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[bloodyrosemccoy]

With all these books I have to read for the first time, I probably shouldn’t spend so much spare time rereading my old Sector General novels. But I can’t help it! There’s an irresistible lure to them for me: their content is very similar to my own idea for Doctors! In! Space!, which I thought was totally original forty years after these stories started appearing. DAMN YOU, JAMES WHITE!

 

Another wonderful thing about these books is that I can then console myself that I’m still a damn sight better author on technical merit than James White, King of Expository Dialogue, is. Not that my writing is particularly magnificent; it’s just that his sucks. He’s got all these great ideas, but I just want to strunk the hell out of the way he presents them.* I could spend hours detailing his dreadful writing,** but I truly love the stories told in there and thus am reading that instead of better-written things right now.

 

Plus, how can you resist a series that has this on its Wikipedia page? “The series is remarkable in unusually diverse and believable non-humanoid aliens. It is also possibly the only sci-fi series where the most sympathetic character closely resembles a giant wasp.”

 

Favorite part of that sentence?  That it’s possibly the only sci-fi series with that distinction.  Never mind all the sympathetic giant wasps you find in hard crime fiction.

 

Ah, yes, ’tis my kind of trash, all right.

 

 

*strunk v. 1: to correct grammatical errors in a textual body 2: to submit a textual body to editing.  Refers to William Strunk, Jr., co-author with E.B. White of The Elements of Style, which is inflicted on all writing students everywhere. Coined by Amelia in revenge, since one of the rules laid down in the book is to never, ever, under any circumstances, make a noun into a verb. Mr. Strunk, you got verbed.

 

**In the names of the mother of God and all her wacky nephews, the man literally CUTS AND PASTES giant blocks of infodump into each book! As DIALOGUE! Do these sonuvabitches all have to memorize these pages and pages of exposition? And why the hell do they keep reciting them to each other? If I could go back in time I would track him down and hand him a thesaurus.

Comments

[biomekanic.livejournal.com]

I haven't read them in a while, mostly because they're still packed away in our storeroom... where they've been for about 7 years now.


As for Elements of Style... I managed a BA in writing without ever actually having to read that.

*runs for cover*

[chibicharibdys.livejournal.com]

Dang, mine are all packed, but I love those books.

Especially since I keep mentally editing that one character's name to Priscilla, which is awesome.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

They're doctors and medical students. I've actually heard people doing that. Even junior zookeepers do it sometimes, learning the animals. It's kind of amusing.

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

Most excellent. I don't have anything useful to add, but I loved this post.