Quote:
|
But what if some Confederate foot soldier just said "Hey pal, you dropped something."?
|
Yesterday, I read
How Few Remain. Damn, that book sucked!
He didn't really explain in the book why it was a significant change. Actually, there was hardly anything about the Civil War at all. He never explained to us how he developed his conclusions about what would have happened: I might have been more interesting in the book had I researched all of the characters beforehand and what they had done in the real world.
The conclusion, of course, was obvious 1/3 of the way through the book. The book dragged on and on. By the last two hundred pages I started skimming through chapters to see if there would be anything interesting; to see if anything in the segment would advance the plot. By the last fifty pages, I read approximately a sentence per page, except for two scenes. I'm confident I missed little. I started to wonder if the segment in Utah had anything to do with the rest of the story. It didn't in this book, but I imagine that it will in the sequels. I'm not going to read them, so I could have done without the entire Utah thread. (The Utah story could have been interesting if it was it's own book)
Later, I realized that there wasn't really a proper plot. Instead, it was about what various famous personnages would do if the Civil War hadn't been won by the South.
A few years ago, I'd read several of Turtledove's books and really enjoyed them. I'd just read Turtledove's book,
Noninterfere, a few days ago. Though that it was a fabulous book, but it was hard to believe that it was by the same author. In
Noninterference, I was fascinated by some of the characters. He skipped what I would have thought to be crucial parts of the book, and he did it by foreshadowing what would happen (a debate between two people which would become a debate between the entire group), then showing us what the implications were, so that we could guess what had happened.
By contrast, in
How Few Remain, he left nothing uninteresting out. He would have a minor event, and then show us what evvveeerrryyyy character is doing, with a brief paragraph to tell us what was happening. Whole sections, if not whole chapters were unnecessary. Stories from the stances of several characters seemed repetitive and and repetitive and repetititititititive. Whole characters and their entire threads seemed to exist solely to provide one or two scenes that were interesting.
I would frequently ask myself: "Why am I reading this? How does this advance the story? What is the author trying to tell me?". Sometimes I found a paragraph near the end which told me some news, then the next section would go ahead and do the same thing. So, in the end, I have no idea. I don't know why those sections were part of the book.
It could have been done in 200 or 300 pages. Instead, it felt like a six hundred page introduction. Which, I suppose, it was.