The Company of the Dead
- Started reading:
- %Sun %b %2007
- Finished reading:
- %Thu %b %2007
Review
Rating: 5
Finished IN THE COMPANY OF THE DEAD by David Kowalski, a new Australian AH writer, with great joy to be over and done with the thing. It’s a great example of What Not To Do in writing AH…
In some AH novels, the writer is so enthralled with the whole layout of what they’ve created that the whizbang just goes on forever in huge, long detail. Tons of characters, a zillion point-of-view characters, lots of gimmicks from the New World, and so on and on and on. The problem is that an editor should step in and say – you are killing the pacing of the book dead as can be with all of this.
I mean, I love epic sweep. Big scale is fine. But have a heart on your readers! An endless trudge of stuff to get anywhere with the plot is maddening.
From other interviews of the writer, I got the impression that he had an idea as to what he wanted to do, and worked with some historically versed people to mold things so that it would make some internally consistency and be moderately credible. Very good. But his enthusiasm for throwing in more and more stuff (the escape from New York for the characters was particularly clunky) just made me feel like I was paddling through fudge.
Short idea of the situation: the McGuffin of the book is the Titanic, and a time traveler messing around with not just the fate of the Titanic (avoid the iceberg) but as to who got off the thing and survived. I thought the narrow change was good, and the actual use of the Kennedy family in the story wasn’t bad short of this weird Dealy Plaza thing that didn’t make any sense but was intended to be a cute mirror of that dreadful day in Dallas.
The world of 2012 is interesting; Germany and Japan have become the superpowers, but it’s an Imperial German, not Nazi Germany. Lots of weird tech, heavy on airships, and so on. The Confederacy rises again. Roswell and Groom Lake get thrown in.
Recommended only for the folks who have the strength of will and patience to slog through it. Or serious Titanic and weird AH buffs. Rating – 5 out of 10, dropped two points for ‘Christ, when is he going to get somewhere with this?’
