Dead Beat, Red Mars, Revelation Space

The only book of the above that I've actually finished is Dead Beat, so I'll start with that...

Dead Beat is the the 7th book in the Harry Dresden series, and it feels the most polished by far -- nice to see that Butcher hasn't rested on his laurels.  The surprises are nicely set up; they rarely feel like they come out of nowhere, which used to be a problem.  Even better, there were elements that I could tell were going to be used from the beginning, but I still didn't quite put them together until the end (for example, once Harry mentions the Field Museum, it's almost inevitable that Sue the dinosaur will play a part in the proceedings).  In previous books, Harry ended up relying on dumb luck, mostly to make up for deficiencies in Butcher's plotting -- here, the plot flows quite smoothly.

Lastly, Butcher has toned down Harry's constant interjections of "Hell's Bells!" which were really getting irritating.  Harry is now a much smoother narrator.  Butcher's style doesn't really stand out for me in a positive way, but it's not the negative it used be.  (As I recall, for one of the previous novels, I said that the plot overcomes the negatives of the style; now, the plot can stand without interference from the style).

Red Mars and Revelation Space are part of the trend to ridiculously large science fiction books, shared by books like Pandora's Star.  Although all three are very different in most respects, they each could use an editor with a heavier hand.

Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson, seems the worse offender so far, but maybe that's because I'm further into the book.  Robinson has chosen to write about the settlement of Mars in fairly realistic terms, including a lot of the political infighting among the early settlers.  When it works, it's fantastic -- it's easy to imagine the debates about how far we should go to terraform Mars vs. leaving it in a pristine state.  But his characters aren't rounded enough to carry the places where it's not so interesting.  In trying to write a realistic treatment of settlement, Robinson has ended up with lots of time when nothing much is happening.  When that happens, the shallowness of the characters is thrown into sharp relief, and it makes it that much harder to continue with the novel.

Revelation Space, by Alistair Reynolds, is a huge novel, and at 120 pages, I'm just a fifth of the way in.  Reynolds has some great ideas in there, and it hasn't felt tedious yet, but not a whole lot's happened, either.  In days of yore (say, the 60s), a Heinlein or a Clarke would be halfway through the story by this point, not just introducing characters and concepts.  And, again, the problem here is that the characters aren't strong enough to carry the weight of the novel.  A 600-page novel needs characters who are intriguing, not slightly filled-out stereotypes of the hard-working scientist, the driven spaceship captain, etc.