend to read the best from that era and that colours our judgement of it.

Modern authors seem to be moving back towards the longer books favoured in the past. This allows them to put in more description (not loved by all), create a bigger canvas (also not loved by all) and generally create a much fuller story experience. Sure that's not always going to be to everyone's taste but, again, criticising a book just because it is long is no better than praising one just because it is short.

Also remember that many of the SF authors that produced short classic books also wrote long ones; Heinlein would be a good example (though of course many criticised him for that).

Bottom line, if it's a good story, well told, then I don't mind how long or short it is.

I already bought the Night's Dawn trilogy so I feel obligated to read them and I want to after having heard many good things. My question would be how many people feel that they contain "fill" that makes them longer than necessary, or does most of the material contribute to the plot. I now have heard that the Commonwealth books are better by most people so I probably will read those as well. They are also quite long but most readers view it as worth it. I see that Hamilton's books get higher ratings at Goodreads than do Banks. I'm don't necessarily think Goodreads is the end-all arbiter but when comparing similar books in a genre that were written during the same period, it may be a reliable indicator.

 

[AndrewT]

i still have a problem with big books!

Most big books could have been made a trilogy of small books. Then would you not have a problem with them anymore? The bottom line for me is the quality of the plot and writing not the size.