I picked up Neal Asher’s The Skinner (NY: Tor 2004) without having heard anything about it whatsoever, which is just as well. A quick google shows that it was well-reviewed, and if I had high expectations, I would have been even grouchier about it.
Oh, dear. Look, there were good things. Jaded sf readers looking for novelty will at least find old elements (super-regenerative humans, rapid mutation, planet-warden AI, foul-mouthed military robots, puppet-master evil aliens using human bodies as blanks, half-machine half-sentient transportation, Hive mind, etc) used imaginatively and in interesting combinations. The plot is preposterous, but is timed to come together nicely, even if it’s pretty obviously forced. Mr. Asher does a good job of creating invulnerable characters with just enough Kryptonite around to make their dangers, um, dangerous. Well, some of the dangers.
But look, as a general rule, if a writer uses the phrase “piscine creatures of the sea”, that writer should be told, gently but firmly, to go and lie down, and let somebody else write the book for a while. There are others, too. At one point a person is knocked unconscious and “falls ... like a falling door.” This isn’t a matter of taste; this is bad writing. It didn’t smell to me like the occasional slip, either; this appeared to be a book written by a clever, imaginative person who doesn’t know how to put together a readable sentence. Feh.
,
-Vardibidian.
Vardibidian, ‘piscine creatures of the sea’ are those that resemble fish but are not fish, not teleosts. They are also distinct from those creatures in the sea neither fish nor fish-like. Best you go find a dictionary to learn the precise meaning of ‘piscine’.
The problem with the phrase ‘piscine creatures of the sea’ is not at all solved by making it clear that what are being referred to are pseudo-fish. That was actually clear. There is an ancient and dreadful tradition of pseudo-fish in sf, also of pseudo-cows, pseudo-cats, pseudo-bears, and in one case I recall, somebody takes pains to point out that the plant called ‘hemlock’ in the author’s world bears no relation to plant on Old Earth with the same name.
But once you’ve called them piscine, I think I know two things about them: they are creatures, and they live in water. In context, I knew that already, because the scene took place underwater, and I could easily figure out that whatever it was that was being eaten was not being eaten by houses, starships or the platonic idea of Good. Now, I could turn out to be wrong about those things. I hope I would not have mocked you for writing the phrase “piscine starships” or “piscine houses”; such phrases are evocative, rather than annoying. Even had you written about piscine creatures of the sky, I would (I hope) not have singled out that phrase for mockery, nor yet bovine creatures of the sea, or feline cars of the highway, or ursine starships of the vast empty spaces between the stars. Well, I would hope that the phrase ‘ursine starships’ would accompany some explanation of just how the starships were like bears. I suppose one advantage of the phrase ‘piscine creatures of the sea’ appearing in an underwater scene is that it certainly requires no further explanation.
Thanks,
-V.
Dolphin-shaped brass door knockers are piscine. The piscine creatures of the sea are distinct from the non-piscine ones like the prill, glisters and leeches. They are piscine because they ‘resemble fish’ – that’s all. Piscine is preferable to fish-like, though admittedly I would have prefered to have written just ‘piscine sea creatures’. Enough.
Lisa and I have been trying to figure out a better phrase than falls like a falling door. The best we’ve found is “He fell like a hybrid Honda Civic.”