Author Habits That Annoy You

[tenmei]

I find myself thinking about Robert Coover's classic short story, "The Babysitter." Every paragraph shifts POV. Then, about the time the reader gets used to that little mind-screw, the BIG mind-screw kicks in: the reality shifts with every paragraph.

There is a murder mystery novel called The Act of Roger Murgatroyd by Devon Adair which is written ...

Spoiler: Novel

... in a manner where you believe it is in the third person until the traditional "j'accuse" scene, wherein it reveals it was actually in the first person and the entire novel has been from the POV of the killer.

 

[JD]

Close — Okona’s POV scenes are first person, past tense; the Nausicaan leader’s POV scenes are first person, present tense. As I explained in the book’s acknowledgments—

Oh my mistake, I didn't remember it very well, so I was just skimming to see and didn't look that closely at which scenes were from who's perspective.

Stories that bounce around different times. I'm reading Atmosphere right now, and it does this. Whalefall also does this. Whalefall does a better job than Atmosphere, but I find this extremely annoying.

My preference is linear stories. I do think this is harder to writer, but it's far more enjoyable to read.

I don't mind that kind of thing as long as it's clear which scenes are in which time period. When I was trying my hand at writing I was inspired by stuff like Lost and Arrow to have a present day and a flashback story that went back and forth with each chapter.

 

[Cap'n Calhoun]

Dayton Ward: Afraid to let his own stories stand on his own and will spend pages and pages recapping old books or old episodes. "Pliable Truths" recapped all of Chain of Command over several paragraphs

I'm listening through To Defy Fate and this is driving me mad.

Recapping information that might be relevant for the current book or even to explain a reaction is understandable.

Lengthy, rambling recaps of things that barely have any connection to what's going on are just distracting breaks of narrative flow. It's not just unnecessary; it kills all of the inertia of the dramatic moments.

I just hit the part of the book where Picard meets a Metron, which is followed by a lengthy recap of... the events of Star Trek Generations? Which was already previously recapped by Guinan to Kovich for some reason.

I'm not done with the book, so if the Nexus ends up being extremely relevant or something I'll cut it some slack. What I can't excuse is Picard reacting to the moment mentioned above by immediately muttering under his breath about his experiences with Kirk. If the characters can't be bothered to care about what's happening in the moment in the story, why should I?

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I will point out that while i cited Coover's "The Babysitter" in the "annoying" thread (maybe more than once), I don't find it the least bit annoying. Just very, very surreal.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Perhaps recaps should be given as starred or numbered notes which can be flipped to if you really don't know/remember the events being referred to, but ignored if you do remember or feel you don't have to familiarize yourself with them.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Blish did that. Maybe other ST novelists, too. Of course, if the reader is like me, and can't resist following an on-page footnote (and occasionally can't resist following an endnote, either) . . . .

 

[JD]

I'm assuming that must have been in the older books, I've been reading Treks regularly since the early 2000s and I can't remember a single one ever doing that.

 

[DGCatAniSiri]

IIRC, it was somewhat common in some of the earlier novels, but I'm fairly sure that tendency ended somewhere in the ballpark of prior to the novelization for the Search for Spock - I'm pretty sure I remember there being those footnotes in Web of the Romulans, but that's the last I can remember offhand of them appearing in the novels.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

And of course, Blish got out of ST long before the license went to Pocket, and his wife/widow not long after.

You should try the Bantam novels. Some are abominably bad (Marshak & Culbreath's "Phoenix" books); some are good science fiction, but a poor fit for ST, and some are quite good, both in general and as ST. David Gerrold brought his "Tomorrow was Yesterday/Yesterday's Children" story pitch back home to ST in The Galactic Whirlpool, just before Bantam lost the license.

 

[Steve Roby]

I can only imagine what it's like to read those Bantam novels for the first time in 2026. Things have changed a bit since the 1970s. Heck, I'd recommend reading them for that reason alone -- a trip back to a time when all that existed was TOS and TAS, and Paramount didn't seem to care how weird the books got.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Ok, here's something annoying that just came up, and it's an author/editor/anthologist/publisher thing: declaring that a particular opus is tied into some franchise, even though the average reader can see no evidence of a connection.

Case in point, "Heartless," by Adrian Tchaikovsky, in the new Oz anthology. All I see is a somewhat disturbing cyberpunk drone-warfare story set in some unstable third-world country. (The best part of it was its ultimate message about war, and about hypocritical "peacekeeping" forces.) I can see no sign of any Oz connection.

 

[Christopher]

Case in point, "Heartless," by Adrian Tchaikovsky, in the new Oz anthology. All I see is a somewhat disturbing cyberpunk drone-warfare story set in some unstable third-world country. (The best part of it was its ultimate message about war, and about hypocritical "peacekeeping" forces.) I can see no sign of any Oz connection.

Sometimes anthologies publish stories whose connections to the topic are more thematic than literal. A story called "Heartless" involving drones implies something thematically related to the Tin Woodman.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

As I said in the "what are you reading" thread, my first thought was a connection to the Tin Woodman. Or to his brother-in-tinplate, Captain Fyter, the Tin Soldier. Likewise, the Scarecrow, the Patchwork Girl, the Glass Cat, Jack Pumpkinhead, and (except for perhaps a bit of heartwood) the Sawhorse would all be literally heartless.

But the only thing I can see about the a distributed-AI drone swarm that could even vaguely relate to Nick Chopper was that they eventually realized that the genocidal orders they'd been given by their purchaser were in direct conflict to their inherent ethical mandate to protect the innocent and stop or prevent violence, in much the same way that Nick, before the Wizard gave him a sawdust-stuffed silk heart near the end of the first book (and before Baum had bothered to give him a name, several books down the line), continually demonstrated behavior that was the very definition of compassion.

And if that's the only connection, then it's a tenuous one indeed. It would be like ADF branding his Humanx Commonwealth works as Star Trek, simply because the Commonwealth is somewhat similar to the Federation.

 

[Christopher]

And if that's the only connection, then it's a tenuous one indeed. It would be like ADF branding his Humanx Commonwealth works as Star Trek, simply because the Commonwealth is somewhat similar to the Federation.

Well, the book's blurb says that its stories are dark fantasy "inspired by" Oz. Inspiration is a broadly defined term. Though I found a review that did say the Oz connections in several of its stories were barely detectable.

Hmm... could the drone swarm be a take on the flying monkeys...?

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Hmm... could the drone swarm be a take on the flying monkeys...?

Note that the canonical common name for the species is Winged Monkeys. I'd give their whole backstory here, but it's all in the first book.

And at any rate, that doesn't seem terribly likely given that (1) the drones in the story are quite diverse, and not all of them fly, and (2) the whole point of the story is that the swarm ultimately decided that their orders were in conflict with their most basic ethical programming, whereas the Winged Monkeys have no ethics, and are compelled to follow the commands of whoever possesses the Golden Cap three times per possessor.

At any rate, I'm close to halfway through, by page count, and this is the only example so far in which the connection wasn't reasonably clear. We have two stories (by father and daughter, no less) about Scraps bringing Dr. Pipt (her own creator) to justice, two that involve Dorothy Gale (one as a central character, the other as a peripheral character), and just one that actively contradicts the Baum Canon (without actively disrespecting it), and would have probably worked better in a different milieu (the details are in the other thread).

 

[Christopher]

Well, the general approach in anthologies is to offer a diverse assortment of stories, rather than having them all feel the same. Which means it's always going to be a mixed bag, with some stories satisfying a given reader's tastes more than others.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

And even the one (so far) that directly contradicted established Baum Canon was a good story, that I enjoyed (although one reviewer thought it, and the leadoff story, to be gratuitously saccharine an opinion I don't share).

And my statement (in both threads here, and the "what are you reading" thread on Fountain Pen Network) that I cannot see the Oz connection in the Tchaikovsky should be taken as an open invitation for anybody who has read it, and does see the connection, to take pity on me and relieve my ignorance.

 

[bdub76]

Failing to land they pronoun. The author decides to introduce a character that uses they as their pronoun, but then the author decides to have multiple characters in a room and use they to both refer to the single character as well as the group. This becomes incredibly difficult to follow.

Martha Wells attempted to overcome this by inventing her own pronoun in Murderbot. This for the most part worked, but I found the made up pronoun kept taking me out of the story. It ended up being a distraction even though it overcome the problem mentioned above.

Pulling this of well I have learned is incredibly difficult, and it doesn't appear that book editors have it done either.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Failing to land they pronoun

If anything, I tend to overcompensate. To the point where I find my own sentences awkward, and agonize over smoothing them out.

inventing her own pronoun in Murderbot.

Hmm.

Hi! My name is Burgoyne, and I'm a Hermat, and my friend here, Gene/Jean, is a Transmute. We're both fully functional hermaphrodites, and our pronouns are s/he / hir.

 

[Steve Roby]

On the subject of anthologies... a few years ago, when Ian Fleming's Bond books slipped into the public domain in Canada, a Canadian publisher pulled together a bunch of Canadian writers to produce Licence Expired, a collection of new Bond stories that would only be for sale in Canada. All well and good, and some very good writers were involved.

But.

This should have been two anthologies. Several of the writers contributed straight Bond stories that would fit in well enough in the current Bondverse of Fleming novels, novels by John Gardner, Raymond Bensoon, the movies, et al. And several of the writers went off in a dozen different directions far removed from whatever your notion of a Bond canon might be. For example, Lovecraftian horror. I think it would have been better if there had been an anthology of straightforward Bond stories and another anything goes genre-busting anthology.

Why? Because it's helpful to know what rules the writers are playing by. My wife Laura was a fan of the Jane Austen adaptations and of old classic Hollywood movies, so we were intrigued when we came across a novel that, the cover text proclaimed, cast Pride and Prejudice's Elizabeth and Darcy as the Regency Nick and Nora Charles (from Hammett's The Thin Man and the popular movie series), bantering and solving mysteries. Sounded like fun. So she's getting into the book and then suddenly Elizabeth uses her psychic powers to figure something out. Pride and Prejudice and The Thin Man don't have any characters with psychic abilities. That threw Laura right out of the book and I don't think she ever finished it. The book wasn't playing by the rules she expected it to play by.

(Incidentally, Iain McLaughlin, who's written a lot of Doctor Who-related licenced fiction, wanted to write some Bond. He's from the UK but followed the Licence Expired approach of publishing and selling in Canada only. I read his short story collection For Queen and Country, which plays things straight. I haven't read his Bond novel, though.)