Books

[dsrtao]

_Escape From Hell_, Niven and Pournelle

About halfway through this sequel to _Inferno_, the narrator says "I'm beginning to sound like a character in a book I don't like" and he's right.

I put it down there. I'm not picking it back up again.

Pointless, almost characterless, and a travelogue plot that doesn't show anything interesting.

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Signal From Fred! Write Better!

Huh. Usually writers catch those. Or editors.

[dsrtao]

He woke up in a featureless white plain. There wasn't any heroin. Damn, he wanted some heroine.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Of course if he had a heroine he might have to split the heroin. Or perhaps she'd bugger off and have a decent story of her own...

[cellio]

Funny, Dani and I were just discussing that book a couple days ago. (He started it; I decided not to after the conversation.) Their Inferno was excellent (and accessible in a way that the original isn't without a lot of footnotes), but I guess they didn't know when to stop.

[dsrtao]

There's a less charitable explanation:

Anything with the Niven and Pournelle names on it will sell. It doesn't have to be good, and in this case, it's pretty bad. Until people stop buying their books based solely on name-recognition, this trend will continue.

[cellio]

Yeah, I think you're right. (Dani read whatever portion of it he read in a bookstore. He's a much faster reader than I am.)

[jducoeur]

About halfway through this sequel to _Inferno_

Really, it pretty much lost me as soon as I saw this phrase. I am fond enough of the original to know that I do *not* want a sequel.

(The original novel was what turned me on to Dante in the first place: it remains my single *favorite* story by either of them, even if I don't think it's necessarily their *best*...)