For the past few weeks I've been listening to and reading the stories on Escapepod, and then following the reactions in the forums. Mostly I felt no need to express an opinion because the remarkably calm and reasonable contributors here have voiced every shaded and nuanced reaction that I've felt, including catching authors out with "errors" of style or substance. Also expressing appreciation for the stories they enjoyed. It's been great.
Then came this story. I couldn't read it all in one chunk, had to go back a few times and there are still a few bits in the middle I'm just not going to get to.
I hate the big ugly present tense. All the arguments for it are about uncertainty, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, for example, used the present tense to produce a level of uncertainty and danger in a historical narrative where the facts and outcome for the main character are fixed and easy to look up. I have no feeling of such an intellectual choice with the tense use here.
Still not enough for me to "spit the dummy" though - then I came across the line "nobody knows how they look like" - That's just Dutch rendered word for word into English. Okay, that caused a bit of bruxism but nothing that a grumpy man hasn't had to deal with before.
And then came the bit about the fictionados, not in the eccentric tales sections but connected to the Afri character's backstory.
I read SF because I love the original worlds, but I've been reading for forty odd years now, so originality gets a bit harder to find, mostly because I remember all the good stuff I've read.
"Shall we have a little Talk" one of Bob Shekley's better stories, deals with a culture inadvertently outwitting a legalistic shark from Earth because of the speed at which their language spontaneously evolves.
"That tribe of fictionados spoke a language that evolved so fast that nobody could meaningfully communicate with them, even in the internet age"
Mun mun. Mun mun mun mun mun - anybody? With his arms out wide! -
By this time I was really quite grumpy, and then I read Unblinking's post and figured out it was all me and I was just seeing it wrong.
What I have in common with Unblinking is we are both writers, and I see in his comments here (and with the Cat Rambo story from a couple of weeks ago) the same thing I got. I'm a member of a critiquing group, the purpose of which is to look at the submitted texts and look for weaknesses and the ways in which they can be improved. So I read, or rather have been reading, these stories as if I were doing a crit. But these stories have already done what they were supposed to do, they have SOLD, sometimes more than once as this is a reprint market.
I think there has to be a difference between a review and a crit. I've had reviews of my own stuff that have read like a crit, and at the end of the piece I've been left with a feeling of "What d'you want me to do about it? It's published, I got paid for it already, I can't change it any more".
Escapepod has reconnected me with my love of written SF, and I can sit back and relax once a week and let someone else drive. All I want is to see the stars, and when I'm at Escapepod, it's from the passenger seat.
So - a non crit reaction
Connoisseurs of the Eccentric - It was alright, bit dull though. Clearly a pilot for a series I personally would have no interest in reading. World ideas without much of a story, and practically nothing blew up at all.
Looking forward to next week.