tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post2815078876011883809..comments2023-10-26T22:06:11.166+11:00Comments on Metamagician3000: Death of Michael CrichtonRussell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-4833060822903559732008-11-07T10:03:00.000+11:002008-11-07T10:03:00.000+11:00I liked Airframe, but it's true that great success...I liked Airframe, but it's true that great success can lead to self-indulgence and sloppiness. Example, Heinlein after <I>The Moon is a Harsh Mistress</I>. He did return to form a bit with <I>Friday</I>, but such books as <I>I Will Fear No Evil</I>, <I>Time Enough For Love</I>, and <I>The Number of the Beast</I> are incredibly self-indulgent. They do have some charm, despite the way they are often simply dismissed - but it seems that Heinlein was under no pressure to produce tight prose, plotting, or anything else in particular during that period, so we get stuff that just seems to indulge his whims and fantasies with little conventional pay-off. He could have sold his shopping list, and sometimes it seemed as if he had.Russell Blackfordhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-77086129544621249252008-11-07T04:46:00.000+11:002008-11-07T04:46:00.000+11:00It's a matter of taste, I suppose, but I found his...It's a matter of taste, I suppose, but I found his corpus to be overall very uneven. Looked at chronologically, I think he went downhill after he went megabig: <I>Andromeda Strain</I> and <I>Jurassic Park</I> were novels one could learn technique from, stylistically and structurally, even though the science was goofy (and, in the latter case, Faustian). The novels which came out after <I>Jurassic Park</I>. . . well, I remember that I read <I>Airframe,</I> but I can't remember any of the characters' names, and the only scene I recall is one which stuck in my memory because at the time it felt like an unresolved plot element stuck in to be more "cinematic".<BR/><BR/>(Thomas Harris comes to mind as a parallel example. <I>Red Dragon</I> and <I>Silence of the Lambs</I> were great books for their genre, written with "local colour" which worked with the characterization rather than being larded in to pad out the word count. Once the movie of the second book made Hannibal Lecter a legend. . . well, the less said about <I>Hannibal,</I> movie or book, the better.)Blake Staceyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13977394981287067289noreply@blogger.com