Derek's Reviews > Zothique

Most of the time Smith doesn't have 'story' in mind. He's creating an extended mood or image playing out like someone panning across a large painting. Sometimes this means a deconstructed story layout that doesn't arc and may not satisfy.

This combines with a writing style that frequently reads like a "do not do" list: colons and semicolons everywhere and sometimes in the same sentence, a precisely-chosen overcomplicated word, and descriptions that go from 'lush' to 'overstuffed'. Lin Carter frequently calls it 'lapidary', which captures the compression by use of specific words but not the conciseness.

All of this feeds into the Dying Earth vibe of a world at its end times, with societies going rotten. Carter points out that if the stories are ordered by the internal chronology (as he attempts to do here) that one sees the progression of the Earth itself failing. The deserts sweep across the continent and humanity moves ever more westward. The end hasn't the dignity of a bang or a whimper.