Test Drive Tie-in Fiction

[jonathan swift]

When I was a kid, all I read were Star Wars and Battletech novels. Looking back on them now, a lot of them weren't very good. But a good bit of them were.

Even now as a young adult, some of the best, or at least most enjoyable fiction I've read has been Warhammer or Eberron novels. (And I've only read a few FR books, just because I'm not a huge fan of the setting, but those all were pretty fun too.)

So I'm quite fine with the concept of licensed fiction.

 

[Mark CMG]

True, Mark. I'm using sloppy terminology. Generally, it's not shared world fiction per se that is frowned upon, but licensed/franchise shared world fiction (e.g., Warhammer, Star Wars, Forgotten Realms, Eberron, and the like).

Also, most licensed fiction does very well, too, if by "well" we mean sales. My particular bugaboo, unrelated to marketplace performance, is the claim, which I've seen a bit less of in recent years, that ALL licensed fiction stinks, that it's a ghetto, etc. My position has always been that some licensed fiction is good, some is bad, and that the proportion of good to bad is similar to the proportion of good to bad in non-licensed genre fiction (and I realize that good and bad in this context have substantial subjective elements that exist only in the eye of the beholder).

Well, maybe if by non-licensed fiction you include all speculative fiction, romances, and westerns, I suppose, because that broadens the scope so far beyond just standard fiction that I guess your point rings true to me. I imagine it actually gets about the same respect that pulp got in its heyday. Bottom line, though, is that some very good wheat came from the chaff back then. I don't think that kind of fiction (tie in/licensed) will often, if ever, get slotted along side the great classics of literature but I also do not believe it aspires to those heights. Does anybody who writes such fiction sit down with the setting bible and expect what they churn out to be in the running for a Nobel Prize for Literature? Naw. So, I suppose the cream will rise and the rest will define the bulk of what it actually is perceived to be. No offense, of course, but I get the feeling you agree with this position for the most part and feel your own contributions should be standing out as something more. But you must already know that your name carries that extra impact in your field, right? If you feel it is underappreciated, maybe you should write a bit more sans license so that your output is unfettered by the stigma. I do not doubt you would do well.

 

[PaulKemp]

No offense, of course, but I get the feeling you agree with this position for the most part and feel your own contributions should be standing out as something more. But you must already know that your name carries that extra impact in your field, right? If you feel it is underappreciated, maybe you should write a bit more sans license so that your output is unfettered by the stigma. I do not doubt you would do well.

What I think is that each book, irrespective of the marketing niche in which it stands, should be evaluated on its own merits (perhaps we're saying the same thing here). In that regard, I think a good amount of licensed/tie-in fiction is underappreciated.

It's really the same unwarranted phenomenon that causes non-genre "literary" writers to sniff at genre work ("Oh, Lovecraft is just a genre writer"). It's no different, other than the source of the comment, from "Oh, he/she is just a tie-in writer".

On your last point: Indeed I have decided to make a concerted effort to write outside of tie-in this year. I have time only for short stories but I've had some successes in that regard (with a few stories appearing in anthologies later this year, and a few more on the burner). But I'm not doing that because I want to escape tie-in writing (I quite like writing in FR). I'm doing it to expand my audience and try something different.

Anyway, thanks for sharing your thoughts, Mark. Appreciated.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

There is so much great original fiction I still have to read that I can't see spending time reading RPG fiction books.

 

[grimslade]

There is so much great original fiction I still have to read that I can't see spending time reading RPG fiction books.

I think this is the attitude that Paul wants to change. His main argument seems to ask "Is there an assurance of quality with "original" fiction more so than tie-in fiction?" or to put it another way "Can tie-in fiction be great fiction or is it reduced to the dust bin by using a shared setting?"

I know I have read a lot of really bad "original" fiction and some good tie-in fiction. The good tie-in fiction is, however, a much smaller subset of the whole. I like Paul's work and look for his titles. He belongs in that small subset. This is in spite of the fact that I generally dislike the Forgotten Realms.

A lot of tie-in fiction reads, to me, like contract work, formulaic and bland. Sometimes there are stories that are shoehorned into the setting, which is jarring. The setting becomes a straight jacket to others. A lot of game settings make no cohesive sense and this shackles the author to illogical and contradictory facts that ruin a readers suspension of disbelief.

Writing a ripping good tale that grows organically out of the setting is a tall task. You need to blend the collective imaginations of several authors and designers into your unique story.
I think the next difficulty is getting the word out about a good tie-in author.

 

[PaulKemp]

There is so much great original fiction I still have to read that I can't see spending time reading RPG fiction books.

I agree that there is a lot of excellent original fiction. But I also think there's a lot of excellent fiction that just happens to tie-in to a world that also serves as a setting for a game.

Flexor, do you take your position because you think there is no quality tie in fiction or because you think it's not worth your time to search out something you'd regard as quality tie-in fiction (whereas you feel that locating quality non-tie in fiction is not as difficult)?

Clearly some original speculative fiction is bad. But many readers are willing to sift through the bad to get to the good.

Clearly some tie-in fiction is bad (hell, maybe mine is), but some is also good. Yet many readers are unwilling to sift through the bad to get to the good.

Why is that? Is it simply that readers regard the ratio of good to bad to be much worse in the context of tie-in and therefore aren't willing to spend the time and effort looking for the quality fiction? If that's so, I wonder, in the case of many readers, if the view is based on substantial actual experience or on the undying meme that "licensed fiction stinks."

 

[PaulKemp]

I know I have read a lot of really bad "original" fiction and some good tie-in fiction. The good tie-in fiction is, however, a much smaller subset of the whole.

Ah, you were typing while I was typing and you answered my question. Thanks, Grimslade.

 

[crazy_monkey1956]

In steps an aberration...

I used to read only Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance with a very rare foray into non tie-in books. I'm finally starting to get out of that by committing to read stuff that my wife likes to read so that we can have a level playing field in our book discussions.

Paul, unfortunately your stuff came along after I had stepped out of tie-ins for a while (I started with Dragonlance Chronicles and Moonshae Trilogy).

 

[PaulKemp]

Paul, unfortunately your stuff came along after I had stepped out of tie-ins for a while (I started with Dragonlance Chronicles and Moonshae Trilogy).

Not the first time I've been a buck short and a minute late.

 

[crazy_monkey1956]

Something else I've noticed about game setting tie-ins is that it is really easy to overlook a lot of titles because there are so many of them. I started out trying to read everything that came out for Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms and just couldn't keep up. Every so often I'll see something that catches my eye, mainly due to being more advertised than other titles (the 6 book Spider Queen series in FR comes to mind, though I only read the first one in the series).

A lot of books, including probably some really good ones, just get lost in the shelf at the book store.