Crescent City Rhapsody
Dec. 13th, 2005 09:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperI hoped that I would like Crescent City Rhapsody more than I did Mississippi Blues, and thankfully it turned out that I did. The third installment in Goonan's Nanotech Cycle was a much more solid story than its predecessor, thanks to tighter characterization and a lot less delving into paragraphs of Telling Rather Than Showing Technonanobabble.
There were fewer instances of her lyricism this time around, but at least for me the portrayal of several characters I liked helped make up for that. I've seen people posting on Amazon.com that they had a hard time following the storylines of so many characters, and one person even complained that there were not one, not two, but three love stories in the plot. The multitude of characters didn't bother me in the slightest; for one thing, it had a sort of Close Encounters of the Third Kind feel to it, bringing together several disparate characters and showing us how this huge thing changing the world affected them all, and I didn't think that was a bad thing in the slightest. Moreover, it fit in with the whole "rhapsody" point of the title--taking all these disparate lives and weaving them together into one big story. I liked that a lot, even though it took a while to bring all the viewpoint characters together.
Also--I definitely disagree with the person who was complaining about the love stories. Sure, there are multiple instances of characters becoming lovers, and actually there are more than three: Zeb and Ra, Jason and Abbie, Kita and Hugo, and Illian and Artaud. That reviewer seemed ready to dismiss this story as a romance just because of the number of pairings in it, but I don't think that does it any justice. This smacks of the attitude that an SF story can't be "serious" if it has a love story in it, and I think that's bullshit, as I have ranted before. None of these pairings dominate the story at any time; they are merely single themes in the overall greater piece telling the reader about these people's lives. And let's face it, folks, falling in love is a regular part of people's lives. With the time frame this story covers, and the number of people it introduces to the reader, it's inevitable that we're going to see some of them in relationships--especially in the context of how the changes sweeping the world affect those relationships. And we do get a lot of that.
One point I saw raised on the Amazon.com reviews holds true, though, and that is that because of the number of viewpoint characters, some of the depth of characterization does suffer. We get several things hinted at but not touched on with any detail at all--we don't have time because Goonan's switching back and forth between her viewpoint characters more often. Some of them are interesting side details about relationships between the characters; some of them are larger details about the disintegration of the political climate all over the world, things that would have been nice to see spelled out a little more. And one major plot detail from Mississippi Blues, the creation of the New Orleans Plague and who was responsible for it, was only very briefly mentioned at all in this story--which seemed odd to me given that the whole point of Crescent City Rhapsody was supposed to be Marie Leveau's using New Orleans as a jumping off point to get Crescent City created. It would have been nice to see the creation of the plague touched on a little more to tie the previous books better into this one.
And I was vaguely disappointed to see not one mention of what happened to Cincinnati at all--or even a mention of Abe Durancy.
All in all... some rough spots, but not nearly as many as in Mississippi Blues, and a lot more tightly put together.
There were fewer instances of her lyricism this time around, but at least for me the portrayal of several characters I liked helped make up for that. I've seen people posting on Amazon.com that they had a hard time following the storylines of so many characters, and one person even complained that there were not one, not two, but three love stories in the plot. The multitude of characters didn't bother me in the slightest; for one thing, it had a sort of Close Encounters of the Third Kind feel to it, bringing together several disparate characters and showing us how this huge thing changing the world affected them all, and I didn't think that was a bad thing in the slightest. Moreover, it fit in with the whole "rhapsody" point of the title--taking all these disparate lives and weaving them together into one big story. I liked that a lot, even though it took a while to bring all the viewpoint characters together.
Also--I definitely disagree with the person who was complaining about the love stories. Sure, there are multiple instances of characters becoming lovers, and actually there are more than three: Zeb and Ra, Jason and Abbie, Kita and Hugo, and Illian and Artaud. That reviewer seemed ready to dismiss this story as a romance just because of the number of pairings in it, but I don't think that does it any justice. This smacks of the attitude that an SF story can't be "serious" if it has a love story in it, and I think that's bullshit, as I have ranted before. None of these pairings dominate the story at any time; they are merely single themes in the overall greater piece telling the reader about these people's lives. And let's face it, folks, falling in love is a regular part of people's lives. With the time frame this story covers, and the number of people it introduces to the reader, it's inevitable that we're going to see some of them in relationships--especially in the context of how the changes sweeping the world affect those relationships. And we do get a lot of that.
One point I saw raised on the Amazon.com reviews holds true, though, and that is that because of the number of viewpoint characters, some of the depth of characterization does suffer. We get several things hinted at but not touched on with any detail at all--we don't have time because Goonan's switching back and forth between her viewpoint characters more often. Some of them are interesting side details about relationships between the characters; some of them are larger details about the disintegration of the political climate all over the world, things that would have been nice to see spelled out a little more. And one major plot detail from Mississippi Blues, the creation of the New Orleans Plague and who was responsible for it, was only very briefly mentioned at all in this story--which seemed odd to me given that the whole point of Crescent City Rhapsody was supposed to be Marie Leveau's using New Orleans as a jumping off point to get Crescent City created. It would have been nice to see the creation of the plague touched on a little more to tie the previous books better into this one.
And I was vaguely disappointed to see not one mention of what happened to Cincinnati at all--or even a mention of Abe Durancy.
All in all... some rough spots, but not nearly as many as in Mississippi Blues, and a lot more tightly put together.