Through reading A Deepness in the Sky, a single thought kept crossing my mind..."the spiders seem to be more human and deeply characterized than 90% of the actual humans in this book". That might just be a product of the author introducing a device which strips humans of their natural personalities...or of the fact that the author deliberately chose to completely remove most emotions from most of the humans. Sure, you get good characters like Pham Nuwen, or the occasion emotional outburst from Ezr...but on the whole, i felt that the human side of the book was very inhuman, and fell into the analytical trappings that bind most science fiction. In my experience this seems to happen often in this type of science fiction...the author gets so hung up in the science, and the overly drawn out plot, that he often forgets that what makes a story great are the characters that drive it.
On the converse, you have Sherkaner Underhill, a brilliant mad scientist far ahead of his time. I felt that he was the best character in the book, simply because he had a human aspect that nobody else had; the desire to explore. everbody else had these paper thin motives...i want to rule everything...i want to get my 45 year old girlfriend back...i want Thomas to love me because apparently i am a 30 year old with a 13 year olds emotions...but not Sherkaner, he had the completly human desire to explore the possibilities that his imagination had thought up. And one of those possibilities was complete social reform on a deep level. It was if he was Einstein, Oppenheimer, Columbus and Joan of Arc all rolled into a spider...who didnt actually know any real science. He even had an evil religious antagonist to bring him down.
all in all i found the book interesting, but the length was not needed...at all. it was well written (unlike this blog), but the story just didnt want to get to the story till about 200 pages from the end. i give it possibly a B+...A-?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
200 pages too long and it gets a b+? i agree it was lengthy, and cutting out a lot of what amounts to filler would have made it much faster paced and interesting read. but i give it a c. and here's the scale:
1-50: oh. it got published. your book has...words. that's nice.
60-70: eh.
80-90: wow. that was a good book. i will recommend this book.
90-100: holy crap, this book changed my perception of reality, and i will start jihads over it.
i totally agree with you, in that Sherkaner was way more humanized than the actual human characters. And the 45 year old girlfriend bit - when you stop and look at it from that perspective, it really is pretty darn funny.
Post a Comment