Julian Meynell's Books

There is a lot of nice imagery in this book. It has a red, gold, blue dream like quality to it that is effective. The individual stories have many problems. The martian psychology of the early tales is identical with 1950's middle-America which completely undermines the alien vistas. This is no longer a problem by the mid-point of the book. A lot of the stories have twist endings which become more and more predictable as the stories go on and the psychology of the humans is unconvincing.

This is one of those books, like the Harry Potter books or Ender's Game which is OK, but, for some reason that is inexplicable to me, has been singled out as amazing. There is nothing super duper about the book, it thinks that it is smarter than it is, but there is nothing really wrong with it and it does successfully invoke a dreamy ancient Mars, although it is far from my favorite Mars.

OK book, but I think I may stop reading Bradbury, because he is not really light entertainment, but not smart or pretty enough as a serious writer.