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Book Blog: Apocalypse fiction
I would also have liked some details on where the island was; a few clues about “the mainland” and so on. Just too vague. It did the job for about half my train journey and then it was hard to be bothered any more. I was pretty sure they weren’t on Rottnest as I didn’t see how that island would support 1000 people, but beyond that, no clue.
I need to exert more self control about the Kindle. The last lot of books I read on it were the After The Cure series, which was better than the above, but not a lot. I liked what I read of Connie Willis’s Crosstalk, but that deserves a real book, in my opinion; probably I will get a copy next time I get to Stefen’s Books.
I’m wondering whether I need to go back to older reading habits of more library books and rereads from my own collection. Reading more new books doesn’t work when most of them could use a damn good editing. Even then, some of them wouldn’t have been published by traditional editors. Kindle books also aren’t conducive to leafing through to find your favourite bits. Sure, you can do it if you remember a precise phrase or a page number, but usually I won’t.
That said, the book before the one described above was Mira Grant’s Feedback, and that was indeed a real book. Stefen [of Stefen’s Books] thought it read like an alternate version, or direction to the one taken in the Feed trilogy. I don’t want to misquote Stefen, but that’s as near as I can remember. Another batch of bloggers, this time following the Democrat campaign of 2040 rather than the Republican, following a roughly similar course.
There are attacks on the candidates and the bloggers themselves [weaponised zombies!] and a lot about the characters’ convoluted lives. Where Feed’s characters were the more conventional of their breed as befitted a Republican presidential hopeful, i.e. a male candidate with attendant wife and children, and a brother and sister team of bloggers with their friend, this bunch were so diverse that it was actually a bit distracting and as though the author had tried to include every possible variant of person in the mix.
They’re a poly family; one is lesbian, one is gender neutral, one is bi and one is hetero male. The candidate they’re following is a single woman. I’m not sure I can see the United States becoming that accepting in the next 23 years, or even longer than that, zombie apocalypse or not. Characters from the trilogy show up and are sometimes found to be quite different from the impression previously given of them. This was somewhat irritating. “Oh, she’s not really like that, this is how she really is, if you only knew such and such….”
Makes me think of the reworking done of Lestat by Anne Rice after the first novel, as well as some of the minor characters therein.
The book does have a proper ending; it's not a cliffhanger. I can’t tell whether there are meant to be any more yet; all I will say is that the author could go either way, but that if it stops now, I will be disappointed with that ending. The book is good, the writing is good and it kept me going until the end, losing some sleep in the progress, but all up, I preferred Feed.
At the moment I’ve reread Dark Eden [think I’ve blogged about that somewhere earlier in LJ] and have not yet made it back to the bookshop for Crosstalk.
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But when there's no one to order you to rewrite or not be published, you don't have to rewrite, even if you've hired an editor. If something is only available from Amazon, it's *probably* self published. And no, it wouldn't be Rottnest Island. The author is American and lives in Florida.
I love my ebooks, but if you don't like a book you can't give it away, alas!
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