The First Law (Joe Abercrombie; 2006, 2007, 2008)

This has been an odd series to read, somewhat enjoyable, but very much a chore. I’m about 80 pages from the end of the third book and I’ve decided not to finish it: I no longer have the energy to read it for more than a few minutes at a time. But many of my friends enjoyed the book, so I thought I’d briefly give some of my thoughts on it.

Atonement (Ian McEwan; 2001)

This is only the second of Ian McEwan’s novels that I’ve read, the first being his 1978 novel,  the Cement Garden. The Cement Garden surprised me with how well it was written, so when I got a  copy of Atonement I decided to give it a read.

Ilium

I’ve just finished reading Dan Simmons’s “Ilium”. It’s a science fiction novel, set simultaneously in the past and the future, and centres itself around the siege of Troy (called Ilium in Latin, hence the name of the book). The main conceit is that the Greek gods are humanoids (possibly even human) from the distant future, empowered by technology to have godlike abilities. These “gods” are reaching back through time to act out the role of the Greek gods in the Trojan war.

The book is an interesting read, and fun, but pretty much standard science fiction fare. The one science-fictionism that stood out for me is science fiction’s need for unnecessary information. The characters, for instance, are often walking textbooks: Odysseus has the line, “If one of those asteroids — or even a big enough chunk of one — hits the ocean or land, it’ll throw enough garbage in the atmosphere to drop the temperature by sixty or seventy degrees Fahrenheit in a few hours.” While Odysseus could know about asteroids and the effect a large enough impact would have on the Earth, very few people could easily, and off the cuff, tell you that it would be a.) a drop in the range of sixty to seventy degrees Fahrenheit, and b.) that this temperature change would take place over merely a few hours. The novel’s omniscient narrator also loves breaking in to a character’s point of view just to add unnecessary information (this limb is a vestigial limb, and this other item has this interesting but unnecessary factoid associated with it) which the view point character clearly doesn’t know. In fact, many of the characters have grown up in a society which seems to have forgotten much of what we today would consider trivial knowledge — such as the world being round — and that seems to actively look down upon obtaining any knowledge at all.

Now I imagine that there are people out there who squee whenever a character or the narrator can drop in unnecessarily detailed information, but doesn’t anyone else find that it just breaks the narrative flow? Aren’t there other readers out there who stop to wonder just how Odysseus knew the exact temperature range and time frame for the after effects of an asteroid impact? Does no one read a throw off remark about how a piece of anatomy is vestigial and wonder what addition that factoid has made to the novel?