How do I break out of those weird tropes but still write something with gnomes and shit? What does it look like when wizards control the means of production?
How do I break out of those weird tropes but still write something with gnomes and shit? What does it look like when wizards control the means of production?
I've been working through Malazan for a while and while the characters represent a hodgepodge of ideologies and it's certainly not always written from the perspective of common folk, it does feel refreshingly grounded in not being "The Wheel of Time."
I'm interested in revolutionary fiction, trying not to be too on the nose about it but I'd definitely like to port some aspects of 1848 or 1917 to a different setting. I wrote a chunk of a sci-fi novel set in a (you guessed it) post-climate setting. Everything terraformed to Hell trying to cool the planet, concrete mining as basic subsistence, huge lighter-than-air tubes extending into the stratosphere pumping constant SO2 to keep up with a runaway greenhouse. Revolt was brewing, but ultimately though I got too down writing in that world, and I've never finished a book besides so it was time to move on.
Maybe a light Pratchett style world with very serious political movements is due? That let's me keep some classic tropes because of right of satire, then destroy them through a proletarian uprising.
Malazan is great, especially when you get to the America analog. Erikson is a vocal leftist and it shows.
For revolutionary fiction being "too on the nose": nonsense. The more on the nose your writing is, the better. Most political work cloaks itself in layer after layer of abstraction and metaphor, and everyone just ends up missing the point. In my book, the good guys are communists. The bad guys are cops and capitalists. Connecting it directly to the real world doesn't distract from the writing; it gives people context, grounds the story, and lets you spend more words on your characters and plots than world building that just recreates what people are already familiar with.
Yo I love this advice thanks, time for Shmoseph Shmalin to make his debut.
And I'm on Dust of Dreams right now - so good - this has been the best series I'm glad I didn't walk away from when the first book hit me like a wall.
No problem! I have a Shmarl Shmarx type person that's long dead as of the book taking place but it's pretty clear who they're supposed to be if you're familiar. I'll probably add in a Shmao Shmedong in my rewrites as well.
Also, I stopped Malazan during Toll the Hounds, but one day I'll get back to it.
So much this! I think the subtle form of implied ethics in a narrative has become subservient to aesthetics in so much literature and other popular media forms. This is why Parasite hit so hard for many people, it didn't concern itself much with trying to be so damn subtle about the message.
Uncritical support for Tehol Bedict crashing the Letherri economy.
Wheel of Time isn't the worst (Sword of Truth has it beat on all counts), but it is still dreck that is heralded as great because people grew up reading them when the alternative was that or sword of truth.
I read the first few of those Goodkind books and goddamn they were dreadful. A friend insisted they were great, which is why I kept trying, but holy fuck they were so bad.
The main thing I know about the Wheel of Time is that it's super gender essentialist in a way that's impossible to ignore, which is enough to make me not want to read it.
Good call. I got into them before I developed any sort of analytical capacity to recognize horseshit, but I dropped off in the middle of the series because damn they were not very good and Robert Jordan was a clearly a very trad-horny man.
I still haven't haha and would love to know more of your thoughts on what makes the series bad if you don't mind.