It's a rare day -- an ice fishing on the River Styx day -- when I don't
like a science fiction book. "Empty cities of the full moon" by Howard
V. Hendrix is _so_ badly written, by page 17 I was dizzy, by page 20 I
was feeling nauseous, by page 27 the rectal itching started, and by page
53, the urge for self preservation kicked in and I flung the book aside,
then penned a note for the librarian to have the book reclassified for
the "Do Not Read" section of the library.
This thing is _so_ bad, it almost convinces me that L. Ron Hubbard is
back, writing under the assumed name "Howard V. Hendrix." I mean, there's
no point in reading the remaining 388 pages when by page 33 one reads,
"Weeping loudly, she crawls to where her young comrade lies
dead, face down, faceless. When she reaches him she begins
to wail furiously, her lost comrade clearly much more than
just a comrade."
<groan> It's like the sequel to Battlefield Earth, complete with the
endlessly, exhaustingly tilted camera, this time manifest in the author's
inability to pick a tense -- past tense or present tense -- while spewing
such idiotic phrases as a "faceless face" or a "comrade much more than
a comrade."
Had I actually paid money for the thing, I'd expect I'd be damned
angry at the wasted money right now. Killing angry. I'd be
round-up-all-the-horrible-author-wannabes-in-the-world-and-dump-them-
naked-into-Alabama angry.
But mixed tenses are only half of the torture. The other half is the
quasi philosophical meandering utilizing blicitive porendic terms and
phrases tailored toward mosopistic shamanism symbology in a gross and
blicitive misunderstanding of basic Jungian concepts -- complete with
made-up words much like "blicitive" and "porendic" and "mosophistic."
For $25 -- had I paid for the book -- one gets to read about shamanism,
quantum mechanics, nanotechnology, the destruction of Earth's populace,
alternate universes, all jumbled together with made-up words that lack
only the meanings an Alice in a Wonderland could unravel -- after a
large hit of quality LSD.
And going into this book stoned on acid is the _only_ way to make it
smoothly over the brain-numbing stubleing blocks of phrases like,
"He looks over the jungle and felt civilization crowding in."
ARGH! Kill me, please! No, wait! Better yet, kill the author, please!
---
http://www.ElmerFudd.US/ http://www.rightard.org/ http://www.thedarkwind.org/
"We're going to sue your *****, AND your balls!" -- Scientology's leader
.
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