Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25626-20160518042528/@comment-21519-20160724204744

I haven't gotten to FO yet, but I did like BA, even if most of the POVs struggled to find something useful to do. I'm wondering if HT should try mid-level POVs: instead of bomber crew members, how about the base commanders who send them out on their missions? Ship captains, senior civil servants. People who are closer to momentous decisions, but aren't actually making those decisions themselves. People like Heinrich Jager, for instance, or Irving Morrell before he became an army group commander in GWII--back when it was actually appropriate for him to get as close to the fighting as he continued doing later on.

There are also people like Sam Yeager or Flora Hamburger or Liu Han, who start out as ordinary schlubs and very quickly advance to more nearly-central roles in events by serendipitous circumstances that don't strain credibility too badly and build on factors that were already a part of the character's bio. I wish HT could rediscover how to write those characters. Alistair Walsh looked to be heading that way, but, well--

But I like the premise of this series just fine. If you want to do a WWIII story that is both nuclear and conventional, the 50s is the decade you have to use. The Cuban Missile Crisis would be an initial Armageddon followed by surviving rump governments fighting over the rubble; come 1970 or so, there are no surviving governments and not enough rubble to fight over, not after two thousand cities vanish in an afternoon. And in the 50s, it's pretty impossible not to notice a deep impression left by WWII, politically, culturally, and technologically.

I don't want HT to ape Lovecraft's style, but I do want him to use a Lovecraftian subject matter and tone. "Trantor Falls" (can't call that one TF, because that's me) reads just like any two-POV HT piece, but it's not at all out of place in the Asimov canon. There's not a single plot choice made that has you saying "Asimov wouldn't have done that!" (well, except for the Speakers not using their stupid coded language, but that's easily overlooked since Asimov only ever "translated" that as normal conversation anyway). But FS felt more like a parody than a pastiche. 9DC was closer but, as you say, still well off. And the presence of thinly veiled rockers, to me, provides an unnecessary and unwelcome distraction.