Blackout and All Clear
Dec. 30th, 2010 05:27 pmI got a Nook for Xmas, and so I proceeded to blow every B&N gift card I've ever not finished spending on books for it. I love it! Now if it crosses my mind to check out a book, I just DO, rather than forgetting about it. So I decided to see if All Clear was out, and it was.
I'm about two-thirds of the way through it now, and I have to say, I think someone should have stopped Connie Willis at some point and told her "no, it's not two books, it's one. You don't need two hundred pages at a time of people chasing each other around, keeping secrets from each other, and following dead-end leads." Because that was pretty much the first third or so of this book, and there was a lot of that in Blackout, too. That said, I'm reading it in preference to playing WoW, so she obviously did somethng right.
At some point along the way, a spoiler happened that was sad but not as devastating as I know she can be - so much so, in fact, that I wouldn't be surprised if what appears to have happened isn't what happened - and at the 400-ish mark, a revelation has made things look very dark, which is pretty effective although I'm almost certain that it's not what it appears. Interestingly, given how many changes she's made to the overall "time-traveling historian" concept along the way, there's a callback to "Fire Watch" partway through. (Interesting because "Fire Watch" was such a rough draft of the idea; the Mr. Dunworthy of the novels would never send someone to a time centuries away from where he'd wanted to go.) I'm reasonably certain that a particular character, named and heard but not really appearing, is the narrator from "Fire Watch," though I'm not sure the Fire Watch narrator ever had a name. There's also a mention of Ned and Verity from To Say Nothing of the Dog.
I'll have a spoiler post once I've read more; for now, I've just had a suspicion confirmed, and the book only has 200 pages left, so hopefully it won't spend too many of those on running around in circles.
I'm about two-thirds of the way through it now, and I have to say, I think someone should have stopped Connie Willis at some point and told her "no, it's not two books, it's one. You don't need two hundred pages at a time of people chasing each other around, keeping secrets from each other, and following dead-end leads." Because that was pretty much the first third or so of this book, and there was a lot of that in Blackout, too. That said, I'm reading it in preference to playing WoW, so she obviously did somethng right.
At some point along the way, a spoiler happened that was sad but not as devastating as I know she can be - so much so, in fact, that I wouldn't be surprised if what appears to have happened isn't what happened - and at the 400-ish mark, a revelation has made things look very dark, which is pretty effective although I'm almost certain that it's not what it appears. Interestingly, given how many changes she's made to the overall "time-traveling historian" concept along the way, there's a callback to "Fire Watch" partway through. (Interesting because "Fire Watch" was such a rough draft of the idea; the Mr. Dunworthy of the novels would never send someone to a time centuries away from where he'd wanted to go.) I'm reasonably certain that a particular character, named and heard but not really appearing, is the narrator from "Fire Watch," though I'm not sure the Fire Watch narrator ever had a name. There's also a mention of Ned and Verity from To Say Nothing of the Dog.
I'll have a spoiler post once I've read more; for now, I've just had a suspicion confirmed, and the book only has 200 pages left, so hopefully it won't spend too many of those on running around in circles.