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Who is the author of Chung-Kuo? You've caught my interest.
The author is David Wingrove. The basic premise is a future world (sorta, but not quite a dystopia) centuries after China took over the world. It starts a bit dark, but the story get REALLY messed up the farther you go. The main themes are duty, power, change (on a big & small scale) & how you deal with "necessary evil".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chung_Kuo_%28novel_series%29
They've started republishing the lot because of a recent resurgence in popularity, and I remember reading somewhere that the last (dissapointing) novel was being re-written. So yay!
As for SoI&F, I'm unlikely to reread it soon. It is one of 2 series that I dropped because I lost all investment in the story. So it's very unlikely I retry it. And folks pushing me to do so will only activate my contrarian tendencies. You've stated your case, so let's pass onto other disappointing books. Maybe there should be a thread for non-disappointing ones.
Neil Gaiman has been very hit-and-miss for me, for some reason. I've loved a lot of his stuff, but I got a few pages into The Ocean at the End of the Lane and decided that it was too depressing for words.
@Quirel,
I read the short story version of the book you mentioned, and I actually rather liked it - like you, I found the increasing frustration of the aliens really fun to read about, the fight scenes were amazing, and the entire thing made me almost feel patriotic for being a human.
Yeah. It was a HFY story done well. It's kind of nice to read about aliens who view humanity with something other than condescension or adoration. Horror and exasperation is a welcome change.
I actually did like the ending though - I liked the sudden genre mixing, and it's not as if the twist came from nowhere - there was some foreshadowing sprinkled in the story.
Yeah, I know that there was supposed to be foreshadowing. Part of the story took place in a part of Europe that's only known because of Vlad Dracula.
The problem is, it doesn't matter how much foreshadowing was in there because I wasn't looking for fantasy elements. I thought the character who turned out to be Dracula was just ex-Russian special forces or something.
It even inspired me to run a version of the story as an RPG in a convention - the game plays out like a sci-fi war adventure, and in the finale the players have to choose if they will allow their characters to become vampires and carry on the fight.
How did your players react?
However, I was hugely disappointed by the Honor Harrington series - or at least, I found the first book nearly unreadable. No character had any depth or reason for me to care about them, and the story was moving rather slowly. Not what I expected at all, and it caused me to give up on Weber for now and go read some great stuff that's on my waiting list.
Allow me to let you in on a little secret: It doesn't get better.
I liked the first two books enough to keep reading, but the politics were insurmountable by the third book. You'd have a dozen pages of people talking about what they're going to do, then it happens, then another dozen pages...
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@Quirrel, I guess the expectations one has of a novel are greater than those from a short story. I guess if I would have dedicated considerably more time to the story (as I remember the novel being quite long), I might have preferred a more "fair" solution to the problem as well. Given that it was only a short story, I was far more willing to accept a twist ending that shook things up. It was a, "this short story is based on an interesting idea" kind of thing.
About the convention game I ran - the players liked it, for the most part, but then again this might just be the same issue again - a convention game is supposed to be a short one shot that you barely invest in. There is a very decent chance that, had I ran the same game for my usual group as a long, multi-session sci-fi adventure, they would have been upset at the ending.
