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Title: Time Pressure
Author: Spider Robinson
Genre: Science Fiction (second in trilogy)
Thingummies: 2.5
Synopsis: A hippie finds a glowing egg in the woods with a naked woman inside. Turns out she's a time traveler.
Thoughts: So while this is the second book in the Lifehouse/Deathkiller trilogy, it doesn't actually feel like it until three chapters from the end. In which he does the exact same exposition dump thing as in the previous book, only even more egregiously.
This was written several years after Mindkiller, and the maturation shows. There are hints of humor missing from the earlier book, and his character-building is far better done. (And I'd liked the characters in the previous book.) Unfortunately, the protagonist gradually reveals himself to be rather problematic, deliberately so. It's plot-necessary, it turns out. But it means you spend the entire book embedded in the head of someone leaping to conclusions and saying, "no, that makes no sense, you don't have enough evidence to believe that." Twice, his conclusions turn out to be exactly right, which is ridiculous. The third time, his conclusion (the most exasperating of all) does turn out to be desperately, desperately wrong. But I'd spent so much time being annoyed that by the time Sam realizes his mistake, I'd already written him off.
It does not help that most of the intricately, beautifully drawn secondary characters are also annoying as hell. Especially the Sunrise commune gang, most of whom I suspect were modeled after neighbors of the author, lovingly drawing on their strengths and flaws. Unfortunately, since I didn't have a preexisting affection for them, I just found them all annoying. I think perhaps I'm the wrong person for this book--I see very little romantic about the hippie commune model of arguing over every last thing to achieve a consensus. I've been in that dynamic--it's never really a consensus (and it isn't here), it's just the strong personalities bullying weaker personalities into agreeing, but forcing them to also declare that their previous resistance was a form of psychological weakness and "hang ups" in the process.
But really, it's the ending. The never-fully-justified, near-death experience ending that just dumps all the info that's been withheld in the most graceless manner possible. The problem I'm seeing here is that Robinson wants to write about huge, universe-shattering ideas in theory, but in practice he actually writes about small people dealing with small problems. There's nothing wrong with that, only he has the grand master plan running in the background and can't figure out a way to tie them together. There is brilliant work to be done about people trying to live everyday lives in the shadow of world-shaking events. (Constellation Games is one I've read recently.) But you can't make your big events the secretive conspiracy based kind if you want that to be your plot. But Robinson wants to have his cake and eat it too--he keeps his characters, and thus his readers, entirely in the dark, and then substitutes a grand reveal for a climax. "Here's what actually was going on all along, which no one ever could have guessed! Oh, and I guess that fixes your little piddly problem, too." It's a cheat. The characters couldn't have guessed because the author refused to tell them.
Oh, and I'm really tired of hearing about every woman's magnificent tits. Repeatedly. The amount of sex and pot use in both books goes beyond gratuitous into annoying.
There's a third book. I read the first two chapters. There's a deep, heart-rending scene about a daughter watching her mother die in the hospital. Which is promptly dropped for a sex-and-drugs scene. I like Robinson's character-building quite a bit. But I'm done with the sex, drugs, and exposition. Maybe I'll try the Callahan series at some point, but I'm not finishing this one.
Author: Spider Robinson
Genre: Science Fiction (second in trilogy)
Thingummies: 2.5
Synopsis: A hippie finds a glowing egg in the woods with a naked woman inside. Turns out she's a time traveler.
Thoughts: So while this is the second book in the Lifehouse/Deathkiller trilogy, it doesn't actually feel like it until three chapters from the end. In which he does the exact same exposition dump thing as in the previous book, only even more egregiously.
This was written several years after Mindkiller, and the maturation shows. There are hints of humor missing from the earlier book, and his character-building is far better done. (And I'd liked the characters in the previous book.) Unfortunately, the protagonist gradually reveals himself to be rather problematic, deliberately so. It's plot-necessary, it turns out. But it means you spend the entire book embedded in the head of someone leaping to conclusions and saying, "no, that makes no sense, you don't have enough evidence to believe that." Twice, his conclusions turn out to be exactly right, which is ridiculous. The third time, his conclusion (the most exasperating of all) does turn out to be desperately, desperately wrong. But I'd spent so much time being annoyed that by the time Sam realizes his mistake, I'd already written him off.
It does not help that most of the intricately, beautifully drawn secondary characters are also annoying as hell. Especially the Sunrise commune gang, most of whom I suspect were modeled after neighbors of the author, lovingly drawing on their strengths and flaws. Unfortunately, since I didn't have a preexisting affection for them, I just found them all annoying. I think perhaps I'm the wrong person for this book--I see very little romantic about the hippie commune model of arguing over every last thing to achieve a consensus. I've been in that dynamic--it's never really a consensus (and it isn't here), it's just the strong personalities bullying weaker personalities into agreeing, but forcing them to also declare that their previous resistance was a form of psychological weakness and "hang ups" in the process.
But really, it's the ending. The never-fully-justified, near-death experience ending that just dumps all the info that's been withheld in the most graceless manner possible. The problem I'm seeing here is that Robinson wants to write about huge, universe-shattering ideas in theory, but in practice he actually writes about small people dealing with small problems. There's nothing wrong with that, only he has the grand master plan running in the background and can't figure out a way to tie them together. There is brilliant work to be done about people trying to live everyday lives in the shadow of world-shaking events. (Constellation Games is one I've read recently.) But you can't make your big events the secretive conspiracy based kind if you want that to be your plot. But Robinson wants to have his cake and eat it too--he keeps his characters, and thus his readers, entirely in the dark, and then substitutes a grand reveal for a climax. "Here's what actually was going on all along, which no one ever could have guessed! Oh, and I guess that fixes your little piddly problem, too." It's a cheat. The characters couldn't have guessed because the author refused to tell them.
Oh, and I'm really tired of hearing about every woman's magnificent tits. Repeatedly. The amount of sex and pot use in both books goes beyond gratuitous into annoying.
There's a third book. I read the first two chapters. There's a deep, heart-rending scene about a daughter watching her mother die in the hospital. Which is promptly dropped for a sex-and-drugs scene. I like Robinson's character-building quite a bit. But I'm done with the sex, drugs, and exposition. Maybe I'll try the Callahan series at some point, but I'm not finishing this one.
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Date: 2012-10-15 12:02 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2012-10-15 12:25 am (UTC)From:no subject
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