Friday 10 August 2012

Green Lantern Sleeping

I recently finished a trilogy of Green Lantern novels, the Sleeper series by Christopher Priest. And, to be honest, I expect more.

The basic idea is that there are Sleeper Rings, seeded into our universe from Qward, which turn people into Sinestro. Because that can happen it seems... wait, what? The hell? Since when? Sinestro is a 'program' that can be programmed into rings that convert people... no, that has never been a thing.

So, aside from that, in the first book, Kyle Rayner fights a single Sinestro, because there is only one ring. Then we go back to Alan Scott in time, who fights someone else from continuity I completely don't remember, and finds out about all the rings from... a scene that is referred to but never happens. I think because the second book was co-written with someone else, and they forgot to edit it properly. There are huge exposition gaps, weird considering Christopher Priest loves to throw in huge chunks of the stuff... must have been the other guy. And then Hal Jorden has to fight all the rings, only he's the Spectre during all this, except not now because Christopher needs to have Hal Jordan be Green Lantern again, and has a totally different encounter with Alan Scott, which is a repeat of the scene in the previous book, although it is completely different (admittedly there is a line about how they remember it differently, which is amusing, but doesn't excuse the lack of editing).

So all that inconsistency, and slabs of exposition, made this set of books a slog to get through. I assume, as I do, that Christopher enjoyed writing this and really thought it was an important story to tell... but I didn't. The story is too much of a mess, mixed with author pomposity, that it doesn't invite the reader to want to be an active part of it. I do admire the attention to detail with respect to the continuity, but the ending doesn't match (because, of course, Christopher wasn't writing the main Spectre comic [quickly checks the internet]), so that was another issue, but one that can't be blamed on him.

As a GL fan, of course I wanted to enjoy this. But I didn't.

[END]

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