Yet another geek blog

20 December 2010

And Another Thing... (Hitchhiker's Guide, #6) by Eoin Colfer

Panic Now, The Guide is back!

This is a very enjoyable read and it was great fun to be plunged back into Adams' world. The characterisation of Arthur is a bit ropey but Ford and Zaphod leap off the page like old friends. Colfer shows that he knows his stuff by tentative linking to different Guide continuities and even to Dirk Gently.

Frustratingly though, it is just too careful not to stray from the path. In places it feels like a Douglas Adams tribute. (In a way of course, it is.) With Adams, you never knew where you were going to be on the next page. This book has none of that attitude.

Of course, it is good that Colfer wants to embrace the fans and show that he respects the material he has been given. But I hope that in the next book, he is confident enough to honour the spirit of Douglas Adams by letting his imagination of the leash a little more.

Labels: reviews

1 December 2010

The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack (Burton & Swinburne, #1) by Mark Hodder

A flawed masterpiece.

I need to start by saying that this is an extremely enjoyable book. A real page turner. The characters are vivid, their world well drawn and the pace of the story never slackens. I look forwards to the next instalment.

But...

But the author seems to have stumbled into Science Fiction without any understanding of science and this frustratingly weakens the book. The re-imagined Victorian era is peppered with utterly random creations - brain transplants, coal powered helicopters, dogs that understand postal addresses - that have had no effect on general society and have not been developed from anything. Indeed, they are just 'invented' as needed by individual scientists. The culmination of this is a character who has had a clockwork 'analytical engine' grafted into his brain to improve his intelligence. This would be a wonderful image in a Lewis Carroll style fantasy or an allegorical story. But seriously asking the reader to consider that a brass-cog desk calculator could be attached to a human brain (let alone that either would be improved by this) undoes too much of the author's good work elsewhere.

Labels: reviews

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