{"id":4636,"date":"2010-04-25T10:50:17","date_gmt":"2010-04-25T10:50:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2010\/04\/25\/series-i-like-disappoint-me\/"},"modified":"2010-04-25T10:50:17","modified_gmt":"2010-04-25T10:50:17","slug":"series-i-like-disappoint-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2010\/04\/25\/series-i-like-disappoint-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Series I Like Disappoint Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jim Butcher’s Changes<\/cite>, the 12th Dresden Files novel, came out not too long ago, and there’s been a bunch of discussion of it in various places on the Internet. I seem to have a slightly less positive take on the book than a lot of other people, so I figured I’d put up a slightly grumpy post about it, to get it out of my system.<\/p>\n

There are good things about the book, to be sure– the ending is very eventful, to say the least, and fires a lot of the guns that have begun cluttering up the mantel. Butcher very emphatically justifies the title, ensuring that nothing will be the same after this point in the series.<\/p>\n

But there are a bunch of smaller things that bug me about the book. Discussing them will require MASSIVE BOOK-DESTROYING SPOILERS<\/strong>, though, so I will put that material below the fold:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One major problem is the sheer weight of backstory involved. Harry spends most of the book traveling around calling in (or trying to call in) favors from various other characters. Every single conversation in these sections is Meaningful due to past events, requiring a short recap of said events. Which means there’s tons of Telling about the personal significance of everything Harry is doing, and not so much Showing of what’s going on. It made the middle third of the book really drag.<\/p>\n

Second, Harry gets off a little too easy. After pages and pages of hand-wringing about having to make Difficult Choices and Endanger Friends, there is exactly one significant character death. It’s a doozy, granted, but it ends up serving the greater good, and none of the other people he brought in end up being hurt at all.<\/p>\n

On top of that, while Harry does have to make an unpleasant bargain in order to get the power he needs to fight the Red Court, absolutely everybody who matters, up to and including God, forgives him instantly (or even pre-emptively). There’s a lot of talk about how hard it is to make the choice, but the immediate consequences of it are pretty negligible.<\/p>\n

I’m also not entirely happy with Harry’s apparently infallible sense of character, as yet again we have an officious wizard who rubs him the wrong way turning out to be doing the work of the Red Court, and another character who appears to be a good guy but annoying is actually an enemy agent, retroactively justifying Harry’s instant dislike of him. It feels really cheap.<\/p>\n

Again, I’m not saying the book was actively bad– it’s still an engaging read, and does tie up or cut off a bunch of dangling plot threads. But there were a bunch of little things about it that irked me, and detracted from the overall effect.<\/p>\n

Of course, as much as some of the details bugged me, it wasn’t a patch on the abrupt ending of Steven Erikson’s Dust of Dreams<\/cite>, which was kind of the Malazan Empire version of the wasabi zombies episode of Samurai Champloo<\/cite><\/a>— lots of portentous stuff happens, and then, effectively, an asteroid strike kills everyone. What the hell was that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jim Butcher’s Changes, the 12th Dresden Files novel, came out not too long ago, and there’s been a bunch of discussion of it in various places on the Internet. I seem to have a slightly less positive take on the book than a lot of other people, so I figured I’d put up a slightly… Continue reading Series I Like Disappoint Me<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,37,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-pop_culture","category-sf","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4636\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}