I tried to read Stephen King several times across the years and I don’t know, it never worked. Tried his short stories, the different genres he wrote, … a bit of everything. It frustrated me a bit because I loved every single adaptation from his work in TV show or movie form.
As I started watching It:Welcome to Derry, I got an itch to give him another chance as I really wanted to get to finally know the whole story behind. And I don’t know what changed, perhaps I got older and my taste changed, but I’m speeding through It and I absolutely love it, I can’t let go of the book!
I’m just surprised how taste can evolve across time. Might give a chance to several authors I never liked when I was younger!
I feel his ideas are great but his story telling is poor. It might really be his characters. If anyone or everyone in a chriton book died I would shrug my shoulders. You don’t get very vested in his characters. Its why I feel his books make better movies than books because by and large the fix it. My big example is jurassic park. Everything useful done by the boy and girl in the movie was done by the boy and in the book the girl just cried and was just sorta a mcguffin to cause problems. So in the movie to make the girl a mor likeable character they split up the boys character from the book between them which made the movie much better.
Interesting, I never read the book or many his other books, except read ‘The Andromeda Strain’! I really liked that story, because it fits my hated of Chemical Weapons, spending way to much resources on everything Space, while so much suffering in our country & love our government run safety & health services. You got to love that story?
Oh yeah and again. His concepts are great. Its just his ability to make characters you care about which to me is a big part of story telling. Something that makes reading a much more amazing experience. So basically I would ask if you cared about what happened to the characters in the andromeda strain. Did they feel like real people that you love hate or at least understand. Thats my main complaint with him as a writer basically.
I really have to think about that, been so long.
I guess not, but story never requires that much connection to the characters. If they died, not bad, but bad if that is true, because they could prevent the strain from getting out to the real world it means everyone or very near everyone would. I assume you read the book? Maybe, it just me that feels that way,
Its been a long time since I read it but im like 99% sure I did for similar reasons to reading king back in the days when reading outstripped most other entertainment by miles. I actually read jurassic park after the movie so more recent times but still decades ago. Could just be personal preference but I have read many authors back in the day and his is the only standout for that. Granted I can’t really point to other contagion type quite like that. Remember one with an alien in the antartic were if it escaped it would be the end of the world and other with stakes like that but they were set such the characters had meaning to. Like alien. I don’t think the stakes necessarily mean the characters need be throwaway.
Was that ‘The Thing’?
possibly. Its been a long time and some of these were books around the house that we had. Like we had a lot of the nebula award winners and such short story compilations to.
Sorry, what is ‘Nebula’ award? For SciFi’s best books, for each year?
I don’t know off hand. There were several types of short story compilations like that that originated from magazines which was were a lot of sci fi fantasy writers got their start. I only later found out at least one of the awards comes from the world science fiction society (that might not be the exact name) who does world con which I only found out about world con by going to local non for profit fan cons. So like very year several different orgs had books that were compilations of these short stories from magazines.