Warts and all...

[Mouseferatu]

Ann McCaffery, Dragonriders of Pern series. Tends to write the same book, over and over, whether it's Pern, Freedom, brainships, Acorna. That said, I still enjoy the first Dragonriders books, especially the Harper Hall series.

I was going to say something very similar about David Eddings.

I love most of Eddings' stuff. (I can say that because his series "The Dreamers" does not exist in any reality I choose to acknowledge.) I've read his other series multiple times since I was a teenager, and the Elenium is still one of my favorite fantasy trilogies. He's just such a fun read.

But holy crap, the man had exactly one plotline and one well of characters. The plots of The Belgariad, the Malorian, the Elenium, and the Tamuli are all pretty much the same. And the characters are all combinations of the same pool of personalities (albeit mixed and matched a bit differently).

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

And one last thing. Batman, kill the Joker and Black Mask. Superman, kill Lex Luthor and Darkseid. Spiderman, kill the Kingpin and Green Goblin. They aren't just criminals, they are mass murderers and serial killers and terrorists. You say you wanna protect and defend the innocent? No you don't. Or you'd kill the men who make a practice of repeatedly and unrepentantly murdering the innocent.

Beyond the question of can Superman actually kill Darkseid, i don't have a problem with those guys not killing. I mean, if you really believe that killing is intrinsically evil or is beyond your ethical boundaries, then it shows strength to abstain from doing so.

It then falls upon the rest of society to deal with the defeated. Lets face it, with the exception of Darkseid- about as cosmically powerful an entity as there is in most of the DC Universe- the others are relatively mundane humans with some extraordinary abilities. Incarceration in a RW modern Super-Max prison would be virtually unescapable, and I'd assume a Super-Max in a comic book world would be even tougher.

(The main weakness in a Super-Max is the staff: they are corruptible or threatenable.)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Re: Recycling

It is an eeeeasy trap. I remember watching Stephen King's The Stand and noticing he did something like that in the first installment of the mini-series. He didn't recycle a character, he recycled a scene. 2 "good guy" characters' introduction sequences involve struggling with someone over a handgun, and the gun firing as the characters grapple, killing or seriously wounding the "bad guy."


And before you say, "Well, that's the Hollywood adaptation", remember, The Stand is the one SK decided to take the reins of himself, so he can't escape responsibility for this.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Re: Recycling.

Oh, I understand how easy it is, believe you me. Heck, I'd argue that a certain degree of it is even necessary and desirable; it's part of what defines an author's style.

But the key phrase there is "certain degree." As in, the occasional detail, twist, or character quirk.

Not, as in Eddings' case, everything but the surface details.

(And again, this coming from not only an avowed fan, but someone who puts Eddings in the list of top five authors who influenced my own writing style.)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

(And again, this coming from not only an avowed fan, but someone who puts Eddings in the list of top five authors who influenced my own writing style.)

I think you've said that before...

 

[RangerWickett]

Neal Stephenson. I love his writing but the man never gives you a good denouement. Snow Crash has a great two-pronged climax up until almost the very end, and then one prong goes a little wobbly (a second-tier character becomes the focus when you really want the first-tier character to save the day). And then it pretty much just ends.

 

[Joshua Randall]

E.R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros might be the best fantasy novel ever, but dear lord, some of the names are bad. So bad that they jar me out of the narrative every time I read them, which is about once every 10 words for certain characters (Goldry Bluszco, e.g.). Still a great story, though.

David Eddings is maybe the definitive "warts and all" writer. His books are deliberate recycling of countless plots and characters -- but highly entertaining nonetheless.

Jim Butcher's Dresden Files books are egregious examples of Mary Sue-dom (or Marty Stu-dom if you prefer), but I can't stop reading them.

 

[Terraism]

Not, as in Eddings' case, everything but the surface details.

(And again, this coming from not only an avowed fan, but someone who puts Eddings in the list of top five authors who influenced my own writing style.)

My long-time stance on Eddings has been - much as I love most of his stuff (similarly, barring Dreamers) is that his stories are identical down to the same silly blue rock, but that it's worth it because the characters caper and dance around the page every time they open their mouths.


To add something new to the discussion, I recently got off my butt and read A Game of Thrones, and while I very much like the book - I do, really - I had a very hard time with the amount of bleakness in it. I generally think I can tolerate a lot in my entertainment, but so few of the characters in that book had redeeming qualities that I sometimes was disgusted just reading it. I had the same reaction to the first of Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books - as engaging as the story and world are, it's just painful trying to stomache past a not only flawed protagonist, but a monstrous one.

 

[Wild Gazebo]

Generally, I loath catch-phrases that permeate an authors work regardless of character or circumstance. I tend to feel the same way about repeated turn-of-phrase in description...but this can be forgiven depending on the generality or length of the compositions.

I detest explanatory exposition. I don't want a treatise on the history of the XXXX or a long-winded explanation of why this is relevant to the encounter: I want to discover the world and it occupants through the eyes of the character or narrator. This is doubly unforgivable if it is an editors insert to bridge past works or to explain events that will be illuminated later in the text. Don't coddle the reader!

 

[Tamlyn]

Have a point/goal/resolution. Not sure that A Song of Ice & Fire does. I haven't read them in a while but it feels like everyone is doing their own selfish thing and there's nothing bigger than the individual character. Lord of the Rings feels slow and it takes a long time to get there, but it actually goes somewhere. R. A. Salvatore's (I know, I'm sorry) two most recent trilogies suffered from this. Long, ongoing stories with nothing appreciably different at the end. It felt like a waste of time for the characters and the readers.

Give us a glimmer of hope. Like [MENTION=278]Terraism[/MENTION], I feel like GRRM seems bleak for bleakness' sake. And I understand that the real world can be bleak and hopeless at times. But I read fiction to get away from that. James S. A. Corey (Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck) avoided that in Leviathan Wakes. It could be portrayed as a bleak book, but there was hope there. That hope shifted a few times over the course of the novel, but the reader had some hope.