Re: Dan Simmons on Larry Niven?

On Sat, 16 Feb 2008 10:04:36 -0500, Sea Wasp
<seawaspObvious@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
David T. Bilek wrote:
Gene Ward Smith <gene@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


Sea Wasp <seawaspObvious@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:47B67715.4010509@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:


Twaddle. Hyperion is a murky, wandering mess with

little to recommend

it, while Mote is a cracking good yarn.

Hyperion has pretensions towards asking interesting
questions, but Mote delivers.


Mote is written with all the grace and elegance of a hippopotamus
crashing through a plate glass window. What's the difference what
so-called big ideas are present when it might as well have been
scrawled on a paper bag in purple crayon?

Mote delivers an interesting story with some complex twists and
turns, and does it in a nicely readable way. This makes it
head-and-shoulders above most books published in ANY year.

Okay, so the hippopotamus and crayon thing is, indeed, a little bit of
hyperbole. Yeah, _Mote_ is better than, say, Robert Sawyer's Hugo
winner. But that's not a hugely difficult goalpost to make it
through. It doesn't exactly try to push the boundaries of SF in any
way.

It's a competent enough attempt at nothing too ambitious. For the
author (have we determined if we're talking about Niven or Pournelle
yet) to call it the stupidest book he ever read is absurd. _Hyperion_
is better written, it reaches further, and hits a lot more emotional
buttons than _Mote_.

Has either Niven or Pournelle (or both) written anything as moving as
Sol Weintraub's story?

-David
.

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