{"id":211,"date":"2004-03-11T14:28:00","date_gmt":"2004-03-11T14:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=211"},"modified":"2007-03-03T08:27:56","modified_gmt":"2007-03-03T13:27:56","slug":"hardcase-and-hard-freeze-by-dan-simmons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2004\/03\/11\/hardcase-and-hard-freeze-by-dan-simmons\/","title":{"rendered":"Hardcase and Hard Freeze, by Dan Simmons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Amazon links for <A HREF=http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0312980167\/ericnehrlisho-20>Hardcase<\/a> and <A HREF=http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0312989482\/ericnehrlisho-20>Hard Freeze<\/a><\/p>\n<p>I picked these up at the same time as <a href=http:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2004\/02\/25#dim_sum_dead>Dim Sum Dead<\/a>, in my failure of self restraint at the used bookstore.  I like a lot of the work by <a href=http:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/book\/sfbooklist.html#simmons>Dan Simmons<\/a>, and am thoroughly impressed by his exploration of so many different literary genres.  These two books are apparently his attempts at hard-boiled fiction.  They were decent, but not nearly as compelling as, say, <a href=http:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/book\/sfbooklist.html#vachss>Andrew Vachss<\/a>.  The writing wasn&#8217;t nearly as distinctive, and the protagonist wasn&#8217;t very well developed; he had an appallingly brutal streak, with little explanation as to the contrast between his cold-bloodedness with his enemies as opposed to his warmth with his friends.  Vachss developed the character of Burke, explaining his absolute loyalty to his family, but Simmons&#8217;s character of Joe Kurtz is a cypher.  One of the problems I had with the book was the same problem I had with another book of Simmons that I read recently, Darwin&#8217;s Blade, where the protagonist, Darwin, was actually too skilled; the book became just a shooting gallery of bad guys getting annihilated by Darwin.  Kurtz did much the same thing in these books; it was mildly interesting to see the different methods used by Kurtz, but it never really felt like he was in any danger.  I&#8217;m not sure I&#8217;ll pick up the next book, Hard as Nails.  Maybe if I see it used.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Amazon links for Hardcase and Hard Freeze I picked these up at the same time as Dim Sum Dead, in my failure of self restraint at the used bookstore. I like a lot of the work by Dan Simmons, and am thoroughly impressed by his exploration of so many different literary genres. These two books [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mysteries"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}