50 in '08: 24
Oct. 25th, 2008 08:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sakon76Title: 1634: The Baltic War
Authors: David Weber and Eric Flint
Length: 718 pages
Yes, so I've been reading over 600 pages a day since Wednesday. So what. Only three more to go!
This book is very much an immediate follow-on from the still-unresolved events of 1633. There are no dropped threads that I could find, either; in fact, several more have been woven in, which makes things... problematic. While 1632 suffered from cognitive dissonance between its main two storylines, this one has so many that at every switch I ended up going "who, what, where, wait, when?!" Too many balls in the air! I really hope the authors ease back on the throttle for the rest of the series. It's bad when your audience has to step back and try to figure out which storyline they've just been switched over to.
That said, again, things unfold in a natural, believable manner (for the most part), and the unfortunate tendancy of its predecessor to fall into scenes of military or mechanical technobabble has evaporated. The few instances of technobabble, in fact, make sense as we see the 17th-century natives taking their own stabs at manufacturing higher-level technology... which succeed or fail for varying reasons. The Obligatory Romances (two, this time), however, both felt shoehorned in, one much more so than the other. Then again, the one which felt shoehorned in was done for believable reasons. So I'm not sure what to make of that.
Verdict: Recommended, especially to finish up all those dangling threads from the book before it.
Authors: David Weber and Eric Flint
Length: 718 pages
Yes, so I've been reading over 600 pages a day since Wednesday. So what. Only three more to go!
This book is very much an immediate follow-on from the still-unresolved events of 1633. There are no dropped threads that I could find, either; in fact, several more have been woven in, which makes things... problematic. While 1632 suffered from cognitive dissonance between its main two storylines, this one has so many that at every switch I ended up going "who, what, where, wait, when?!" Too many balls in the air! I really hope the authors ease back on the throttle for the rest of the series. It's bad when your audience has to step back and try to figure out which storyline they've just been switched over to.
That said, again, things unfold in a natural, believable manner (for the most part), and the unfortunate tendancy of its predecessor to fall into scenes of military or mechanical technobabble has evaporated. The few instances of technobabble, in fact, make sense as we see the 17th-century natives taking their own stabs at manufacturing higher-level technology... which succeed or fail for varying reasons. The Obligatory Romances (two, this time), however, both felt shoehorned in, one much more so than the other. Then again, the one which felt shoehorned in was done for believable reasons. So I'm not sure what to make of that.
Verdict: Recommended, especially to finish up all those dangling threads from the book before it.
