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Loading... World's End (1984)by Joan D. Vinge
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Not as good as the first one in the series, The Snow Queen. ( ) I don't quite understand the hate piled on this one. All the "waste of time" reviews. Yes, this is a much smaller story than Snow Queen but it's still an important one, as it opens up the world that Vinge had kept locked down for so long. No, Gundhalinu likely wouldn't have been my first choice to lead the sequel, but Vinge did a good job of rounding out his character and allowing him to dig into another mystery. What I didn't like was the first third or so of the story. While it was a touch interesting, and set up what was to come, it largely felt like filler to bring a novella-sized story to the bare minimum for novel size. I won't go into what happens, but I think anyone who reads what they were originally going after, and what they found will agree, it was unnecessary, and didn't serve the second half of the book in any way. World's End is not as intricately plotted as The Snow Queen, and though it's much shorter, the plot drags more slowly in places. One character, Spadrin, seems to exist solely to annoy the reader for no reason at all for many pages. Finally, all comes neatly together in an exciting reveal, but the novella could have been half as long. (I wonder if this started as a short story that the publishers wanted to stretch to book length.) Looking forward to The Summer Queen and hoping it's more like The Snow Queen than World's End. Where The Snow Queen struck me as surprisingly contemporary (or maybe timeless), World's End did seemed stuck in the 1980s. Both the outdated approach to gender and sex and the actual prose were not to my tastes. Beyond that issue, I also found much of the story to be a miserable slog, and the older I get the less interested I am in stories that are heavy on unrequited pining. The plot itself was pretty interesting, but all in all, I'm hoping the other two books in the series bear more in common with The Snow Queen than with World's End. World’s End is the second book in the Snow Queen Cycle. I enjoyed it quite a lot, although maybe not for the same reasons I had enjoyed The Snow Queen. It’s very different from the first book in both setting and style. At half the length of the first book, this story is simpler and more focused. We follow one of the characters who had left Tiamat at the end of the previous book. (Character name only in the spoiler tags: If you’ve read the first book, that description may make you wonder how it could possibly relate much to The Snow Queen at all. In many ways it just feels like a short, diversionary story about a pretty likeable character from that first book. However, there is a connection eventually, and it’s a big one that I expect to be very relevant to the next book. The plot held my interest well and the pages in the book seemed to fly by. The first half is more of an adventure story, but things become increasingly more mysterious toward the second half. I did have some frustrations with the main character. I liked him quite a bit in the first book, but we didn’t really get to know him all that well in retrospect. In this book, no reviews | add a review
Book two of Joan Vinge's belovedSnow Queencycle of classic science fiction, back in print! When BZ Gundhalinu's irresponsible older brothers go missing in World's End, a badlands rumored to drive people mad, he begrudgingly goes after them. The further in he travels, the stranger things get. The Snow Queen Series The Snow Queen World's End Summer Queen Tangled Up In Blue Other Books 47 Ronin Catspaw Cowboys & Aliens Dreamfall No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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