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Choosing Where To Start
Oct. 11th, 2009 04:24 pmApr 2009
The Family Trade - Charles Stross - Tor, 2004
* * *
All hail Dave Langford, author of one of the funniest novels I have ever read (The Leaky Establishment) and book reviewer par excellence. His Critical Mass columns in White Dwarf magazine were an important part of my development as a teenage SF reader. It was his favourable review of an obscure paperback called The Colour of Magic that has enabled me to follow the journey of Terry Pratchett from his humble origins in fantasy geekdom to his current eminence as knight of the realm for services to literature, one of the minor pleasures of my adult life.
Sadly, Critical Mass went the way of all flesh when White Dwarf became Games Workshop's house magazine, and in the absence of such authorities, it is hard for even a dedicated reader to identify a good author just as he or she gets going. This means that more often than not, a reader wanting to try an author new to them has to choose where in their existing body of work to start. The obvious place - their most famous or best reviewed book - is like having sex on a first date. You may be more motivated to continue the relationship, but there is nothing to look forward to. Starting with a lesser work, on the other hand, may result in disappointment but at least means that next time it could be better. With my strategist's mind, I generally adopt the latter approach. Reading is after all a lifetime activity; true classics are rare and I don't want to be stuck in old age with only second-rate books to read.
So to Charles Stross. He has a reputation as an energetic ideas man, one of the young(ish) Turks of British SF along with Alastair Reynolds, Peter S. Hamilton, Ian McDonald and China Miéville (depressingly, British women science fiction writers are noticeable by their absence: Justina Robson is the only one that I can think of). His most well-reviewed novels - Iron Sunrise, Singularity Sky and Saturn's Children - are space operas, but his most recent work has been a fantasy sequence called The Merchant Princes. Following Zerothin's Law of Genre-hopping, I reckoned that the latter would be the weaker work and therefore the place to start. I think - I hope - that I was right.
( Read more... )
The Family Trade - Charles Stross - Tor, 2004
* * *
All hail Dave Langford, author of one of the funniest novels I have ever read (The Leaky Establishment) and book reviewer par excellence. His Critical Mass columns in White Dwarf magazine were an important part of my development as a teenage SF reader. It was his favourable review of an obscure paperback called The Colour of Magic that has enabled me to follow the journey of Terry Pratchett from his humble origins in fantasy geekdom to his current eminence as knight of the realm for services to literature, one of the minor pleasures of my adult life.
Sadly, Critical Mass went the way of all flesh when White Dwarf became Games Workshop's house magazine, and in the absence of such authorities, it is hard for even a dedicated reader to identify a good author just as he or she gets going. This means that more often than not, a reader wanting to try an author new to them has to choose where in their existing body of work to start. The obvious place - their most famous or best reviewed book - is like having sex on a first date. You may be more motivated to continue the relationship, but there is nothing to look forward to. Starting with a lesser work, on the other hand, may result in disappointment but at least means that next time it could be better. With my strategist's mind, I generally adopt the latter approach. Reading is after all a lifetime activity; true classics are rare and I don't want to be stuck in old age with only second-rate books to read.
So to Charles Stross. He has a reputation as an energetic ideas man, one of the young(ish) Turks of British SF along with Alastair Reynolds, Peter S. Hamilton, Ian McDonald and China Miéville (depressingly, British women science fiction writers are noticeable by their absence: Justina Robson is the only one that I can think of). His most well-reviewed novels - Iron Sunrise, Singularity Sky and Saturn's Children - are space operas, but his most recent work has been a fantasy sequence called The Merchant Princes. Following Zerothin's Law of Genre-hopping, I reckoned that the latter would be the weaker work and therefore the place to start. I think - I hope - that I was right.
( Read more... )