Seize Your Copy La Guerra Larga (La Tierra Larga, #2) Narrated By Terry Pratchett Distributed In Booklet
the second book in The Long Earth Saga I give/stars, It is long and slow to start out, Most of the good stuff takes place in the last third of the book, It is mostly a travelogue, following the old stereotype for science fiction and fantasy trilogies,
It does end with a great, big, huge natural disaster on Datum Earth that would be our earth, and the death of a major character, setting up for the third book, "The Long Utopia.
" I see I liked this more than most reviewers did, I'll try to explain why,
OK, the other reviewers are correct: the characters are pretty much cliches, and mostly do not directly have any conflict with each other though they missed a GREAT opportunity with the Sally/Helen subplot!.
Mostly, though, everyone is railroaded by the La guerra larga's version of fate or destiny, which is an AI.
I doubt that this is a spoiler for anyone who's read,
The overall plots are diffuse, though some of the individual, immediate scenarios are wellhandled, The overarching plots are seen more obliquely than directly, . .
And that is why I gave itstars,
"Life is what happens when you're making other plans" and that's what's going on here.
I don't know if it was intentionally done, but it was pretty clever, Even with problems people were trying to address directly usually the direct approach was a FAIL, and only more indirect, holistic approaches worked.
And that's appropriate, and reflective of real Life though many of us read fiction because things ARE more direct there than in RL!.
What does it mean to be a member of a bellicose species that suddenly has really no excuse for war, nor any realistic way of waging it How can you keep people in a broad sense oppressed when they can just leave For me, these questions and the sometimes direct, sometimes oblique approaches to them, make this book well worth reading.
. . but the reader does have to put many of the pieces together, I think that's good otherwise it'd be too much of a polemic,
Anyway. I liked it, and am looking forward to, Grabbed this off the bestsellers shelf at the library and waspages in before a friend informed me it was a sequel.
In deference to his horror that I might continue to read out of order, I stopped around page, obtained "The Long Earth," and then came back to this one.
It actually reads very well as an introduction to the "Long" universe,
However, as it progressed it became more and more a series of only loosely connected vignettes, none more than half developed.
Really, one could not help but feel that the authors had bitten off far more than they could chew, especially with the piddling page count.
The ending was especially unsatisfying, with the supposed resolution of the two central conflicts on one hand almost ridiculously anticlimactic, and the other not even really comprehensible.
As other reviews have noted, there is material in here for dozens of novels, It's obvious that at least one more is planned, given the entirely predictable cliffhanger ending which is not in the Least reminiscent of The Long Earth's cliffhanger.
No. Not at all! I've no doubt I will read it, but there is really no chance of this universe usurping, for instance, Discworld just to chose a completely random example! Those who expect this to be an actionfilled story about war, weapons, injuries and such will be very disappointed.
Those, however, who expect an adventure, a wellwritten study of society and possibilities the Long Earth IS about possibilities after all geological, mythological, biological and physical alike will be delighted.
As in the first book, you will also find wonderfully humorous passeges in this sequel and the characters have even more depth.
What stands out is that this second book is somewhat darker than the first, Not just because of what happens to Joshua, but the overall situation, I am still pretty shaken about Monica and Yellowstone although I expected both and can't wait to read the third and final book to know in which direction the authors will take the story.
Not just a story, Not just fun. Not just challenging. Not just one possibility. Endless possibilities, formidable writing, definitely meant to amplify our worldview and our minds and our hearts, You'll see. Just read it. First I would note that according to the goodreads rating system,indicates that the book was okay.
In other words, the book isn't bad, I just thought it was okay,
I loved the first the books and was highly anticipating this second book, Unfortunately it lost a lot of the charm and curiosity of the first book and focused more on those areas that I didn't like from the first book.
In the first book it was a lot of fun to read the chemistry or lack thereof between Joshua and Lobsang.
In this book Joshua and Lobsang are almost never together, Lobsang himself was a character I loved from the first book, In the second book he's only in the background, Even Joshua is less in the spotlight, but not to the degree of Lobsang, And at any rate Joshua's character has changed from the wandering loner,
Some of what made the long earth itself so intriguing is also missing in the second book.
The first book was a wondrous exploration of the multiverse earths, The from the first book seems to be a major threat.
If not the major threat, it is the climactic and most interesting threat near the end of the book.
The second book all but throws that away, There are similar creatures, but hardly a threat and of no significant interest, The trolls lose some of their mystery and become more of your stereotypical embodiment of innocence, This leads to the next and most annoying issue in the second book:
It's more focused on politics and theology than the first book, in all the wrong ways.
The first book spent a good deal of time exploring how various political situations might arise in a "long earth" and some theological reactions we might encounter.
That was fine. It did a good job in the political sphere and showed more the uncritical reflection of the authors in the religious sphere.
But the second book simply toes all the party lines for secular liberalism, The reader is treated to an extremely stereotypical portrayal of the baddies read: conservatives and crazies read: religious and all the current soapboxes of our real life liberalism are simply cut and pasted onto the long earth so we get to read about climate change, speciesism, the virtues of those colonies that "don't do God" and the dangers of those religious nutjob colonies, etc.
The trolls serve as the oppressed minority, though it's not clear whether they are a minority or not.
The problem is that the authors end up making the trolls too perfect, too innocent to be believable.
It's Green Peace and whales or Jane Goodall and gorillas, only with trolls,
The end result was a book that felt more like preachy ideology on politics and religion than a wondrous exploration of the multiverse earths.
Потръгна ми малко подобре, след като вече съм чел първата част.
След първитестраници направо си стана увлекателна и бързичко я приключих.
Завършва с масивен клифхенгър, та няма как ще се чете и "Дългият Марс" имам го на английски.
Но всичко е много повече бакстъровско, отколкото на Пратчет. Тъй като го харесвам повече, това за мен не е проблем. The long earth is a very long read and I felt like like a kid in a car on an interminable journey "are we there yet"
The ideas were brilliant, what a wasted opportunity to explore the implications of the sapient inhabitants of other earths.
The wooden characters often behaving in juvenile and naive fashion reminded me of Isaac Asimov at his worst.
Sigh. Okay, mostly it's just a mindtour through infinite possible worlds, And that's fine. There's also a bit of Star Trek: The Next Generationlike advising in a supremely wise manner, And I like that, too, There isn't a war, which I probably prefer to skip, although it does make the title misleading.
There is also stuff that was just plain wrong, specifically about drug abuse, Drug use and abuse isn't more common among poor people, it's just more visible, and more frequently and harshly punished rape is a bad plot device, but really especially bad if it's just a lazyass way to justify a male character's vigilante "justice".
And while there are several very interesting and nuanced characters, there are also quite a few who are pure stereotype.
Although I appreciate the effort to include a major character of color, it's probably best not to play that game if you aren't going to commit, and pretending that a great big darkskinned man from South Africa is going to be automatically deferred to, rather than targeted as a thug, is a whole new kind of fantasy.
Some interesting ideas, but the most disappointing book I've ever read with Pratchett's name on it.
Library copy
And really, the ease of moving between worlds in this scenario creates a nightmare for anyone thinking about sexual or domestic violence.
The bad people have a literal infinity to hide in, or keep victims in, You really don't want to get your reader's minds set on that horrific track,
Sequel to "The Long Earth" I really wanted to like this, and I still love the setting, but I'm just not feeling this one.
I think my main problem was that there were too many plot threads, which made it all a bit confusing to keep track of in particular, I'm not sure what the point of any of Nelson's subplot was, and while the Chinese expedition subplot was interesting, it didn't really add anything.
Similarly, I thought a lot of the Franklin crew's subplot was interesting but irrelevant, and in the end the whole book seemed like a bunch of good ideas randomly mashed together, without much structure.
There are a lot of things I liked: Terry Pratchett's extreme hatred of elves, everything to do with the Rectangles, the
existence of the Gap space program although that is another part that I felt could have been done without to streamline things a bit, Finn McCool, the postscarcity philosophy stuff, "the Healed Drum", "Bosun Higgs".
I thought that having this book take place several years after the first one worked well,
On the other hand, I was disappointed by the character of Helen in this book, who seems to have been reduced to only two personality traits jealous wife and exposition fairy as Sally says, "Im profoundly uninterested in Helen", and I wish they wouldn't describe how many pockets Sally had every time she appeared.
In my opinion, it would have been better to leave out several of the subplots which could perhaps be turned into separate short stories, since they do contain some interesting worldbuilding stuff and tighten the whole thing up a bit, and to expend a bit more effort on giving Helen an actual personality and reason to be in the book other than to give Joshua a reason to occasionally feel conflicted.
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