Moon Age Daydream

Usually, in a review, I mention what I liked about a book. I certainly think that's only fair to the writer and to those who would read this review. There isn't anything good that I can say about this one.

This author writes as though he opened up a thesaurus and started choosing the biggest words that he possibly could. There is no consideration given to the connotation of any of the words and the overall effect is the reading equivalent of walking past a perfume counter on Sample Day. It's both horrifying and overwhelming. I wish that I could simply say it's a matter of this not being my sort of book, however, I've read cyberpunk, nonfiction, mainstream fiction, slipstream fiction, horror, graphic novels, classic literature, splatterpunk, and "People" magazine-which all make the fact that I could not get into this book all the more surprising. I was trying to ignore a televised football game by reading and this book was so terrible, I couldn't even do that.

It's a jumbled mess of vignettes that might make a plot farther into the book, but at 100 pages, I had had enough and simply had to give up the idea ofslogging through it. Even worse, while the science fiction and fantasy traditions have a long and sometimes celebrated tendency to unhinge the English language into new and interesting words (some of which later get inducted into mainstream language), often by splicing elements of other languages together, there is a point where a work becomes impenetrable. This book is complete with a 27 page glossary at the end which a reader must reference almost endlessly and therefore disrupt the flow of the book. I've read "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess, and I agree with his view that it didn't need a glossary for the Nadsat lingo he created because he wrote so skillfully that readers could use context clues to figure out the meanings. Shaun Von Dragen doesn't write well enough to pull off the amount of slang he so casually tosses around the pages.

Then, there's the uncredited use of two words that I immediately recognized from Mr. Burgess's novel, "glazzies" and "guttiwuts." I don't believe that they ought to be used without giving credit to the Nadsat language that Anthony Burgess created.

There are spelling errors and horribly mangled words that could have come from the George W. Bush Vocabulary Institute. There's no need to make up cumbersome words to express something that's already got a word to describe it. In addtion, when referring to pop culture, it might be a good idea to define all of the artists mentioned in a particular paragraph. Many people, I'm certain, are quite familiar with Paul Gauguin, yet that definition is included, while a similar reference is not available for H.R. Giger. Finally, when using a credited word from a movie as popular as "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" or a book as popular as "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", one should do one's best to make sure that they're actually using a word from that source. The word you were probably looking for was "scrumdilyumptious" not "scrumdilyicious."

This book is rife with these problems. I can't even in good conscience pass this book on to someone else because I couldn't bear the thought of inflicting it on them. Neil Gaiman gave some great advice in his webjournal about reading more than you write. I have trouble believing that Mr. Von Dragen does, because there's certainly no feeling for the reader that the author has a great love of and relationship with words. In Mr. Von Dragen's case, I believe that I would recommend he start his reading with those time-honored and wonderfully informative books by Strunk and White, "The Elements of Style" and "The Elements of Grammar."