Dear Epic Fantasy of the Very Late 1980s...
Look. This is hard for both of us. Let's not make it any harder than it needs to be. We had some fun, didn't we, back around 1998? You were fresh to me. I was fresh to the world of letters. I'd never seen anything like you, you with your thousands upon thousands of pages, you great thumping quadrilateral of a book. You citadel of wood pulp. You horse-slaughtering trebuchet missile of a fantasy sequence. I thought you were pretty keen.
Alas, time has worked its alchemy on the pleasure centers of my brain, and they've become such fussy precision instruments. I suppose as adults the term we use is "more discriminating." Those old Sense-of-Wonder nodes are still there, resting in the deep darkness, but you can't just flounce on in unannounced and slap them like you used to. I've sort of rearranged the furniture, you see. It's like an obstacle course in there, and all the weak, lumpy, misshapen ideas that used to tickle me without trouble just can't find their way past the gauntlet.
Maybe it's my fault, for conceiving the notion that we could recapture what we shared fourteen years ago. It started as an exercise in curiosity, and while it was rocky at first (my younger self had a great deal more tolerance for languorous chapters of fuck-all happening to anyone, and for thick-headed teenage protagonists too dim to walk in a straight line) my perseverance paid off in an ultimate reading experience that was not entirely excruciating. Heartened, I vowed to turn it into a sort of state-of-the-genre survey project, and continued to your second volume.
Which is where the metaphorical primate had sexual relations with the hypothetical football.
See, you've got this character who happens to be an unusually educated swamp-dweller. A wiry little man with a very able intellect, undervalued by his own people, and decidedly one of your more engaging characters. This poor fellow sets off on a journey by flat-bottomed boat, up rivers and across mangrove swamps, during which he dangles a hook and attempts to catch some nourishment.
This he does, reeling in a fish of commendable size, a fish so large and powerful he can't immediately haul it into the boat for fear of snapping his line. No worries. He decides to let the fish tire itself out before trying again. Alas for him, he notices the dark shape of a crocodile slipping from the bank into the river, obviously intent on eating his lunch.
I have to confess that I lacked the creativity to predict what our hero, the experienced swamp-dweller, quite an expert on dangerous amphibious animals, would do in response.
He dove into the water and put himself between the fish and the crocodile.
That's right. This lean, aging fellow, unskilled in arms, attempted to distract a crocodile away from a fish using his own mortal body, despite obviously knowing what crocodiles can do to human beings in water.
I wonder why your author, so plainly enamored of the notion that this poor fellow's life needed Exciting Complications Leading to a Cliffhanger, couldn't find it in his heart to use any of the other narrative tools just sitting there, gleaming, ready and eager to be deployed. Why not endanger the boat with a bout of bad weather? How about an attack from hostile forces? How about a surprise attack by dangerous aquatic life? Nope. I'm afraid your author decided our swamp-dweller should do something transparently, frustratingly witless. Not merely an act born of hubris, arrogance, mental incapacity, or anger (though he attempts to lampshade things by having the character curse himself on those terms), but absolute plot-convenient stupidity without any laudable underpinning.
That snapping sound you just heard was my suspension of disbelief as the trap door finally opened beneath it and the noose jerked tight around its neck.
And so, I wish I could say "it's not you, it's me." While my tastes have changed, they haven't changed so much that I couldn't make a sincere go of it... until characters started literally feeding themselves to crocodiles to keep the semblance of a plot lurching forward. So yeah, it's definitely you, not me.
Look, don't take it like that. You'll always have a place on my bookshelf. I'll always think highly of your worldbuilding, your well-earned sense of gravitas, and some of your beautiful riddles. We'll always have 1998.
But what we won't have is characters feeding themselves to crocodiles for no good reason, okay?
Alas, time has worked its alchemy on the pleasure centers of my brain, and they've become such fussy precision instruments. I suppose as adults the term we use is "more discriminating." Those old Sense-of-Wonder nodes are still there, resting in the deep darkness, but you can't just flounce on in unannounced and slap them like you used to. I've sort of rearranged the furniture, you see. It's like an obstacle course in there, and all the weak, lumpy, misshapen ideas that used to tickle me without trouble just can't find their way past the gauntlet.
Maybe it's my fault, for conceiving the notion that we could recapture what we shared fourteen years ago. It started as an exercise in curiosity, and while it was rocky at first (my younger self had a great deal more tolerance for languorous chapters of fuck-all happening to anyone, and for thick-headed teenage protagonists too dim to walk in a straight line) my perseverance paid off in an ultimate reading experience that was not entirely excruciating. Heartened, I vowed to turn it into a sort of state-of-the-genre survey project, and continued to your second volume.
Which is where the metaphorical primate had sexual relations with the hypothetical football.
See, you've got this character who happens to be an unusually educated swamp-dweller. A wiry little man with a very able intellect, undervalued by his own people, and decidedly one of your more engaging characters. This poor fellow sets off on a journey by flat-bottomed boat, up rivers and across mangrove swamps, during which he dangles a hook and attempts to catch some nourishment.
This he does, reeling in a fish of commendable size, a fish so large and powerful he can't immediately haul it into the boat for fear of snapping his line. No worries. He decides to let the fish tire itself out before trying again. Alas for him, he notices the dark shape of a crocodile slipping from the bank into the river, obviously intent on eating his lunch.
I have to confess that I lacked the creativity to predict what our hero, the experienced swamp-dweller, quite an expert on dangerous amphibious animals, would do in response.
He dove into the water and put himself between the fish and the crocodile.
That's right. This lean, aging fellow, unskilled in arms, attempted to distract a crocodile away from a fish using his own mortal body, despite obviously knowing what crocodiles can do to human beings in water.
I wonder why your author, so plainly enamored of the notion that this poor fellow's life needed Exciting Complications Leading to a Cliffhanger, couldn't find it in his heart to use any of the other narrative tools just sitting there, gleaming, ready and eager to be deployed. Why not endanger the boat with a bout of bad weather? How about an attack from hostile forces? How about a surprise attack by dangerous aquatic life? Nope. I'm afraid your author decided our swamp-dweller should do something transparently, frustratingly witless. Not merely an act born of hubris, arrogance, mental incapacity, or anger (though he attempts to lampshade things by having the character curse himself on those terms), but absolute plot-convenient stupidity without any laudable underpinning.
That snapping sound you just heard was my suspension of disbelief as the trap door finally opened beneath it and the noose jerked tight around its neck.
And so, I wish I could say "it's not you, it's me." While my tastes have changed, they haven't changed so much that I couldn't make a sincere go of it... until characters started literally feeding themselves to crocodiles to keep the semblance of a plot lurching forward. So yeah, it's definitely you, not me.
Look, don't take it like that. You'll always have a place on my bookshelf. I'll always think highly of your worldbuilding, your well-earned sense of gravitas, and some of your beautiful riddles. We'll always have 1998.
But what we won't have is characters feeding themselves to crocodiles for no good reason, okay?