Tratyn Runewind
First Post
Hello,
A lot of this thread could have been avoided, maybe. I don't know that it would have made his book seem any better to me; I hadn't heard his opinions before I read it, and he isn't ragging on other authors there, beyond the sense of trying to be different for the sake of being different, with its implication that being different from "traditional" fantasy authors is somehow an improvement in and of itself.
Er, I did say I "strongly doubted" he stole even the cactus men. And the likes of railroads and airships are downright common in fantastic fiction compared to them. I suspect it's just an unfortunate coincidence that he chose elements that are prominent in the most popular console RPG series ever produced. He did seem to be trying for originality, and I suspect he'd have avoided a combination so prominent in something so popular like the plague, if he'd known of it.
I don't mind meandering slice-of-life-in-the-setting stuff in general - heck, I'm fine with Douglas Adams and Robert Jordan, where that kind of thing seems like half the books or more, at times.
But when it's stuck in what seems as though it should be a relatively fast-paced mystery/adventure story, I prefer for it to be either relevant to the story at some point, or to be really interesting in its own right. Too much of the stuff in Perdido Street Station struck me as neither.
This "living, breathing world" stuff touches on what I was talking about. It's a sense that the stuff in the book is interconnected, is there for a reason other than "the author thought it was cool", even if we are not outright told the reason. The inability to discern any reason for a thing's presence leads to the question, "so what is this even doing in here?", which is not what you want to be thinking in the middle of a story. And the farther some idea strays from the genre norms, the more likely it is that questions like this will spring to mind - a harsh fact for Mr. Mieville, who is battering at the norms and boundaries at every opportunity, so often that it would be a nigh-impossible task to make every divergence cool enough for us to give it a pass.
Sometimes this is true for me, and sometimes it isn't; it depends on the material. Little things that are different but not impossible in the real world (say, an extra moon) don't really need much explaining, to me. Magic can do with a lot of explaining or a little, depending on what styles of it the author has chosen - scientific-like magic tends to need more explanation. And some things outright shouldn't be explained, like Lovecraftian horror, which loses a lot of power the more knowledge you have of it.
And of course, explanation doesn't need to be outright exposition. It's sufficient, and often the better choice, to simply lay out the story elements and let the reader see how the questionable items fit in.
Well, a statement of opinion, anyway. Your location says "New York City", so perhaps your patience with pretentious artistes is low for a reason - they're reputedly pretty thick on the ground in your area...
I haven't really been following your discussion with Umbran and Celtavian in this thread, but this bit intrigued me. I haven't read any Brust, either his novels or his criticism, but I have to wonder about the idea of placing the divide between "real literature" and "popular literature" at someplace as specific as a single author. Hasn't there always been literature, and works in other entertainment forms, put together for artistic reasons in ways that can only fully be appreciated by persons with particular educational backgrounds? Or does he mean that's when people started getting snooty and superior about it, considering works that can entertain only the educated "better" than those that can entertain anyone?
The argument can even be made the other way around, with the divide created by the "popular literature" publishers, noting that even people of modest education used to read "real" literature much more commonly than they do now, often with the explicit goal of self-improvement, until low-brow publishers started flooding the market with paid-by-the-word "penny dreadfuls" and their sucessors.
This discussion also brings The Difference Engine to mind again; there's a scene there in which the main character tells T. H. Huxley that his sister is a fan of a particular novelist, and Huxley gives him a glance that says, essentially, no female of the Huxley clan would be caught dead with a popular novel. Maybe I just have Gibson on the brain - odd, since I haven't been re-reading him lately...
A lot of this thread could have been avoided, maybe. I don't know that it would have made his book seem any better to me; I hadn't heard his opinions before I read it, and he isn't ragging on other authors there, beyond the sense of trying to be different for the sake of being different, with its implication that being different from "traditional" fantasy authors is somehow an improvement in and of itself.
Er, I did say I "strongly doubted" he stole even the cactus men. And the likes of railroads and airships are downright common in fantastic fiction compared to them. I suspect it's just an unfortunate coincidence that he chose elements that are prominent in the most popular console RPG series ever produced. He did seem to be trying for originality, and I suspect he'd have avoided a combination so prominent in something so popular like the plague, if he'd known of it.
I don't mind meandering slice-of-life-in-the-setting stuff in general - heck, I'm fine with Douglas Adams and Robert Jordan, where that kind of thing seems like half the books or more, at times.
But when it's stuck in what seems as though it should be a relatively fast-paced mystery/adventure story, I prefer for it to be either relevant to the story at some point, or to be really interesting in its own right. Too much of the stuff in Perdido Street Station struck me as neither. This "living, breathing world" stuff touches on what I was talking about. It's a sense that the stuff in the book is interconnected, is there for a reason other than "the author thought it was cool", even if we are not outright told the reason. The inability to discern any reason for a thing's presence leads to the question, "so what is this even doing in here?", which is not what you want to be thinking in the middle of a story. And the farther some idea strays from the genre norms, the more likely it is that questions like this will spring to mind - a harsh fact for Mr. Mieville, who is battering at the norms and boundaries at every opportunity, so often that it would be a nigh-impossible task to make every divergence cool enough for us to give it a pass.
Sometimes this is true for me, and sometimes it isn't; it depends on the material. Little things that are different but not impossible in the real world (say, an extra moon) don't really need much explaining, to me. Magic can do with a lot of explaining or a little, depending on what styles of it the author has chosen - scientific-like magic tends to need more explanation. And some things outright shouldn't be explained, like Lovecraftian horror, which loses a lot of power the more knowledge you have of it.
And of course, explanation doesn't need to be outright exposition. It's sufficient, and often the better choice, to simply lay out the story elements and let the reader see how the questionable items fit in.
Well, a statement of opinion, anyway. Your location says "New York City", so perhaps your patience with pretentious artistes is low for a reason - they're reputedly pretty thick on the ground in your area...
I haven't really been following your discussion with Umbran and Celtavian in this thread, but this bit intrigued me. I haven't read any Brust, either his novels or his criticism, but I have to wonder about the idea of placing the divide between "real literature" and "popular literature" at someplace as specific as a single author. Hasn't there always been literature, and works in other entertainment forms, put together for artistic reasons in ways that can only fully be appreciated by persons with particular educational backgrounds? Or does he mean that's when people started getting snooty and superior about it, considering works that can entertain only the educated "better" than those that can entertain anyone?
The argument can even be made the other way around, with the divide created by the "popular literature" publishers, noting that even people of modest education used to read "real" literature much more commonly than they do now, often with the explicit goal of self-improvement, until low-brow publishers started flooding the market with paid-by-the-word "penny dreadfuls" and their sucessors.
This discussion also brings The Difference Engine to mind again; there's a scene there in which the main character tells T. H. Huxley that his sister is a fan of a particular novelist, and Huxley gives him a glance that says, essentially, no female of the Huxley clan would be caught dead with a popular novel. Maybe I just have Gibson on the brain - odd, since I haven't been re-reading him lately...
