Ninefox Gambit Q4: Writing as a craft
What do you think of the writing? Turns of phrase, pacing, structure of the story, the use of interstitial interludes, all of those sorts of things. What worked, what didn't?
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The book went quickly enough, but I do not think I understood at all most of what was going on, accepting many things at face value, without comprehension on any deeper level.
I almost gave up about half way through because of my complete lack of understanding of what was happening and who I was supposed to think of as worth favouring, but persuaded myself to finish it. The ending kind of confirmed my feeling that we were mid-series and I shouldn't expect any real resolution.
At first I thought the author was intentionally taking the long way to writing the story. Some of the writing was very wordy at the beginning. For example: "Charis opened the relay and said to the recalcitrant sergeant, with great leniency, "Reconsider." I would have been preferable to secure his cooperation. She would have to adjust the formation otherwise, with uncertain results." <- This could have been written much more directly, but it wasn't. Later, this kind of thing either went away, or I got used to it, so it stopped bothering me.
But what never really stopped bothering me was the frequent use of concepts that had been given terms in the novel, but were never really explained. In the passage above, for example, we see a reference to 'formation'. What does formation mean, here? The term is used a lot in the book, but the importance of 'formations' is never really explained. I still don't know if they mean formations of moths ('ships'), or of foot soldiers, or of 'concepts'. I think it different times, the same word referred to any of those three. But even guessing what the word referred to, we still never learned WHY these were so important. We did ok with the Who, What, and skimmed over a lot of the How, and I gathered that the Where and When were not too important because it's an imaginary setting, but the WHY was really lacking in this book.
That's really neatly put, @Apocryphal
I think the writing was workmanlike at best. No great turns of phrase, no elegant setting of scene, and the pacing was somewhat off. A lot of the characters made fairly nonsensical decisions too.