De Gutibus. I Guess.

On the flight back from Readercon I found myself with only one book to read. I'm not going to tell you the title or author or the publisher, because I'm not a reviewer, which means I'm only going to use this space to review books I adore. I made my way through this book because I had nothing else to read, and because the book's editor had sent it to me in the hopes that I would like it and talk it up and help it garner some buzz. And indeed, the ideas in the book were very interesting. Unfortunately, it wasn't a good book. Some of the problems seem to have been in the editing: I don't know if that particular publishing house has been skimping on copy-editors, but there were sentences I needed to read several times before I could parse them. There were grammatical problems that have not yet been consigned to the "hey, it's the way people are doing it these days" slag heap. And there was a murkiness of motive and action that transcended mere sentence structure, and which I'm not sure I could have fixed without rewriting the whole book.

More than that, the book suffered from what I think of as Hateful-Character disease. It's a dystopian novel with many sides in contention for survival, and you don't expect them to be serving cookies and hot chocolate. But everyone in the book is brutal in their quests for advantage over everyone else. There are two people who look out for each other, sometimes, but otherwise it's all about everyone dominating everyone else, and it gets wearying. Worse still, I was hard-pressed to figure out whose solution to the dystopian crisis I was supposed to be rooting for.

I get the feeling that some writers (and movie makers and even audiences) believe that loathesome=authentic. Yes, life in times of turmoil is brutish and dangerous, and has been so for millenia. But that doesn't mean that everyone in a time of turmoil is vicious. That there is no generosity or loyalty or any of the other squishy virtues. A dystopia that doesn't show people attempting to be greater than their basest nature despite the ugliness of their surroundings doesn't work for me, because after a while I start thinking that all the people I'm reading about don't really deserve any better than they've got. And yet, the editor who bought it, and the author, and the people who wrote blurbs for the cover, must have found this a compelling story.

In other words, I am not the target audience for this book. I hope that the author gets a chance to grow a little--despite its shortcomings, the setup and ideas in the book were intriguing. But no, there will be no buzz from my little corner of the universe, and I feel a little bad about it.

And my Trip Report

...is over here, because if I do one for LJ and one for my website I will never get any writing done.

Short form: I had fun. I did cool stuff. I talked with cool people* (whom I do not namecheck, because). There you go.