Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

homestead - Re: [Homestead] The Wastelands of Zbanzig

homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Homestead mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] The Wastelands of Zbanzig
  • Date: Sat, 17 Jun 2006 13:27:00 EDT

Ray:

> Still, he began a genre that gets better and better.

It's a matter of perspective, I'd say. All the bazillion fantasy books out
there seem so very much the same to me, as if they were a word processor
document filled with tokens where the authors have simply put in their own
pseudo
names and places.

"<Main character> looked out over the wastelands of <generic badlands> and
thought how many <ficticious time intervals> it would take to reach
<ficticious
city state> before the storms of <name with a lot of bilabial sounds>
descended or the marauding hords of <stock barbarians> found his trail. He
checked
the saddle of his <ficticious beast of burden> and made sure his <ficticious
weapon> was at the ready. .... etc"

Then the writer simply makes up a list of names and merges the document. For
example, Ormog, Xarnak, Quor, Blargzoridian, etc. A dozen score of times a
Fantasy fan has pushed this or that tome with the enthusiastic "Oh, you don't
understand, THIS is really different ...." Yet the Chronicles of Thlantonath
end up being so very like the Znabtarph Trilogy.

Someone a couple of years ago said they had a SciFi book that was so good
because of the utterly unexpected twist to the story, one just HAD to read
it.
The author was something like Orson Scott Card (names in some order or the
other) and I believe the first of the six or seven books of the trilogy was
Xenophobe or the like. I read the first half of the first chapter and said
to
myself, "Oh, I see, he's actually going to be commanding the fleet for real
although
he thinks it's just a training exercise, standard SciFi plot 28-B. Oh well,
I'll read it anyway to see what the big twist in the story is. Long
predictable story, then ..... that was it. That WAS the great contribution
to the
corpus of literature, just another version of the old "he thought it was a
training exercise but he was actually controling the fleet in earnest all
along."


I'm into doing Celtic music and could bore people silly with the subtle
differences between reels and hornpipes, slip jigs and set jigs, etc. and
which
tunes came from which county. To someone not into the gendre, it all sounds
so
very much alike. I think literature is that way. If you are into fantasy
novels, small subtle differences against a uniform background are whittles
and
drink to you. But to those not into it, it all seems like yet another round
of:
"Gorg looked out over the wastelands of Zbanzig and thought how many Torgls
it would take to ,,,,,,,"



  • Re: [Homestead] The Wastelands of Zbanzig, Clansgian, 06/17/2006

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page