I/O

I picked up Simon Logan's I/O a few months back along with a bunch of other independent and self-published fiction (from Mellick, et. al.), back before I learned the true value of an editor. Being a collection of short stories, the omission isn't as painful here, though a decent copy editor would certainly have caught the grammatical errors.

This is a thin volume of 8 very similar stories: various loners in industrial settings (junkyards, factories, wastelands) striving after women who wound them. The final story, of course, proving the exception to this rule and revolving around a group of women who seduce and kill celebrities.

The writing is young and self-indulgent: every verb has its adverb, every noun its adjectives, every sentence its string of clauses that enhance, support, or belabor a simple subject-verb-object combination. Unpolished prose.

Some of the ideas are interesting enough, "Ignition" being the most fun to read, "Foetal Chambers" and "Irong Lung" having good rough concepts (if sparse treatment), and "Method of Pulse" visualized well enough to make a decent animated short. So there is promise.

Taken as a whole, though, the work is too amateurish to be worth reading. The ideas, the writing, even the setting of these "industrial fiction" stories have a from-the-hip feel: not considered, not thought out, not crafted. All in all, a slow, rough read.