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The Extremes

(Gollancz SF)

By Christopher Priest

(6)

| Paperback | 9780575075788

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1 Review

Is "Epistemological seachange" another way to say "you suck at story endings"?

John Clute uses "Epistemological Seachange" and lots of other words ("discombobulate" makes an appearance, too) in his Afterword to this novel. The gist of it is that Priest is an author who just doesn't fit - his novels are too much for critics, and can't be easily put on the same shelf of SciFi, e ... (continue)

John Clute uses "Epistemological Seachange" and lots of other words ("discombobulate" makes an appearance, too) in his Afterword to this novel. The gist of it is that Priest is an author who just doesn't fit - his novels are too much for critics, and can't be easily put on the same shelf of SciFi, even if Priest is "labelled" mostly as a SciFi writer.
What Clute seems oblivious too (or maybe I am much too discombobulated and can't understand Priest's prose) is that while Priest has always been good at taking very odd ideas and blending them with very mundane lives in a very mundane, contemporary (or mostly Victorian, in the case of The Prestige) England... he seems prone to reach a point where he can't find a way to properly end the story, so he basically pulls the plug and closes it on an abrupt and often slightly incongruous note.
The Extremes is a classical example of this: the tale becomes more and more complicated while it progresses, and the reader is genuinely thrilled to see how everything will be resolved, or explained, or anyway "closed".
Then you turn the page, and you are staring at John Clute's foreword. You backpedal... surely you skipped a page... no. It really "ended" like that.
Three stars because Priest writes well and I find his work pretty engaging. While it lasts...

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Pamar said on Mar 22, 2010 | Add your feedback