nicanical

This bad boy is longer than Raymond Chandler's other novels.

The Long Good-bye is also more introspective—both in terms of Marlowe's characterization in it, and probably for Chandler in writing it as his wife Cissy was terminally ill at the time. Terry Lennox and Roger Wade doubtless represent aspects of Chandler himself.

The Long Good-bye is aptly named. There's the obvious reason: even after Terry ventilates his head with a nickel-plated down Mexico way, Marlowe cannot shake the specter of his presence. But Chandler also keeps in extraneous scenes and details in a manner deviating from his previous novels. When Marlowe must narrow down a shortlist of doctors, Chandler gives each visit its own scene where he otherwise might have done away with the wrong doctors with one line. Similarly, Chandler reproduces troubled writer Roger Wade's rambling stream of consciousness draft in full—again, something I feel Chandler could equally likely have done away with in a single line. These parts slow down the pace of the story when encountered but not to the point of detriment. More importantly, keeping in these parts gives nuance to Marlowe's thinking.

This might be the most literary of Chandler's novels, with its web of relationships, and exploration of its characters' steely loyalties and psychological debts—I appreciate why Chandler considered it his best book.

David Weber's On Basilisk Station is a nice piece of military sci-fi pulled down by too much exposition.

A lot of exposition isn't immediately a story's death knell for me. I like Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers and it has plenty of exposition. Working through Weber's exposition though is like spooning mouthfuls of cement dust. Get ready to wade through swathes of gobbledygook.

Maybe Weber put extensive effort into crafting the setting and he included the dense expository passages out of excitement for his worldbuilding. Who knows? But have the courtesy to move that stuff into an appendix man. That's what Dune did. Follow Frank Herbert's example, not Neal Stephenson's.

Otherwise, the rest of story is well-paced and enjoyable. I like Honor, the main character. I like how the Fearless's crew comes together. I like how Honor exploits all the resources of her ship—the marines, the pinnaces, the weather probes (down to reconfiguring them into proximity sensors). The occasional views into the background political intrigue was a nice touch. I could have used more of it if Weber clearly telegraphed perspective shifts.

Originally titled The Prefect and first of the Prefect Dreyfus series set within Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space universe, Aurora Rising gives readers a glimpse into the Belle Epoque talked about in other books in the series.

Pacing is good. Good cycles of tension and relief entice readers along. Character development is shallow but the magic here is in Reynolds's worldbuilding. The characters only need depth enough to push buttons and pull levers to show the world as a living, interactive thing. There may even be too many characters. Thalia, for example, is locked up in a polling core and languishes for awhile perhaps because Reynolds didn't know what to do with her. Sparver, too. He's present early on, disappears, then conveniently rematerializes just as Dreyfus embarks on a suicide mission.

Some conversations are thinly-veiled replacements for exposition. These read artificially, like an interview where all the questions are softballs. It's a minor thing. I mention it only because it's not a problem I recall with other books in Revelation Space.