ed_rex

Tuesday afternoon saw me on Java's patio for the first time in quite a while, scribbling in a notebook with a pint near to hand. Yes, I have actually been writing at long last! Nothing that I am yet willing to show anyone, but the mere fact of putting pen to page for something other than a blog leaves me glowing, just a little.

I have also been reading. Tuesday morning saw me discover a new bookshop on Roncesvalles, where I picked up Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I managed to read a couple of hundred pages before making my way downtown. And, downtown at Java, a couple of gentlemen at a nearby table were discussing some to do with Harry Potter, loudly enough that I feared I would be struck down by a dreaded spoiler.

I first tried the old stick-your-fingers-in-your-ears-while-mumbling, but found that was conducive neither to writing nor drinking, nor even to smoking. Also, I suspected it made me look a tad sillier than even I do normally. I finally removed myself to the back of the patio and waited until they - happily - took their loud leave a few minutes later.

That said, I finished the final Potter volume yesterday, and I will do my best to avoid loosing any spoilers below, though in my ever-so-humble opinion, there isn't much to spoil.

Obviously, given that I read all 600 pages of the book over a 30-hour period, J.K. Rowling's words are as compulsively readable as ever. And possibly, her prose has improved significantly. At the very least, I noticed far few extraneous adjectives accompanying the dialogue (eg, "he said crossly, happily", &ct).

Other than that, though, the book was a let-down. As one very long climax, it lacked dramatic tension and none of the surprises surprised me all.

The final 125 or so pages consist of a battle for Hogwarts, as the good guys and bad guys line up to (mostly) cast spells at one another. While I kept turning the pages, the battle scene - despite its length - felt more like it was meant for the silver screen than to be prose.

The novel - and by extension, the series - lacks pathos and I closed the book happy that it was over. If I'd known Tuesday what I know now, I'd have waited for the paperback.

All dissing aside, it is eminently readable and reasonably entertaining. I imagine that, were I a teenager rather than a jaded goat in the late days of his youth, I would have liked it quite a bit more.

Recommended for those who've been waiting for it, but if you've avoided the bandwagon this long, you might as well keep on walking.

One of the many knocks against science fiction is that it tends towards the "heroic"; that is, SF follows the formulaic tropes of adventure stories, in which an exceptional hero, through courage, brains and sheer grit, triumphs over evil forces of (apparently) vastly superior powers.

Like most slanders, there is some truth to the claim and, in the early days of SF, there was a great deal of truth to it. In the 1930s and into the 1940s, written SF was sold to the pulp magazine market at (if the writer was lucky) a penny a word, and hacks cranked the stuff out so long as there was a market. Polished prose was a luxury the few writers capable of it did not have time for, and so its (mostly young) readers were treated to westerns in space, as it were. Unidimensional heroes that made Star Trek's Captain Kirk seem as conflicted as Hamlet were forever saving babes, worlds and the universe itself, apparently undergoing no psychological growth whatsoever while doing so.

But those were the early days and the field has matured, both commercially over the past 30 years and artistically, over an even longer period of time.

Yet the slander remains, and "serious" literary people won't deign to even read the stuff unless it is written by Margaret Atwood or some other literary author who has chosen to slum. (That they almost always do a piss-poor job of it - Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale being an excellent case-in-point. The novel said little, politically or psychologically, that had not been said by Robert A. Heinlein in his novella, If This Goes On, published in 1941. But I digress.)

As things now stand, written science fiction, in terms of the quality of its prose, is probably no better and no worse than other fields of fiction (SF is not a genre, though there are genres within the field of science fiction - space-opera, for example; it is a field of literature with certain conventions, yes, but not the strict formulae of Harlequin Romance novels or superhero comic books). Where SF differs from so-called "mundane fiction" is that it is not restricted to what is commonly considered the "real world", nor is it restricted to dealing with human psychology as it is now.

Science fiction can be set in the past, the present or the future, just as an SF novel's narrative can be followed on Earth, in space or on a world located thousands of light-years away. It requires author and reader, both, to make use of their imaginations in a manner that mundane fiction seldom does. Done well, it provides the double-pleasure of showing the reader something utterly new, while at the same time providing a distorting - and so, creative - reflection of that reader's own time and place. In other words, SF can do all that mundane fiction can, with a whole lot of extras thrown in at no extra charge.

Which brings me to Neal Stephenson's very long novel, Quicksilver. At nearly 1,000 pages of small, close-set type it is only the first volume of his three volume trilogy, System of the World. It is at once an literary tour-de-force in its loose, comfortable style, and a traditional exercise in plot-driven, heroic adventure in its guts - though I was deep into the second volume, The Confusion, before I realized it.( I know, I've waited a hell of a long time before asking you to read on! )

Cross-posted to my own journal, to bookish, to bookreview_lj, to books, to mere_review, to review_o_rama, to sf_book_reviews, and to the you_review communities.