I’ve read some early Elizabeth Bear SF novels and enjoyed them, but her new space opera, Ancestral Night, produced a lot of frustration. I found Ancestral Night full of riffs on democracy, artificial intelligence, and galactic history. Dull. The last 200 pages of this 512-page novel was a slow slog. If the blah-blah-blah was subtracted, Ancestral Night would be a 250-page novel…and a better book!
A salvage crew finds a strange alien starship in Deep Space. Then, they’re attacked by space pirates. The chase is on! But the action seems to happen in slow-motion with too much talk and not enough oomph! Not worth the effort. Elizabeth Bear will probably write some sequels to Ancestral Night, but I won’t be reading them. GRADE: C
So, definitely not the place to start reading her, then. I haven’t had success with a couple of others I tried either.
Jeff, I really like the SF/Lovecraft mashup stories Elizabeth Bear writes with Sarah Monette like “Boojum.”
Yes, Bear has become vey didactic over the years. Never a favorite author, I now avoid her books. It was also a problem in Karen Memory.
Rick, I’ve avoided Elizabeth Bear’s SF novels the past few years because of the “bloat” problem in her books. A 200-page book gets puffed up by 300 pages of extraneous blah-blah-blah. I believe Bear is a talented writer, but she’s developed some Bad Writing Habits.
Not just that, her writing comes across as a lecture in story form. Not for me, thanks. I want to be entertained, not preached at.
Rick, you’re right about Elizabeth Bear and her “lectures.” They don’t advance the plot and they rarely help develop the characters. They just slow the action of the novel down.
I guess some writers feel compelled to use the platform they have earned to try to improve things. Awfully hard to do well.
Patti, I have no problem with writers expressing their “views” in their novels. What I object to is 300 pages of “views.”