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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9186899" data-attributes="member: 18">I mean don't mean to be down on Scalzi but yeah that definitely seems to apply a lot, and at this point I've stopped reading his books because they just don't have enough to say, and even their SF ideas tend to be, well, not novel - c.f. The Kaiju Preservation Society, where like, it had precisely two interrelated ideas which it seemed to think were novel but both were kind of close to an SF novel I read in the 1990s. That's not to say it was not enjoyable, it was a fast read which flowed well, was structured well, made sense (more than a lot of "lost world, strange creatures" SF/thrillers), but it was just a little bit too twee and cutesy, with some fun but VERY Whedon-esque dialogue. Nobody can tell me that style has died out, it's just people don't usually call it by its true name when authors/writers they like use it - we even got multiple "THAT JUST HAPPENED!!!!!" < soyface > type scenes which I had to grit my teeth through.I kind of wish he'd write something genuinely dark and scary, and drop the twee and quips for a while - which wasn't really a thing back in say, Old Man's War (at least the ones I read) - because I think he'd be great at it. Maybe he already has and I just haven't come across it. Kaiju kept seeming like it was going to be actually scary or tense, and then he'd just absolutely undermine that with quips and THAT JUST HAPPENED!!!!! stuff.I really want to like it, but I just wish there was a bit more to it.I've been reading a lot less than usual lately due to podcast and thanks to my blasted brother, anime, filling the same time spaces, but I did finish Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo, the second one of her Alex Stern books which was, I think a considerable improvement on the first one, at least for my money. It's still about a young woman who can see, speak to and use ghosts, who is studying at Yale, but only on sufferance (she's far too poor to go there) because she's working for magical secret society, but it's got a bit more energy, in part because it has less backstory to explain and more story to tell. Bardugo herself went to Yale and it shows, because she loves the place as a place perhaps just a little too much, but she was also in a secret society, and wow she paints those in an extremely negative light, so I guess there's a degree of give and take, and also doesn't shy away from highlighting Yale's grim past with slavery and so on.Anyway I enjoyed it quite a lot of a sort of genuinely kind of creepy occult adventure novel. Much as I've enjoyed her later Grishaverse stuff, I'd kind of like to see more stuff from Bardugo along these lines.</blockquote>

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