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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

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 ,,,,,,,"