elfs | Two sentences to break my heart (Reply)

Seraphs brought the news to General Machen first. They confirmed a sighting of Isol as she stole their wing space in the stratosphere and brushed sensor fields with the Heavy Angels surrounding Idlewild Base. (Justina Robson, Natural History)

Every once in a while, I remind myself that there are three kinds of writers-for-writers out there. There are those who you think are your peers, or with whom you aspire to peer. As I told Jeff Vandermeer a couple of weeks ago (hey, he asked), Bujold, Banks, and Stross all inspire me to write because their style seems accessible. With enough hard work, I could write as well as they do. That doesn't seem impossible.

Then there are writers who anger me. Reading stuff like that horrible rape fantasy novel I blogged about the other day also inspires me because if that kind of tripe can get published and sold surely I can come up with better.

And then there are writers that just frustrate me because they're so damned good. Justina Robson lives there. I mean, just go re-read that quote. Like the famous Heinlein sentence, "The door dialated," which Harlan Ellison described as one of the most important sentences in SF, the sentence that hooked you, the sentence that told you you were in the Future, Robson completely nails a sense of wonder in two sentences. And, oh, her choice of verbs: "brushed" and "stole" tell you everything you need to know in so little: the way Isol interacts with the Seraphs-- and what are the Seraphs? Why do they have "sensors?" Surely she doesn't mean the divine beings, must be some kind of code word, you must keep reading to find out!-- and a sense of both the delicate and illicit in this moment is sent to the reader pure and unvarnished.

The problem I have with Robson is that she's a lot like Neal Stephenson. Her stories kind-of finish, but you're always left with the sense that a lot of what she wrote was style that contributes little to the outcome, that there are moments of linguistic fireworks she doesn't actually know how to weave back into the plot, so they just kinda hang.

Which is such a shame because Robson's sense of le seul mot juste is so stunning that it just takes my breath away.