= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Negative and Positive Selection - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (262)
I also tried American Gods for a while and found that its charm was mostly lost on me - maybe I didn't get far enough in. Good Omens, on the other hand...
Understand, I always knew that Good Omens was a great book and that I wasn't yet writing that well; it's only now that I'm staring at a Neil Gaiman short story, thinking, "I can tell that he's doing something outstandingly right here that I'm not doing, but it's hard to say exactly what..."
Gaiman frequently doesn't grab me, though I think "A Study in Emerald" is brilliant.
I wish American Gods had been written by someone who understood and liked America better. Why was the computer god a marketing monster rather than a programmer? Or a computer? And I know it's not fair to blame a writer for not writing a different book, but I'd like to see a version of the idea with the guts to engage with actual American religions.
American Gods is pretty evenly written; if it didn't grab you in the first fifty pages or so it was probably never going to. (I say this as someone who fell in love with it and considers it among my favorite of his work.)
I blame the SeinfeldIsUnfunny effect. I've seen GodsNeedPrayerBadly done so many other times that it seemed like a cliche.
Personally, I disliked that trope even before I'd seen it enough times for it to seem cliche, but I count American Gods among my favorites of Gaiman's work in spite of it.
Perhaps. It was far from being my introduction to that trope, but I found it worth reading for something other than the originality of that particular idea. Still, different people like different things in their art.