Audiobook finished

[johnridley]

Feed by Mira Grant

I've always been baffled by the popularity of zombie stuff, but I figured if it was a Hugo nominee, it was as good a chance as I'd get to see if there was anything to it.

I still don't care about zombies, but like any SF, it's simply a mechanism for a good story about people. And this is a good story with good characters.

There were some glaring factual errors to ignore, but I wouldn't be an SF reader if I didn't have sturdy belief suspenders.

Comments

[rono-60103.livejournal.com]

I presume you are aware that Mira Grant is a pseudonym for Seanan McGuire, who also writes under that name.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Why would I know that? I just get books and read them, I don't follow the authors except to get more stuff by them if I like it. Mira Grant is what it says on the cover.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Why the pseudonym anyway? I'd never heard of her before anyway, but looking at Wikipedia, it looks like this isn't really much different than her previous stuff. Is a pseudonym sometimes just a ploy to get placement elsewhere on the bookstore shelves?

[mbumby.livejournal.com]

Because of the different class of book. Seanan writes dark-ish urban fantasy, but zombies are a world/market of their own. And can be very polarizing. Me, I like urban fantasy a lot, but wouldn't choose to buy a "Zombie book" -- but since I knew it was Seanan, and it was out and her next of the UF series wasn't, and I could get her to sign it, I bought Feed. So I like it despite the fact that it's a Zombie book. And I found it very captivating. Could barely put it down. But if someone (if you'll pardon the image) devours everything zombie that they can, and they pick up a book by the same author, expecting something like that and there are fairies and elves and sprites and shapeshifters???? No, for you and me, it's not the clear delineation between Seriously Adult stories that writes and the Young Adult stories that

[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<name.2>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]

Because of the different class of book. Seanan writes dark-ish urban fantasy, but zombies are a world/market of their own. And can be very polarizing. Me, I like urban fantasy a lot, but wouldn't choose to buy a "Zombie book" -- but since I knew it was Seanan, and it was out and her next of the UF series wasn't, and I could get her to sign it, I bought Feed. So I like it despite the fact that it's a Zombie book. And I found it very captivating. Could barely put it down. But if someone (if you'll pardon the image) devours everything zombie that they can, and they pick up a book by the same author, expecting something like that and there are fairies and elves and sprites and shapeshifters???? No, for you and me, it's not the clear delineation between Seriously Adult stories that <name> writes and the Young Adult stories that <name.2> writes -- genres that don't mix a lot, but zombies are a special market.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Seems weird and counterproductive to me, I think it's silly to expect an author to only ever write one kind of thing, but I guess they know what they're doing.

[mbumby.livejournal.com]

Mmm, maybe. Perhaps it's largely more important for parents than for readers. If "Carolyn Keene" also wrote bodice-rippers, some parents and grandparents who got surprised might not buy any more Nancy Drew for their kids, or for that matter, might try to prevent the kids from buying them themselves...

And even the masters have done it -- remember Isaac Asimov writing as Paul French?

(Sorry about the false markup in the prior -- I didn't notice it until you'd responded, and I can't edit it.)

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

"remember Isaac Asimov writing as Paul French?"

No, not at all, I didn't know that (nor had I heard of Paul French before just now). I do not follow the industry in any way. I pick books up and read them. Unless it says on/in the book "By Paul French, but this is really an Isaac Asimov pen name" I will never know.

In fact I don't even really know where I would ever find out any of this information. I'm not sure if I care either.

I ask for recommendations, and I look at book lists to decide what to pick up next, but I've never gotten a "this is a pen name" notification via any of those channels as far as I can recall.

[mbumby.livejournal.com]

Space Opera. Lucky Starr and the XXX of YYY (moons of Jupiter, rings of Saturn...) _Maybe_ on the same level as Doc Savage. Or Perry Rhodan. (Neither of which I'd read in 5th grade, which is when I started reading these.) If you saw Isaac Asimov on the cover of an SF book, and expected it to be well thought out and not a hack job, you might hurl it across the room if you found yourself in possession of a Lucky Starr. (Similarly, if you expected the same easily accessible fluff that you got with LS, and picked up something more serious, you might have been put off.) On the cover of the book I borrowed from the library was indeed written "Isaac Asimov writing as Paul French." I guess he'd been outed by then, and the publisher thought it would sell more books.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I guess part of the difference here is that I think I may be less tied to authors than series or worlds. Generally if I read something I like, I'll give that author preference in the future but I don't automatically think that if I liked one thing he wrote, I'll like everything, or that if he wrote one book of a certain type that that's all he writes.

If I read something an author wrote in a series, I'll be likely to expect the same sort of thing from that author in the same series. Ditto worlds.

I do try to read a wider selection of genres and levels of seriousness though. I liked The Old Man and the Sea, I like comic books, I liked Ender's Game, and I liked Bill the Galactic hero.

I'm not always in the mood for one thing or another, but eventually I'll be in the mood for almost anything. If I start a book and it's not what I want right now, I just shelve it for a bit. Its time will come.