association-list

On Niall Harrison’s rec­om­men­da­tion I picked up Hurley’s God’s War and read it over the week­end. As a paid up member of the Post-​​Cyberpunk clade, it’s a solid piece of work. Vio­lent, enter­tain­ing out­casts are jerked around by the pow­er­ful, people are killed, scores are set­tled, bad-​​assery is done. The world-​​building is vivid, if not entirely con­sis­tent. Its treat­ment of gender is inter­est­ing, and rea­son­ably novel, and it depicts the issues of its two Muslim civ­i­liza­tions as being orthog­o­nal to the fact that they’re Muslim. It’s even well paced.

It isn’t with­out its flaws, of course. The writ­ing could be better, espe­cially in the neol­o­gisms depart­ment, and the world-​​building suf­fers quite a lot from tech search and replace issue, sub­bing in ‘bug’ for any number of other terms just to make things fit with the aes­thetic, with­out ever both­er­ing to think of whether these sub­sti­tu­tions actu­ally make sense. The vehi­cles, in par­tic­u­lar, suffer from both the neol­o­gism issue (‘bakkie’??) and from being pow­ered by and con­structed from bug-​​encrusted hand­wav­ium (this wouldn’t be so much of an issue if they weren’t so promi­nent and often men­tioned). The world-​​building is big on bold, vague strokes and light on telling details, and the visual descrip­tion could use some real work. Also, for being so many thou­sands of years into the future, it’s all a bit old-​​fashioned.

EDIT: Niall points out in com­ments below that bakkie is South African slang for a pickup truck. So I apol­o­gize for that (although it still sounds a bit silly to Amer­i­can ears), but this high­lights the visual descrip­tion issues that I men­tion. Nowhere that I noticed was a bakkie described in enough detail for me to get that it was any­thing other than a wheeled vehi­cle (run­ning on bug spit and uni­corn farts).

END EDIT

None of these things are fatal flaws, and are easily over­looked, espe­cially since this is the author’s debut. If you like Richard Morgan (par­tic­u­larly the second two Kovacs books), you’re quite likely to enjoy God’s War.

That said, the more of these I read, the more I wonder why people still bother to write them.

To get at why, I am going to have to delve into spoiler ter­ri­tory, and pos­si­bly into some uniquely per­sonal aes­thetic pref­er­ences, so go read it if you haven’t. It’s only a few bucks online. I’ll write another post detail­ing why I say that tomor­row, once I’ve had some more time to chew over my objections.