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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 5097396" data-attributes="member: 2205">Cross-posted from another discussion... I thought the topic interesting enough to me personally that I wanted to have the conversation again with a different crowd.An oldie but a goodie.  What're your thoughts?<a href="http://paulskemp.livejournal.com/95519.html" target="_blank">Blog of Author Paul S. Kemp - Why Authors Grow on Different Trees</a>Personally, I've sampled a lot of apples.  The idea that "just keep trying more, you're bound to find something you like!" is more masochistic than logically intuitive at some point.Also, there are constraints put on shared world fiction that Kemp doesn't acknowledge.  I read some Eberron novels a while back that I think were held back by their format and the restrictions placed on them by wordcount and whatnot.  I.e., they were decent books that could have been much better books yet if not operating under some arbitrary (well, from a writing standpoint; I'm sure they weren't truly arbirtrary from a publishing standpoint) constraints about how they had to be written.I'd say that I've tried a lot of apples, and I'm still willing to try more, but I've had enough experience to be skeptical and to have very low expectations.  It's not that there's (much) about the format of shared world fiction that makes it more likely to suck compared to "regular" fantasy fiction, its just that experience shows, and not just with a handful of novels read in the late 80s and penned by Rose Estes, that most shared world fiction just isn't very good.  I've taken a much broader sample than he refers to, and yet I've still come to that conclusion too.Also, there are some external factors that work differently with shared world fiction than with other fiction, and some of them do, in fact, select for poorer writers.  Or, at the very least, they fail to select against them, like "regular" fantasy fiction tends to.That said, I think there certainly are some writers who at least aren't any worse than others operating in a non-shared world environment.  Weis and Hickman made their name in shared world fiction, and since migrated relatively successfully into their proprietary Death Gate setting and Darksword settings, for instance.  R. A. Salvatore may not be a great writer, but he's certainly no worse than Terry Brooks or David Eddings.  And so on and so forth.In the interest of full disclosure, I do like a handful of shared world books. Or, well, at least I don't completely dislike them. The original Weis and Hickman Dragonlance books I bought in paperback as a teenager, and I've read them a few times since, and never sold them back like I did hundreds of other books. Same for the original Salvatore trilogy with Driz'zt and Co. I think the original Timothy Zahn trilogy that kicked off the modern Star Wars licensed fiction madness holds up relatively well. The first few Thieves' World anthologies ain't bad.Other than that, I've read many others that were somewhat forgettable, yet weren't bad per se, just also not really good. Certainly, they were within spittin' distance of most other published science fiction and fantasy I've read in terms of quality. Some of these are RPG settings, like D&D or Warhammer fiction, and some of them are Star Wars or Predator or Aliens based fiction, etc.I've recently bought a couple books in an Eberron trilogy, but that's because it's about hobgoblins, and I like them. I have no idea if it's any good or not, and I probably won't get around to reading the two I have until the third book in the trilogy comes out later this year anyway. If not even later. I've also recently bought the first in a trilogy written by Kemp himself, and I probably would have bought the entire trilogy, except the bookstore only had the first one in stock.I keep trying to like shared world fiction, and occasionally I actually do. Most of the time, though, it's well within the realm of mediocre, and most of the really bad novels I've read have been in the shared world realm.</blockquote>

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