Last night I finished Living Next-Door to the God of Love, by Justina Robson. I enjoyed much of it, but found it kind of frustrating and annoying, in ways that were hard to define. The main one, though, was that some things were insufficiently explained.
Now, as SF readers we are used to jumping into new worlds, not quite knowing what’s going on, and picking it up as we go along. Indeed, that’s part of the toolkit for reading it.
But here, there was something just not quite right, I felt. It was as if there was too much understanding assumed. Had the writer spent too long with her world, I wondered? So long that she could no longer tell what the reader would and wouldn’t know, since she knew it so intimately?
When I finished it I went looking for reviews, to see whether others had the same feeling as me. And what I found proved that, in a sense, I was right about her assuming too much knowledge.
It turns out the book is a sequel.
Oh yes. It’s the sequel to her previous book, Natural History.
Which is fine. But nowhere on the book itself does it tell you that. Nowhere. I’ve checked again and again: it’s not in the blurb, it’s not on the title page, it’s not in the front matter.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I would have liked to have known this little detail before I started reading. Sure, you can pick things up as you go along; and now that I know it, I realise that she gave us the necessary backstory very well. But really, Pan MacMillan: next time, let us know, OK?
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You have not missed out, believe me.
I just read that in late December myself. I decided to catch up on my Robson before Novacon, as she was guest of honour & I was on a panel with her.
I rather enjoyed /Mappa Mundi/ and /Silver Screen/ had its moments. /Natural History/ is a strange, hallucinatory space opera with possible contact with a possible other intelligence which is possibly on another planet possibly in another galaxy. And has given us or possibly we have accidentally found a sort of FTL star drive thing that is also an AI or the alien or something.
It’s very hard to tell. It’s confused, self-referential, barely explains its own background or setting.
Kinda fun if you don’t mind being permanently confused.
Then I read /LNDTTGOL/. This borrows a couple of references from /NH/ and makes passing reference to the primary Plot Device™.
I found /LND…/ almost unreadable, myself, and very hard work. It’s a confusing morass of a book with no discernable primary plot, & a whole bunch of the primary viewpoint characters who are basically nothing but dei ex machinæ. They can do whatever they want whenever they want to anyone they want, be anyone they want, except when they randomly can’t, and nobody can stop them. But people love them anyway. Sometimes. Except when they hate them.
Deeply irritating book with no real redeeming features.
/NH/ is confusing but all right. You sort of mainly know where you are & what’s going on most of the time if you don’t mind doing some guesswork.
But it has no bearing on /LND/ and /LDN/ as no bearing on it. It’s hard to believe they’re the same authoress.
/LND/ reads, to me, like one of those wretched Gwyneth Jones things which is all about “questioning the nature of identity” or some balls like that.
As for Ms Robson, stick to the one-off novels or the current robo-elf-pr0n series. They’re actually quite fun.
Oh, BTW, if it’s not obvious, I didn’t manage to catch up ‘til it was too late. :¬)
Yea, Martin. I kind of felt the same about this book. (I reviewed it a while back on my blog.) I’d read Natural History and it was OK but I didn’t recognise any of the stuff in LNDTTGOL as relating to it. And, yes, Pan MacMillan should have flagged the sequel thing on the cover.