New World Order
Feb. 17th, 2008 03:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kitewithfishI think that I've come to an odd realization about my reading habits.
There are a number of sci fi/ fantasy novels that suffer from old problems- their characters are formulaic, the plot is predictable, etc, etc. And people don't want to read them for those reasons- the particulars of the story in question are dull.
However, sometimes these novels are absolute gems of World-Building. The characters are less interesting to me than the world in which they are shown, and I find my literary sight drawn from the foreground to the landscape. The most recent examples of these, that I've found, have been quite nice AU fantasy novels, with good to decent characterization and plot, but create really, really compelling and interesting worlds for their characters to move through.
I'm in the middle of rereading Robin McKinley's Sunshine, which features some nice twisting of fantasy tropes (the Chosen One/ Descendant Girl with Magical Powers, Vampire Who Talks Old, etc), but the really interesting thing for me is the background world McKinley created. It seems fairly well like ours, with the main difference being that Others (vampires, werewolves, and demons, oh my) are real and publicly acknowledged as threats- superficially, it seems like an Alternate Universe with a mystical background that exploded into outright dangerous war several years before the story takes place, and has since reached some kind of peace accords.
But McKinley keeps sticking little things in there that seem to hint at a much more convoluted history- Instead of "cool" and "damned", the slang is "spartan" and "carthaginian", one swears to gods and kali (lower-case) when one's pissed. These things are not one-offs, but consistent, and the particular opposition of spartan (good to the Roman mode of thought) vs. carthaginian (very, very bad to the Romans), seems to suggest a period of longer influence for the Roman Empire. Gods doesn't stand against that idea, but then where does Kali come into the mix?
The other books that I'm thinking of in the realm of the intriguing world building is "The Dresden Files", a series by Jim Butcher on the adventures of the Chicago's only advertising wizard (he's in the phone book), who features primarily as a detective in supernatural cases. (Clearly, this series violates the Knox's Ten Commandments and Van Dine's 20 Rules right off the bat. If you can't hack it, just give up.) Having read 2.5 of the ten books in the series, I can warn you that they tend towards a formula and the writing is rather workmanlike at times, nor are they truly "detective stories" in the that it's generally impossible for you make an educated guess along with the main character.
But the world(s) that Jim Butcher put together for this series are just delightful. They are lovely and complex, and honestly, that's partly the reason that I keep reading these things, not generally being a fan of the detective mindset in general. But right off the bat you get a delightfully evil mob boss with the cold "soul of a tiger", and a large and varied backstory on the main character that only gets hinted at within the first book. I want to know more, not so much about whodunit this week, but more about how everything all fits together- the greatest mysteries of this series are clearly not the ones that Dresden is called upon to solve, but the much wider ones of politics and who's pulling the strings, which are clearly only going to come out gradually over the course of the maaaaany books.
There are a number of sci fi/ fantasy novels that suffer from old problems- their characters are formulaic, the plot is predictable, etc, etc. And people don't want to read them for those reasons- the particulars of the story in question are dull.
However, sometimes these novels are absolute gems of World-Building. The characters are less interesting to me than the world in which they are shown, and I find my literary sight drawn from the foreground to the landscape. The most recent examples of these, that I've found, have been quite nice AU fantasy novels, with good to decent characterization and plot, but create really, really compelling and interesting worlds for their characters to move through.
I'm in the middle of rereading Robin McKinley's Sunshine, which features some nice twisting of fantasy tropes (the Chosen One/ Descendant Girl with Magical Powers, Vampire Who Talks Old, etc), but the really interesting thing for me is the background world McKinley created. It seems fairly well like ours, with the main difference being that Others (vampires, werewolves, and demons, oh my) are real and publicly acknowledged as threats- superficially, it seems like an Alternate Universe with a mystical background that exploded into outright dangerous war several years before the story takes place, and has since reached some kind of peace accords.
But McKinley keeps sticking little things in there that seem to hint at a much more convoluted history- Instead of "cool" and "damned", the slang is "spartan" and "carthaginian", one swears to gods and kali (lower-case) when one's pissed. These things are not one-offs, but consistent, and the particular opposition of spartan (good to the Roman mode of thought) vs. carthaginian (very, very bad to the Romans), seems to suggest a period of longer influence for the Roman Empire. Gods doesn't stand against that idea, but then where does Kali come into the mix?
The other books that I'm thinking of in the realm of the intriguing world building is "The Dresden Files", a series by Jim Butcher on the adventures of the Chicago's only advertising wizard (he's in the phone book), who features primarily as a detective in supernatural cases. (Clearly, this series violates the Knox's Ten Commandments and Van Dine's 20 Rules right off the bat. If you can't hack it, just give up.) Having read 2.5 of the ten books in the series, I can warn you that they tend towards a formula and the writing is rather workmanlike at times, nor are they truly "detective stories" in the that it's generally impossible for you make an educated guess along with the main character.
But the world(s) that Jim Butcher put together for this series are just delightful. They are lovely and complex, and honestly, that's partly the reason that I keep reading these things, not generally being a fan of the detective mindset in general. But right off the bat you get a delightfully evil mob boss with the cold "soul of a tiger", and a large and varied backstory on the main character that only gets hinted at within the first book. I want to know more, not so much about whodunit this week, but more about how everything all fits together- the greatest mysteries of this series are clearly not the ones that Dresden is called upon to solve, but the much wider ones of politics and who's pulling the strings, which are clearly only going to come out gradually over the course of the maaaaany books.
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Date: 2008-02-18 03:12 am (UTC)I mean, yeah, it had some accepted genre tropes, but then, it's an unapologetically genre novel. But I absolutely do not think that the characters are formulaic, or that the plot is predictable, or that it falls too deeply into genre patterns, or any of the other criticisms that genre work generally draw. The world the characters inhabited did pique my interest, but not so much that it's what I chiefly remember in the story.
I'm not sure that I would label it a gem of world-building, partly for that reason. When I hear 'world-building,' I usually think of something Tolkien-esque. Knowing Robin McKinley's work, I am certain she spent a LOT of time working out the history of Sunshine's world, just as she's spent a LOT of time working out the particulars of all her worlds. But the term itself just makes me think of high fantasy, (perhaps unnecessarily) complicated back stories, unique geography, linguistic and cultural paraphernalia, and a general overarching sense of a different world.
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Date: 2008-02-18 11:53 am (UTC)To be truthful, I do have a great deal of affection for the characters- Sunshine could very easily have been pegged down as a sort of magical heir to the throne by her powers and her situation, but she ends up Queen of Cinnamon Rolls. I also read it for the first time when I was about 12, and most of the finer points of novels I either missed completely or had later forgotten. I don't mean to call it a clichéd book, because it simply is not. She is a complicated and internally twisty character.
I find that a lot of my affection for Sunshine as a character thought is bound up in her role as narrator and giver-of-informative- asides: while she's freaking about about getting caught by the authorities, she's also giving a running explanation of what those authorities are, and what they have the legal right to do to her in this world. The stuff that makes her relationships complicated (beyond the stress of immediate family), is that her world is different than ours. Her internal struggles about growing up/ who her estranged father and grandmother were/ her "betrayal" of her people by saving Constantine the vamp, etc, is motivated by the places where her world diverges from ours.
Maybe world-building is too strong a word; maybe Alternate Universe would be better term- both of my examples are more AU than fresh worlds. But feel like that's too narrow a term, too! It sounds like I'm only talking about alternate history or something.
But, in any case, I don't think the novel is cliché at all, really. If it was retold from a third person perspective, maybe it would get there, but as the narrative POV is so complex and linked to the main character, then I can't say that it really ever falls into the traps of the bad genre novel.
By the by, do you know any good German authors, fantasy or otherwise? I want to start reading more German authors, but I don't know any of the authors (except the ones whose books are translations from English!).