Oh, this one failed so fucking hard.

1636: The China Venture by Eric Flint

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


This is a library book, so I did not give it the hearty toss across the room it so deserved.

I endured for 100 pages. Cardboard characters. Almost no actual action is seen in the pages, an entire bandit uprising is told in the past tense and third person so we can get to the bandit kings arguing over musucains. Badly.

But what killed this for me is the author's inability to not slam his research onto every damn page. Every single ship isn't just introduced, we get its history back to its construction. We can't just talk about how the ships' armaments have been upgraded, no, we need a page and a half of expository text detailing the new guns. As in all the Ring of Fire books, there are some real people, and they are introduced as if a bored BBC presenter was reading their biographies!

About half of what I read is set in Ming Dynasty China, and it is so devoid of any descriptive text. . . I had no idea who these people were, or what they looked like, or if any of them ever experienced human emotion! As an example, early on two women are traveling to a temple in a horse cart. That's the description we get in the book. Nothing about the weather, the condition of the road, who is driving this cart, what can be seen from the road. . . nope, two cardboard women in a horsecart on a featureless plane.

What kills me is so many of these books (and there are over two dozen, do a great job of giving the history organically, even it's one up-timer explaining something to someone else for a few sentences. It works in the plot and doesn't require huge blocks of expository text.

Sorry, but this one was a complete fail for me. I could not make myself endure this dreck for another page.



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