There are some hints of global warming, some mentions of eco scandals - BSE, foot and mouth - that had recently happened or were happening when Jones wrote the novel, but nothing all that concrete. I had the same sort of problems with the future England Bold as Love predicted, which at first seemed dated and implausible, more sixties New Wave than early 21st century science fiction.īold as Love‘s future England is part of a Britain more or less peacefully dissolving itself, against a background of ecological catastrophe engulfing Europe, never really explained. She writes her characters from the outside in, rather coolly and hence it takes more time to get into her characters’ heads than it would with a more “warmer” writer. Gwyneth Jones is not a writer who grabs you from the first sentence - at least she isn’t for me. Perhaps it was just that this was a novel I needed to immerse myself in fully, not read in bits and chunks here and there during the daily commute. Clarke Award and which was commercially succesful enough to span four sequels, must have something in it that I was missing. That, and the feeling that a novel which had won the Arthur C. Only the fact that I was reading this as part of a self imposed challenge kept me going. Didn’t like the writing, didn’t believe the world building or plot, couldn’t care for the protagonists. For a long time I wondered whether I had made a mistake selecting this book, picking it up and putting it down again, not getting to grips with it.
Bold as Love is the second book in my year of reading women sf challenge, chosen partially because Niall Harrison was also going to read it in February, for Torque Control‘s similar project.
0 kommentar(er)
