User Profile

I loved this book as a kid, I found it better written, more mysterious and meaningful than The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. So I was really looking forward to share it with my 8-year-old for our goodnight story.

Well... We had to put it down halfway through because he hated it so much. He liked the first parts of it well enough, was caught by the mystery of the terrible uncle, the magic rings, the Wood Between The Worlds, and the ruin world of Charn. But he could not abide the smugness of Aslan, the revering and worshiping descriptions of him (this is too cringe, dad!), and he found the one-dimensional description of the witch as irrationally evil to be so insulting to his intelligence that between that and Aslans smugness, he found himself siding with her. He was not taken by the creation myth of Narnia, found it "cringe" in its (my interpretation) postulated rather than demonstrated wonder. And believe me when I say this is not a kid who has lost the sense of wonder, let alone the ability to think about morality. Quite the opposite, he found the characters and their morals insultingly simplistic and lacking in empathy. Harsh truths from an 8-year-old.

It was a bit of a blow to me but I am also immensely proud of Junior, because I totally can see his points, my childish sense of wonder had just lingered with me since my own childhood and led me to never question these things. I still think there is a lot of good storytelling in this book, as in the rest of the series, but... Just got to realize, I guess, that it isn't aging as well as I'd have liked it to.

I found this book very hard to finish.
I read it having heard it was a classic in early Science Fiction, bringing some philosophy and literary ambition into a genre otherwise dominated by Flash Gordon type pulp zine stories. And, well, the ambition is certainly there. I guess some of the thoughts and ideas in it may also have been novel for its time, but they are heavily dated for today's reader and have mainly historical interest.

The writing style is rambling, overwrought, as full of adjectives as H. P. Lovecraft, although not quite as terrible. On the other hand, Lovecraft knows to keep it short, which is not exactly the case for Stapledon.

One thing that speaks in Stapledons favor is that he has clearly been careful about being up to date with the scientific state of the art of his time. Which is hopelessly outdated today, of course, but it is pretty interesting to get some insight into what they got right and wrong at the time. He also has a remarkable imagination when it comes to conjuring up alien life forms - there are passages that are genuinely interesting to read for that.

That doesn't change that the book could have been cut down to 25 or 30% of it current length and only gained in quality by it. The format of the story doesn't make it better: the detached journey through countless worlds in the Universe means that just as one world begins to get a little interesting and engaging, it is left behind. Also, Stapledon doesn't use the world to tell a story, but to prove a philosophical point, meaning that he treats his protagonists with a careless detachment that quickly wears off on the reader. No matter which great imagination he displays, ultimately the whole (very considerable) length of the book is basically just an incredibly elaborate wrapping for a surprisingly boring and unoriginal vision of (what he carefully doesn't name as but which is, as plainly as Aslan) God.

So yeah, there's good stuff in this book, even glimpses of greatness in the descriptions of the various worlds and alien species, but they are depressingly thinly scattered in a never ending desert of pompous, unstructured rambling.

As I read more of these books, I am increasingly impressed with houw the authors can keep widening the scope, such that every time ou as a reader think you have nailed what kind of book this is, they manage to "zoom out" and reveal thwt so far we've only been looking at a smaller part of the greater picture.

Also, I am impressed with how they use their world in a new way in each new book, making each book a different kind of experience even though they are all part of the same greater narrative. Cibola Burn was no exception, possibly the best of the books so far, in my opinion.

I partly agree with some other reviewers that not all the new POV characters are equally interesting. Especially, Havelock was a bit boring IMO. But I liked Basia well enough, and Elvi was a great addition to the gallery.

And the Big Rescue was so well thought out it made me want to learn to paint, just so I could make a painting of it. Good stuff.

I was kind of split about Leviathan Wakes. I think it is one of the few cases wjere I like the TV adaptation better then the book. I really like the main plot of this story, but for Leviathan Wakes compared to the first 1-and-a-bit season of The Expanse the TV show, the latter seems so much more elegant and well done. The writing here is a bit ham-fisted, the characters are two-dimensional and the narration is a bit clumsy. The script writers of the TV show have made a lot of good calls when it comes to altering the story to trade gore for suspense, and they did absolutely right in introducing Chrisjen Avasarala much earlier in the story - the character gallery in the book is too narrow, and the story line too linear, it feels a bit claustrophobic.

This is not to say I dislike the book. It's just a great story written by unseasoned writers (Caliban's War, the next in the series, is already much better). And on the upside, the prose has a good flow to it. It is an easy and fast read and, despite all my criticisms above, often hard to put down. No, it's not a bad book at all, it's just that the TV series has shown how brilliant it could have been, and it isn't, not quite.

Still, definitely worth the time.

I read this one as a kid and really, really loved it, so I thought I'd give it a go as a read out loud book for my son. And I have to say.... It hasn't aged well. Well, in certain ways it has, and I don't regret having read it for him, and he really liked the story and its wild imagination and surprising twists to a deliberately predictable plot. I had forgotten how genuinely horrifyingly scary it was in places, I remembered it as only fun, but that's okay, that is not the author's fault.
But the book is steeped in sexist stereotypes and horrible body shaming which I of course was blind to as a child. I simply had to leave out or on.the-fly change certain parts just to take the worst edge off. This was a real downer since I remembered the books with such joy, and it actually was very good, especially once we got to the last parts of it (the plot with Sir Simon and Madame Olympia is brilliant!) .
So... Mixed feelings on this one.