“The parts that I liked, I liked. The parts that were not so great were…not so great.
The issue is that there was a really stark separation between those parts. Without getting into the book itself, there is the main narrative, then some codas at the end. So while I enjoyed the book itself, the nearly 100 pages of coda didn’t do much for me with the exception of the last one.
So while I found the book itself to be almost great, even doing a good job of skirting the normal sci-fi trap of setting up a cool sci-fi world and then spending too much time in our world of 2000’s Los Angeles, the codas were not the easiest thing to get through. Except that last one, which I found very touching and really believe would have made an excellent standalone.
If you’re the kind of person who can read this way, read the novel, then skip to the final coda, the one titled CodaIII: the Third Person. The other two aren’t poorly written and certainly succeed in fleshing out some characters. Unfortunately, they were some of the less exciting ones. A television writer and an aimless 20-something.
Maybe it won’t be such a problem to other people. I have to acknowledge that I’m sensitive to fictional writers in books writing about writing. I don’t know why. It’s just fairly…uninteresting to me most of the time. Maybe it’s just a strong feeling that I would prefer to get the expressions that come in those types of works from other works, in another context.
I’ve always said (probably didn’t make this up, but adopted it somewhere along the way) that great science fiction disarms us so that we can look at our real-life issues in a clear way. Through the regular narrative of this book there were great opportunities to do just that. Lots of chances to talk about the ideas of writing as presented in the coda. Certainly in a less expansive way, but I honestly think the book would have benefited.
By the time I got to the end, it was like eating a great entree, then plowing through some so-so side dishes only to find that I really should have saved some more room for dessert. The final note was fantastic, but I was too full to really enjoy it.”