More Words, Deeper Hole

is interesting for all sorts of reasons, good and bad.

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.