I like omni, myself, but only the particular kind of omni that has an explicit narrator telling you a story - as for example in Alexandre Dumas (and beautifully pastiched in Steven Brust's Khaavren books starting with The Phoenix Guards) - who is a character in their own right. IMO that's pretty solidly there in English literature until Dickens breaks it and it then degenerates into headhopping bestseller-omni that we have now, which is undisciplined and yucky
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where part of the point is that there is no Big Bad, that more than one side of a struggle is sympathetic, which I find more interesting than an Evil Which Is To Be Defeated.
by occurring in realistically large and complicated worlds where plans crash into each other, hit unexpected obstacles and generate consequences that nobody had realised
These are things I love and aspire to as well. However, as my wrangling with the project in question (check the tags, I call it That Thing That Will Not Stay Written) has proven, I'm not yet at a point where I can handle something that huge and complicated. I would love to; most of my ideas emerge that way in my head. I just don't yet have the skill to achieve something like that, and I know that. I have yet to finish a full novel, as in write a first draft, and edit edit edit until it's a passable manuscript, then edit again until I have something worthy of even thinking about submitting anywhere. For me, I think I need to start small, start simple, and work my way up to epic novels of
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These are things I love and aspire to as well. However, as my wrangling with the project in question (check the tags, I call it That Thing That Will Not Stay Written) has proven, I'm not yet at a point where I can handle something that huge and complicated.
Fair enough; I didn't mean to come across as pushy, and I certainly sympathise with not trying to do things you're not yet ready for.
(Most of my villains, btw, are not evil in the way of "good vs. evil" black-and-white. They're usually sympathetic in some way. I hope the reader can understand why they do what they do, even if the reader wouldn't choose that path.)
It seems to me that very few people, however villainous, are Evil from their own POV. I try to make my antagonists understandable, at least; wouldn't say I need them to be sympathetic.
I find it very difficult to stay in one PoV for very long, because there's usually a great deal going on, and usually in more than one place. So the PoV switching allows me to show what's going on in all those places leading up to the
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Fair enough; I didn't mean to come across as pushy,
Not pushy so much as you definitely have an idea of what you like and don't like. :) And I'm a person who likes what I like even if other people don't, and for most things (except Twilight, grr), I can honestly say I don't see a problem with liking to write or read them. What I mean is, I'm seeing a trend in people coming down hard on certain types of writing in the fantasy genre ("Eurofantasy" and the like), pushing for a break from these types of plots, stories, settings, and characters. Which is fine, I think it's a great thing to introduce more influences from other cultures. But I also happen to like some of the things people are trashing now, and don't see why there can't be both for the people who enjoy them.
It seems to me that very few people, however villainous, are Evil from their own POV.
Very true.
I am, I think, just tired of books that do that with no discipline at all, when having that information come through fewer POVs makes for tighter and more controlled
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Oh, on the magic-treated-almost-as-a-science front, I am a working research scientist, and, while I can appreciate a good magic-as-reliable-applied-technology story, I am so totally fed up at the paucity of magic-as-science stories that feel like really doing real cutting-edge science that I have given up and am working on one myself, though it's not foregrounded at the moment.
Okay, maybe I'm playing a semantics game here, and maybe there's really not the distinction I'm seeing, but what I meant was not really "magic-as-science" but "magic-approached-in-the-way-we-approach-science
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Okay, maybe I'm playing a semantics game here, and maybe there's really not the distinction I'm seeing, but what I meant was not really "magic-as-science" but "magic-approached-in-the-way-we-approach-science."
Define "we". *grin*
What you're talking about sounds... well, it sounds as though the people writing it really want to be writing science fiction and have been told they can't, they don't have enough "hard science" knowledge, or whatever.
That's not what I meant, nor did I mean to sound dismissive. There are some really excellent novels - first examples to come to my mind are Walter Jon Williams' Metropolitan and City on Fire - where magic is logical and throughly understood, where it is effectively a utility and it's used like electricity is used in the real world; that strikes me as definitely a thing worth doing. But it's not the same thing as real research and poking at the bits that do not fit together, and paradigm shifts and so forth, and how that feels and the way there is a sort of awe in expanding the limits of
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*set pontificate-mode=ON*
I like omni, myself, but only the particular kind of omni that has an explicit narrator telling you a story - as for example in Alexandre Dumas (and beautifully pastiched in Steven Brust's Khaavren books starting with The Phoenix Guards) - who is a character in their own right. IMO that's pretty solidly there in English literature until Dickens breaks it and it then degenerates into headhopping bestseller-omni that we have now, which is undisciplined and yucky ( ... )
Reply
by occurring in realistically large and complicated worlds where plans crash into each other, hit unexpected obstacles and generate consequences that nobody had realised
These are things I love and aspire to as well. However, as my wrangling with the project in question (check the tags, I call it That Thing That Will Not Stay Written) has proven, I'm not yet at a point where I can handle something that huge and complicated. I would love to; most of my ideas emerge that way in my head. I just don't yet have the skill to achieve something like that, and I know that. I have yet to finish a full novel, as in write a first draft, and edit edit edit until it's a passable manuscript, then edit again until I have something worthy of even thinking about submitting anywhere. For me, I think I need to start small, start simple, and work my way up to epic novels of ( ... )
Reply
Fair enough; I didn't mean to come across as pushy, and I certainly sympathise with not trying to do things you're not yet ready for.
(Most of my villains, btw, are not evil in the way of "good vs. evil" black-and-white. They're usually sympathetic in some way. I hope the reader can understand why they do what they do, even if the reader wouldn't choose that path.)
It seems to me that very few people, however villainous, are Evil from their own POV. I try to make my antagonists understandable, at least; wouldn't say I need them to be sympathetic.
I find it very difficult to stay in one PoV for very long, because there's usually a great deal going on, and usually in more than one place. So the PoV switching allows me to show what's going on in all those places leading up to the ( ... )
Reply
Not pushy so much as you definitely have an idea of what you like and don't like. :) And I'm a person who likes what I like even if other people don't, and for most things (except Twilight, grr), I can honestly say I don't see a problem with liking to write or read them. What I mean is, I'm seeing a trend in people coming down hard on certain types of writing in the fantasy genre ("Eurofantasy" and the like), pushing for a break from these types of plots, stories, settings, and characters. Which is fine, I think it's a great thing to introduce more influences from other cultures. But I also happen to like some of the things people are trashing now, and don't see why there can't be both for the people who enjoy them.
It seems to me that very few people, however villainous, are Evil from their own POV.
Very true.
I am, I think, just tired of books that do that with no discipline at all, when having that information come through fewer POVs makes for tighter and more controlled ( ... )
Reply
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Define "we". *grin*
What you're talking about sounds... well, it sounds as though the people writing it really want to be writing science fiction and have been told they can't, they don't have enough "hard science" knowledge, or whatever.
That's not what I meant, nor did I mean to sound dismissive. There are some really excellent novels - first examples to come to my mind are Walter Jon Williams' Metropolitan and City on Fire - where magic is logical and throughly understood, where it is effectively a utility and it's used like electricity is used in the real world; that strikes me as definitely a thing worth doing. But it's not the same thing as real research and poking at the bits that do not fit together, and paradigm shifts and so forth, and how that feels and the way there is a sort of awe in expanding the limits of ( ... )
Reply
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