His happy good-night air
I finished Poul Anderson’s Fire Time today at lunch. It took me a long time to read, even though it wasn’t very long, and it was fairly well-written. I think the main issue had to do with a particular way that it was written.
In any work of non-genre fiction, there are certain details that are not explained, as it’s expected the readers knows about them from his or her own experience. Nobody is going to explain how many fingers a person has, or what marriage is, or why a person acts how they do when a loved one dies. The authors makes some assumptions about the knowledge of his or her readership and omits details that would be redundant for them. This book was written with the same kind of thing in mind, except that the tacit assumption by the author is that the readership is of the same milieu as the characters in the story. Never mind that they’re 6-legged feline centaurs with symbiotic plant manes living on a planet in a binary star system.
Anyways. I don’t mind that kind of thing — it just means that the author is focusing on the plot and the characters and not on their culture of physiognomy. However in this case, there was just so much back-story and so much political intrigue and so much other business going on that I had no idea what was going on much of the time. By the time all of the interesting details about the aliens, and their history, and the history of human space exploration, and their war with some kind of giant walrus people, and everything else had been set up, I was totally non-engaged. Skimming back over the book, the plot is actually pretty interesting, but it took me a long long time to actually get through it all. Oh well.
I’m now partway into the third (and final (yay!)) of Lindsay Gutterdige’s wonderful novels about Mathew Dilke, Fratricide is a Gas. Great title, huh?