plane reading

[zwol]

Sean McMullen: Glass Dragons. Good characterization and setting; desperately needs to work on proper incluing, narrative coherence, and management of dramatic tension. I saw similar, but less severe, problems in the other book of his I've read, Souls in the Great Machine; unfortunately this suggests he's getting worse, not better, as the latter was published much earlier.

Comments

[falsedrow.livejournal.com]

Funny - I was going to say I had also picked that up to read on a plane and had a similar opinion of it, but that was actually Irene Radford: Glass Dragon (singular).

[zwol.livejournal.com]

I haven't read that, but all the problems I mentioned do go together. I think at root it's an authorial desire to get everything they worked out about the setting into the book, never mind whether the story is best served by it. (See also Neal Stephenson.)