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- Dec 9, 2000
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I've never found him hardcore atheist or anti-religion if you actually dig into his work beyond the headlines, and there's a whole pile of sympathetic religious characters in the new one. I do agree it doesn't grab you immediately like the others did though; it's a very slow, meandering read for quite a while, but that can be nice too. I'm kind of waiting to see how the whole trilogy works as a whole before passing any kind of judgement on it. There were certainly some bits in it that I was a bit iffy about
mostly, for a book that is obsessed with the practical side of things; making rafts, taking care of young babies etc., to suddenly jump into a chapter or two of a weird fairy-tale fantasy felt very jarring.
let us know how that goes will you? People are always bigging him up but the only book by him I have read was a YA one called Un Lun Dun and it was embarrassingly bad.
Agree with respect to your spoiler. It felt like one of those filler episodes on a TV show. Maybe its a deliberate trope though? On the religion thing - sure there are sympathetic religious characters such as the nuns but I don't think that changes the overall thrust of where he is coming from. Sometimes I feel like I'm being lectured at by Richard Dawkins. I really liked the whole idea about consciousness being distributed around all material things and the connection with particles/Dust though (not a spoiler I hope). More of that please! I do remember not being particularly taken with the first book in the original trilogy but it then it really catching fire with Book 2 so maybe we'll have the same situation here.
China Mievelle (sp?) - enjoying it so far. My feeling about his novels is that they are based on amazing ideas but generally don't really go anywhere and end up something of a disappointment. So, we'll see .....