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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tratyn Runewind" data-source="post: 1212459" data-attributes="member: 685">Hi again, Haven't read any Brust myself, alas, but I'll throw Tim Powers' name into the discussion at this point.  I don't know that I'd say he's pushing fantasy boundaries, but he certainly is blurring them in interesting ways with other branches of genre fiction.  It's certainly debatable whether much of his stuff is "fantasy" at all.  "Weird Fiction" is actually a pretty good tag for his blends.  He seems to have a better handle on his ideas than Mieville did in Perdido Street Station, he does his homework, and he's a competent artist and technician with the English language.Since I've also compared Mieville to Gibson, I'll just say here that the writing style of Perdido Street Station reminded me of The Difference Engine and the attitude reminded me of the "Sprawl" stuff.Such broad definitions of "hierarchy" given would take in Frodo and Sam's master-servant interaction, but they'd also encompass pretty much any form of government or leadership, democratic or not.  Does anyone think Tolkien's nations should have been leaderless?  I doubt even Mieville believes that.  That would have been even less believable than the elves, dwarves, and magic.I'd call the leadership of Tolkien's heroic nations far more tribal than feudal.  The Rohirrim are explicitly a barbaric tribe, and the leadership of the Dunedain is about the same, except with a few more generations between Aragorn and Beren and the other tribal chiefs of the Edain.  Of the major marks of feudalism, land tenure for regular military service is implicit at most, and serfs bound to the land are nowhere to be seen.  I believe you.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  I actually didn't outright dislike Perdido Street Station, though my previous description of it was far from a ringing endorsement.  It was vastly overhyped, though that can hardly be blamed entirely on the author.  Mostly I was frustrated with it, since Mieville's skill with the language strongly indicates that he could have done a better job with his ideas - instead, we get a very "hey, this sounds cool, let's throw it in the mix" hodgepodge worthy of August Derleth.  And the self-consciously cutting-edge-hip attitude, subtle as he is with it at times, starts to grate very quickly when half or more of the oh-so-cool concepts are ones I (and probably millions of other gamers) have seen around in one form or another for years.Somehow this makes me wonder how much C++ programming you've done...especially dealing with virtual functions in code written by other people...  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />For now, I'll finish up with Tolkien's likely reaction to Mieville's article, taken again from the Foreword to LotR:"Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing they evidently prefer."Hope this helps!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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