Danny McG
"Anything can happen in the next half hour!"
The Last Storm by Tim Lebbon.
A post climate-fail apocalypse story
A post climate-fail apocalypse story
DNF - it seemed more urban fantasy and I couldn't get into itThe Last Storm by Tim Lebbon.
A post climate-fail apocalypse story
Yes I've given up getting riled by misogyny in books from that era (actually, no, I do still get riled but I go in expecting it!) although here it wasn't really misogyny but rather just relegating women to also ran status. And yes it all seemed a bit extreme and also a bit storm in a teacup territory towards the end apart from the slightly ridiculous galaxy domination bit.I read it for the first time this year, too, but I was happy with it right up until the denouement when as far as I'm concerned it all fell apart. I managed to suspend disbelief as far as Daneel's acceptance was concerned and Baley's inability to comprehend things, and though I was narked by Gladia's characterisation I could cope, but the motive behind the killing was just unbelievable and unless I missed something important, the events of and immediately after the murder had a plot-hole a mile wide! Interesting ideas but deeply flawed as a murder mystery was my verdict.
Solaria produces shiny mechanical robots. Daneel is a fleshy being, more like an android, and is the only one of his kind in the galaxy. Besides which, the notion of a robot pretending to be a human would never occur to most humans. It's something like not believing a country can produce advanced fighter jets, yet fail to spot a stealth plane when the first one flew. On the second item, societies as extreme as Earth's and Solaria's will have a very hard time understanding each other. Most people don't even understand their own societies and certainly have a hard time understanding others' so it's not odd at all to me that Baley would have trouble with Solaria, though he does grasp it sufficiently in the end. In fact, they have an even harder time with his society.Does Asmov really expect me to believe that the residents of a planet producing the most advanced robots in the galaxy can be fooled into believing Daneel was not a robot? Especially when all his dialogue is, frankly, so robot-like. And it became very frustrating how Baley is constantly being blind-sided by the attitudes of the population. Asimov explained them very well early on and each time whatever caught Baley out just seemed incredibly obvious to me.
Lust for power (however sublimated) seems believable to me. Out of curiosity, if you could put the plot-hole in spoiler tags, I'd like to know about it. I had various quibbles myself though I didn't feel anything was too major.the motive behind the killing was just unbelievable and unless I missed something important, the events of and immediately after the murder had a plot-hole a mile wide!
Apart from the agraphobia I didn't feel Baley's cultural environment was all that different to ours and yet I had no problem getting the Solarian culture which is why I found Baley's difficulty with it difficult to accept. Yes we all have difficulties understanding other cultures but Asimov had done a good job of explaining the Solarian culture to the reader sufficient for me to be unsurprsied by all the things that Baley seemed to be surprised by. I just found that a little difficult to accept as reasonable.On the second item, societies as extreme as Earth's and Solaria's will have a very hard time understanding each other. Most people don't even understand their own societies and certainly have a hard time understanding others' so it's not odd at all to me that Baley would have trouble with Solaria, though he does grasp it sufficiently in the end. In fact, they have an even harder time with his society.
Out of curiosity, if you could put the plot-hole in spoiler tags, I'd like to know about it. I had various quibbles myself though I didn't feel anything was too major.
TLoL progress from something like a memoir to a mystery to fantasy to horror. Carroll habitually goes low-key, understating rather that pushing the drama. I find in the best of his work I've read I like that approach.The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll. There's something eerie about books within books: The Dumas Club by Arturo Perez-Reverte is perhaps the best example. The Land of Laughs is about a man who travels to the home town of his favourite novelist (a children's writer whose books sound like a cross between Dr Seuss and Alice) to write his biography. Things become stranger and stranger, and move from comedy-drama to a small town magic-realist story that reminded me of Ray Bradbury and Stephen King.
Overall, it's a good read. It feels slightly underplayed, as the weird events take a long time to appear, and the book takes a massive turn about a third from the end. The actual ending is powerful and ultimately creepy.
I've read Voice of His Shadow, Bones of the Moon, The Marriage of Sticks and From the Teeth of Angels. I really liked the first, enjoyed the next, was a bit meh about Marriage and felt the last was missing something, that it didn't quite work for me. I've also read a handful of his short stories and there's not one I wouldn't recommend; even the one I wasn't fond of "Mr. Fiddlehead" wasn't bad and "The Sadness of Detail" and "The Panic Hand" are excellent.Are the rest of his books good? I don't think I'll forget TLoL soon. I'd love to see what Marshall France's books were like.