Book Rant

[nonionay]

I'm about a quarter of the way through Harry Turtledove's Disunited States of America (Thanks, Tor!) The first chapter's great-- tense, exciting, you quickly figure out we're in an alternate USA about 100 years in the future. He's got a lot of great worldbuilding at first. There's a war memorial that lists a bunch of wars, so you can tell that our timeline and theirs split sometime around the start of the 19th century. As a result, the states are basically independent nations -- usually violent and repressive.

Then some people from our timeline show up, and the story turns into, "My alternate timeline! let me show you it!" And since everyone is stuck in a tiny town in west Virginia, that means the adults lecture the kids on history.

What I'd like, is to experience the world from the point of view of a native. I want to sink in and live it. Unfortunately, our native pov character is from California, a much freer state than Virginia, and she has about the same, "OMG this is awful!" attitude as the guy from our timeline. At one point, she even asks Mr. From-Our-Timeline "what do you think it would be like if we were all one country?" GEE, I'VE NO IDEA!!

I'm at the point now where every time they talk about history, which right now is pretty much constantly, it knocks me out of the story. The ways he brings up the history are great (two adult characters are historic coin experts) but there's just so much of it.

It's a fascinating world with decent characters and plot, but the infodumping is driving me batty.

Comments

[jsbangs.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

Yeah, that's been my experience with Turtledove books in general. I've never liked any of his alt-histories. They all seem to suffer from clumsy writing, maid-and-butler dialogue, and more interest in the history than in having believable characters. Not for me, kthx.

[criada.livejournal.com]

Sad that all his books are like that. They could be really interesting. I was starting to wonder if it might have been serialized originally, like Stross' Accellerando was. That would explain the HEINOUS REPETITION of info.