Sheffield is often called a Golden Age author, meaning one like , but I was here reminded of a character describing Golden Age mysteries, and Wilkie Collins to boot: the real crime wasn't what everyone thought it was, the real crime happened years ago and hardly anyone noticed.
Sheffield's plot is like that, and also has serious conflict between incompatible goods (and their reasonably-likeable proponents), which is as much characterological subtlety as one is supposed to expect from a Golden Age author. Sheffield elsewhere has had much more subtle characterization. I think he might have been avoiding a singularity problem: some of his characters might not think like us at all, at all, and with too much introspection that might have been either obvious or unbelievable.
It's a little like the plot of The Moonstone, in that way.
Dark As Day is said to be a sequel, I wonder if it deals with the 'everything changed' problem. surprised me a lot when she stepped up to it; her first three novels are increasingly sweeping space-opera, ending in deus ex machina; the fourth, not exactly a sequel, is different in construction and style; heady, nearly unhinged; a shot at reflecting a material difference as great as that between, say, 's Confessio Amantis and . Okay, on reflection, Baird doesn't make as big a change as that, but few SF writers make a larger one. Some New Wave novelists do, but over the course of their own stylistic development, not directly in the service of a story.
ISBN: 0812511638
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