Stirling’s got a blog at Amazon, where he mentioned how some writers have a weakness for alcohol–but his is for food. (Critics of Dies the Fire complained that he spent too much time describing feasts.) He’d just gotten a Kindle to help him escape boredom while using the treadmill. Stirling’s apparently got no illusions that he’d be a warrior hero.
His style for the Lords of Creation series is almost pulpish & tons of fun. From the Acknowledgements in **The Sky People ** (set on an alternate Venus):
The next book in the series, In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, takes place on Mars–of course.
Stirling has written seemingly dozens of sequels, so it must have some traction with the reading public. I recently listened to DTF on audio, and I originally heard of it years ago, somewhere other than here. I’m not actively involved in SF fandom so it must have happened through osmosis.
I will join this re-activation of this thread. He did write many sequels, but he eventually killed off too many characters and the new characters weren’t resonating with his audience. The series ended rather abruptly after that.
And other examples of lazy, or just B-grade, writing. Someone mentioned characters being described the same (“Her face was a mask of obsidian” vs “Her face was a mask of basalt”).
I got that feeling from the trilogy where Nantucket Island gets inexplicably jumped back in time (and place: they end up dealing with… Aztecs? Why?).
Oh, and, conveniently, a battleship that happened to be in the harbor got sent back, too. If anyone here’s lived on Nantucket, it’s a small island with a shallow harbor. I’ve only seen much smaller boats moored there.
I shouldn’t be too critical. Even though I love Time Travel novels, I only made it through half of the first book. Oh, wait, that means I should be critical…
I think I’ve read most of what Stirling has written and reread several of his books multiple times. So it’s fair to call me a fan. That said I feel there are three periods to his career:
His early career (about 1985-1998): This is when he wrote the Draka books and the Fifth Millennium series and co-wrote the General series. I feel he was still developing as an author in this period.
His mid-career (about 1998-2010): I feel this was when he wrote his best work. This was when he wrote Conquistador, The Peshawar Lancers, The Sky People, In the Courts of the Crimson Kings and the Nantucket trilogy. I would recommend any of these.
His later career (about 2010 to the present): I feel this was when his work started getting bloated. I feel he turned what should have been single books into trilogies and what should have been trilogies into long series. The Emberverse series (which started with Dies the Fire) began in the mid-career period and ran into the late career period and the quality of the books in the series showed a decline.
I just want to point out that my original statement was made 15 years ago, and there are certainly groups now far more idiotic than rich MA liberals.
It wasn’t a battleship, it was the US Coast Guard Eagle, a steel hull, motorized 3 masted sailing vessel. It was passing by Nantucket at the time, IIRC, not docked, and got transported back as well.
It was incredibly useful to the Nantucketers (and the plot) to have a large sailing vessel full of coast guard officers & sailors available - they would have mostly starved the first winter without it. But given that it’s a ship that actually exists, and whose home port is about 100 nm from Nantucket, it wasn’t unreasonable for Stirling to include it.