The Turing Cat Who Walks Through The Stand

I just finished Stephen King's The Stand last week, and while I was engrossed along the way, I was disappointed by the end. I'll explain more, but first I must highlight the several explicit references to Polk County, Nebraska, where I was born and lived the first 18 years of my life. Indeed, one of the main characters has lived her whole life there, and almost everybody else spends the second third of the book traveling from wherever they are in the U.S. to Polk County. King even explicitly mentions "the banks of the Platte, 12 miles north of Osceola" (quoted from memory...), and unless I'm mistaken, Swede Home. That's amazing, because Swede Home is a "town" with...maybe two or three houses and a church. (It's conspicuously absent from the exact center of the Google map I linked above.) I lived in a house 1/2 mile away from Swede Home until I was 12, and then moved to another house ~3 miles away from Swede Home. Who'd a-thunk that location would ever be mentioned in a well-known work of fiction? Not me.

But then the end of the book comes along, and ruins it all. You'd think the book would have some respect for the sacrifices of its heroes, but no. The end is not entirely unreasonable, but I can't help but feel like it's arbitrary. It doesn't follow necessarily from who the characters are and what they do. It feels almost like King noticed the book was getting long, and he was bored, so he just ended it. Of course that didn't happen, but that doesn't change my feelings.

So I've just started Harry Harrison's and Marvin Minsky's The Turing Option, and here's what I said in IRC to the guy who loaned it to me:
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02:21 [moquist] It's an entertaining read (1/3 done now?), but I gotta say that it's tremendously heavy-handed and expository.
02:22 [moquist] [long paragraph about AI and brains and minds]
02:22 [moquist] Interlocutor: I've been the CEO of this company for 20 years, and I don't know a darn thing! Can you please tell me more about this "AI" stuff?
02:22 [moquist] [long paragraph about AI and brains and minds]
02:23 [moquist] [concise assertion of philosophical point about society, morality, or religion]
02:23 [moquist] [long paragraph about AI and brains and minds]
02:23 [moquist] Back to the interlocutor...and so on.
02:23 [moquist] It reminds me of the later Plato, really. Same dialogue formula.
02:23 [moquist] [long bit of philosophy]
02:23 [moquist] Interlocutor: You are so wise, Socrates!
02:24 [moquist] [long bit of philosophy]
02:24 [moquist] etc.
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I've been putting off Cornelia Funke's Inkspell, because I've enjoyed her other books so thoroughly and it's so fun to know this one is waiting for me.

Ah - almost forgot. I finished Robert Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls the other day, and I later found most of my own observations already nicely articulated in Heinlein's Wikipedia page, in the paragraph beginning "The tendency toward authorial self-referentialism..." under "Later work, 1980-1987".

But I should be working now (on this), so I'll stop blathering.