Books I Loathed discussion
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Unnecessary cruelty: Chung Kuo and The Chronoliths
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I was put off by the incidental actions more than the actual story. Maybe that was the main problem in how I read it. I felt pages that should have been cut were left in to be "tuff" rather than to advance the action. I didn't find the major plot very compelling, though, so I may have missed the connection.
I'll give it another try in a couple of years. I find I like a lot of books more after a bit of digestion. I just had that happen with The Fat White Vampire Blues.

Needless brutality in novels can be a big turn-off, though, especially when it lends NOTHING to the story, and sometimes when it actually does. Case in point: Stephen Donaldson's Gap series. The first book is ... nasty, brutish and short ... but it sets up the rest of the series, which I enjoyed a lot more.

But since it does support the story, I'm willing to let it go. I'm certainly willing to understand people who don't. I similarly like the Elric Saga, which one of my friends once called five hundred pages of papercuts down the reader's wrist.
It's hurting the characters just to hurt them as though that qualifies as character development that really bugs me.
The worst example I can think of is the prevalent meme in certain classes on modern fantasy and horror whereby the heroine has to have ben raped to be tough enough to be a heroine. Cheap, offensive, and even good writers fall into it as a trope of the genre.


Mind you, I'm a Mishima fan too, so perhaps I'm just weird.
I discovered later that the friend who had loaned it to me had suggested I stop around 300 pages in, to get the entertaining setup and not read the rape.
The Chronoliths isn't nearly as bad, but it is another case of an author being told to "make things hard on the protagonist" and not knowing why. It is filled with repeared violence and cruely that doesn't drive the plot anywhere; in fact, it gets in the way of the plot. I suspect the authro wanted to show that he could write that kind of violence but didn't know how to make it part of the story.