I was shooting to do Strange/Norrel next, but I ended up rereading (or starting to reread) a trilogy by David Weber. The wonderful thing is how quickly the read is. Enjoyment that doesn't really feel like an interruption of a longer and more ponderous work in progress. As far as the genre goes, Weber has a very nice take on a less than brand new plot. The alien menace and the extra-terrestrials who are here to help save us is a staple of the genre, but it's a staple because it makes it easy for the writer to create characters.
Mainly this comes from the lack of a time lag for the reader to overcome. "A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away..." sound cool, but getting into touch with the motivation of the characters can be dicey. All to often we never get well rounded characters because Adam Awesome is a dashing space adventurer! So there goes Adam off to save the princess. The human Id is easy enough to tap into - we all like fun and excitement, so there goes the space man finding space excitement. It's an infantile but easy method of putting together a story, and while it can be a fun distraction, it's rarely a worthwhile one.
A character worth caring about has to interact with the Ego and Superego. There have to be relationships that are dynamic and complex - and this is where a SF writer suddenly has a much harder time. What drives a sentient plant or an intelligent dolphin? How does and AI interact with and view the world? If they're all just humans with different body types then the setting loses the feel of the future.
An alien's visit nowish Earth avoids that issue by creating a modern human who can view the encounter and with whom the reader can easily bond with and support as the protagonist. Weber creates this world with an amusing twist. In Mutineer's Moon the Earth is hanging on the edge of a massive empire that is ravaged every few epochs by marauders bent on wiping out all competing life. There is a mutiny aboard one of this empire's ship, and the final stages of it play out on just post modern earth.
And the moon is a giant spaceship.
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I'm making this a comment, it takes away from the rest of the post.
The other reason that I enjoy this series is that Weber hasn't (*knock on wood*) bathed the story in his own moral and political views. I believe that the protagonist and he share many similar viewpoints, put he expresses them well, and shows flaws in them. There is a point at which a writer stops doing that, and they spiral into being unreadable. Case in point: Tom Clancy is a republican, so Jack Ryan is a republican. I'm fine with that. I think that a character has to express the beliefs of a writer or the story becomes two dimensional. But by the time Clancy shat out Rainbow Six, it was like reading a fantasy created by Ann Coulter for the edification of the Heritage Institute. The author's viewpoint overtook the story and strangled it in the closet of seedy Vegas hotel.
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