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A review by nigellicus
An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe
1.0
A funny thing happened yesterday. I decided to stop reading a Gene Wolfe novel. Yup, I decided An Evil Guest just wasn't worth my time. I love Wolfe. Soldier of Sidon and The Wizard Knight were amongst my favurite reads last year, but this? Nope. It's set in the future but drenched in the past, and so triangulates on the present. Consequently, stuff that passes fine in his science fiction and fantasy becomes unbearably grating, specifically his patented 'dialogue as spoken by no living person, ever, not even bad old pulp stories.' The way characters bring Sherlock Holmes style razor sharp deductive reasoning skills to bear on stuff that at first looks trivial, and then later turns out to actually be trivial. People telling each other exactly how many points they're about to make. Vacuous female characters.
It all feels like a subtle joke, (and I suspect this book is supposed to be humourous,) not necessarily on the reader, but it just doesn't seem terribly funny, and if there's all this stuff going on in the background or hidden, then why does the stuff up front have to be so boring and stodgy? Never a badly written sentence, mind you. Maybe I'll pick it up again later in the year and it'll be better.
It all feels like a subtle joke, (and I suspect this book is supposed to be humourous,) not necessarily on the reader, but it just doesn't seem terribly funny, and if there's all this stuff going on in the background or hidden, then why does the stuff up front have to be so boring and stodgy? Never a badly written sentence, mind you. Maybe I'll pick it up again later in the year and it'll be better.