Peter Watts reviews Bowl of Heaven (2012) by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven ...

Julian Bond - 2013-03-02 08:29:53+0000 - Updated: 2013-03-02 08:29:53+0000

Peter Watts reviews Bowl of Heaven (2012) by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven and ponders the travesty that is a badly edited manuscript split into a series by the publisher without warning the potential consumers in any way. Beancounters greed!
http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=3952

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Stef Kunzer - 2013-03-02 09:13:46+0000

Wow. I'm a massive Larry Niven fan, but wouldn't buy this book on the basis of the Amazon reviews, much less this review. Maybe when the concluding part is released (in paperback)... It's a sad indictment of something, I'm not sure if the publishing industry or Tor in particular.

Dan Thompson - 2013-03-02 15:08:56+0000

I know what you mean about the annoying splits. The Merchant Princes series by Charles Stross was butchered in this way. I can't remember exactly which of the books this happened to, but it seemed like there was a trilogy that got spread over four books. As such, some books seemed to end without a climax, while others seemed to climax in the middle and have a long meandering denouement. Until I found out the behind-the-scene antics at the publisher, I simply thought the author knew nothing about structure and pacing.

Traci Loudin - 2013-03-04 05:01:04+0000

Ouch, that's awful. A poor split is actually what made me stop reading GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire series. The whole way through Book 4, I was wondering why Tyrion never showed up once. Only at the end did it finally explain that the book was so long it was cut in half. Not in the traditional way of the first half being Book 4 and the second half being Book 5. Oh no. They had to split it by viewpoint. I read that entire miserable book without once seeing my favorite character. So I was done after that.