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Louisgod
Sep 25, 2003

Always Stupid
Bread Liar
Seems like the Wired dude was expecting to uncover some sort of secret sex ring or unmask a psychotic villain (go interview JK Rowling) but instead discovered a genuinely boring dude who has a ton of money and some sort of mental disorder (??) that allows him to write non-stop.

The “problem” with Sanderson is that he’s your standard boring nerd you’d find at any IT job. Is Mormonism weird? Well, yeah, but so is Christianity, and Buddhism, depending on the branch. Is the Cosmere a grandiose allegory for the general concept of Mormonism? Probably, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting or fun. In this shithole country we have tens of millions of people who are convinced the son of god died over 2000 years ago and think he was born in December, and they sadistically wear his dying body nailed to planks of woods on their ears and necks. That’s equally weird, and even more of a cult albeit a culturally accepted one.

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Megazver
Jan 13, 2006
Mormonism is technically a Christian sect. (But they tend to avoid the crosses for reasons you listed.)

Megazver
Jan 13, 2006
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/why-isnt-sci-fi-author-brandon-sanderson-taken-seriously/

This Mormon sci-fi author made $55m last year. So why isn’t he taken seriously?
A mocking interview with Brandon Sanderson has gone viral. It's time fantasy authors – from Stephen King to JK Rowling – got more respect

Under paywall, but you can read it in the comments here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/brandonsanderson/comments/120yjhq/telegraph_comes_out_fighting_for_brandon/

Louisgod
Sep 25, 2003

Always Stupid
Bread Liar

Megazver posted:

Mormonism is technically a Christian sect. (But they tend to avoid the crosses for reasons you listed.)

True true, I tend to see it differently considering how much it branches (I lived a few years in Boise and spent time with friends reading the book of Mormon while we laughed at how insane it is). Still, all religion is weird, we’ve just been conditioned to be okay with some over others.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Megazver posted:

Mormonism is technically a Christian sect. (But they tend to avoid the crosses for reasons you listed.)
A lot of other Christians, possibly most, don't consider them Christian, for various doctrinal reasons. I'm an exmo now but that bit still looks like stupid gatekeeping to me, I've yet to see any reasons that actually make any sense; most commonly the reasoning is explicitly given as a popularity contest, ala "well most Christian denominations agree on these things, therefore if the Mormons believe differently then they're not Christian".

quote:

Is the Cosmere a grandiose allegory for the general concept of Mormonism?
I think it was probably inspired by Mormon ideas (since in Mormonism, God used to be a man and people on Earth can go on to become gods), but I have serious doubts that it's an intentional allegory. In Mormonism, basically anyone who reaches godhood is supposed to be perfect in personality, the same way Christians conceive of Jesus and the Father. Whereas anyone who picks up a Shard eventually is twisted by its intent, becoming a living caricature, it's just a super different take.

NikkolasKing
Apr 3, 2010



I do think it's a good question about why Sanderson isn't more talked about. Then again, maybe not. Maybe Rowling and HP are a unique phenomenon. Did A Song of Ice and Fire do better than Stormlight Archive? Obviously with GoT it was catapulted into the stratosphere but was Martin similarly confined to Fantasy nerd circles before that? Maybe there's nothing unusual here, Rowling is the unusual one. Even Stephen King I imagine benefited a lot from his books being made into films, same as Martin with GoT. That is what made him mainstream popular. I think. I dunno.


I'm actually going through the whole thing because I got nothing else to do right now.

quote:

In fact, at that first dinner, over flopsy Utah Chinese—this being days before I’d meet his extended family, and attend his fan convention, and take his son to a theme park, and cry in his basement—I find Sanderson depressingly, story-killingly lame.

He sits across from me in an empty restaurant, kind of lordly and sure of his insights, in a graphic T-shirt and ill-fitting blazer, which he says he wears because it makes him look professorial. It doesn’t. He isn’t. Unless the word means only: believing everything you say is worth saying. Sanderson talks a lot, but almost none of it is usable, quotable. I begin to think, This is what I drove all the way from San Francisco to the suburbs of Salt Lake City in the freezing-cold dead of winter for? For previously frozen dim sum and freeze-dried conversation? This must be why nobody writes about Brandon Sanderson.

So, recklessly, I say what’s on my mind. I have to. His wife is there, his biggest fan, always his first reader, making polite comments; I don’t care. Maybe nobody writes about you, I say to Sanderson, because you don’t write very well.[

quote:

I’ve read 17 of the actual books. Or maybe it’s 20. Exactitude is pointless here. As the major books are all set in the same universe, which Sanderson calls the Cosmere, they’re all but meant to blur together.

I dunno about you all but even the two Mistborn Erss' novels don't "blur together" for me, let alone Stormlight and Mistborn.

quote:

The one question I ask practically everyone is, Why Sanderson? I only need to ask it a few times to realize the answer is always the same. It’s a two-parter. First part: Sanderson’s characters. “They feel like real people,” everyone insists. Multiple parents say they’ve named their kids after their favorites, usually the princely protagonists who’ve overcome various depressions and triumphed chivalrically. “I’ve done some things I’m not proud of,” one man tells me. Then he read the first Stormlight book, The Way of Kings, and now, reformed, he has a 2-year-old son named Kaladin.

The second answer to Why Sanderson? is his worlds. This is probably what he’s best known for. Worldbuilding, as it’s called. Sanderson dreams up far-off lands—sometimes cities, sometimes whole planets, with rules and systems and politics—and then he populates them with characters whose fates are also the worlds’. So the second answer is just the inverse of the first; you can’t have worldbuilding without characterbuilding. Some characters die, some become gods. The good ones, and most of them are good, are very good. Inspiringly good. No one has sex. They only save lives.

What nobody, not a single person, complains about, in my two days walking the Palace floors, is Sanderson’s writing. If they mention his sentences at all, it’s merely to acknowledge that they’re easier to read than, say, Tolkien’s—whose work they may well graduate to, with Sanderson lighting the way. (Sanderson himself admits he was late to Tolkien, in whose shadow he now happily lives, even as he tries to write beyond it.) Still, I can’t help but try to trip them up. Surely he’s not a great writer? I prod. Polite, embarrassed smiles. They’re suspicious of me, I can tell. They probably think I don’t know my Kaladin from my Adolin. I do! I even like Kaladin! The scene midway through Way of Kings where Kaladin talks to a mysterious stranger (it’s Hoid!) on the Shattered Planes? “A story doesn’t live until it is imagined in someone’s mind,” Hoid says. Do I know what that means? Not exactly. And that’s exactly why I read science fiction and fantasy, why I’ve pretty much only read science fiction and fantasy my entire life: for those plays at profundity, at the essence of storytelling. Storytelling beyond words.

Well looks like I'm fairly average in this regard. I can't tell who is a good write by sentence structure, I'll admit. I just like Sanderson's characters, his magic systems, and his idealism. I'm a very pessimistic peson but that's precisely why we need fiction that tells us the suffering we endure isn't meaningless or worthless.

NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Mar 25, 2023

Megazver
Jan 13, 2006

NikkolasKing posted:

I do think it's a good question about why Sanderson isn't more talked about.

He has no adaptations. (Yet.) That's 90% it.

Louisgod
Sep 25, 2003

Always Stupid
Bread Liar
A large part why I enjoy Sanderson’s books is 1) he’s very good at kicking his characters to their lowest lows and finding a way for them to receive redemption (Raoden, Kaladin, Siri), and 2) there’s no weird sex scenes. The sex jokes in TLM are fun but god, sex scenes in books are just.. weird.

socialsecurity
Aug 30, 2003





I'm not going to pretend Sanderson is some amazing prose artist or something, his writing can be simple but that's fine. I read his books to be entertained and they do a good job of that, not every piece of literature needs to stride to be overly complex, it's that kind of weird gatekeeping that prevents people from getting into books in the first place.

Louisgod posted:

A large part why I enjoy Sanderson’s books is 1) he’s very good at kicking his characters to their lowest lows and finding a way for them to receive redemption (Raoden, Kaladin, Siri), and 2) there’s no weird sex scenes. The sex jokes in TLM are fun but god, sex scenes in books are just.. weird.

God yes this, I had just finished Dresden before starting Sanderson and I cannot tell you how much I appreciated the lack of rape scenes and the main character oogling every woman describing how much she wants him and has perfect tits or whatever.

Jose Valasquez
Apr 8, 2005

NikkolasKing posted:

I do think it's a good question about why Sanderson isn't more talked about. Then again, maybe not. Maybe Rowling and HP are a unique phenomenon. Did A Song of Ice and Fire do better than Stormlight Archive? Obviously with GoT it was catapulted into the stratosphere but was Martin similarly confined to Fantasy nerd circles before that? Maybe there's nothing unusual here, Rowling is the unusual one. Even Stephen King I imagine benefited a lot from his books being made into films, same as Martin with GoT. That is what made him mainstream popular. I think. I dunno.

Even JK Rowling wouldn't have been as much of a phenomenon without the movies, but YA fiction is kind of a different beast than fantasy. GRRM was just for nerds until GoT came out, ASoIaF had only sold 12 million copies before GoT compared to more than 90 million after (As of 2018). Compared to that Sanderson had 23 million copies sold by 2018, about half from finishing WoT and half from his other books, so he is roughly equivalent to pre-GoT GRRM although his audience is somewhat smaller because the dude churns out books like nobody's business, but Martin also has a multiple decade head start.

Robert Jordan is the surprise in that he sold 90 million years before the Amazon WoT adaptation came out

eke out
Feb 24, 2013



Megazver posted:

He has no adaptations. (Yet.) That's 90% it.

and, from what I can tell, the reason he doesn't have any adaptations is primarily that he's been very active in controlling the rights and making sure the first one isn't a bad adaptation that fucks over his chances on other novels. which makes a lot of sense when you're already quite rich

Tunicate
May 15, 2012

He actually sold the rights a few times and nothing got made, and they eventually reverted to him.

eke out
Feb 24, 2013



he has talked at great length about his involvement in many attempts to get them made since then yes

CK07
Nov 8, 2005

bum bum BAA, bum bum, ba-bum ba baa..
He's not a great writer. That's actually one of the main things I like about him, and that's what lets him churn out so many books for me to devour. There are no stunning turns of phrase that stop me in my tracks, which is good actually, because I just want to know what loving happens next to these weirdly good-to-the-core characters who somehow keep surprising me. I wanna know all the weird secrets and go, poo poo, how did I miss that, or poo poo, I totally saw that coming.

There are stupid cringy bits that, delivered by any other horrible nerd, would turn me off immediately. But Sando is such an impossibly wholesome and self-aware horrible nerd that I can't help but take him on his own terms and just laugh at it. (see "I am a stick") And it is an honest relief sometimes to read a book that is just a stupid, fun romp of a story, where the author isn't phoning it in but also isn't trying to cram in volumes of subtext.

He seems like a genuinely good guy who stays in his lane and won the lottery doing what he loves. He's not a religious maniac or a bigot. He loves his fans and treats them with care and respect, and he learns from them. He does well by his community. So what if he built himself a 12,000sqft cardboard fort out of Black Lotuses with his kickstarter millions, people do stupider poo poo all the time that is far more destructive. John Grisham probably invests all his bad-writing money in Lockheed Martin or some other murder machines to jerk off over. At least Sando has an imagination to speak of.

In other words, gently caress that bitter journo. And their writing ain't poo poo either.

Jorenko
Jun 6, 2004

I think you're just mad 'cause you're single.

CK07 posted:

He's not a great writer. That's actually one of the main things I like about him, and that's what lets him churn out so many books for me to devour. There are no stunning turns of phrase that stop me in my tracks, which is good actually, because I just want to know what loving happens next to these weirdly good-to-the-core characters who somehow keep surprising me. I wanna know all the weird secrets and go, poo poo, how did I miss that, or poo poo, I totally saw that coming.

There are stupid cringy bits that, delivered by any other horrible nerd, would turn me off immediately. But Sando is such an impossibly wholesome and self-aware horrible nerd that I can't help but take him on his own terms and just laugh at it. (see "I am a stick") And it is an honest relief sometimes to read a book that is just a stupid, fun romp of a story, where the author isn't phoning it in but also isn't trying to cram in volumes of subtext.

He seems like a genuinely good guy who stays in his lane and won the lottery doing what he loves. He's not a religious maniac or a bigot. He loves his fans and treats them with care and respect, and he learns from them. He does well by his community. So what if he built himself a 12,000sqft cardboard fort out of Black Lotuses with his kickstarter millions, people do stupider poo poo all the time that is far more destructive. John Grisham probably invests all his bad-writing money in Lockheed Martin or some other murder machines to jerk off over. At least Sando has an imagination to speak of.

In other words, gently caress that bitter journo. And their writing ain't poo poo either.

I'm gonna agree with every sentence of this post -- except the first one. Being great at writing doesn't exclusively mean that you write flowing poetic purple prose. Brandon's great at being a utilitarian, plot-and-character-focused writer.

Everyone
Sep 6, 2019

by sebmojo

Jorenko posted:

I'm gonna agree with every sentence of this post -- except the first one. Being great at writing doesn't exclusively mean that you write flowing poetic purple prose. Brandon's great at being a utilitarian, plot-and-character-focused writer.

As other people have mentioned, it's also nice to realize that you can probably read/recommend Sanderson to kids without fear of warping their views of human sexuality or gender, unlike, say, Jim "I will now have my character spend a couple of paragraphs describing his underage female apprentice's absolutely awesomely bodacious pair of tatas that she presumably developed while growing up in the Breastriary of Boobapolis" Butcher

Louisgod
Sep 25, 2003

Always Stupid
Bread Liar
He’s a great writer because he’s able to rouse such curiosity and mystery alongside genuinely wonderful characters. He’s also very, very good at stitching together a cohesive story and ending without making it feel cheap or unearned. I’m just about done with Tress and feel it’s one of his best works specific to insightful introspection, and there are parts where you can see him breaking through his Mormon veneer (evolution is a thing, your uncle is racist, etc). Being great doesn’t mean that you have to use big complicated words to suss out the human condition or whatever pretentious garbage people define as “good writing”. It’s also great that Sanderson isn’t a huge transphobe bigot like Rowling, or a Twitter obsessed resistance lib like King.

HidaO-Win
Jun 5, 2013

"And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"
Beautiful prose is the most over-rated metric applied to writers, people who are dogshit in every other respect are lauded because of it, see Martin, G. R. R. and Rothfuss, P.

Sandersons prose is workmanlike and clear, his strengths are elsewhere.

Calidus
Oct 31, 2011

Stand back I'm going to try science!
Is GRRM actually known for having good prose?

Does does any fantasy author actually write a not terrible sex scene? Broken Earth had a bunch but I don’t remember them being bad or good.

Grundulum
Feb 28, 2006

Calidus posted:

Does does any fantasy author actually write a not terrible sex scene?

I would imagine it’s highly dependent on your own viewpoint whether a sex scene is steamy or cringeworthy. (There is also an entire genre devoted to that stuff—surely those authors can write a good scene for at least some people, but I am not willing at present to do the research to see if the hit rate is higher over there.)

Nucleic Acids
Apr 10, 2007

Louisgod posted:

True true, I tend to see it differently considering how much it branches (I lived a few years in Boise and spent time with friends reading the book of Mormon while we laughed at how insane it is). Still, all religion is weird, we’ve just been conditioned to be okay with some over others.

Not everyone tithes 10% of their income to a homophobic MLM scheme.

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





Sex scenes are best when they’re hilarious. See also: Joe Abercrombie.

scary ghost dog
Aug 5, 2007

Calidus posted:

Is GRRM actually known for having good prose?

Does does any fantasy author actually write a not terrible sex scene? Broken Earth had a bunch but I don’t remember them being bad or good.

the witcher books have some very intentionally amusing ones

Megazver
Jan 13, 2006
"Geralt wasn't particularly impressed with the collection. He had lived at Yennefer's house in Vengerberg for six months and she possessed an even more interesting collection, including a phallus of unprecedented proportions, apparently from a mountain troll. She also had a magnificent stuffed unicorn, upon whose back she liked to make love. Geralt was of the opinion that the only place even less suited for lovemaking would be the back of a live unicorn. In contrast to the witcher, who considered a bed a luxury and valued all possible applications such a wonderful piece of furniture offered, Yennefer was wildly inventive. Geralt recalled pleasant moments spent with the sorceress on the slope of a roof, in the hollow of a dead tree, on the balcony, and those of others, the railing of a bridge, a canoe, rocking unsteadily on a rushing stream and lastly while levitating thirty fathoms above the ground. But worst of all was the unicorn. One happy day, however, the thing collapsed beneath them. It ripped open and broke into pieces, causing the pair to burst into wild laughter."

aparmenideanmonad
Jan 28, 2004
Balls to you and your way of mortal opinions - you don't exist anyway!
Fun Shoe

ConfusedUs posted:

Sex scenes are best when they’re hilarious. See also: Joe Abercrombie.

Reading the sex scenes with Logen and Ferro were the first time that I ever had the thought, "Oh, this fantasy author has actually had sex before."

CK07
Nov 8, 2005

bum bum BAA, bum bum, ba-bum ba baa..
Okay, you're all correct that great prose does not a great writer make. I agree and recant that assertion - although good prose doesn't hurt, there are many more important qualities of storytelling.

I definitely understand using Rothfuss, Martin, Abercrombie, etc for comparisons. But I have been idly working through the Sword of Truth re-read thread over the last few months, and it just occurred to me that Terry Goodkind is Sando's bizarro-world evil twin.

Workman-like, functional writing in pretty sizable volumes, but opposite in every other way. Consistently abysmal plotting and pacing, really gross and gratuitous sexual poo poo, everything heavily motivated by the author's real-world ideology and full of strawmen to smug out over. Extreme black-and-white thinking. Set in a cold, sterile, poorly-thought-out world, with a magic system that can be generously described as a nonsensical and arbitrary instrument of pure deus ex machina, and characters that are flatter, less interesting, and composed of more recycled material than cardboard. A manifestly unplanned plot that goes nowhere and has zero payoff. Vast quantities of Deathly-Hallows-style reveals of critical plot elements that everyone has apparently heard of but no one has mentioned until they become relevant to Our Hero (e.g. evil magic death chickens, which are played completely straight). Goodkind even refuses to consider himself a fantasy author because he looks down on genre fiction, but kept writing this schlock because it made him more money than anything else he wrote. He also repeatedly doubled down when called on the worst of it. This reflection makes me even more grateful for the harmless*, lovable doofus Sanderson.

*except for the millions in tithe money that goes toward exterminating queers and evangelizing

NinjaDebugger
Apr 22, 2008


CK07 posted:

I definitely understand using Rothfuss, Martin, Abercrombie, etc for comparisons. But I have been idly working through the Sword of Truth re-read thread over the last few months, and it just occurred to me that Terry Goodkind was Sando's bizarro-world evil twin.

Fixed, by the grace of whatever gods you care to attribute.

CK07
Nov 8, 2005

bum bum BAA, bum bum, ba-bum ba baa..
e: ^^bless you for making my day

Also the fact that the article brought up Orson Scott Card for no reason but then just described him as a "weird Mormon" instead of a raging homophobe and conservative conspiracy theorist wingnut who hasn't written a decent book in 20+ years told me quite a lot. It would be pretty easy to make a positive comparison there between Card and Sanderson but nah

Invalid Validation
Jan 13, 2008




Like I have problems with his writing but there’s so little to try to make a hit piece out of you might as well just make up imaginary things to blast him on if you’re still gonna go that route. What a waste of time to burn a bridge literally nobody thought was smoldering to begin with.

mrs. nicholas sarkozy
Jan 1, 2006

~let me see ya bounce that bounce that~
People keep saying Rothfuss has beautiful prose what am I missing lmao

Brutor Fartknocker
Jun 18, 2013


Nothing until that piece of poo poo writes the third book. I've been informed not to start Rothfuss until he releases that, which will only happen once he stops being able to milk his fame for appearances and random poo poo, maybe.

To add though, who has this wonderful prose that always gets talked about?

Torrannor
Apr 27, 2013

---FAGNER---
TEAM-MATE

mrs. nicholas sarkozy posted:

People keep saying Rothfuss has beautiful prose what am I missing lmao

Nothing. These people convinced themselve of Rothfuss' greatness, and praising him is their way to cope with the fact that there will never be a third book.

And I can only second the point somebody else made, that you can let kids read these books without problems. And it's not that these books aren't dark at times, or that they don't deal with heavy/complicated topics. But the lack of gratuitous violence and sex is pretty wholesome, as is the generally positive outlook. I like Joe Abercrombies books a lot, but I don't want all literature to be grimdark and hopeless. The world is lovely enough as it is, I like my escapist fiction.

M_Gargantua
Oct 16, 2006

STOMP'N ON INTO THE POWERLINES

Exciting Lemon

Brutor Fartknocker posted:

To add though, who has this wonderful prose that always gets talked about?

Catherynne M Valente maybe ?

M_Gargantua fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Mar 25, 2023

Megazver
Jan 13, 2006

M_Gargantua posted:

Catherynne M Valente maybe ?

I tried reading one of her books and she wrote it in an excruciating pastiche of Douglas Adams voice. I only lasted ten pages or so.

Calidus
Oct 31, 2011

Stand back I'm going to try science!
N.K. Jemisin gets a ton of credit for actually making second person work in a novel.

M_Gargantua
Oct 16, 2006

STOMP'N ON INTO THE POWERLINES

Exciting Lemon
I read The Habitation of the Blessed and wondered how much psilocybin was involved underneath the prose.

Taffer
Oct 15, 2010


Brutor Fartknocker posted:

To add though, who has this wonderful prose that always gets talked about?

I really enjoy Dan Simmons (Hyperion mostly), he doesn't overdo it to the point that it obstructs the movement of the story, but he puts in some absolutely gorgeous descriptive prose at fitting moments.

But I mostly only read garbage scifi books so my bar for good prose is probably quite low

Tunicate
May 15, 2012

Zelazny

Grundulum
Feb 28, 2006

Taffer posted:

But I mostly only read garbage scifi books so my bar for good prose is probably quite low

If you want garbage sci-fi, try to find The Quantum Connection by Travis Taylor. Spoiler/teaser that, if I recall, happens quite early in the book: the protagonist gains access to a machine that can do literally anything he thinks of, and he uses it immediately to give himself the body of an Olympian god and an enormous dick.

My friend still hasn’t forgiven me for recommending that book to him. In fairness, I may have undersold the (pulp) quality of the book.

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Brutor Fartknocker
Jun 18, 2013


Thanks guys, I'll check those authors out. I think I have something by jemison in my audible account, probably start that finally.

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