"Have you ever (read/seen the film) 'Jumper'?"

Firstly: "YES! Yes I Have! AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!"
Ahem. Sorry.

But yes, I've seen the film; I'd seen it before starting on 'All Your Base Are Belong To Her', and to be sure, some bits of that were rolling around in my brainspace as I wrote about Dawn's teleporting adventures.
(Though I'd say I was actually thinking more of Nightcrawler, since I used to be an X-men fanatic, way back in the day, and absorbed Claremont's classic run on that book directly into my bloodstream via fanboy osmosis)

Anyway, I've seen that movie, and thought it was okay, and I read the first novel a while back as well. That was interesting in that it is not like the film at all, either in terms of story or in general tone.
Over the last few months, I've gotten around to reading the other three (main) books in the series.
And my reaction to them might be summed up via this quote from Buffy's Oz:
"...Huh."

These books are... not bad? I guess? Unfortunately they're also not great, or even really that good, but the reason why they're stuck in this in-between place is really interesting.

People who know me in real life have sort of resigned themselves to hearing long monologues from me whenever I see a movie or read a book, wherein I go over, in exhaustive detail, everything that I found wrong with the thing. And one of the things I'm usually yammering about, as I stand there or pace back and forth, with my arms waving like a crazy person, is a shortage of explanation.
When something happens, I want to know why it happened. When a character does something important, I want to know his motivations. There are lots of ways to lay in information for the audience, and I'm fine with any sort of artsy or clever way of doing that, but ultimately I want to feel like there was some process involved in what happened, some string of A to B to C to D that led things to wherever they ended up, and caused the characters to act as they did.
When we get none of that, it feels like lazy storytelling; like no one could be bothered to lay the groundwork.
(This sort of thing is one of the main reasons why I loathed Batman v Superman--Nothing Luthor does has any reason given; we never see how he learns about Bruce or Clark's secret identities, why he's so driven to destroy Superman, etc. And really, I could go on for an hour or more about this movie's failures, but I'll spare you that)
So yeah, I like some detail in my stories, and usually, even in books I absolutely love, I'm left wanting more description, more discovery, more of the character's thought process.
Well, I'm here to say that these books taught me my lesson--they gave me what I wanted and then some, to the point where I felt like I'd been beaten over the head with a set of encyclopedias.

These books lay everything out in great detail.
In exacting, excruciating, endless detail.
And then we get some more detail, whether we wanted it or not.
Seriously, in a couple of the books, the story comes to a screeching halt, to allow for a few chapters of detail. In the most recent book ('Exo'), the story damn near never happens, because we're receiving so much detail.

I'm not even exaggerating (much); both the story and the characters in the story really, really suffer because of the emphasis on, and very tight focus on, the details of what is happening and the reasons why it's happening.
Talk about 'be careful what you wish for', right?

And okay, to be fair, the fact that I did make it through all four books does say something about the general readability of the things; there are some nifty bits in there, and the nature of the teleportation power itself just leads to some interesting things. But even so, there were many, many times when I was just like 'Okay, I get it, I don't care about detail #53 of the plan, let's just get to something happening, or somebody acting like a human being an not an exposition-delivery system'.

Because that's the other big problem with these; the characters.
They alternate between being Vulcans and being cardboard; Davy is believable when he's angry, and Millie does worry and tension pretty well, but everything else is stilted and unconvincing, and don't even get me started on Cent, who is the poorest attempt at a teenager I've seen in quite a while.
Again, to be fair, some of the supporting characters are semi-interesting and occasionally provide a glimmer of humor, but that's counterbalanced by the dark, sucking voids that are the villains. Never, ever have I seen a more cursory attempt at bad guys; I honestly believe that the author didn't want to include villains at all (other than book two, which revolves around a villain plot). I think he just wanted to play with the concept of superpowered people in a very mundane world; which, fine, that's cool, but in that case go all-in and do that, instead of tacking on one or two chapters of ultra-lame, easily-defeated nothing baddies.
Book Four could have the villains removed entirely and the reader would barely notice.
(By the way, with 'Exo', which is very recent, you could really, really, really see that this author wishes he'd written 'The Martian'. I mean, he desperately wishes he'd written it, and is doing everything he can to give us Watney-like problem-solving and technical details, in a space setting, except he again goes too far, and it becomes more ridiculous than riveting).

Speaking of riveting, that was a fun ramble to read, wasn't it?
::Silence::
Oh. Well, I just wanted to talk about it a little, is all, because I did find these books educational. I think that, as I work on this next bit of the Dawn/SG:1 thing, I'll try and move things along a little faster. Detail is great; I love telling stories at one-minute per minute speed, where we see basically everything the characters think and do, but there is definitely something to be said for actually moving the story forward. NOT rushing things, because I'm not trying to get anything 'over with'; exactly the opposite, actually. I have a LOT of stuff that I want to actually get to; things I really think people will love, if only we get there and see it.
Even though the Jumper books are far from my favorite, there are four* of them.
That's a lesson I'm trying to learn too; that a flawed book people read is substantially better than a flawless book that is never, ever written.


*I know he's written a couple of side things that take place in the movie version of his 'verse, but I've not read those yet, though I probably will at some point.