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Reviews Mainpage
Warning!
This review contains numerous plot spoilers. Read on at your own risk.
For a spoiler-free review, read Mark McSherry's.
The Young and the Tendrilless:
A Golden Age Soap Opera
An Article about Slan, Dune, & Anderson's Sequels
© 2007 by Isaac Wilcott
8. Things have been intentionally kept "low-tech" in Slan Hunter. Anderson clearly made an effort to give this book a '40s feel by including revolvers and suchlike. But just as I was beginning to appreciate the effort even if it did feel a bit shaky he undermines it by offering unnecessary internal explanations for why the novel has the feel of the 1940s. Although such a decision could be viewed as clever, I personally did not react well to this. It struck me as being too self-conscious and it felt like he didn't expect his readers to figure out he's simply paying homage to Golden Age SF and the era they were written in.
7. When the character of Deacon popped up I had flashbacks from Waterworld going through my mind. Surely he could have had a different name? Or is this over-the-top tendrilroasting psycho supposed to be an actual deacon?
6. The repeated descriptions of apple pie got rather tedious. I admit this is a petty and inconsequential nitpick and I really ought to be ashamed of myself for bringing it up, but once you've described Granny's delicious apple pie you don't need to keep doing it. We know it's delicious and we believe you already. We've had apple pie before we get the picture! And these descriptions were framed in truly bizarre scenes that mixed cozy domesticity with the tense atmosphere of mortal enemies who know that black betrayal and spectacular death lie in their immediate futures. Between this and the recurring apple pie, reading this part of the book was just plain weird.
5. One thing that greatly annoyed me with the new Dune novels was this obsession to needlessly connect everything. Everyone had to be a secret relative of someone else, or revealed to have been the so-and-so who did thus-and-such to what's-his-name. Everything was retroactively connected that was perfectly fine when they were unrelated. Seemingly, nothing can have any significance on its own. The same thing happens here: numerous things in Slan have now been re-interpreted as loose ends that needed to be "tidied up." Far from making the story more compelling, doing this kind of thing merely shrinks it by forcing the rich background to fold in on itself. Everything has to be tied together into one gigantic, misshapen ball of twine.
4. I found it rather amusing that the "secret" police went around wearing flashy armbands. The secret police in the first book wore civilian clothes to blend in with the mainstream population. Hence the word "secret." Yet another sacrifice of plausibility for the sake of a knee-jerk reaction. Their own red-and-black insignia may be different, but we all know what it alludes to. But wicked is as wicked does, not as wicked dresses. The evil deeds of these men should speak for themselves; recourse to stock symbols is a cheap way of creating an instinctive emotional reaction rather than letting the reader feel that revulsion on their own by observing these men in action. In other words, we're being told to be horrified rather than giving us something to feel horrified about. "Zoiks! They dress like Nazis! I hate Nazis!" For me anyway, this made them come across as garish and silly rather than insidious and deadly.
3. The phrase "slan hunter" only appeared once in the first book. It was used in reference to John Petty himself and was certainly never intended as anything more than a general description. It was taken for granted that all non-slans would be "slan hunters" by simple definition of what they did when they saw a slan. Hunting slans in the street is what everyone already did. This novel gives the impression that "slan hunter" is an entire profession of its own, while this is clearly not the case in Slan. Slans were few and far between in the original work (see Chapter 8) there simply weren't enough around to hunt them as a full-time profession. Here we even have an amateur so successful on his many slan hunts that he wears a necklace made out of tendrils. Again, we have cheap sensationalism substituted for faithfulness and plausibility.
2. Just as R.A. Salvatore started doing in his books, Anderson doesn't know when to let a character remain dead. Killing them off just once is dramatic enough, thank you we don't need to see selected individuals turn up a few pages later not quite as dead as they appeared and then perhaps finally get killed again. It just makes me groan. "Doesn't anyone ever stay dead?" Petty jokingly asks when he sees Jommy alive in Chapter 39, after having apparently escaped certain death himself a few pages earlier. I echoed the words in all seriousness. And pointing it out in the book isn't cutesy, it's annoying. Resurrecting Kathleen at the end of Slan was credibly done and fit in with the rest of the story, but in Slan Hunter this sort of thing is used just as a highly unwelcome soap opera stunt. (And the same goes for doing something horrible to a character when the reader knows full well it's going to be fixed one way or another in the end.) This sort of thing just sucks the drama out of it through sheer repetition. When the cow's run dry it's time to stop milking it. If you keep going at it you're only embarrassing yourself and making the cow uncomfortable.
1. The final crown of ignominy to this novel was John Petty's last scene... well, I can't believe it was ever put to paper. Any of it. It is the most lurid and overdone scene I've ever read in any professionally produced publication. To put it in suitably purple prose, I reeled from the text and raised my hands to defend myself from the juvenile hysteria leaping out at me, its fangs dripping with the ultraviolet ichor of overblown imbecility. Aside from the atrocious writing in this scene which is very uncharacteristic of Anderson, and is perhaps another indication of how fast this book was written Petty is suddenly credited with killing off the entire Cross family. Once again events in Slan are shamelessly rewritten so they will fit in better with this bubbly soap opera paradise. Petty clearly had nothing to do with Patricia's death, though he did happen to be driving nearby at the time. Peter was pacifistic to the point of being suicidal and was killed, without resistance, by the panicky police who captured him. Now Peter Cross is shown to have been the slan equivalent of Rambo (Slanbo, perhaps?), riddled with bullets yet easily gunning down several secret police during their raid on a slan refuge. Am I the only one who has a problem with this?
A Tongue-in-Cheek Digression:
An Exciting Excerpt from Chapter 84:
"Being the Intelligent and Practical People That We Are, Why Should We Worry About the End of the World When We Could Have a Mean & Dirty Fist Fight Instead?"
(With half-hearted apologies to Mr. Anderson)
Inspired by this remarkable passage, and as a fitting homage to this thrilling climatic scene, I have composed an additional chronicle of Petty's persecution of the Cross clan, to heighten the unspeakable tragedy even further. Imagine, if you will, John Petty now foaming impressively at the mouth, his eyes aglow with murderous exultation, his eyebrows twitching with barely-restrained bloodlust. As the sweat pours down his forehead like a salty waterfall, Petty tries with difficulty to focus through his haze of hate on Jommy standing a few feet away, and shouts: "Jommy, you remember when you were four and your mother got you that pet goldfish? You were so happy with it, but one day it just disappeared, didn't it? You were devastated. But you know what, Jommy? I did it! I snuck into your bedroom one night and I ate your goldfish! And it was delicious!! You should have heard his little bones crunch between my teeth! And I'd do it all again in a heartbeat! And I would've eaten your cat too if I weren't allergic to them! How do you feel about that, slanboy! Huh? You wanna piece of me? Bring it on! And Queensberry rules be damned!"
6. I appreciated how the tendrilless slans are portrayed as dealing with the latent tendril genes that start cropping up in their offspring they are defeated by their own paranoia. (I'm even willing to ignore that the tendrils weren't supposed to crop up in their genepool for another few decades...)
5. Anthea's predicament was fleshed out quite nicely, her circumstances forcing her to re-examine the prejudices and propaganda that had been ingrained into her. She's a mundane person (here in the right role, for a change) thrown into exceptional circumstances and her plight is engrossing. Indeed, when I lost patience with the appalling scenes featuring Petty, Jommy, Lorry, and company, Anthea's scenes were the only parts that kept me going.
4. Joanna's brief interchange with one Captain Campbell in Chapter 18 was a poignant scene that perfectly highlights her divided loyalties and nicely emphasizes how her entire life since meeting Jommy must have been a prolonged tightrope act.
3. The description of the library, to say nothing of the library's archives, had me smiling with delight. I really wish I could visit that place myself!
2. I found I had quite a soft spot for Mr. Reynolds the librarian, and I wish we had seen more of him. To me he epitomizes everything that's wonderful about people who love books. His scenes were very enjoyable and I always looked forward to reading his next piece of dialogue.
1. In Chapter 17 Anderson addressed an issue that bothered me quite a bit when I recently re-read Slan Jommy's use of hypnosis to influence the minds of those in the valley where he and Granny lived. This really made me uneasy. I understood he did this to protect himself, but even so it felt like going too far. But the justification that Anderson puts forth is simple yet couldn't have been put better or more succinctly. It has actually helped me "feel better" about what Jommy did. In fact, this admittedly "minor" section may have been my favorite part of the entire book. Anderson summed it up so well, and it was an issue from the first book that legitimately needed to be addressed, and I salute and thank him for it.