(10-29-2021, 07:55 PM)Nayrb Wrote: I've been sneaking fun reading as I've been working on this thesis, and I've still been reading the Black Company books. They are fun, but sometimes I also find that they just sort of gloss over atmosphere in favor of character intrigue and plot. It's really not bad, just a different style. But, yeah, sometimes it kills the mood a little. Erikson does the same thing, but then he'll throw something at you that just HAS to be a spectacle, like a huge mysterious statue or something. When you get those kinds of things, it makes up for the fact that the city is just "the city," or whatever.

(10-29-2021, 07:55 PM)Nayrb Wrote: I think as long as they don't write like Raymond E. Feist, it'll probably OK

(10-29-2021, 07:55 PM)Nayrb Wrote: Recently, I was in a SF mood, and I bought a book by Ben Bova (I work at a used bookstore, and with my employee discount, it's peanuts to take a chance on paperbacks). It was awful. I guess he was an influential editor, but that must have been his main skill. (So, if we're starting a list of authors to avoid, put him on there, ha!) Reason I bring that up is that I just hate it when there's some author with a lot of praise that I can't wait to check out, and then I'm unimpressed.

(10-30-2021, 09:45 PM)Mattias Westlund Wrote: Sanderson does pretty much just that. His characters are cardboard cutouts, his worldbuilding largely amounts to "oh, this is a thing btw", yet when the time comes to describe something that interests him he can spend five pages detailing how someone performs a feat of magic and how the whole underlying system works. Yes, it's a style and it isn't bad per se, it's just not my cup of tea. To me it feels like Sanderson focuses on the wrong things, making his worlds and the people inhabiting them feel like soulless constructs that only exist to forward the plot. I'm perfectly happy to read more terse prose but there needs to be balance in terms of what gets detailed descriptions and what doesn't, I think. Some flavor once in a while as opposed to just matter-of-facts statements is nice too. Like, I dunno, instead of At the mouth of the river was an ugly, run-down city, why not The city huddled at the mouth of the river like a kicked dog or something like that. SOMETHING.

(10-30-2021, 10:14 PM)Terry93D Wrote: This! I enjoyed Mistborn, and I think that the first trilogy is the strongest of what I've read of his, but it basically lays out his strengths and weaknesses that persist across each book: his two great strengths are worldbuilding and plotting, and if those are enough to carry one through clunky prose, rough dialogue, middling humor, and merely adequate characterization, then they're excellent books. But prose and characterization are two things I value very highly indeed. Strength in worldbuilding is something I don't care much for; but I value prose and characterization highly. That leaves plotting and that's just not enough to make me a Sanderson fan.

(10-31-2021, 12:17 AM)Mattias Westlund Wrote:

(10-30-2021, 10:14 PM)Terry93D Wrote: This! I enjoyed Mistborn, and I think that the first trilogy is the strongest of what I've read of his, but it basically lays out his strengths and weaknesses that persist across each book: his two great strengths are worldbuilding and plotting, and if those are enough to carry one through clunky prose, rough dialogue, middling humor, and merely adequate characterization, then they're excellent books. But prose and characterization are two things I value very highly indeed. Strength in worldbuilding is something I don't care much for; but I value prose and characterization highly. That leaves plotting and that's just not enough to make me a Sanderson fan.

Prose, characters and wordbuilding are probably what I value most in a fantasy novel. Not necessarily always in that order, but they all need to be there for me to enjoy a book. I don't require Tolkien/Lovecraft style flowery prose, but it needs to paint a picture and it needs to have a character onto itself. Hard to explain really; some writers have it and some don't. And some styles obviously appeal to others but not me.

(10-31-2021, 04:31 AM)Nayrb Wrote: For me, my outlook is "everything works, if you do it right." I'm a big fan of the flowery stuff, like Lovecraft etc., but it's easy to do that entirely WRONG, and to be boring as hell. That's true of every approach. The more spartan stuff, like Cook and Erikson, is just more plot driven. If they don't do the plot-driven stuff right, it gets boring. I'm not sure what the hell Feist was trying to do with Betrayal at Krondor, but it was dumb and boring. It was based on an old computer game based on his world; but you know how some old computer games fired your imagination with their simplicity and made you think of your favorite novels? Yeah, it doesn't work seem to work well if you reverse it. Not to mention how the writing was just clunky to begin with: "James went up to the door. James picked the lock on the door. James tried the doorknob. James opened the door. Then everyone was back in the nondescript throne room looking at the king, who said, "why are there assassins in the sewers?" (Sorry, I just like picking on Feist, I guess).

I read the Earthsea books often. They're among my absolute favorites. I think Le Guin understood the balance between flowery and prosaic. She was a really, really good writer, who understood her craft through and through. She knew that she didn't need to go to great detail to make the world seem believable as long as she fed us the right stuff, which I think is sometimes the key to making a fantasy world appear organic and developed. I appreciate minute detail, but there's a delicate balance. I can smell both lazy whimsy and pseudo-complexity a mile away. It's a real skill to do be able to do a lot with either a very little or a whole lot. It's going to come down to the writer's abilities and rhetorical purpose, I guess.

(10-31-2021, 04:31 AM)Nayrb Wrote: For me, my outlook is "everything works, if you do it right."

(10-31-2021, 04:31 AM)Nayrb Wrote: It was based on an old computer game based on his world; but you know how some old computer games fired your imagination with their simplicity and made you think of your favorite novels? Yeah, it doesn't work seem to work well if you reverse it.

(10-31-2021, 04:31 AM)Nayrb Wrote: I read the Earthsea books often. They're among my absolute favorites. I think Le Guin understood the balance between flowery and prosaic. She was a really, really good writer, who understood her craft through and through. She knew that she didn't need to go to great detail to make the world seem believable as long as she fed us the right stuff, which I think is sometimes the key to making a fantasy world appear organic and developed. I appreciate minute detail, but there's a delicate balance. I can smell both lazy whimsy and pseudo-complexity a mile away. It's a real skill to do be able to do a lot with either a very little or a whole lot. It's going to come down to the writer's abilities and rhetorical purpose, I guess.

(10-31-2021, 06:59 PM)Terry93D Wrote: Worldbuilding is valuable to me to the precise and exact extent that it unlocks the characters and the plot. I dislike storytellers more interested in all the cool things they come up with in their world than in the characters that populate it, and Sanderson is unfortunately very guilty of that.

(11-01-2021, 11:40 PM)Mattias Westlund Wrote: Big +1 on Le Guin. She's one of my absolute favorite writers as well, and I count the Earthsea books as some of the finest fantasy ever written. They sort of proved that the genre could be more than machismo and monsters and swashbuckling adventure.

I've probably said this before, but if you like Le Guin you should really check out Patricia A. McKillip's Riddle Master books, which are very similar in tone and style, while still being their own thing.

Edit: ...similar to the Earthsea novels, that is. Le Guin wrote a ton of stuff, a lot of it sci-fi.

(11-02-2021, 02:34 AM)Nayrb Wrote: And yes, Le Guin's SF is good stuff, too. The Dispossessed is excellent. Left Hand of Darkness is great, too, though I got sidetracked from reading it awhile back. Need to get back to it.

(11-02-2021, 02:34 AM)Nayrb Wrote: Has anyone read any Patrick Rothfuss? I keep hearing that The Name of the Wind is really good, but it flies off the shelves whenever we get a copy in at the store.

(11-02-2021, 02:34 AM)Nayrb Wrote: And by the way, a new Tad Williams novella set in Osten Ard comes out tomorrow! Too bad my store probably won't be getting any copies in until someone sells us a used one. I'm looking forward to reading that.