Artemis answers “How is this different from <a...”

Dan Drake asked this question about Finna (LitenVerse, #1):

How is this different from <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13129925-horrorst-r">Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix</a>? They seem like they have effectively the exact same premise, except that Horrorstör is in the form of an Ikea catalog. I'm kinda wondering why anyone would read this instead of Horrorstör.

Artemis Do you go up to every fairy tale retelling, every Cinderella story, every Romeo and Juliet story, and ask why it needs to exist? Probably not. Concept…moreDo you go up to every fairy tale retelling, every Cinderella story, every Romeo and Juliet story, and ask why it needs to exist? Probably not. Concepts are cheap; the power is in the execution.

Anyway, even that analogy is selling FINNA short; FINNA isn't a reimagining or retelling of anything, it's entirely itself. It's not a horror story, nor is it trying to be; it's about navigating the multiverse, both literally and metaphorically. It's about two exes trying to be friends again, and understand each other better and rebuild something fragile and real between them that they hope they haven't destroyed. It's about choices. It's about tired queer millennials navigating the world - and as a queer millennial myself, I've never seen a depiction that NAILS it so well as FINNA does. It's a satire of of corporate retail culture and capitalism - which lots of people feel right now, and I welcome all the books doing that. No one book has a monopoly on a narrative that thousands of people live.

FINNA isn't the same as Horrorstör any more than A Game of Thrones is the same as Lord of the Rings even though they both are second-world medieval-Europe-ish high fantasy about the exiled heir to the kingdom. Do you think that no more fantasy novels about kings and kingdoms should have been written because Tolkien already did it? No one should bother to write about, say, grungy cyberpunk hackers being pressured by the cops to do a job for them to keep their freedom, because you could just read Gibson instead? Premises are simple. It's all in the execution that makes a book what it is. And if you personally didn't like it that doesn't mean it's worthless to exist.(less)

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