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Anderson
Date: 2008-12-29 10:35 am (UTC)OC is four novellas, and three of the four are ambitious and flawed in different ways. It's not a great book, but it's a very interesting one just from the how-does-the-sausage-happen POV.
Frex, the infodumps in part IV are indeed awful, as is the ham-handed attempt to connect the bad guys to Current Events. (Anderson caught a bad case of dirtyfuckinghippyphobia right around the time he wrote this... in fact, this might be the first appearance of it in his writing.) (Funny coincidence: right around this time, c. 1969, the Nixon administration was coordinating a huge, illegal, covert domestic surveillance program to try to find the non-existent connections between domestic dissidents, war protesters, and ***The Communist Menace***. Its name: Operation Chaos.) And parts of that story are even worse than you've shown. And yet, there are some powerful images -- mostly the ones where he shows only a single piece of something, or just alludes.
Clavinism, first off-the-cuff guess: reaction to the New Wave. Good writing is what those weird guys are doing; it's all literary and has girl cooties now. Let's go back to cardboard characters, simple plots with wicked villains, and 'as you know, Bob' explication.
Doug M.