Reviews and Comments

The idea behind Boss Fight Books was always to look at a game from the personal perspective of the author. Some of the books achieve that more successfully, some less. This is one of the successful books.

It's written in part by a scared little boy who tries to escape from an abusive family by immersing in the world of Galaga, in part by his cynical grown-up version who makes up facts to appear interesting, and in part by a serious author who has thoroughly researched the game and presents it along with insights into his life.

The book is organised as 255 "stages", most of them less than a page long, that each tell a bit of that story but are ordered seemingly randomly. It appears as a feverish race between the three personas, as the lines between them blur, but are always just barely pulled straight again through a cold listing of facts between the more personal and the made-up parts (which Kimball is always honest about, eventually).

It's hard not to get drawn into this narrative, as if William S. Burroughs had decided to write about video games in his cut-up technique. How successful it is largely depends on the reader's willingness to accept the mixture of uncomfortably personal details and lighthearted tidbits – but then, why else would anyone read a book in this series?

Again, this one is quite different from the first two books: everything encountered before falls together (or at least gets a cameo) to create a monumental story that encompasses even the parts of the universe not yet explored. There are a few threads that don't seem to go very far and are mainly used to shed more light on the situation as a whole, but that is hardly noticeable among the many other events that do form a part of the larger puzzle.

Politically, Scalzi doesn't want to take a clear stance for or against the Colonial Union and what it stands for, and instead has his characters discuss both sides thoroughly and with contantly shifting sympathies. The reader will have to follow along whatever arguments seem to make the most sense.

Originally, this was meant to be the last story in the Colonial Defense Forces universe, but at the time of writing this short review, there are already three further novels and a couple of short stories, so that idea seems to have been abandoned.

Though Lyon Sprague de Camp was clearly fascinated by the diversity of peoples around the world, he was certainly not a racist. His vocabulary was not modern, and might sometimes appear offensive to today's tastes, but he always had an affection for all his characters that makes it easy (or at least possible) to forgive any inappropriate word choices.

However, the same is unfortunately not true concerning his view of women. While he tries to treat the female main character fairly, he has undeniable problems with the idea of "modern" women. Alicia Dyckman has zero regard for other people's lives (especially if they are alien) and demands somebody be killed more than once. She is a detached scientist without any sexual drive (but really just hasn't met the right man yet) and with a confused concept of men who should sometimes be more masculine and sometimes less. Of course, this is how de Camp sees feminists, because what else could go on in their pretty little heads.

His male main character, Percy Mjipa, must therefore be a hero in every regard, be it as a fighter, a diplomat or a philosopher, and strong in his sexual identity. While I seem to remember that de Camp had previously displayed a largely approving stance towards homosexuality, this time he has Mjipa say about it: "the idea revolts me".

The story itself is rather typical fare: a journey with lots of detours and interruptions. It's really quite a fun read, but depending on your personal views, the mentioned issues could be a smaller or a larger obstacle, all the way up to making it hard to like the book at all.

After a rather perfunctory first book and two carefully constructed middle books, this last one is much less stringent. Williams really likes to talk, and can fill hundreds of pages with branches that serve no real purpose other than establishing (or maintaining) atmosphere. For the first three books, this was very apparent, but worked fairly well, especially in his long and empathic descriptions of fascinating worlds.

Here, however, he apparently found out during writing that he didn't have much story left, so a large part feels empty, with people wandering from one world to the next, only to find that they need to go somewhere else entirely. He starts inventing more obstacles that are sluggishly resolved, just to present more of less the same situation in the final quarter as in the beginning of this volume.

Strangely, that last quarter – starting around chapter forty, in the middle of the third part of the book – has a completely different narrative style than anything before. There are now sensationalist cliffhangers for almost every section along the lines of̈́ "he couldn't believe what he saw next". This makes for a reasonably entertaining read, but feels a bit out of place after the 2000 pages that came before.

After the resolution there are still 80 pages left that are spent with a sprawling monologue to explain everything that hadn't been explained before, and finally an unending series of treacly "perfect" happy-end scenes that feel a lot like the ending of the Lord of the Rings movies.

In the end, it's a disappointing conclusion to a well-written, if too long by half, saga that manages to hold everything together just enough to avoid being irritating. Not bad at all, but it could have been much better.

Sicherlich tut die Übersetzung von Edda Janus der Geschichte keinen Gefallen: Die feine britische Ironie verkommt zu angestrengter Langeweile, amüsante Dialoge werden zu Phrasentennis – und kein Wort darf in der Übersetzung ausgelassen werden, so dass es von "Nun ja", "Also", "sogar" und "Laß uns" nur so wimmelt.

Das größere Problem ist aber der Roman an sich. Die Hauptcharaktere sind so penetrant sympathisch, dass eine ganze Serie mit ihnen kaum zu ertragen sein dürfte. Man bekommt das Gefühl, es mit einem Ehepaar von Miss-Marple-Parodisten zu tun zu haben. Sämtliche Figuren sind in Klischees ausgearbeitet (bis hin zur Unverfrorenheit, von einer Person zu behaupten, sie „hätte aus einem Roman von Dickens stammen können“) und reden in Formeln – dabei wird an etlichen Stellen ohne erkennbaren Grund betont, wie unangenehm hektisch und unmoralisch die moderne Zeit doch sei.

Besonders schlimm ist, dass Christie von vielen Dingen keine Ahnung hat und geradezu trotzig doch von ihnen schreibt. Was sie in aller Ausführlichkeit über Mal- und Bildhautechniken von sich gibt – oder ihre naive Vorstellung vom organisierten Verbrechen –, lässt einem mehr das Blut in den Adern gefrieren als die angestrengte Schlusspointe. Dazu kommen immer wieder Vergleiche mit großen Schriftstellern und Malern, die so oberflächlich sind, dass sich der Verdacht aufdrängt, sie könnte die Namen aus einem Lexikon gegriffen haben.

Und, ja, wenn die Auflösung dann endlich passiert ist, muss man sich auch die Frage stellen, ob denn dazu wirklich 200 Seiten notwendig waren! Wenn nicht immer wieder haarsträubende Dei ex machina den Karren aus dem Sand ziehen würden, wären es vermutlich 500 geworden.

Das alles ändert nichts daran, dass Agatha Christie die grande dame des britischen Krimis ist, und ich möchte an dieser Stelle betonen, dass dies das erste Buch ist, das ich von ihr gelesen habe. Ich gehe da gerne von einem Formtief aus. Allerdings einem sehr, sehr tiefen Tief.

(Hinweis: In einer früheren Version dieser Besprechung waren ein paar alberne Vergleiche enthalten, mit denen nun wiederum ich mir keinen Gefallen tat und die ich deshalb hier umformuliert habe.)