I finished Mieville's PERDIDO STREET STATION a couple weeks
ago. I was sorta disappointed. His writing just rolls with
talent, but it seems like he skimped a bit on the discipline
side of things. He does a great job describing and setting
the mood in a huge sprawling city called New Crobuzon, and he
develops a couple good characters, but the ending the was
totally unsatisfying. My strongest objection is that I didn't
think it was true to character. Another complaint about the
end is that it didn't tie any loose threads together. I know
that there's a modern trend to do this purposely for an artsy
appeal, but it seemed to me that he simply wrote the book
with no idea of how it was going to end and when it was time,
he just wrapped it up quick and dirty.
I don't mean to be bad-mouthing him so hard. The book had the
potential to be utterly fantastic. As it was, it was just OK.
I still like his writing. I bought THE SCAR and look forward
to reading it.
Shifting gears, I was watching Twilight Zone a couple nights
ago and I noticed that Richard Matheson (I AM LEGEND) got a
big credit at the beginning. The episode was called "Steel"
and Lee Marvin was in it. It was set in the future (1968)
when robots boxed instead of people. It wasn't very
good.
Happy new year,
miker
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 03 Jan 2004 EST