Little Toy Robot

I know I’m a picky reader. I need to be, otherwise I’d lose the will to do anything but read, and live in a world of fiction.

So I have a few “stop words” and now “stop phrases” that can make me put a book down. For example, any time I read a book that uses the word “faery,” spelled with the “ae,” I know I’m swimming in undesired waters.

Same thing with the word “magick” with the “k” at the end. Astute LTR readers will know that I made an exception with Matt Stover’s Heroes Die last month. This was acceptable because the deliberately anachronistic spelling of the word actually made sense in the context of the narrative. OK, it irked me a little, but it was an exception.

Last but not least, and this is what sparked this post, I’m always nervous about Sci Fi in which a character has a barcode tattoo. The phrase “barcode tattoo” is the stop phrase. I made that mistake with Jennifer Government, when I realized that the barcode tattoo was just a kind of lazy science-fictional shorthand for corporate overlordship (OK, I made that word up). It just seems so ridiculous, so out of date as a trope, that I can’t take it seriously. C’mon, people! Get a little creative! If you’re going to have anything to say on the subject, implant RFID chips into your characters or something.

This time around it was Richard K. Morgan’s Market Forces. But I’m still reading the book.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 12th, 2006 at 6:00 pm and is filed under books.