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dustydigger
Posted 2019-04-28 10:58 AM (#20806 - in reply to #19521)
Subject: Re: Pick & Mix 2019 challenge		Quote Reply



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Location: UK		Ouch,ashamed to see I haven't been on here for over two months. Ill health,family crises have certainly made mayhem with my reading. Most of my reads have been crime and junior fiction.
February I read some of Murray Leinster's Medship stories,not too bad,but just middling.
Ursula K LeGuin's Powers was an OK read,but not a gleam of light,humour or happiness anywhere.Well written,but dark and depressing,oh so earnest and...well,worthy.Passionate about the plight of woman and slavery and so on.Le Guin certainly likes to hammer home the message. Sorry,but apart from probably the first 2 or 3 Hainish books I find her books too dry and earnestly issue based for my tastes. I read her books,about 1 or 2 a year,but as duty reads really.And I have never fancied rereading any of them.This book felt a bit like an anthropological description of various scocietal models!
I have a soft spot for the BDO subgenre,the Big Dumb Object or more politely the Alien Mysterious Megastructure.The 70s produced some of the most famous examples,Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama,Larry Niven's Ringworld,John Varley's Titan.
Bob Shaw's Orbitsville certainly depicts one of the biggest.A Dyson metal sphere 300 million kilometres across,built round a single star,equivalent in livable space to 5 billion earths! Now that's big! Inside however is is surprisingly dull,just endless savannah,millions of miles after millions of miles.. I did feel at times that Shaw could have been having a bit of a dig at the genre,especially the way they named the vast megastructure as Orbitsville! lol. But the writing didn't seem slyly satirical,so I had to look upon it as a standard,quite enjoyable adventure novel.It did have a rather bleak premise about the purpose of the BDO in the final chapter.But I couldn't feel much sensawunda,as ithe sphere was just too big to grasp,and yet very boring.




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