10-13-2011, 02:24 PM
Brasyl by Ian McDonald (2007)
At first blush this reads like a Doom wet dream: fencing, martial arts (capoeira), quantum knives, manyworlds spacetime-slipping, etc. But I'm not going to recommend it. I suspect some of you have read it and maybe even reviewed it (Greg? Yeti?), though I don't see it on the current BB. Maybe you liked it. A lot of people like Ian McDonald. The SF community is raving about him. There's no question he has a prodigious mind.
But he totally buried me. His vocabulary is out of this world. He uses a lot of Portugese in this one, and wouldn't you know it, I was halfway through (and totally bewildered) before discovering a glossary in the back. But even that wouldn't have helped much. His style is hyperbolic. Each scene is so pyrotechnically described--
Just a sec. Lady Cranefly is shouting something to me. She wants me to look up "eyeball kick" in the Turkey City Lexicon. What the hey? What language is SHE speaking?
Okay, I guess the lexicon is a shorthand for critiquing writers in writers workshops. I found it here:
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer-for-sf-workshops/">http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/turkey-city ... workshops/</a><!-- m -->
And here's what it says about eyeball kick:
Eyeball Kick
Vivid, telling details that create a kaleidoscopic effect of swarming visual imagery against a baroquely elaborate SF background. One ideal of cyberpunk SF was to create a “crammed prose” full of “eyeball kicks.” (Attr. Rudy Rucker)
Yep, that's what I mean. It overwhelmed me to the point I couldn't get into the characters. I finished the book, but it was painful, and I wanted everyone to die horribly because I just really didn't give an eff.
But here's the thing. The SF field kowtows to Ian McDonald. Almost everything he writes gets rave reviews. When he's up for an award, he wins (unless he's up against Connie Willis, whose popularity makes her largely invincible (even when she writes sloppily and poorly). (She can write some brilliant stuff, but not lately.)
I readily accept the fact that McDonald is brilliant. I'm in awe of his command of language. Some of his descriptions are absolute masterpieces. But so far I'm finding him unreadable. I just tried his short novel Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone, but it seems too religious for my tastes, and again I was impatient to find a character I cared about. Then I tried Ares Express, which borrows the same world (a future Mars) as Demolition Road (which I haven't read). Again I found myself struggling to get into the characters (the POV character is a 16-year-old girl, which might have something to do with it).
I'm going to give Dervish House a try (when it becomes available at the library), because everyone is raving about that one. Maybe then I'll finally grok Ian McDonald. Because up to now I've been groping about in his prodigious mind but I can't find handholds or footholds, and somehow I fall through the cracks, and it's reaching the point where I might have to accept my own mediocrity and inability to appreciate true genius.
At first blush this reads like a Doom wet dream: fencing, martial arts (capoeira), quantum knives, manyworlds spacetime-slipping, etc. But I'm not going to recommend it. I suspect some of you have read it and maybe even reviewed it (Greg? Yeti?), though I don't see it on the current BB. Maybe you liked it. A lot of people like Ian McDonald. The SF community is raving about him. There's no question he has a prodigious mind.
But he totally buried me. His vocabulary is out of this world. He uses a lot of Portugese in this one, and wouldn't you know it, I was halfway through (and totally bewildered) before discovering a glossary in the back. But even that wouldn't have helped much. His style is hyperbolic. Each scene is so pyrotechnically described--
Just a sec. Lady Cranefly is shouting something to me. She wants me to look up "eyeball kick" in the Turkey City Lexicon. What the hey? What language is SHE speaking?
Okay, I guess the lexicon is a shorthand for critiquing writers in writers workshops. I found it here:
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer-for-sf-workshops/">http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/turkey-city ... workshops/</a><!-- m -->
And here's what it says about eyeball kick:
Eyeball Kick
Vivid, telling details that create a kaleidoscopic effect of swarming visual imagery against a baroquely elaborate SF background. One ideal of cyberpunk SF was to create a “crammed prose” full of “eyeball kicks.” (Attr. Rudy Rucker)
Yep, that's what I mean. It overwhelmed me to the point I couldn't get into the characters. I finished the book, but it was painful, and I wanted everyone to die horribly because I just really didn't give an eff.
But here's the thing. The SF field kowtows to Ian McDonald. Almost everything he writes gets rave reviews. When he's up for an award, he wins (unless he's up against Connie Willis, whose popularity makes her largely invincible (even when she writes sloppily and poorly). (She can write some brilliant stuff, but not lately.)
I readily accept the fact that McDonald is brilliant. I'm in awe of his command of language. Some of his descriptions are absolute masterpieces. But so far I'm finding him unreadable. I just tried his short novel Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone, but it seems too religious for my tastes, and again I was impatient to find a character I cared about. Then I tried Ares Express, which borrows the same world (a future Mars) as Demolition Road (which I haven't read). Again I found myself struggling to get into the characters (the POV character is a 16-year-old girl, which might have something to do with it).
I'm going to give Dervish House a try (when it becomes available at the library), because everyone is raving about that one. Maybe then I'll finally grok Ian McDonald. Because up to now I've been groping about in his prodigious mind but I can't find handholds or footholds, and somehow I fall through the cracks, and it's reaching the point where I might have to accept my own mediocrity and inability to appreciate true genius.
