Another reason is to try and get and get it right this time.<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
By that measure, I should be happy. I should be downright ecstatic; a lot of people are actually saying that Echopraxia<\/em> is as good as Blindsight<\/em> (or even better). Traditional reviews<\/a> from the usual suspects are, if anything, better than for the first book (Kirkus<\/em>, whose praise for my work has generally been leavened with grumbles, just pulled out all the stops and raved this time around). The Goodreads<\/a> graph is more in line with expectation, showing a strong preference for 4- over 5-star reviews (compared to the slight 4-over-5 preference in Blindsight<\/em>‘s case), but the mean score is statistically identical (technically 0.01 star less, but P><\/em>0.6). It wasn’t loved as much or reviled as much, but it was “liked” by a greater proportion of the overall audience. (Actually, the spread is almost identical to that for Starfish<\/em>, which was hardly a flop.)<\/p>\n And over on Amazon<\/a>\u2014 against all expectation\u2014 Echopraxia<\/em> is kicking Blindsight<\/em>‘s ass by almost half a star, 4.4 to 4.0. Even given the fact that Blindsight<\/em> has over three times as many ratings, that’s highly significant (P<0.002). Echopraxia<\/em> pulls in twice as many 5-star ratings on Amazon as all its other scores combined: 84% of readers gave it 4 or 5 stars.<\/p>\n Anyway. There’s no shortage of readers on either site who think that Echopraxia<\/em> is the best thing I’ve ever written. In fact, in some ways it’s received too much<\/em> critical adulation; when a book starts getting raves from men’s rights groups and climate change deniers, you begin to wonder what went so horribly right.<\/p>\n And yet I am bummed.<\/p>\n I am bummed because other<\/em> readers aren’t just meh, but deeply disappointed. Some people waited eight long years for a follow-up, only to get something that fell short in every way: less characterization, less plot, less depth, less focus. Less point<\/em>.<\/p>\n Of course, Blindsight <\/em>was bound to have had an easier time if for no other reason than that there was no other book to compare it to. Even if the two books were of empirically identical quality, human variability dictates that some will prefer one and some the other. So why worry about those inevitable naysayers when the overall response is actually better than I’d hoped?<\/p>\n Basically, because I’m afraid they may be right. I was afraid of that before I even started writing the damn thing.<\/p>\n They’re not right about everything, mind you. Some hold, for example, that Echopraxia <\/em>is plotless next to Blindsight<\/em>. But when I <\/em>put Echopraxia<\/em> next to Blindsight<\/em>, I see one book that spends its first half in conversation and setup, basically “My Dinner with Andr\u00e9” in a tin can\u2014 while the other hits the ground with a vampire uprising, a desert war with zombies and a weaponized tornado, a bioengineered plague and an close escape into space, followed by an immediate jump-cut to an attack on a spaceship from without and a vampire playing cat-and-mouse within. I see one book with a single team and a single purpose up against a single antagonist\u2014 and another where everybody and their dog has their own agenda, each exploiting the others in a weird game of posthuman chess. If I had to pick one of those books to call plotless<\/em>, it sure as shit wouldn\u2019t be Echopraxia<\/em>.<\/p>\n The problem, I think, is not lack of plot; it’s lack of clarity<\/em>. You can see it in some of the complaints: oh, lots of stuff happens, people admit. Shit blows up real good. But it never seems to converge on anything with a point. Sound and fury, signifying nothing.<\/p>\n It does signify stuff, of course. There is a point, but these readers aren’t seeing it. And I can only assume they’re not seeing it because I fucked up the delivery.<\/p>\n Too many people never got a good sense of what was going on. Even many of those who absolutely adore Echopraxia<\/em> admit that it is a “difficult” book, that they frequently had to reread certain passages, that they’ll probably need to read the whole book again\u2014 perhaps after revisiting Blindsight<\/em>\u2014 to really understand what happened.<\/p>\n This should not be necessary.<\/p>\n It’s true that I deliberately constructed Echopraxia <\/em>to reward multiple passes. It’s also true that a certain level of reader confusion was built into its DNA, for the simple reason that posthuman motives are going to be at least partially opaque to baselines by definition. But no one was supposed to leave the party confused. My goal was to have various motives and agendas gradually resolve through the haze, and then\u2014 as we joined Daniel Br\u00fcks back in the desert\u2014 to be able to say Hmmm, the Bicams could be doing <\/em>thus or they could be doing <\/em>so. Valerie’s actions are consistent with either Scenario <\/em>A or <\/em>B. Don’t really know which at this stage, but it could work either way\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n In other words, you weren’t supposed to wonder what was going on. You were supposed to know what was going on, and wonder what it meant.<\/p>\n![\"Goodreads\"](\"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Goodreads.jpg\")
<\/a>It’s not that the last outing went wrong<\/em>, exactly. In terms of reviews\u2014both reader and traditional\u2014 I actually got off easier than I expected. I knew it would be pretty much impossible to deliver a focused thematic Blindsight<\/em>-scale gut-punch twice in a row, I knew that playing with multiple cool ideas wouldn’t match the impact of a single mind-blowing one. Echopraxia <\/em>wasn’t ever going to escape the shadow of its predecessor. So I downsized my hopes. I’d settle for people thinking this was a good or (preferably) a very<\/em> good book, even if it didn’t shatter anyone’s worldview. Echopraxia<\/em> could be 2010 <\/em>to Clarke’s 2001<\/em>, Count Zero<\/em> to Gibson’s Neuromancer<\/em>[1]<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/a>There’s a general pattern to reader reviews that I’ve mentioned before<\/a>. Normally you expect initial scores to be really high as hardcore fans, favorably disposed, snatch up the first copies and comment early. Mean score thereafter declines as the wider audience, with less of a positive bias, weigh in at their leisure. For Echopraxia <\/em>that happened at Goodreads\u2014 but not at Amazon. It’s been four months and Echopraxia<\/em>‘s mean Amazon rating remains pretty much where it was at the outset. Maybe that means that people who write Amazon reviews really do prefer Echopraxia<\/em>. Maybe it means the wider audience never even got to Echopraxia<\/em>, and that stellar score only suggests that nobody read the book except<\/em> hardcore fans. (I was warned this would happen, back when I insisted on “Echopraxia” for a title. The sales people won’t know what it means<\/em>, my then-editor told me. They won’t know how to pronounce it. Rather than risk embarrassment during a pitch call to distributers, they’ll just ignore it entirely in favor of books with simpler titles<\/em>.\u00a0 Maybe this is the price I pay for sticking to my guns.)<\/p>\n