The City and The City
Jun. 3rd, 2015 01:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethFinished reading The City and the City.
That was a waste of some hours.
Starting with a dead woman is almost always a promise of more dead women later (yep) and never very interesting.
Don't know what the point was meant to be. Also don't know why it was shelved with SF on the spine. It's just people being people, keep your head down, stick with your own, obey the rules you know, only doing it a bit harder than usual. Calling it SF is the only thing that papers over the obviousness of the plot, where ordinary people do ordinary things for ordinary reasons. Once I realised it wasn't going to twist and all the SF elements were red herrings there was still at least a quarter of the book to go. Plus when it turns out the characters in the book were being fooled and jerked around by believing the SF/fantasy elements then it's like calling the reader stupid for believing the genre label. Also if there was meant to be a metaphor in there it was too flat to figure.
It's boring and thinks it's clever.
That was a waste of some hours.
Starting with a dead woman is almost always a promise of more dead women later (yep) and never very interesting.
Don't know what the point was meant to be. Also don't know why it was shelved with SF on the spine. It's just people being people, keep your head down, stick with your own, obey the rules you know, only doing it a bit harder than usual. Calling it SF is the only thing that papers over the obviousness of the plot, where ordinary people do ordinary things for ordinary reasons. Once I realised it wasn't going to twist and all the SF elements were red herrings there was still at least a quarter of the book to go. Plus when it turns out the characters in the book were being fooled and jerked around by believing the SF/fantasy elements then it's like calling the reader stupid for believing the genre label. Also if there was meant to be a metaphor in there it was too flat to figure.
It's boring and thinks it's clever.