Vellum

[coalescent]

My travel reading over the past week has been Hal Duncan's debut novel, Vellum. It's a book which has been attracting a fairly significant amount of attention in the sf world, and it's also getting a big marketing push from Pan Macmillan (the proof copies, from a limited run of 600, are things of beauty). You can read a very short extract here, and

Comments

[scribeoflight]

I suppose this is the sort of passage that could divide readers:

The road cuts deep into the sharp-carved shadows of tall trees for a second, slices between dark juts of moss-slicked rock and through a concrete underpass; and she takes the circling slip road off to the right and turns and turns, and then she's up and out and on the Blue Ridge Parkway, riding the wide road that runs from mountain spine to mountain spine along the length of the whole range. And the sun is hot but the air is clear and crisp as a cool spring and she can look out to her left and to her right and see the world on either side, the hills in the beyond, the valleys in between, the vast, green, rough, soft sculpture of time and space, of earth and sky.

Earth and air, earth and sky... etc. etc.

I'm not sure what I think of it. I fear reading it would give me a headache. And isn't clear and crisp air a rather over-used cliché?

And yes, if you look to both the left and the right, you will see "the world on either side." Happens to me all the time. :o)

[immortalradical]

I will put that on a handout for my fortchoming 'Not Everyone Can Be China Mieville 101' class ...

[scribeoflight]

Don't forget to send me a copy...

[chance88088]

do people want to be?

*has yet to finish one of his novels*

[immortalradical]

I think we have the tortured evidence above.

[chance88088]

ah - I can't get enough into his novels to really recognize and the couple shorts I've read by him were nothing like that.

[immortalradical]

I still say you should read The Scar. But, yes, the above is rather like China when he's being self-conscious (so like China much of the time, really).

[chance88088]

heh - that's the one I've never actually tried and had recommended to me several times when I said I found PSS and Iron Council completely unreadable.

[immortalradical]

I actually liked PSS, but it really isn't a very good novel. Iron Council is, to be honest, not very good - the more I think about it, the less I like it. The Scar, on the other hand, is if nothing else funner.

[chance88088]

it's cute when you admit you liked not very good books :)

[immortalradical]

And it's cute when I admit I liked excellent books. WINNAH.

[chance88088]

eh not that cute.

no crown for you

[immortalradical]

I do not believe you.

[chance88088]

so you say, but can you be sure?

[immortalradical]

Hmm. Yes.

[coalescent]

In some ways, I actually prefer Duncan's writing to Mieville's, I think. They both tend towards an excess of detail, they both overuse certain words and constructions, but Mievillle will tell you the same cool thing in three different ways, and Duncan will (usually) tell you three cool things in different ways.