Lit-rature!

[Debaser]

I love this. Print on demand! It give me so much hope for our future as a culture that any douche can be a published author.

Let's hit the highlights:

In the year 232 of the New Renaissance, a global regime known as the Quadra Order advocates total control by means of manifest will from Heaven. Throughout their history, malformations of greed and corruption have been swept beneath the earth.

The manipulated and discarded burn from the golden sight, searing in the agony of being outcast. The rebellious are smashed, and condemned as final judgment rends them asunder. In their desperation, the forgotten plead for a new messiah to rise from light?s adversary, the placid darkness.

Yeah, look, I know I got my degree at an unaccredited debasing college and all, but this whole anti-Christian meme has to die if people can't start finding a new direction to take it in. I mean, isn't this quoted verbatim from the backstory to the original Diablo or something? Let's not even waste timing wondering how long he spent paging through a thesaurus to find the word "malformation".

But that's not the best part. The author's name is listed as "Kain Branford". Uh huh, sure. For those of you who didn't know, my real name is Cloud Seritoph. But even that's not quite the best part. The best part is the name of the book's main character: Kain. Outstanding.

Other characters:

DUKE:
Kain?s primary antagonist, Duke is a human infused with the blood of the legendary paladin race that rivals the knightmare race. Spanning numerous centuries, Duke was responsible for Kain?s death once before. Now in the day of the New Renaissance Kain is reborn, and Duke takes on the fight to overcome the darkness once again. Though this time, he finds himself not faced with a powerful tyrant, but a virtuous entity driven by ideals.

So is he a Duke? Is he John Wayne? The hell is this shit?

SIR JAY GARAMONDE

How much you want to bet "Kain" here's best friend, worst enemy, or real name is actually Jay?

CECIL LIGHTWIND

So we've got a character named Kain and a character named Cecil. I smell pulitzer!

ARCANO LUTHER ZERN

Well, at least it's original. Sort of.

JADE

Christfuckcockass.

KINCADE LEMINGTON

Wasn't he a character on Days of Our Lives?

Ooh, and we've got excerpts!

As she walked as one of these people, citizen Lonna Chere, she played in her mind the resonating words of an earlier given speech. Considered lovely by most, Lonna is no older than nineteen years. She led the life of great accomplishment, error hardly her enemy. Her whole life, she had never been through the hardship of bleeding. A mind keen, and room for notions of brilliance. Today brought about one of those brainchildren.

"The Theory of Healing on the Necromantic."

This is so totally cut and pasted from a roleplaying message board. In the next paragraph her thoughts are probably by colons. I know I should make a joke about the "Healing on the Necromatic" line, but absolutely nothing's coming to me.

"Yes, this blade has been bathed in the blood of your soldiers?? Kain then took notice of the cadavers of his men lying upon the entryway floor, ??as it was of yours so many years ago!? All that suffering rushed back to him, the twilight agony, and the brink of death that hurled him into oblivion. ?Come on; come get your vengeance if you can take it from this old man!? He took the bait; Kain drew forth his blade from a flash of energy into his right hand. Half swallowed by darkness with his purple eyes glowing, half displayed in the searchlight from his ship, he stood ready. An explosion shook the home, Duke to his feet holding his sword.

I'm sure I'd be on the edge of my seat in this climactic swordfight between Evil-Good and Good-Evil if I could make a lick of sense out of it.

Okay, look. This is pretty horrible, but the first paragraph of this post is entirely non-sarcastic. I mean, this dude put his (or his parents, whatever) money on the line to get his thinly disguised Final Fantasy self-insertion fan fiction published. Hell, he even has advertising for the damn thing. And, as much as people rag on capitalism or the internet or whatever, I love living in a world where people can do shit like that. Because if "Kain Branford" can do it, then so can someone who actually has something interesting or important to say. Hell, I think Nietzshe was pretty much self published, too (and it would be laughably easy to MiST Zarathustra, after all).

But the toxic bit is that you just know a bunch of people from "King Edgar's AVALANCHE Roleplaying Board" are going to buy copies and email the poor fuck with facile praise, which means he'll never fucking improve because no one anywhere is going to offer his any sort of constructive criticism. This is why escapist fiction is dying. I mean "Sire Jay Garamonde". Fuck.

[Vitriola]

Without the sententious, grammar-school writing style, that plot sounds like something I'd read. If it's so overdone and been-there-done-that common, what would you recommend for me?

Allegories? They're cool, but after the Simmons Christianity tale I could do with a different one.

Cycles of life, enemies reborn, but not always the same way, with free will? Interesting.

The outcast and misunderstood having a hero? I've always liked the idea of the classic sense of 'good' being a bunch of useless but pleasant poofs, and evil being a more aggressive and misunderstood breed of warrior, someone dissatisfied with the status quo, but frustrated at the inability to change it.

Genetics playing a part of character? Ancient races having an effect on today's society? I liked Numenor, I might like something like this, too.

Necromancy and medical experiments and discoveries? Bring it on.

Indie writing, like indie anything else? Pretentious enough to give me a false sense of superiority whenever I am talking to people who make me feel outclassed. Positive!

[Debaser]

The outcast and misunderstood having a hero? I've always liked the idea of the classic sense of 'good' being a bunch of useless but pleasant poofs, and evil being a more aggressive and misunderstood breed of warrior, someone dissatisfied with the status quo, but frustrated at the inability to change it.

I guarantee you that anyone who sends this kid positive feedback will open with a paragraph just like this. And I don't mean that to pick on you, or splatter you in with the shit I have been and will be flinging in this thread, but the "virtue is just oppression in disguise" meme is just ridiculously vogue in fantasy right now, and has been for the past fifteen years.

And I don't have a problem with it as such. Fringer and outcast heroes is fine and good. It plays neatly into the audience's psyche. Just like the Farmboy Hero archetype let every small-town whitebread kid imagine himself right into stories of daring an adventure, the Outlaw Hero let's the kid who gets mocked at school and chided at home for not conforming pretend he's a badass for 350 pages. I'm fine with that. Hell, I'm part of that.

But we're past the point as a collective consciousness when rotating the D&D alignment system 90 degrees is enough to bring freshness to the idea of people running around and dividing themselves up more or less neatly along a binary Good/Evil axis. "total control by means of Mandate from Heaven", " a new messiah to rise from light?s adversary, the placid darkness.". There's no room in nonsense like that for actual characters.

Cycles of life, enemies reborn, but not always the same way, with free will? Interesting.

Maybe if you didn't spend your childhood struggling through the ever-increasingly unreadable works of Robert Jordan, because it took you far too long growing up to develop actual taste. But unfortunately it did and I did, so it isn't.

Genetics playing a part of character? Ancient races having an effect on today's society? I liked Numenor, I might like something like this, too.

Look, I'm not going to pound the originality hammer, because I realize how lame that would be. If you boil any story down to the "idea", you can probably point out some earlier work that had the same basic thought. But the "I like X and Y recycles all of X's ideas, so I'll probably like Y" mentality is exactly what everyone rips on Hollywood for.

[Vitriola]

Alot of what you said is true, but my original question stands. I read some fantasy/sci-fi, but not ALOT of fantasy/sci-fi, because I feel the writers concentrate more on their genre and making it True than concentrating on good writing, realistic characters, or believable outcomes. You've seen it-done it a hundred times, what would you recommend?

Jordan, Negative! First 5 books were great, but I have the same problem with it as everyone else does. Characters have become a crude copy of themselves, plot is stalled, ending is nowhere in sight. If I have to hear some dimwitted slut exasperatedly sigh Men! one more time, I'll burn the damn book. I stopped reading them awhile ago.

Martin, Positive! But we'll see. The chapter of the new book he has on his website seems slightly cringeworthy in places, but I'll definitely be buying it when it comes out. His characters are deep enough that I really can't tell what any given one of them might do in some such situation. Well, the adults. The children and annoying.

Any Eddings-type bullshit, anything with a 'Dark-elf' or all D&D flavored asspuke, I won't even finish 50 pages.

Sci-fi is worse. Heinlein? Self-righteous garbage. Niven? Come on, the guy had a starcraft pilot named Rod Sterling or some shit. Old-school robot stuff? Pass. What's new and decent? That doesn't just have the people as cyphers for toggling on and off the machines, or getting out of the way of the imminently impacting asteroid?

Cyberpunk, it's decent. I read alot of it, but almost by default. I need something a bit different.

You can rehash a plot a million times, but a good writer is a good writer no matter what he borrowed/stole. I'll take a decent author over an innovative plot anytime.

Ok, GO!

[Debaser]

Ok, GO!

Geeze, I dunno. I kinda got zonked out of Fantasy lit after my first year out of high school, because so much of it is ass. So saying I've seen it all is excessive, I've just seen more than enough to recognize the obvious. You've probably read as much as I have, but here goes:

Steven Brust is/was a fantasy author who's held up better than most of my childhood idols. He's not brilliant or anything and pretty much anything in the Vlad Taltos series after the third book should be avoided like the plague. Characterization's weak but not cripplingly so, but his primary setting is interesting in a few different ways, and he's good as a writer in the pure sense of the word. His early work has kind of a nice, pulpy feel to it, but he gets more experimental later on some. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes it's basically Communist propoganda.

The Phoenix Guards is a good little read as is it's sequal 500 Years After, and I have a somewhat unwarranted fondness for Brokedown Palace, which is not to be confused with the movie about the chicks who get arrested for drug smuggling.

Ray Fiest starts off fairly awful but, in contrast to just about every fantasy author ever (who all seem to actively deteriorate for some reason), improves a bit as he goes along. His earliest stuff is straight cliche fantasy, then he moves into this weird repressed sexuality phase where somebody gets sexually assaulted in some bizarre way every book, but the four Serpentwar books aren't bad (although they may not play as well to someone who hasn't suffered through his early stuff and gotten to know the characters). And his work with Janny Wurts (who as far as I can tell has done nothing else) on the Daughter of the Empire series is above average, too.

Gaiman's an easy recommendation, though you're probably already aware of him, and he's not straight fantasy usually. Though yeah, Neverwhere, Stardust, etc., all very good.

Jordan, Negative! First 5 books were great, but I have the same problem with it as everyone else does. Characters have become a crude copy of themselves, plot is stalled, ending is nowhere in sight. If I have to hear some dimwitted slut exasperatedly sigh Men! one more time, I'll burn the damn book. I stopped reading them awhile ago.

Yes. Precisely.

Sci-fi is worse. Heinlein? Self-righteous garbage. Niven? Come on, the guy had a starcraft pilot named Rod Sterling or some shit. Old-school robot stuff? Pass. What's new and decent? That doesn't just have the people as cyphers for toggling on and off the machines, or getting out of the way of the imminently impacting asteroid?

The first two books of Dune are pretty good, though I'm guessing you've already read them. Scifi's always been a film/television genre for me.

[Vitriola]

Steven Brust
The Phoenix Guards
Ray Fiest

Noted!

Gaiman's an easy recommendation, though you're probably already aware of him, and he's not straight fantasy usually. Though yeah, Neverwhere, Stardust, etc., all very good.

Exactly. Read, and read. Just finished 'Good Omens' lasy night, actually. Amusing, had some silly/stupid parts, but overall, worth the time.

The first two books of Dune are pretty good, though I'm guessing you've already read them.

Believe it or not, no. Keep meaning to. Those might be my next choices when I'm down a little on the stack I have out now.

Did you have an original point with your post? There's a bunch of poncey lackwits on the internet or something?

[Debaser]

Did you have an original point with your post? There's a bunch of poncey lackwits on the internet or something?

The point I was going to make, but didn't really get to because I was too busy taking the easy shots is that, whatever his glaring faults as a writer and human being, this guy put together enough consecutive pages about something to make a book and is now proceeding to sell it. So he's got that one-up on me and everyone here (unless that one guy who wrote about the eunich is still lurking around here somewhere).

But the other side of that is that he's trapped in his own little circle jerk. He doesn't have to deal with an editor or a publisher or a critic or an audience that isn't a bunch of roleplaying friends who will praise him unconditionally because they just want to see stuff that resembles their favorite video games, whether it's any good or not. So this guy, who's got the commitment and drive to actually write entire books will never have any incentive to write better books. He was probably never going to be Gaiman, but he could have maybe been Feist, at least.

And that extends down to all the amateur fiction on the net and up to guys like Robert Jordan who write a couple tolerably good books, get a devoted fanbase to kiss their ass, and suddenly stop realizing they need to improve. And that's why escapist fiction is dying.

[Vitriola]

Yeah, but not every wanna-be pro is going to get a book deal. Many talented artists never see mainstream, or get distribution. I think just doing something that we haven't is enough reason to be proud :P

As for escapist fiction dying, it was never the best books that had the shelf-end or storefront displays. I was going along the sci-fi fantasy shelves in Border's a few weeks ago, and when you look at them, you see many, many feet of shelves containing 1 copy of many books. That's alot of books by alot of authors I'd never heard of, and some looked like they might be good. I just don't buy books. Doing this at the library is also fun, and alot of times, turns out to be more expensive than just buying them in the first place...

Speaking of which, anyone need a copy of Cryptonomicon? I've finished it, and post office book rates are so cheap...

[Debaser]

Yeah, but not every wanna-be pro is going to get a book deal. Many talented artists never see mainstream, or get distribution. I think just doing something that we haven't is enough reason to be proud :P

Yeah, yeah. Like I said I'm generally in favor of the open forum for precisely that reason. It's just that, as someone who has spent nearly a decade improving as a writer and that same decade not finishing a book it frustrates me to see some guy who's got the hard part down (from my perspective) but will never amount to anything.

As for the rest of it, comic book guy stereotypes aside, geekdom is largely an inclusive, forgiving society when it comes to its own, almost pathologically so, so the standards for publishable (even successful) fantasy literature are dangerously low and people who get sick of the shit tend to either leave it behind or just grin and bear it. And Print on Demand publishing lowers the bar even further.

"Real" literature is traditionally harder to get published and has an effective review system in place. Having "the establishment" tell you what to read and why you should like it iss annoying but also A. Spares the audience the need to sift through the chaff, and B. Encourages the mediocre and sub-mediocre to get better. Interactive Fiction has the same deal. While there are certainly reviews of sci-fantasy lit out there, they just don't carry the enough weight with the audience (and, consequently, the authors) to mean a damn thing. "Review Proof" summer blockbuster type movies have developed a similar disease, which is why so many of them suck, too.

Since I don't think anyone except maybe Knuckles is in favor of closing off these sorts of open forums, I don't see an obvious answer, except that the readership should be more discriminating, I guess.

Anyway, I think I've made and/or beaten to death my point.

[Vitriola]

"The Establishment" lets too much chaff through, if you ask me.

[Roody_Yogurt]

I'd like to take Cryptonomicon, although I'd prefer to do it after I have a job and can afford to send something back at ya.

[Vitriola]

OK. Maybe I'll send it with that 'Necrotic Drift' cd thing I keep hearing about. Unless you want it anytime soon. (I'll send it out next time I'm by the post office. I don't need anything in 'return', you can just get me a drink in Vegas :))