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avramI finished Ventus (by Karl Schroeder) last night. The front-cover blurb, from Vernor Vinge, is a prime example of the sort of thing you’d only find being used as promotional copy on an SF novel: “milestone in science fiction about nanotech and fine-grained distributed systems”. Yeah, that’s gonna have ’em lining up to buy it. It’s the Citizen Kane of fine-grained distributed system novels.
It’s a good book, but not a great one. I’d have liked it a whole lot when I was a teenager — it’s got good action set-pieces, things going on at a number of scales, some clever surprises, and manages to give all the characters motivations that don’t just boil down to being good or evil. I thought Schroeder spent too much time telling us what the characters were feeling rather than letting us see it in their actions, and the prose style seemed flat. I kept wondering what China Miéville would have done with the descriptions of the Diadem swans and Heaven hooks.
It’s a good book, but not a great one. I’d have liked it a whole lot when I was a teenager — it’s got good action set-pieces, things going on at a number of scales, some clever surprises, and manages to give all the characters motivations that don’t just boil down to being good or evil. I thought Schroeder spent too much time telling us what the characters were feeling rather than letting us see it in their actions, and the prose style seemed flat. I kept wondering what China Miéville would have done with the descriptions of the Diadem swans and Heaven hooks.