Ideas and knowledge are not enough

 This week I've finished reading a blockbuster SF novel with some breathtaking ideas, and now I'm struggling through a short book of environmental SF.  

I loved the ideas and concepts of the blockbuster, but boy was it overwritten.  There is a huge chunk in the middle of the book where the protagonist and antagonist basically sit down and have a long debate about competing social systems and psychologies.

This was a classic case of the writer's advocacy and research showing,  If I was editing that book I would've cut nearly all of that section.  Which would be at least 10,000 words.  Taken together with the many other sections which are overwritten, the book could have been 30,000 words shorter at least.

After a while I developed a sense of when I was coming up on an overwritten section, so I could skip several pages of the tedious debate.  This worked well, and I didn't miss anything I needed to understand the story.  I do have a tendency in my work to not put enough character thoughts/feelings and setting description  into my work, but this overwriting couldn't be described as anything else. The grand ideas alone weren't enough to carry this book.  It would've even better without here excess fat.

The short book I'm reading suffers from s different problem.  It has several viewpoint characters, and I'm now halfway through the book and I can't see any narrative thread tying their stories together.  Each of these viewpoint characters is telling their own self-contained story.

The narratives are fractured by regular quotations about the plants and animals which the characters have taken as their code names.  They're scientists working in a resistance, and the interspersed sections are written in formal scientific language and describe the animal or plant they've chosen.

The constant chopping-up of the narratives by these quotes just when you've got into the story is very jarring.  I feel myself getting drawn into that character's story when one of these quotes throws me out of the scene.  I've stared skipping over the quotes, and I'm not missing anything.

These books are both perfect examples of grand ideas and clever knowledge not being enough to make the book work.  Both are sold as novels, so I think it's not unreasonable for me to expect to be told a good story.

In the case of the blockbuster, there is a dammed good story in there, and once I got past the tedious debate the action part became became tense and the writing sharp.  In the case of the short novel, I'm halfway through it and it's still a slog.  I'm having to read it in short bursts to keep going at all.

To me, this is a common problem of SF literature.  Often people enthuse about a story because it has great ideas.   But that isn't enough for me.  If you're setting yourself up as a storyteller then I want you to use those great ideas to actually tell me a story.  One with some kind of narrative timeline, and some kind of beginning, middle, and end.  

When ideas and storytelling skills do come together you get a truly fabulous book, one that stays with the reader for ever.