Marc's comments
(member since Aug 17, 2008)
Marc's comments from the SciFi and Fantasy Book Club group.
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Jon wrote: "Welcome Wizkid! And you're not a geezer, otherwise I'd be one too. And I'm four years older than you. :P"1962, here. Grew up on Oz books and Star Trek.
I wouldn't put His Majesty's Dragon in the same class as American Gods. I like both, too. I wouldn't put my own books in that category!
Brooke wrote: "io9 has up their picks for the decade's best SF comics and SFF books. Agree with them? Disagree?
http://io9.com/5423355/10-of-the-decades...
http://io9.com/5423847/20-best-science-fi..."
Never read any of them, except for the first few Potter books. They were OK. Curse of Chalion should have been there.
I guess my favorite series of the decade would be the Merchant Princes series by Charles Stross. I don't know the order of the titles.
The Family Trade
The Clan Corporate
The Revolution Business Book Five of the Merchant Princes
The Hidden Family
The Merchants' War
The year 2000 was the last year of the last decade, century and millenium. They all ended on the last day of the last month of that year. The next decade, century, and millenium started on the first day of the first month of the following year, 1/1/2001.
I am not sure if this is important for this discussion but I believe Marc is correct. The first year of the calendar would have been year one so the first decade would be years one through ten. All other decades would follow the same way. Am I doing the math right? ..."
You are correct. A decade ends on the end of the tenth year, just as a century ends on the end of the hundredth year and a millenium on the end of the thousandth. A decade can more loosely be used to refer to any period of ten years but that is not what is usually meant by 'the best book of the decade'.
Jeffrey wrote: "As we approach the end of the year, and the end of the decade..."The end of the decade is the end of next year.
Alien races are impossible to depict as truly alien, simply because the author is human. Some have come close. E.E (Doc) Smith did a great job with his Lensman books depicting the various other races, but he usually did that from the perspective of one of his human characters. Gordon Dickson's The Alien Way had a strong alien lead, but again the alien life was filtered through a human's perceptions, and also the alien culture itself was a very stripped-down version of a human culture.
Books aren't designed to be an e-book. My novels were released as both print and e-books, and there is no difference in the text. E-books are just a different way of delivering the text, but the story is the same. Lots of big publishers are turning their backlists into ebooks, but they don't get re-edited, just re-formatted.
Sarah Pi wrote: "I nominate The Thread That Binds the Bones, a Nina Kiriki Hoffman novel. I think she extended it into a series later. It's been a long time since I read it, but I seem to recall the s..."
The problem is finding copies. This is one of my favorite books and I'd love to second it but I don't imagine it'll be easy to come by. There is a second novel in the series and at least one short story.
Can I suggest my own
The Flame in the Bowl Unbinding the Stone in this connection? Not only is the magic Tarkas gets stuck with based on music, especially the words, but I also have a different take on elementals, bearing in mind that I don't claim to have read everything and someone else may also have done them the way I did. The emphasis in this book is not so much the magic as what having the magic does to Tarkas' life.
Richard wrote: "the whole idea of the shadow of his death and its effects could be seen as philosophy rather than fiction."That's what I like about fantasy, it's a perfect venue for deep philosophy without being deeply philosophical about it. I got the ideas for my novels while I was a grad student in philosophy. What bothers me is when the author brings the whole book to a screaming halt so they can put pages of monologue in the main character's mouth, hitting the reader over the head with their view of how the world works as if it was coming from the mouth of God. Needless to say, that's one thing I made sure not to do in my own writing.
Unfortunately it felt somewhat exploitative to me, giving him a 'career achievement award' simply to promote the prequel trilogy. Not to mention the costume looked a bit ratty, and the antics of the guy in it were distracting.
Stefan wrote: "but I'm already looking forward to something with a bit more depth and originality."Is that my cue? Is this thing on?
Trudi Canavan's Black Magician trilogy is about a young girl with incredible power who must go to the Magician's Guild training facility or die...and take everything with her when she goes.If you want bad fantasy, you could try Cristopher Stasheff's Her Majesty's Wizard. Student of ancient languages discovers an ancient scroll in a book, translates it, and is taken to an alternate arth with magic and demons, etc., and everyone speaks Elizabethan English, naturally.
And if you want excellent fantasy, Terry Brooks' Word and Void trilogy features Nest Freemark, a young girl who starts the series as a High school senior and ends as a post-collegiate Olympic runner, when she isn't working to defeat the forces of evil.
The Logical Magician is about a mathematics student who has to discover modern day talismans to use in the battle against left-over forces from Man's mythical past. He represents Order, they represent Chaos.
In the Guardians of the Flame series the college students are translated into the characters they were playing, becoming bigger, stronger, more agile, sneaky, magic powers, etc. Part of their problem is to be themselves in the new bodies, rather than become the characters they started out as.
A Logical Magician is about a graduate student in mathematics taking on ancient mythical beings.Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame series is about a group of college friends whose D&D session becomes real.
The story is about an author writing a story, so it fit rather nicely. Here's the scene:
I was incredulous. “That bilious tripe? A woman in a dungeon six months, yet her hair still flowed and billowed over high, pert breasts? What kind of swill do you think my readers will swallow?”
“They’re my readers now, author guy, and they’ll take whatever swill I throw at them, as long as there’s breasts in it.” (I stifled a groan. ’Breasts’ is plural, you moron.)
My editor called me on one like this a while back:
Confusion of singular and plural “There’s three of them in the barn.” [“There are” is correct.:]
It was in my story 'Chasing His Own Tale', which is now available, by the way, as an ebook single. I took her criticism (which wasn't entirely valid since the line was spoken by an obvious plebe) and worked it into the story, since it was a comedy and that made it funnier.
I have posted it up in the Tips section of my website, which is a click away, off my profile. A quick check would save any writer, old or new, from quite a few of the most glaring pitfalls.I found a Tips link under the Books tab, but I didn't see what you describe here.
Pat wrote: "Marc, I hope that was an example of your sense of humour (UK spelling)."
Nope, just indicates that I failed to reread my own note before I sent it.
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