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I agree about the familiarity breeding contempt. Mostly. I liked Transmet well enough when it started, if even then it seemed to me the writer wasn't half as clever as he thought he was. A lot of what was supposed to be sharp political satire was this kind of "damn the man" stuff that anyone (of any political affiliation) could comfortably view through the veil of his/her own prejudices; a lot of what was supposed to be funny was just abrasive and juvenile; moments that were supposed to be emotionally affecting felt insincere; captions read as though lifted from a better writer (Hunter S. Thompson); the science fiction elements didn't add up to a world that seemed prescient or even likely. That said, it was...enjoyable? For about two years. It doesn't read as well to me now as it did in the mid-'90s, when I was ten years younger, but whether that has to do with Ellis's style seeming very, very old to me at this far remove, or whether it's just that I read a lot more critically now, I can't say. Still -- until it ran out of gas, a good book, for what it was.
Like you're saying, though, it doesn't seem that Ellis has grown at all as a writer since then, and it does seem he's mostly content to just recycle attitude and bombast and wonky science. I realize that all writers have their pet themes and obsessions, but unless readers are equally obsessed with those themes (as it would appear some of Ellis's readers are), it starts to feel like leftovers. |
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