Walter Mosley, Nalo Hopkinson

[teaotter.livejournal.com]

The Wave, and Blue Light, by Walter Mosley. I've read a couple of Walter Mosley's mysteries and enjoyed them, so I thought I'd give his science fiction a try. Honestly, I disliked both of these books immensely. I enjoyed the first third of The Wave, but then most of the interesting characters drop out of the story until close to the end. Blue Light simply never drew me in enough to care about any of the characters.

The New Moon's Arms, by Nalo Hopkinson. This book was slow to start, but every time I thought I would put it down, I found myself caught up in the characters' lives and swept along. In the end, I was very pleased to have kept reading. It's much more of a 'family drama with fantastic elements' than a fantasy, but the characters are interesting and incredibly well-drawn. This is one of my favorite reads, so far.

So Long Been Dreaming: Post-Colonial Science Fiction & Fantasy, eds. Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan. This book has been reviewed here once before, but I have to add that this is one of the best science fiction short story collections that I have *ever* read. It's the first time I've read a collection in which I loved all of the stories, not just one or two.

I noticed an interesting pattern in this book, of characters who have no control over the larger circumstances of their lives but who still manage to pursue a better life on their own tems. I hadn't realized how much of an embedded idea it was, for me, that characters without power had to seize it in order to make the story work. That *isn't* the framework for most of these stories, and I am just blown away by how many possibilities open up once that assumption disappears.

Comments

[holzman.livejournal.com]

Blue Light drew me in, but it seemed like he got to the end of his blank pages, didn't know how to actually resolve the tension he built, and just kicked the table over instead. I came away feeling like I had a science fiction appetizer, science fiction salad, science fiction soup, science fiction pasta, and just as I was getting ready for a nice thick, juicy science fiction main course I was getting a fairly mundane coffee and desert along with the check.

[teaotter.livejournal.com]

I tried to read Blue Light after The Wave, so I was much more suspicious when I went in. Both books felt kind of like old manuscripts he'd stopped writing at one point, then picked back up later and slapped some more chapters on. I was disappointed.

[sophinisba]

I felt the same way about The Wave. I was especially disappointed that Nella was almost completely absent from the second half.

[teaotter.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the treatment of the female characters really drops off. I kept wondering if he'd started the book at one point, then came back to it later with no real idea of where he'd been heading at the beginning.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

It's been a while since I've read any, but I've always felt more disappointed with Mosley's SF than with his mysteries.

Nalo Hopkinson, though? Rocks.

[cyphomandra.livejournal.com]

I stalled halfway through Blue Light (same problem - inability to care about characters) and so it's actually encouraging to hear other people had the same problem and yet liked the mysteries. I'd been reluctant to pick one up in case the same thing happened again.

[billies-blues.livejournal.com]

I felt the SAME way about New Moon's Arms.