The Silk Code, Komarr yet again
I enjoyed Borrowed Tides enough to try again, but The Silk Code left me cold. I think it was a genre problem: I liked the detective, Phil D’Amato, but I got the feeling that he was a series I’d walked in upon (Paul Levinson has written short stories about him) rather than the main character of someone’s first novel.
And what sort of a novel was it, anyway? Sure, the binding had the Tor crest and the words “Science Fiction” in tiny print, but there was no other indication that this was a sci-fi novel. Set in the present time, it seemed more like a disaster novel with a bit of mystery thrown in. Yet if a mystery, the eighty-page flashback to the Dark Ages was a curveball that threw the whole thing off. If a disaster, the culprit was too small-time for the dark conspiracy of the ages built up over the past and present timeframes.
That may sound like there was something for all comers, but I’ll call the glass half-empty and say there was something to disappoint any reader — medical-thriller science instead of sci-fi science, flailing timeframe instead of a tight mystery plot, and an anticlimax instead of salvation from imminent disaster. I’m a glass-half-empty kind of reader.
Much more enjoyable was rereading Komarr again, in order to do my plot-book homework. I hereby declare LMB rereadable - I kept getting into the story, despite having just reread it two weeks ago, instead of taking my homework notes. (I would have used Shards of Honor for my homework instead, but I gave my copy to Veronica.) The plot outline impressed me with just how much was going on in the novel, especially on the science side. It’s easy to fall into the sci-fi mistake of overlooking whatever science is well-written as not hard enough. The only thing that bothered me after so much rehashing was the Barrayar-bashing from the ladies. At least Miles treated the Time of Isolation as more than just a feminist straw-man.