- Sargeant Biffalot
- Nov 24, 2006
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:
I think I've read about 2/3rds of Wolfe's stuff, and I respect him as a writer, but he's not a favorite of mine.
Most writers people think of as "great fantasy writers" or "great SF writers" aren't really all that much when it comes to actual prose style, they're just great at plotting and pacing, sometimes with a some skill at writing characters and settings. Butcher's a great example of this -- he's a Book Barn favorite because he's got a few really good, likeable characters and he can tell a rip-snorting story that makes you shout "YEAH!" at climax, but he's never going to be known for his prose style.
Wolfe's the opposite -- he's basically a professional writer's professional writer, technically expert and highly skilled, but he's not all that hot when it comes to things like narrative pacing or telling a story that makes sense. In a sense, that's part of the charm -- he's telling stories for people who enjoy stories that take a lot of work to read -- but there's a reason he's not popular with a lot of people who you'd expect to like him. For all his technical skill, he's just not in the first rank as a storyteller, and that's what counts for a lot of readers, especially fantasy/sf readers.
Malazan's chaotic as all hell, but Erikson's just better at pacing and plotting than Wolfe is -- there's a sense of a story happening with Malazan that frankly Wolfe just doesn't have for long stretches of his work.
For an example of what I'm talking about, see this clip from Mat Parker and Trey Stone:
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/09/07/arts/television/100000001039812/a-clip-from-stand-in.html%3Cbr%20/%3E
Basically, huge swathes of the Book of the New Sun are just "and then this happens" "and then this happens" "and then this happens" "and then Severian wanders across a mountain" "and then he meets an ancient dictator" "and then he climbs down a mountain" etc. It's paced poorly. For some readers that's not really a flaw, but for others it is, which is why it's hard to predict who'll like it and who won't.
This is on the right track pointing to different expectations but the terminology is a bit misleading. Wolfe's stuff is in the pulp tradition so anything longer than a short story takes the form of a picaresque. Compared to the quest structure of the later doorstop fantasies it's a less coherent a plot structure, and Wolfe executes it less tightly than most pulp writers, but he's still no way near as ponderous as the average post-pulp fantasy writer. Martin's a good example, his stuff has a really well designed plot that requires many storylines to stall or go through holding pattern digressions while the slower one's catch up. Whereas even a dreamy picaresque like BoTNS never needs to spend longer on a setting or idea than it takes to develop it. It's a case of reading for what's happening on the page vs. reading for what's going to happen in the next chapter.
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Nov 19, 2011 02:43
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Apr 25, 2024 16:46
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- Sargeant Biffalot
- Nov 24, 2006
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Yeah I totally agree that readers generally like stuff with more structure to it than the picaresque and can be turned off by it's lack of structure, especially when comparing it to something like modern fantasy which is usually very clearly and dramatically structured. I just wanted to distinguish that from pacing because most of the writers in the pulp era had really great pacing due to really strict size constraints and most of the giant brick book guys don't due to the complete lack of them.
And yeah there's a complex subtextual plot but you can do that with a more direct narrative too, like in Seven Soldiers or All Star Superman (I'm going to blame my picking comics here on your avatar). The surface plot would feel as aimless without them, assuming the protagonist was still described as bloodlessly.
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Nov 20, 2011 05:59
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Nov 19, 2011 02:43
