Goodreads | Sam's review

Sam's review

Sam's review
rating:
bookshelves: science-fiction

Pretty good for a first novel and a real page-turner.

This novel was highly enjoyable and has several things going for it: it's imaginative, the prose is good, the plot works well, and the main character is likable.

It also has some things that bother me: the dialog is "overly clever" - that is that every, and I mean EVERY, exchange between the main character and his friends includes some high degree of verbal irony, witty remark, and satire, all of which loses some amount of reality for the characters - also the characters are mostly very shallowly developed, which includes the main character who is not as well-developed as one would like in a novel about war, and a final problem - though some might not see it as such - is that this novel doesn't say anything. By that, I mean that it presents sentiments that are both pro-war and against it as absurd, yet it develops neither. This leads to the obvious observation that this novel is primarily just an entertaining stor...more Pretty good for a first novel and a real page-turner.

This novel was highly enjoyable and has several things going for it: it's imaginative, the prose is good, the plot works well, and the main character is likable.

It also has some things that bother me: the dialog is "overly clever" - that is that every, and I mean EVERY, exchange between the main character and his friends includes some high degree of verbal irony, witty remark, and satire, all of which loses some amount of reality for the characters - also the characters are mostly very shallowly developed, which includes the main character who is not as well-developed as one would like in a novel about war, and a final problem - though some might not see it as such - is that this novel doesn't say anything. By that, I mean that it presents sentiments that are both pro-war and against it as absurd, yet it develops neither. This leads to the obvious observation that this novel is primarily just an entertaining story about war.

Some minor things that also could have been better are the differentiation between genders, he seems to have committed the Heinlein error of writing masculine females to a higher degree than Heinlein himself ever did, though this might be expected from the admitted Heinlein influence. Also, the relationships between characters were not as believable as they could have been (an example being that between John and Jane, which seems preposterously simple considering the circumstances). A final comment is upon his kitsch use of introducing technology through obviously staged dialog where one character just so happens to have supreme knowledge of the thing in question and is only too happy to explain it in excruciating detail (this happens several times with the same character even!). I won't presume to attribute these things to anything, but hope to see improvement in future novels by this writer, whom I will undoubtedly read in the future, though without expectation of a thought-provoking read.

Anyways, a summary of the above ramblings might read as such: Scalzi is a very creative writer, having many great ideas that he's able to synthesize for a unique read, but his much lauded style (in my opinion unjustly lauded) leaves many things to be desired....less

Like this review? yes flag

comments (showing 0-0 of 0)

all Sam's books »