Book #39 of 2014: Survey Ship (TW: Sexual abuse of children.)
Survey Ship by Marion Zimmer Bradley (Book not linked on purpose.)
Rating: 2/disliked (1-5/hated-loved)
Reading books on the Kindle, cover images are in black and white, and smaller than LJ icons. Sure once you open the book you could see the whole cover as big as your screen, but by default the book starts you on page one of the story, not on the cover. Usually I try to go back to the cover and start from there, but sometimes I don't.
This time I hadn't. I should have.
I loved the prologue so much. The story went somewhat downhill from there, but I was still generally enjoying it. So, when I had a chance, I googled to see who wrote it and if s/he had written anything else. I was unhappily shocked.
In case you hadn't encountered the news yet, Bradley sexually abused children, including her own daughter. Her daughter wrote:
"The first time she molested me, I was three. The last time, I was 12, and able to walk away … She was cruel and violent, as well as completely out of her mind sexually. I am not her only victim, nor were her only victims girls."
If that's not bad enough, "Most notably, she actively aided and abetted her husband, Walter Breen, in the sexual abuse and molestation of children.".
So, yeah. I had to decide what I was going to do about reading this book. Since I already owned it, and had mostly enjoyed it thus far, I decided to keep going with it.
That turned out to be a mistake. This story was about three things, in this order:
Teenagers thinking. (70%)
Teenagers having sex. (25%)
Teenagers in space. (5%)
All I could think about is how she might have used her abuse of children as some sort of research (purposefully or not) for all the sex in this book. It turned my stomach.
I did try to judge the book based on the story alone (thus 'disliked' instead of 'hated', since I liked the prologue so much and I did finish the whole thing). But even without the foul background of the author, the story was just pretty darned boring. Six basically perfect teenagers who spent most of the space trip thinking or having sex. So. Much. Thinking. Often thinking about sex. Page after page after page of nothing but them thinking.
Every problem was solved in, at most, a couple pages. Most of them the next page.
The author had a love affair with exclamation points. The characters! Were constantly! Talking! Like this!
The copy I had was a scan of the physical book (thankfully apparently I didn't buy it), so it was full of errors (like 1 or l in the place of an I), but there was one amusing one. One character screamed:
"They left us out here to live or Jive!"
Teenage jive contests in space. I'd read a book about that, unless it were written by this author.
Currently reading: Thor by Wayne Smith.
Rating: 2/disliked (1-5/hated-loved)
Reading books on the Kindle, cover images are in black and white, and smaller than LJ icons. Sure once you open the book you could see the whole cover as big as your screen, but by default the book starts you on page one of the story, not on the cover. Usually I try to go back to the cover and start from there, but sometimes I don't.
This time I hadn't. I should have.
I loved the prologue so much. The story went somewhat downhill from there, but I was still generally enjoying it. So, when I had a chance, I googled to see who wrote it and if s/he had written anything else. I was unhappily shocked.
In case you hadn't encountered the news yet, Bradley sexually abused children, including her own daughter. Her daughter wrote:
"The first time she molested me, I was three. The last time, I was 12, and able to walk away … She was cruel and violent, as well as completely out of her mind sexually. I am not her only victim, nor were her only victims girls."
If that's not bad enough, "Most notably, she actively aided and abetted her husband, Walter Breen, in the sexual abuse and molestation of children.".
So, yeah. I had to decide what I was going to do about reading this book. Since I already owned it, and had mostly enjoyed it thus far, I decided to keep going with it.
That turned out to be a mistake. This story was about three things, in this order:
Teenagers thinking. (70%)
Teenagers having sex. (25%)
Teenagers in space. (5%)
All I could think about is how she might have used her abuse of children as some sort of research (purposefully or not) for all the sex in this book. It turned my stomach.
I did try to judge the book based on the story alone (thus 'disliked' instead of 'hated', since I liked the prologue so much and I did finish the whole thing). But even without the foul background of the author, the story was just pretty darned boring. Six basically perfect teenagers who spent most of the space trip thinking or having sex. So. Much. Thinking. Often thinking about sex. Page after page after page of nothing but them thinking.
Every problem was solved in, at most, a couple pages. Most of them the next page.
The author had a love affair with exclamation points. The characters! Were constantly! Talking! Like this!
The copy I had was a scan of the physical book (thankfully apparently I didn't buy it), so it was full of errors (like 1 or l in the place of an I), but there was one amusing one. One character screamed:
"They left us out here to live or Jive!"
Teenage jive contests in space. I'd read a book about that, unless it were written by this author.
Currently reading: Thor by Wayne Smith.