When I'm wrong, I'm wrong.
In this case, whoa, was I wrong.
Nostalgia and emotional investment clouded my judgment.
You tried your best to get me to see the truth, but I just wasn't having any of it.
So, Harlock, I'm sorry. I was wrong and you were so very right.
Alan Dean Foster sucks balls. He sucks them hard.
I grew up on the Spellsinger series. I loved it. I ploughed through the Flinx books. I even made my way through Splinter of the Mind's Eye. I soaked up his movie novelizations, like Aliens and The Thing. Actually, The Thing is rather decent. And I suppose I owe some small debt of gratitude for Alien starting me down the path of reading grown-up books.
But there were the worrisome books of his that I just couldn't get through for one reason or another: Cachalot, The I Inside, Icerigger, and so many more.
Almost all authors, especially popular authors, have their on and off days. Even C. J. Cherryh has published books I thought were crap. Only the entrancing fluidity of her prose pulled me through.
It had been many, many years since I'd read any Foster when I found a relatively new discarded hardback on the shelf of our local Friends of the Library alcove. Sure, it was only 75 cents, but I already have a box or two of Foster in the attic. Curiosity got the better of me and I took it home to much eye-rolling from the wife. ("The whole point of going to the library is that we don't have to buy and store more books!")
The book is called The Mocking Program. The cover promises something edgy, maybe even a little cyberpunky.
Within five pages, I was worried. It is an attempt at something like cyberpunk. Imagine that Dashiell Hammett, Anthony Burgess, and William Gibson were locked in a windowless room for a month with a word processor and a 10-pound bag of crystal meth. Considering that Hammett and Burgess are both dead and Gibson is a played-out old hack, yeah, this book is that good.
After 30 pages, I was alternately guffawing and cursing the hamfistedness of the writing.
Let's look at an example.
The main character, an inspector/detective guy and his partner are visiting the next-of-kin at her house. The house explodes. To cap off what should be a scene of scrambling, heart-pounding action, Foster lays this sticky pile of words on the page:
Only the lightweight but virtually impenetrable forcewear he wore underneath had saved him from being torn to shreds by fragments of suburban house that had been unexpectedly transformed into lethal shrapnel.
gak.
Yes. The guy is alive. He was saved by his armor. Why explain all this right now? This should be a throwaway line for later, maybe has the partner is recovering in hospital, instead of one turgid clause after another. And "lethal" shrapnel, as opposed to the soft and fuzzy kind? What gets me most is "unexpectedly transformed". "Transformed" is just the wrong word. The house freakin' explodes. "Transformed" gets me thinking about Optimus Prime. And "unexpectedly"? What the hell? Would the main characters walk into a house they expected to explode? Who wants to read about anything exploding "unexpectedly"? Someone get this man an editor and a decent thesaurus.
I could go on and on. The geewhiz factor of his future city is never dialed down. New lame buzzwords are introduced at the rate of about five per page and they are always tediously explained.
The main character is an "intuit", which means he has a sense for situations and human interactions. He's able to notice things that normal folks don't because he's an intuit. If he hears a weird inflection in someone's voice on the phone, he's able to act on it because he's an intuit. His intuit sense makes it impossible to lie to him. He can intimidate people by simply mentioning that he's "into-it", because he's an intuit. Ad infinitum.
I'm going to finish this book. I should've listened to Harlock, but I didn't. Now I have to pay. The tragedy here is that I'm going to donate it back to the library when I'm done. I just can't throw away a book, no matter how deserving.
Pakeha