We’re clear that my reservation is not that the characters are low-key and modest in their roles, but that they’re not terribly interestingly done, yes?

We are, yes. And, again, it’s not that I disagree with you – McAuley is not going to (hur hur) win any awards for the characterisation on show here. But, whether deliberate or not, that thinness feeds into the book’s project. Or at least, that’s how I read it – and why my enjoyment of the novel wasn’t spoiled like yours. I suppose that, when you say “the book’s interest too-obviously elsewhere,” we are in total agreement … and I rather liked the elsewhere. (The world has indeed turned upside down).

Adam: Yes, exactly. You’re doing both at the same time. Good work!

Er, yes, of course you’re right. *shuffles* I can only beg post-midnight brain collapse. Correction made!

As for the faults of the passage … as I said above, it’s not that I’d dispute your argument per se. Bathos is usually my own first criticism of works like McAuley’s, and his prose does indeed volunteers itself for the stocks. But I do think it needs saying that sexy space pilots of the future are taught Morse code – and that this has a richness to it when put aside the much-vaunted transhumanism of the pilots in question (and the wild fantasies of most military sf). That for me is the key to the book – all is absolutely not surface with it (we never see the levers which exert all this pressure on the characters, but that are, like dark matter, irrevocably present), but what depth there is is there only by implication. The Quiet War doesn’t make much of itself, that’s true, but I think. conversely. that this makes it a more, not less, impressive work.

I wouldn’t by any stretch want to argue that the book is a work of genius. I’m just trying to figure out why I didn’t experience it in the same way as you and Niall.

And that passage you quote is everything that bothers me about the novel in a handy, compressed form. Do I really need to be told what the morse code for SOS is, or that pilots are taught morse code? I think McAuley could have written the same quiet, passionless narrative without making it so bloody blatant, so completely devoid or mystery or a sense of there being anything beneath its surface.

Swap that ‘classic’ for a more equivocal ‘quintessential’ and I’d agree with you. RTD’s episodes are pretty much eating themselves at this point, I think. Having said that, I agree (to my surprise) that we might find ourselves missing both he and Tennant, yes … there’s an energy and humanity to even their worst moments that won’t be easy to recapture.

Having said that, I watched the last 15 minutes of Last of the Timelords on iPlayer last night, and frankly if I never see all of humanity making the Doctor into a floaty Holy Ghost again I wouldn’t mind too much. So maybe not even in their worst moments … !

Chuffed you’re enjoying the posts. I’m beginning to wonder what I’m going to do with myself next year, when all the stories are gone!