Call no man happy until he is dead
I feel like I've said before that I cannot judge a work of fiction until I've finished reading it.
This is probably not actually true. Like, I'm pretty sure that I'm going to be happy with Ra, when it finishes. I've read all of Hughes's prior work, and I know that his sense of what is satisfying lines up well with mine. Plus it's sort of made for me -- magic-as-engineering is one of my weaknesses.
Worm just finished.
I found it on Metafilter a couple months ago. I opened it in a tab, then lost the tab for a couple of weeks. When I got back to it, I expected to read about one chapter and then give up. But I was actually totally sucked in, and read the entire thing. The entire thing is long. He's been writing at NaNoWriMo speeds for over two years(!), and thus has ended up with over 1/3 of the word count of the Wheel Of Time. It's not the best writing in the world -- he definitely could use an editor. But it's definitely got a lot that's satisfying. And I don't even particularly like superheroes.
Speaking of superheroes, I found it interesting that as soon as Siberian encountered Clockblocker, I had an immediate, very strong opinion about of how their powers would interact. I was wrong, but it's still weird to have such strong opinions about nonsense physics.
Here's the thing about Worm: ~5/6ths of the way through, something about the cosmology of the universe is revealed that completely and utterly destroys the story. In a shorter work, that would be enough for me to declare it a failure. But with this amount of good stuff, I decided to ignore it and retcon/patch my way around that aspect of the story. And, ultimately, the ending was (ignoring the cosmology) satisfying.
So I'm going to recommend it to those in the mood for a long read, with some trigger warnings: bullying, violence, really really dark.
This entry was originally posted at http://novalis.dreamwidth.org/173485.html. There are
comments on the DW version of this post already. Please comment there using OpenID. Hint: if you get zapped to the Dreamwidth homepage, click here to log in with OpenID.
This is probably not actually true. Like, I'm pretty sure that I'm going to be happy with Ra, when it finishes. I've read all of Hughes's prior work, and I know that his sense of what is satisfying lines up well with mine. Plus it's sort of made for me -- magic-as-engineering is one of my weaknesses.
Worm just finished.
I found it on Metafilter a couple months ago. I opened it in a tab, then lost the tab for a couple of weeks. When I got back to it, I expected to read about one chapter and then give up. But I was actually totally sucked in, and read the entire thing. The entire thing is long. He's been writing at NaNoWriMo speeds for over two years(!), and thus has ended up with over 1/3 of the word count of the Wheel Of Time. It's not the best writing in the world -- he definitely could use an editor. But it's definitely got a lot that's satisfying. And I don't even particularly like superheroes.
Speaking of superheroes, I found it interesting that as soon as Siberian encountered Clockblocker, I had an immediate, very strong opinion about of how their powers would interact. I was wrong, but it's still weird to have such strong opinions about nonsense physics.
Here's the thing about Worm: ~5/6ths of the way through, something about the cosmology of the universe is revealed that completely and utterly destroys the story. In a shorter work, that would be enough for me to declare it a failure. But with this amount of good stuff, I decided to ignore it and retcon/patch my way around that aspect of the story. And, ultimately, the ending was (ignoring the cosmology) satisfying.
So I'm going to recommend it to those in the mood for a long read, with some trigger warnings: bullying, violence, really really dark.
This entry was originally posted at http://novalis.dreamwidth.org/173485.html. There are
comments on the DW version of this post already. Please comment there using OpenID. Hint: if you get zapped to the Dreamwidth homepage, click here to log in with OpenID.