{"id":304,"date":"2005-01-13T22:31:01","date_gmt":"2005-01-14T03:31:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=304"},"modified":"2005-01-13T22:31:01","modified_gmt":"2005-01-14T03:31:01","slug":"spencer_wen_04","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2005\/01\/spencer_wen_04\/","title":{"rendered":"Spencer, Wen: (04) Dog Warrior"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wen Spencer’s Dog Warrior<\/cite><\/strong> is another series book with structural problems. It is the fourth Ukiah Oregon book (I logged the first three together<\/a>). My immediate reaction on finishing it was that it’s a pity that Spencer couldn’t take the route that Mary Gentle’s Ash<\/cite> did in the U.K., and publish the series as a single book (Ash<\/cite> was broken into four for U.S. publication. I appear to have read it pre-booklog, so I’ll just say I didn’t like it and leave it at that). The weight of exposition to be got through, after three books’ worth of both action and history, is really crushing and does serious damage to the book’s pace.<\/p>\n

On reflection, though, even the Ash<\/cite> route wouldn’t necessarily fix Dog Warrior<\/cite>, because though you could get rid of a lot of backstory put in for the reader’s benefit, this story switches viewpoint character<\/em>. That’s right, after three books’ worth of Ukiah figuring out who and what he is and what happened to make him that way, we get someone else who needs to learn all this stuff from scratch!<\/p>\n

The new character, Atticus, is Ukiah’s new-found brother (sort of), and so it does make sense for us to be in his point of view as he figures out what he thinks of Ukiah and all the odd baggage that comes with him. But the tension, pace, and exposition suffers so much thereby, that I really have to wonder if staying out of Atticus’ head might have been a better course—let us infer his mental journey from Ukiah’s keen observation of his actions. (And give us a straight-up “what has come before” prologue too; at some point you just stop being able to smoothly inclue everything important.)<\/p>\n

Because of all this backstory to wade through, the actual plot seems almost an afterthought. More, it’s another stopgap action in an ongoing war, and I’m left wondering if the larger conflict ever will, or indeed can, be resolved. I found the first three fun and fast reads, and it’s too bad that this, the last for the foreseeable future, didn’t satisfy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wen Spencer’s Dog Warrior is another series book with structural problems. It is the fourth Ukiah Oregon book (I logged the first three together). My immediate reaction on finishing it was that it’s a pity that Spencer couldn’t take the route that Mary Gentle’s Ash did in the U.K., and publish the series as a … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Spencer, Wen: (04) Dog Warrior”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,15,29],"tags":[394],"class_list":["post-304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-sf-and-fantasy","category-ukiah-oregon","tag-spencer-wen"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}