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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tratyn Runewind" data-source="post: 1216872" data-attributes="member: 685">Hello, I do think there's a lot of stuff in there that distracts from the story rather than advances it, I think it's in there just for the purpose of being both "cool", and different from standard fantasy ideas, and I think the "coolness" is lessened by the fact that a lot of this stuff really isn't all that original.  The cactus men are one example.  They could have been any of dozens of more typical fantasy races, werewolves or ogres or what-have-you; their real purpose in the book is to be tough, tough enough to enforce the isolation of their habitat in a harsh city, and yet still easy prey for the main villains.  Since darn near everyone but insane Phase Spiders is easy prey for the main villains, there's no in-story reason they have to be something as odd as cacti, which suggests that the only purpose in making them cactus men is to make them different, original, cool; yet cactus men are deeply associated in my mind, and likely the minds of many others, with Final Fantasy.  The closest thing I've seen anywhere else is the needlemen (or, in 3e, needlefolk) of D&D.  They get more detail in the book than in the CRPG, where they just pop up in desert regions, are very difficult to kill, and can dish out lots of damage.  Mieville's versions live in a city, use weapons, and so on.  But they're still cactus men; and while I strongly doubt he took them from the games, they still come off as an attempt at originality that misfired.  The fact that he's thrown in airships and railroads, unusual in "standard" fantasy but very prominent in the Final Fantasy series, doesn't help him there, either.  It's not the re-use of ideas that bothers me on its own; as you say, that happens all the time.  But when the ideas seem to be put in for no story-related reason, for no apparent reason at all other than to seem original and different, to defy typical fantasy expectations, and yet they still resemble other ideas that have been knocked around in fantasy gaming, animation, or whatever for years, it just doesn't look good for the author.  Perhaps, but too much of the time they were dropped in and then dwelt on to no real point.  I could have done without most of kephra-lady's reminiscing on her and her peoples' history, for example.  Arguably worse is when you start to consider that some little loose-end background detail is cool enough that it might be spun into a better story than the main storyline - there were a few of those moments for me with the book, as well, most notably the excellent potential of the mercenary "adventurers" the main characters hire at one point.  I've compared the magic-and-tech mix to Final Fantasy, but that group also had a strong Shadowrun vibe to me.Do you mean Declare?  I thought Declare was brilliant, but then I have always been a fan of the "secret history"-type stuff and "wilderness of mirrors" espionage yarns. Your description of Last Call does sound inspiring, though; I'll have to look into finding a copy of it.Hope this leaves my thoughts a bit clearer to 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=":)" /></blockquote>

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