I'm not sorry I read the Simmons, but I don't see myself reading them again. He set up a lot of interesting mysteries in the first half. Then in the second half it turned out that a bunch of characters really didn't have good reasons that I could see for their mysterious behavior; some of the mysteries were left dangling (if there was any explanation given for why there were two Odyssees [*], I missed it); Simmons went way off the Quantum Nano Pixie Fairy Dust deep end; he let his Islamophobia infect the story -- Arab-Jew conflicts should not be important in a story set tens of thousands of years in the future.
I could go on, but hopefully it's clear enough that I was pretty disappointed.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-03 10:54 am (UTC)I'm not sorry I read the Simmons, but I don't see myself reading them again. He set up a lot of interesting mysteries in the first half. Then in the second half it turned out that a bunch of characters really didn't have good reasons that I could see for their mysterious behavior; some of the mysteries were left dangling (if there was any explanation given for why there were two Odyssees [*], I missed it); Simmons went way off the Quantum Nano Pixie Fairy Dust deep end; he let his Islamophobia infect the story -- Arab-Jew conflicts should not be important in a story set tens of thousands of years in the future.
I could go on, but hopefully it's clear enough that I was pretty disappointed.
[*] There's a plural you don't see every day.