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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tratyn Runewind" data-source="post: 1215245" data-attributes="member: 685">Hi again, <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">the monster bones big enough to encompass a city, right out of Heavy Metal, </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">the tough cactus-people, lacking only a "10,000 Needles" attack to have come straight out of Final Fantasy, </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Motley struck me as a winged Gibbering Mouther, with perhaps some Mongrelman elements thrown in, </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">the devils the city leaders bargain with, seemingly thrown in just to establish how much cooler his villains were compared to "traditional" fantasy antagonists, </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">the magical steampunk-cyber of the Remade, seen in different forms in various places, from Nuada of the Silver Hand to the half-golem template for D&D.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">the sheer plethora of races that seems like the contents of monster manuals from several different RPGs mixed together at random.  </li> </ul>There are others.  And there's no denying that a lot of the stuff is cool, but there is such a thing in a novel as having too much cool background material.  It's great in, say, a game setting, where you can extrapolate it into lots of interesting adventures.  But it can certainly distract from the narrative in a novel.  In the comparison with Gibson, there seems to be a shared fascination with little cults and sub-cultures, and some of these in Perdido Street Station seemed to have rough parallels in Gibson's stuff; the machine-cult, and Tough Sisters and Palgolak and the Insect Aspect put me in mind of the likes of Gibsons Big Scienists and Christ the King terrs and net voodoo and Pantisocrats.  There's also a similarity between the "crisis energy" stuff and the early perceptions of chaos theory and "catastrophe" in The Difference Engine, with the main characters both disdained for their unconventional views.  I should probably point out in particular that it was the combination of magic-and-Industrial-Revolution-tech, with guns, airships, railroads, cyber, Cactus Men, untrustworthy authorities of scattered independent city-states, and adventuring parties of warrior and mage types that brought the Final Fantasy comparison from me.  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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