I'm lucky my life isn't reviewed by Adam Roberts

[andrewducker]

Because, although Julie just shouted into the room "Andy, there is an interaction I need to have with you." it's clearly dialogue that no real person would ever utter.

(I've just been reading this review of Anathem, wherein he makes exactly that complaint about a line of dialogue that sounds exactly like things I've heard geeks say down the pub.)

Comments

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Dear gods that review is hard work. Probably even harder to read than the book he's reviewing - and almost certainly more pretentious.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

pretty much my thoughts.

well up his own orifice and smugly pleased with himeself to be so!

[andrewducker]

It's very much in the style of the original book, which is full of made-up words in just that vein.

I'm 2/3 of the way through it, and very much enjoying it.

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's just me but it didn't endear me to either the book or the reviewer. Can't quite see the point in reviewing a book in its own style if people who've not read the book (i.e. those that would want a review to see if it's worth reading) don't get the in-joke. It's a failure to communicate when you have to glossary a book-review.

It is of course entirely possible that visual studio crashing every 10 minutes has given me a sense-of-humour failure for the day :)

[zz]

i assumed it was meant as a warning of what you'd have to wade through if you read the book. :>

[soon_lee]

"annoylogisms"

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

His review does seem to jive with the general thickness and effort required to make it through any of Stephenson's newer material, I think. Although I concur that his example dialogue isn't as fakey as he thinks it is, just awkward and over-explanatory.

That's the thing about his stuff, sometimes they explain gently, sometimes they explain hard, but they're always explaining. It's like a version of 'tell don't show' taken hard and to the extreme to justify its use.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Judging by his reviews of my books, I have the distinct impression that Adam Roberts doesn't speak geek.

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

He is after all that most dreaded of creatures: a professor in English literature.

But seriously, Roberts has a ...somewhat different... idea of what good science fiction should be like than Anathem delivers. I can see the merit in his review, even if I did love the novel.

And there is of course a case to be made that Stephenson went a bit overboard here and the book lost some of the traditional qualities of the novel. It is somewhat of an 1200 page infodump...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, exactly. I think people I know love it, because they love talking like that, but the jury's still open on whether that counts as "real people talking like that" :)

[andrewducker]

Are you saying that geeks aren't real people?

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

A response, in case you missed it.

[andrewducker]

Cheers for that - fascinating to see the response!

I'm only 2/3 of the way through Anathem at the moment, and I current think that he has a definite point about it - it's too infodump heavy, and the flow of the book would probably be better without the action bits getting in the way of it :->