The Works of Vermin E: World-Building

Apocryphal

What did you think of the setting? Is it imaginative or derivative? Well-thought out? Well-described? How compelling is it, esp. compared to settings you've loved?

RichardAbbott

As mentioned, I thought the use of scent was a great innovation. Full marks for that. If the overall setting was derivative I;m not sure what it derived from! But overall it just struck me as chaotic and haphazard, and I wasn't persuade that a society with that much constant churn could survive. So I guess it didn't strike me as believable.

Apocryphal

Yes. I was for one thing confused by the onomastics. We seemed to have characters with French names, English names, Russian names and so on, but no real sense of being on Earth, or really anywhere. And no sense at all of local language, which would surely be reflected in the city’s place names. It was a hodge podge and not very believable. To give examples -
Ecdytoxin - a made-up word, and gobbledygook. Christopher Priest would have hated it.

Character names - all from different ethnic backgrounds? Don Javunech, Mallory, Ludovico, Demetrius,

Another made up nonsense word, this one derivative of the Nutty Professor: Phlogiston grenade

Vralen and vant. ‘Eir patron’: Some local pronouns or titles - their meaning never really explained. So there does seem to be a local language - how come the onomastics ignore it? These added more confusion than flavour.

Danseur Laureate - what? Why the mix of European languages when there’s a local one?

Etc., etc. Not really a well thought through setting.

RichardAbbott

Yes, I just gave up on language. I know most SFF authors aren't as bothered about language roots as I like to be, but this was so much of a hotch potch that I abandoned any hope of finding consistency early on.

kcaryths

@Apocryphal you nailed it. I didn't realise how big of a frustration (or why I guess) that was until you pinpointed it. A real lack of internal consistency in that regards makes it difficult to feel like one can become immersed in the world.

I read A Clockwork Orange and while that was also quite a struggle to get on with at the start due to all of the made up language, it had an internal consistency to it that made it easier and easier to get on with, where by the end I was hardly noticing the manufactured nature of the language and the world.

This book was relentless in the struggle throughout. Maybe that was the point? I don't know.

NeilNjae

As i said elsewhere, this is a complex world that Ennis has put a lot of thought and effort into creating. It's clearly highly baroque, with lots of layers and hidden depths. I didn't overly mind the mixed languages, as I thought it added to that sense of complexity.

The trouble is, the world isn't being used enough to tell a compelling story. It's a lovely backdrop, but why do I care?

As for the smell, it's an interesting twist. But I wonder how important it would be if we didn't have a perfumer as a viewpoint character.