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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 2929876" data-attributes="member: 2205">I don't like Brust or Erikson.  I quit the first book of both of their series halfway through.  Brust I might have been able to stick with if I'd had more patience, but I didn't like Erikson's style at all.  It does seem elitist to only point to the pioneers of the genre as the ones worth reading.  Frankly, I'm not that hot on them either.  I've never liked Moorcock; his writing always came across as either pretentious and whiny or pretentious and preachy, and always clunky and awkward.  Howard has some brilliant moments, and I like a lot of what he wrote, but he also fails just as often and gets a big eye-roll, especially when he's on his big preachy "culture and civilization are teh suXX0rz" rants, or in his more transparent wish-fulfilment fantasies about Conan being the ultimate man's man.  Burroughs is another writer I dearly love, but let's face it; he only had one plot line and a handful of characters that he re-used over, and over, and over, and over again.I can't find anything to complain about about Leiber.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />There's some good authors out there.  Although his style turns me off, I really like everything else about Glen Cook, for example.  GRRM is doing some good stuff, although he seems to be dragging his stories out longer than they need to be.  I've read plenty of others that I thought were admirable, but which aren't coming to mind at the moment.Heck, even the derivative guys can be good.  I quite enjoy some of Feist's books.  I recently read the first few novels of Lin Carter's Callisto series, which is so unabashedly, openly and admittedly imitative of Barsoom that I wonder if the editor of Ace Books (I think that's where they were first printed) had a wary eye over his shoulder about a lawsuit from the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  Even so, I liked it quite a bit; better than many of the later novels in the actual Barsoom series, for that matter.I'm also of the opinion that there's not a 80%, or 90% (or whatever it's been inflated to) of everything is crap either.  Maybe 15% of everything is crap.  15% of everything is also great.  The other 70% is neither; it's servicable, it does the job, but ten minutes after you finish reading it, you're kinda ready to move on the next thing, and what you just read is forgotten.</blockquote>

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