I tried reading The Stars Are Legion twice, and gave up, because the total hopelessness of it all left me totally smegging ungripp-ed. You can get away with total grinding hopelessness, but you either need to be a superb writer, or you need to include things to show it's not completely shit. (E.g. during the slog of Mordor, you do get moments of recalling things that aren't completely horrible, and you do get to swap away at various points to places where it's not so totally grim.)
I think you can also get away with more in short stories, because it's maybe 20 pages of grim at most, and then you can go and look at pictures of kittens until your mind unstoats. But novels leave you in the grim for much longer.
I did finish it and I was glad I read it, but I think I would have enjoyed it more if it had had a joke in it. Hurley is _good_ at this stuff; but then, Yoon Ha Lee is good at their stuff and it's not so unrelenting.
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I think you can also get away with more in short stories, because it's maybe 20 pages of grim at most, and then you can go and look at pictures of kittens until your mind unstoats. But novels leave you in the grim for much longer.
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