NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Set" data-source="post: 3460579" data-attributes="member: 41584">If the author was a little more talented, I suspect we wouldn't be seeing people arguing that he was complimenting Tolkein, etc. with terms like 'clomping nerdism.' There are authors, that, IMO, prove his point.  Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time I've listed as an example.  Too much detail.  Not enough plot advancement.  Characters seem to be retarded (not meant as in brain-damaged, meant in the literal definition, as of 'held back, unable to advance.') and are often abandoned for many hundreds of pages, or even *thousands of pages.*  To pick another author that I like, who has gone, IMO, over to the dark side, Neal Stephenson.  Too much background color, to the point of it detracting from an otherwise compelling story.  (Unlike say, Dan Brown or Tom Clancy, who use too much local historical color / sociopolitical techno-porn to pad out an otherwise deadly-dull narrative, but that's not a problem with an overdeveloped world, so much as a frustrating tendency to explain everything to the reader as if he was four years old and just moved on from reading Spot and the Big Red Ball.)There are other authors that, equally IMO, refute his point.  I'll skip Tolkein and go straight into David Brin and Peter Hamilton and Raymond Feist and Fred Saberhagen and Larry Niven and Greg Egan.  All present richly detailed worlds, without losing the thread of the narrative, or risking having the setting eclipse the characters.Various examples of setting eclipsing characters or plot or action, all IMO;Star Trek: the Motion Picture (the cast stands around and stares at the pretty SFX)Close Encounters of the Third Kind (so...  deadly.... dull...  Yes, the darn ships are blinking in musical scales.  Yes, the pretty colored lights are probably hypnotic and enthralling to small paralyzed rodents.  Get the hell over it already.)Rendezvous with Rama (It's a big damn ship!  Somebody do something before my brain explodes!)Much of Isaac Asimov's work (perhaps I'm not being fair.  I never could finish anything he's written.  Perhaps the last 30 pages of every one of his books contains an amazing revelation that would have changed my life, but I never could get there.)The only time I want the *entire narrative* to involve the unveiling of a new world is if there are dinosaurs involved, or it's a Harryhausen film involving Sinbad.  But the author didn't impugn the *entire narrative* being about the world-building reveal.  The mere *act* of world-building, even if it is never overused in the narrative, he maligns and considers a sign of some sort of psychological disorder, which makes me wonder what he thinks of God...</blockquote>

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