Losing his Mooreings

A while ago I wrote the following while considering the problems of character construction in sci-fi.

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.

This sums up Serpent of Venice in a nutshell, and on a larger stage with Christopher Moore's Shakespeare parallax's in general. Fool was silly, and this semi-sequel keeps the silly flowing. The bard wrote high and low humor into his work, and comedy and tragedy into every play. Moore grabbed onto a lot of interesting strands in Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and then distorted his point by covering everything in a layer of penis jokes so large that... sigh.

If what he is trying to do is make a point about justice and equality accessible to everyone, that's noble but, to paraphrase a line from a Christopher Stasheff character attempting the same thing: education in entertainment is great, but it still has to be entertaining. The top layer of Serpent was, but trying to engage with the underlying metaphors and points weren't, and should have been for the book to be fully successful.

That said, Moore is great at dick and fart jokes, it's just that I know that he's capable of weaving both levels in his own work. That could be the problem, that in aping the bard he lowers his own prowess.