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[supergee]

Charlie Stross on understanding reader reviews

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Want to Talk Back at Stross

[arlie]

Interesting reading; it all seems reasonable, but the devil's in the details, and I very much want to talk back at Mr. Stross, and/or talk about how I do ratings.

I'm one of the folks who wrote a bad review of one of the Merchant Princes books on Amazon, and don't believe I ever finished it, let alone the series. Why? Well, I didn't have the terminology, but fundamentally I failed to appreciate the bait-n-switch. It starts out like a portal fantasy, and sucks in readers who are looking for such a fantasy - and then becomes an end-of-the-world thriller, of the dark/doomed kind, with a side order of serious abuse of the sympathetic viewpoint character. There are people who like that sort of thing; I don't think many of them also like portal fantasy.

I'm presently giving Mr. Stross another try. His _Rule 34_ is probably intended the same way - a dark and disturbing ("thoughtful") fiction masquerading as a police procedural/detective story. Fortunately the style is firmly in the Mel Gibson tradition - semi-dystopic future with lets of tech, and enough unexplained to give it a bit of a fever dream quality to the reader. It's not extreme in that vein - or I probably wouldn't have borrowed it from the library - but it's got enough indicators that I was only moderately disappointed by the "thoughtful" and dystopic twist at the very end.

At any rate, I'm pretty sure my reviews are the kind he'd exclude, because they talk about emotional impact on the reader. At bottom, I'm not saying that the faux genre style is poorly implemented, or that the style has problems expressible in rationalistic jargon suitable to English professors. I'm saying that it _feels like_ a "bait n switch" and _I don't like that_, and this is not because of some lit crit deficiency in what the books turn out to be, but because _I don't like the actual genre_, and/or don't like receiving that genre when I'd intentionally selected a different genre.

After this experience, I can pretty much guarantee that I'll never buy anything by Charles Stross unless I've already read a borrowed copy, and liked it enough to want to reread it regularly. It's pretty clear, reading between the lines, that what I call "bait n switch" he considers "thoughtful" or "thought provoking" or similar, and considers to be a virtue of his writing. I imagine he also aspires to produce "literature" not just "novels" - another red flag for me, as far as the chance of my enjoying the book - some literature started out as good stories (Dickens anyone?) but books that try to be "literature" usually fail, IMO, to be good _anything_.

No point posting this on the blog, even if I could navigate the sign up process. It's "off topic" and "negative" --> the comment would almost certainly be deleted, and in any case it would be buried among far too many comments. So you get it.

Thanks for helping me form a picture of Mr. Stross and what he's trying to do.

Re: Want to Talk Back at Stross

[supergee]

I hear you. I was likewise disappointed by the Merchant Princes. That's his aesthetic choice and I won't argue, but it's not what I enjoy.