i would have posted this earlier, but fasting for yom kippur made it hard to concentrate so i only just finished . . .
william gibson and bruce sterling's the difference engine
ok, i'm going to come right out and say that i didn't love this book. the story was pretty good, had a lot of potential, but it really jumped around a little too much from character to character, and then you'd never see the earlier characters again for 300 pages. i think this would have bothered me less if the book wasn't written in a pseudo-nineteenth-century style, with pretention and fraudulent delicacy (like after one sex scene, the girl is sore "down there." she also has a "mound of womanhood"). i did like the bits about leviathan mallory a lot, but he does sort of fade out of the story. everything is sort of all tied together at the end, though the last twenty pages (of fake news articles and weird personal reflections and whatnot) really lost me.
it's not that this book was bad. i think i was just disappointed, since it had such a cool idea, but its execution just didn't do it for me,
thanks for lending it to me, though, georg. i hope my comment didn't offend you!!
3 comments:
Are you at all interested in Pattern Recognition? It's very different, and 100% Gibson. :) (MIke)
is 100 percent gibson something i am more inclined to like, or less? :)
i actually have books up through 95 ready to go, which should keep me busy for a little while.
I'd say 100% Gibson is a good thing... I don't really like Sterling's stuff very much, and although i did enjoy the Difference Engine, it was too obvious to me that there were too many hands in the pot at once. It'll still be kicking around if you manage to run out of books.
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