Thank you. I like Priest's rant a lot. I agree with him about Mieville &
Stross; the others I'm mostly not familiar with. But the citations he gives as
evidence of bad writing are convincing to me, and his literary values seem
legitimate to me, and much like my own.
In particular, I've never been able to finish a book by Stross; they do exude
intelligence, but Priest's characterization of them as hyper-Internet puppies
is perfect. Puppies are cute but often exhausting, totally self-absorbed, and
all too often a colossal pain in the ass. I want to like Stross's books because
he himself seems like a nice guy and he is clearly very, very smart. But his
books always end up reminding me of the "tripping on LSD sequence" of grade B
1970's movies, and Lord knows how excruciating they are.
I've read one book by Greg Bear ("Blood Music"). It was so pedestrian as to be
embarrassing. I've heard some good things about some of this other books, but
having read Blood Music all the way through, I doubt that I'll ever read
another Greg Bear book, no matter how many good things I hear about it. Life is
short.
I much enjoyed Mieville's Perdido Street Station, although I thought the ending
was extremely lame. I've had copies of his other books on my shelves for years
-- given to me by his American editor in those faraway days when said editor
was courting me (that is, talking with me about publishing my books). However,
after having read Perdido, I've never felt much driven to read his other books.
SF curmudgeons of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your hipness!
jrs
On Mar 29, 2012, at 10:07 PM, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
>
> After this very epic Christopher Priest rant that udupa pointed me to
> elsewhere ..
> http://www.christopher-priest.co.uk/journal/1077/hull-0-scunthorpe-3/
>
> Charlie Stross' twitter feed has a cute puppy display pic and there are
> tshirts too. https://twitter.com/#!/cstross/status/185353259169488897
>
> Sad / funny thing is I don't quite disagree with Priest - at least because he
> appears to share my taste for "old style" SF .. Poul Anderson, Frederick
> Pohl, various of the older Baen authors etc, and the few bits of Stross I've
> skimmed through aren't as much to my taste as they probably should be.
>
> --
> Suresh Ramasubramanian ([email protected])
>
