I recently finished
Snow Crash, which just sorta ended really quickly.
Now I'm reading...
And...it's...man...it's got problems.
As you can see from fellow Wisconsinite Patrick Rothfuss' cover blurb, it's got a pretty cool-sounding premise: a story set in a steampunk Japanese land.
The biggest problem is that this is what drew almost everyone to think it was so awesome. One of the toughest things with fantasy writing is that a lot of people have really
great ideas but aren't too good at the execution, and it shows here. Kristoff had a great idea, and he's even good at worldbuilding but, that's where the praise ends.
The first book has front-loaded so much exposition and worldbuilding that every is so ****ing sloooooooooooooow. There's a rather annoying thing where whenever someone important enters the picture, it launches into paragraph(s) to describe them. It's so show-stopping in a "LOOK AT THIS CHARACTERRRRR" that I just imagine their descriptions accompanying catwalk music and spotlights. There's also sort of a problem with the descriptions going a bit too far. Like...he's good at it, but I don't need a constant reminder of how polluted everything is, how sweaty everyone is, and how dirty the entire world is.
My biggest problem with it so far is the complete lack of care taken with the language. The book does a lot to push that this is an analog to Japan, and you'd figure that everyone is speaking the analog to the Japanese language, and we're simply reading it in English for our benefit. However, this is sorta thrown to the wind when characters will pepper Japanese into their speech, sometimes erroneously. For instance, when the main character pleas with someone to stop beating up her father, she says...
"Sama, please. Enough for one day, hai?"
...this one sentence encompasses everything that is wrong with how the language was handled. This implies that characters are speaking English, and then slipping into their language with certain words, for seemingly no reason. Then, "sama" is an honorific, which can only come at the end of someone's name, not in place of it. That's doubly silly when they use the word "Lady" to address a woman of considerable standing, but they only use "sama" for the men. Similarly, "hai" is not some interchangeable word of acknowledgment. They use it in place of actual "yes," but they also use it to imply agreement, like "right?" and this is stupid because there's already proper Japanese for that, like "desu ne?" There's also the redundant moments where the author uses the Japanese term for something, only to then use the English name, like saying "he reached into his obi belt." The problem here being that you could just have used the term belt, and if you don't, well, then you confuse people who don't know what the hell an obi is, whiiiiich is why you have to be really careful about using another language :/
It's at its worse when a being asks what Japanese word means, and the main character translates it, when
their both Japanese! Worse still is that the characters also talk about the "round-eyed gaijin" they are at war with, but then apparently they've been speaking their language?!
It's just really annoying, and there's no better way to say this, other than it all comes off as weeby garbage.
There's also a lot of hubbub about the fact that Kristoff apparently did very little research. He admits that wikipedia was his primary source of information about Japanese, along with asking his friend in Japan questions in exchange for booze. I'm more annoyed at his friend not correcting him than I am where he did how much research, but it already seems to be a huge problem that neither he nor his editor did any due diligence. Sure, it's a fantasy world, but when the entire premise is pushing the whole
JAAAAPAAAAAN thing so hard that it's hard not to get really ****ed about a lot of those inconsistencies.
OH YEAH! And there's a dreamy samurai with green eyes. I just think it's stupid that a full-blooded Japanese guy has green eyes, but others have pointed out that to make him unique, he was given a "white" feature. There's also the problem that some non-Japanese things are featured in the story as if they were Japanese, primarily the use of the exclamation "aiyaa" and bowing with one hand over the fist, which are Chinese mannerisms, and the mention of the mythical beast "Nagaraja," which is Indian.
Once I actually get past the first 50 pages, they say it'll pick up (I'm on the like mid-40s), it's supposed to get a little faster, so hopefully I can continue, despite knowing there's some other terrible dumb stuff and cliches on the way.
