(Cross Posted from SFi With Bite 9/30/06 Thread)trilobitekidDecember 9 2006, 02:58:12 UTC
It seems that on LJ a month is ancient history, so I thought I'd cross post to comment on your journal, knowing that the world has moved on...I did like the story and see your points about it.
In general I think first person is my favorite writing style and it allows the writer to really delve into psychological factors which are unobtainable in third person. I do agree that too many POV shifts are problematic but McHugh generally puts them in a generally understandable format and divides them out among the chapters. So once you realize that shifts are occurring they are easier to follow.
The POV shifts seem excessive at first until you realize that without them she would have had to write 50,000 more words of verbiage to get the reader to understand just what sort of suffering Hariba mindlessly inflicts upon Alem and his family and to impress us with the fact that Akhmim is truly non-human. ((We all have this shifting POV temptation. With my own second novel I'm still valiantly struggling to avoid it but I'm toying with a chapter written from the enemy POV in order to adequately express their emotional motivation. I've seen several popular novels which do nothing but jump POV in an erratic manner and I'm glad she imposes some order on it.)
One thing I absolutely hate in modern fiction is present tense writing but I find this story tolerable in that regard. (I consider this style to be an artifact of our American addiction to t.v. screenplays and to the internet, both of which are normal formats for the present tense.)
The sexual scenes were very well written, more graphic than I would have done, but acceptable in a dehumanized literary environment where so many readers have so much personal experience with casual sex in all its forms. But I still prefer the allusions of 40's and 50's sci-fi.
I couldn't help but think of this story as an allegory about the plight of Mexicans who are streaming across the US borders in ever increasing numbers to escape just this same sort of institutionalized slavery. Unfortunately the sort of folk who run down to Mexican resorts for a week or hire servants at slave wages aren't the ones who read serious sci-fi.
Re: (Cross Posted from SFi With Bite 9/30/06 Thread)calico_reactionDecember 9 2006, 03:12:58 UTC
Thanks for cross-posting it here. I got the comment last night, but that particular comm is members-locked, and I have another user name I stay logged in on all the time, and wasn't able to answer and was too lazy to log in and out. :)
I think for multiple, first-person POV, she handled it very well. I think I wanted headers of the character's names, just so we had a head's up, but other than that, I don't think I minded too much. You're right in that it'd be a much longer book had it been filtered through one POV.
Interesting thoughts on the sex. I prefer the graphic-ness, but I don't mind some creative alluding. What I don't like is the kind of allusion that makes you wonder if the couple did it or not. :) Sorry if that sounds crude. I just like knowing one way or the other.
Oooh, interesting parallel. You're right: those kind of people don't read this stuff, sadly. :-/
Re: (Cross Posted from SFi With Bite 9/30/06 Thread)trilobitekidDecember 10 2006, 04:19:26 UTC
Trust me, when you get as old as me you'll know whether they did it or not, just from the way they hold their coffee cups! Sometimes in real life people surprise me, like the 60 something woman I met at work who said she'd had over a hundred partners, but sci-fi conventions are very stylized, not quite like Kabuki theatre but approaching it.
So what do you think of present tense fiction writing?
Re: (Cross Posted from SFi With Bite 9/30/06 Thread)calico_reactionDecember 10 2006, 15:23:02 UTC
I'm a big fan of the present tense, myself. I understand some of the "opposition" to it, how it can distance a story, but it doesn't bother me. I'm trying to think of a case where the present tense of something DID bother me, but nothing's coming to mind.
Course, I also read mainstream/literary fiction, where present tense is more common and accepted. :)
In general I think first person is my favorite writing style and it allows the writer to really delve into psychological factors which are unobtainable in third person. I do agree that too many POV shifts are problematic but McHugh generally puts them in a generally understandable format and divides them out among the chapters. So once you realize that shifts are occurring they are easier to follow.
The POV shifts seem excessive at first until you realize that without them she would have had to write 50,000 more words of verbiage to get the reader to understand just what sort of suffering Hariba mindlessly inflicts upon Alem and his family and to impress us with the fact that Akhmim is truly non-human. ((We all have this shifting POV temptation. With my own second novel I'm still valiantly struggling to avoid it but I'm toying with a chapter written from the enemy POV in order to adequately express their emotional motivation. I've seen several popular novels which do nothing but jump POV in an erratic manner and I'm glad she imposes some order on it.)
One thing I absolutely hate in modern fiction is present tense writing but I find this story tolerable in that regard. (I consider this style to be an artifact of our American addiction to t.v. screenplays and to the internet, both of which are normal formats for the present tense.)
The sexual scenes were very well written, more graphic than I would have done, but acceptable in a dehumanized literary environment where so many readers have so much personal experience with casual sex in all its forms. But I still prefer the allusions of 40's and 50's sci-fi.
I couldn't help but think of this story as an allegory about the plight of Mexicans who are streaming across the US borders in ever increasing numbers to escape just this same sort of institutionalized slavery. Unfortunately the sort of folk who run down to Mexican resorts for a week or hire servants at slave wages aren't the ones who read serious sci-fi.
Reply
I think for multiple, first-person POV, she handled it very well. I think I wanted headers of the character's names, just so we had a head's up, but other than that, I don't think I minded too much. You're right in that it'd be a much longer book had it been filtered through one POV.
Interesting thoughts on the sex. I prefer the graphic-ness, but I don't mind some creative alluding. What I don't like is the kind of allusion that makes you wonder if the couple did it or not. :) Sorry if that sounds crude. I just like knowing one way or the other.
Oooh, interesting parallel. You're right: those kind of people don't read this stuff, sadly. :-/
Reply
So what do you think of present tense fiction writing?
Reply
Course, I also read mainstream/literary fiction, where present tense is more common and accepted. :)
Reply
Leave a comment