Still reading "The Miocene Arrow"
Oct. 23rd, 2003 04:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avramJeez, it’s taking me for fucking ever to finish Sean McMullen’s The Miocene Arrow. I’m liking it, though not as much as I liked its predecessor, Souls in the Great Machine, but still, it’s something of a slog.
The thing I really like about these books is the professions, the gun-slinging librarians of Great Machine, the aristocratic airplane pilots of Arrow. And the convincing details McMullen builds around the professions, the engineers and other support personnel who care about the weird things that specialists always care about: the train engineers in Great Machine who get into fistfights arguing over rail gauges, the discussion in Arrow of whether the first female pilot can wear a man’s colors on her sleeve.
But The Miocene Arrow is almost 600 pages long, and it doesn’t have 600 pages worth of good stuff. It is, like most modern SF and fantasy genre fiction, just too damn long, and stuffed full of details about a war that I don’t really care all that much about.
Maybe I should shut up and just go reread The Stars My Destination again.
The thing I really like about these books is the professions, the gun-slinging librarians of Great Machine, the aristocratic airplane pilots of Arrow. And the convincing details McMullen builds around the professions, the engineers and other support personnel who care about the weird things that specialists always care about: the train engineers in Great Machine who get into fistfights arguing over rail gauges, the discussion in Arrow of whether the first female pilot can wear a man’s colors on her sleeve.
But The Miocene Arrow is almost 600 pages long, and it doesn’t have 600 pages worth of good stuff. It is, like most modern SF and fantasy genre fiction, just too damn long, and stuffed full of details about a war that I don’t really care all that much about.
Maybe I should shut up and just go reread The Stars My Destination again.
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Date: 2003-10-23 03:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-25 05:19 pm (UTC)My favorite of Tanith Lee's Flat Earth books is the first, Night's Master. It's also very short. My second is the third, Delusion's Master, about as short.
Parke Godwin's Firelord is about 370 pages, which is still shorter than White's Once and Future King, or Bradley's Mists of Avalon -- and Mists is longer than Bradshaw's entire Arthurian trilogy.
There are plenty of good long books. I liked Vinge's The Snow Queen, which really did need every page. OTOH, her Summer Queen was dull, and nearly twice the length.
Little, Big is not exactly short, but it is good.