![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
2012 Book Review #97: The Sagan Diary
Title: The Sagan Diary
Author: John Scalzi
Genre: Science fiction (companion piece to series)
Thingummies: 2
Synopsis: Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades, from Jane's point of view.
Thoughts: This is a short piece, I'm guessing novella length. (I read it as part of a collection of Scalzi's Subterranean Press works, and wasn't paying that much attention to length.) The backstory is that it was written in memorial to someone, which makes it feel churlish to complain, but I'm going to anyway.
Don't bother reading this unless you're so desperately in love with the OMW universe that you're completely pining away. Even then, it's not really worth the effort. We learn nothing particularly new--mostly this is just Jane musing on her philosophy of life. It would have been interesting at maybe a quarter of the length, but it just goes on forever.
What it really feels like is one of those writing exercises, where you try to get into the head of your character by interviewing them. Those aren't meant to be published, though. There's nothing here that's revelatory--everything was implied well enough in the original works that Jane's beliefs shown through. The exhaustive rehash is just that--exhausting.
Still, Scalzi's a decent enough writer that this is still better than some other crap I've read this year, so it get a 2.
Author: John Scalzi
Genre: Science fiction (companion piece to series)
Thingummies: 2
Synopsis: Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades, from Jane's point of view.
Thoughts: This is a short piece, I'm guessing novella length. (I read it as part of a collection of Scalzi's Subterranean Press works, and wasn't paying that much attention to length.) The backstory is that it was written in memorial to someone, which makes it feel churlish to complain, but I'm going to anyway.
Don't bother reading this unless you're so desperately in love with the OMW universe that you're completely pining away. Even then, it's not really worth the effort. We learn nothing particularly new--mostly this is just Jane musing on her philosophy of life. It would have been interesting at maybe a quarter of the length, but it just goes on forever.
What it really feels like is one of those writing exercises, where you try to get into the head of your character by interviewing them. Those aren't meant to be published, though. There's nothing here that's revelatory--everything was implied well enough in the original works that Jane's beliefs shown through. The exhaustive rehash is just that--exhausting.
Still, Scalzi's a decent enough writer that this is still better than some other crap I've read this year, so it get a 2.