Fair enough, Christopher. Just call it a minor pet peeve of mine. At the end of the day, it made me look up the A Time to... series and Paths of Disharmony among others, so its win-win for all concerned.
The State of Star Trek Literature
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Fair enough, Christopher. Just call it a minor pet peeve of mine. At the end of the day, it made me look up the A Time to... series and Paths of Disharmony among others, so its win-win for all concerned.
Well, it's always a judgment call. When I wrote The Rings of Time, I made an deliberate choice not to tie it in too closely to my old Eugenics Wars books, which came out over a decade ago. I allowed myself one (self-indulgent) scene in which the characters talked about Khan and the Botany Bay and such, but tried to treat that bit as an "easter egg" of sorts. In theory, you didn't need to catch the references to understand the current story. (And, in fact, I seriously considered not referencing the EW books at all, just because those came out so long ago.)
It's a fine line. When I did my 4400 books, I recapped past events more than I usually do, on the assumption that The 4400 was not as well-known as Star Trek or CSI, only to get complaints from some 4400 fans that I wasted too much time explaining stuff they already knew.
On the other hand, I also got a very nice piece of fan mail from some guy who enjoyed the first book thoroughly--despite having never seen a single episode of the TV show. (Apparently he'd just picked the book up in an airport one day.)
Striking the right balance can be a challenge.
It's a fine line. When I did my 4400 books, I recapped past events more than I usually do, on the assumption that The 4400 was not as well-known as Star Trek or CSI, only to get complaints from some 4400 fans that I wasted too much time explaining stuff they already knew.
On the other hand, I also got a very nice piece of fan mail from some guy who enjoyed the first book thoroughly--despite having never seen a single episode of the TV show. (Apparently he'd just picked the book up in an airport one day.)
Striking the right balance can be a challenge.
And a challenge which I think yourself and many authors, Christopher included, seem to get right. I read The Rings of Time and did catch the references which belong to The Eugenics Wars. I haven't read those yet, they're on the to-do list, and I had no problem with it.
You're right about it being a tough balance though. Some authors in the past work in a point-by-point synopsis of an episode or previous novel which just bogs the prose down. I don't think anyone wants to go back to that.
And the flip side, of course, is the book that picks up right where the previous one left off and assumes that you've already read (and memorized) the first six books in the series!
With tie-in books, it's probably safe to assume that most of your readers have some familiarity with the original tv show or comic book series, but you can't assume that they've memorized every episode or issue.
In the end, I guess it depends on what the reader needs to know to understand the story at hand. Is something just a throwaway easter egg, or is it essential to the plot?
For example: If I was going to bring back Sela in a big way, I would probably feel obliged to recap her tangled history and origins in some detail, just to bring readers up to speed. But if I was just going to make a casual gag about Hortas or tribbles, that had nothing to do with the main plot, I wouldn't bother explaining what a Horta was.
The way I like to approach it is not just to recap what we saw in an episode or movie, but to approach it from a different perspective or focus on different aspects of the overall event. That way, audiences unfamiliar with the episode get the information they need about its events, while audiences familiar with the episode get to see it from a new angle and learn something about it that they didn't know before. Like how in Watching the Clock I referenced past time-travel episodes but told them from the perspective of the DTI agents who investigated them instead of that of the Enterprise crew, so you got to see a different side of the story. Or like how in Ex Machina, when I recapped events from "For the World is Hollow...," I incorporated some of it into a McCoy monologue that revealed something new and unexpected about his motivations at the time, recapped other parts of the story from the perspective of the natives of Daran V, and worked in exposition about Yonada in a more detailed discussion of its origins than we got in the episode. That way, everybody gets something new and hopefully nobody is bored by the recap.
I think readers give authors too much stick when they moan about recaps. Not everyone has a great memory and (at least in my case) it could be several decades since reading / viewing the preceding story.
It doesn't actually have to be decades - I'm reading Rise Like Lions at the moment and don't know if some of the backstory was in Sorrows of Empire, which I've read, or the MU trade paperbacks which I haven't...
It doesn't actually have to be decades - I'm reading Rise Like Lions at the moment and don't know if some of the backstory was in Sorrows of Empire, which I've read, or the MU trade paperbacks which I haven't...
^ both
I just finished reading A Game of Thrones, and there are a lot of references and discussions of events 15 (I think) years before the story that we don't actually see in the book, or, as far as I know, the rest of the books in the series.
Actually, I suggest finding an author who can do Ent well. Just like was done with Voyager. Now we have Kristen who's doing very well with Voyager. The right author could do Ent well.
I guess I don't really see how the German covers are any better: Lots of crummy-looking collages of slightly manipulated photos, similar to the US covers for the Typhoon Pact novels.
OTOH, recent US covers have been quite nice (I especially like the painterly look of the The Rings of Time cover, and the colors on That Which Divides are nice, too) and all of the Vanguard covers pretty much rock.
That said, as a e-reader I don't really get that much enjoyment out of the covers anyway ...
OTOH, recent US covers have been quite nice (I especially like the painterly look of the The Rings of Time cover, and the colors on That Which Divides are nice, too) and all of the Vanguard covers pretty much rock.
That said, as a e-reader I don't really get that much enjoyment out of the covers anyway ...
And I think that is what is wonderful about Martin's style, in that his love of thematic decompression dominates his story-construction style. His world-building is brilliant, in suggesting and proposing different strands of culture, events and memories that really suggest people living in a world which is far, far more than the reader will ever be privy to. Jut as his characters inhabit more and more decompressed narratives, they also experience the world as decompressed. [And also there is never any sense of small-world syndrome]
As a medievalist, Martin's works are perhaps the best medieval fiction I've ever encountered * - especially because of recurring tropes that suggest continually that this world did not just start with the Trident. These include the continual recourses to the Golden Age before the civil war, the songs like the Reins of Castermere and other legendised events in the world, his ability to depict the very different cultures across Westeros and over the sea created through subtle suggestions like different diets, clothing styles and social mores, as well as (again) differentiation of historical legend. He writes with an incredible historical ability, which only enhances more and more the sense of his characters operating as tiny elements of a long (and long-to-continue) historical narrative.
* Of course Tolkien also was a medievalist of supreme ability, both as an academic and as imaginative writer. His works are more akin to medieval texts stylistically than Martin's ever are, but Martin does so well at depicting the world underneath the chronicle and poetic styles Tolkien worked with (and is also writing a different time period than Tolkien, who reintepreted Anglo-Saxon, as well early Icelandic, Nordic, Welsh and Cornish, historical modes - compared to Martin's high-to-late medieval world which I am more familiar with).
Much as I agree with this, and love both the book and TV series, it bugs the shit out of me when he has archers "firing" arrows at targets...
Oh yeah, because "fire" is a term that would only have come into use for cannons and guns, literally setting fire to the fuse/powder. So what's the proper transitive verb for arrows? Just "shoot?"
Loose, usually. Shoot, or let fly also work.
You *can* "fire an arrow" but that actually means to set light to in the hope that it will set fire to whatever it hits...
To be fair, lots of writers have "firing" arrows at things, but it bugs me more with GRRM cos he does so much else right, that he proves he must know better...
You know, I'm afraid to check, but I figure the odds are at least 70/30 that somebody "fires" a crossbow in Riese or one of my Underworld books . . . .
Oops.
Then again, I don't recall any copyeditor ever catching this.
I just checked one of the climactic chapters of my novel Warpath. … Guilty as charged. All I can say is that I'll remember this thread the next time I write scenes involving archers or other medieval missile-launching weapons.
Very good point! My problems are (perhaps snobbishly) Americanisms like 'pants' in a medieval European depiction.
