Since we haven't been locked down yet . . . .dANdeLION wrote:Variol F., please let me know who you do like, because you sound like a man of incredible discernment. BTW, I'd love to hear your thoughts on Anthony's Xanth trilogy (right. trilogy. to the fifth power, maybe. I think I know why Piers never became a mathmetician)
I am really not tremendously well-read. I am the sort of person who would rather go into a few authors in depth than browse many superficially, and I have a bit of a bias against new books. Old books (the kind that are still reprinted) have the great advantage of having survived. I mean, millions still read LOTR, but who remembers what was #1 on the Times bestseller list back in 1955? It's easier to avoid the trash, because all the trash from 50 or 100 years back was thrown away long ago.
At present, SRD is the only living epic-fantasy author whose work I really and thoroughly enjoy. George R.R. Martin is very interesting, but a lot of work because of those 30,000 simultaneous plotlines; and what with all the death, suffering, betrayal, and rather pornographic violence, I find it just too much of a downer in large doses. (And I'm the guy who cackled with glee at the destruction of the Unhomed, and thought the sun of pestilence was cool.) Tad Williams' stuff is intriguing, but the combination of his rather cautious prose style and downright pedestrian naming (at least in Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn) has always kept me from getting deeply into his work. Guy Gavriel Kay is a brilliant and challenging author, but I could never get past the first chapter of The Fionavar Tapestry. I mean, the wizard and the dwarf were OK, I can buy that, but the protagonists are something else again. I just cannot suspend my disbelief in such an obviously nonexistent and self-contradictory fantasy locale as the University of Toronto!
Lawrence Watt-Evans does some interesting stuff, but I find him uneven — he has sometimes put out books that I thought of as mere potboilers. I like his short stories very much. R.A. Lafferty wrote brilliantly funny short fiction as well — 'Been A Long, Long Time' is my personal favourite. Robert Silverberg's Majipoor books are reasonably cool. Poul Anderson's series loosely congealing round the character of Ogier the Dane is very good; Midsummer Tempest is a real treat. Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books were one of the principal jewels of my childhood. (I wonder where my copies have got to! Lost in the course of too many house-moves, I suspect.) I like and respect Orson Scott Card and Ursula K. LeGuin as prose artists and literary critics, but oddly enough I have never read any of their fiction beyond a few short stories. I'm sure I'm missing something good; but then, life is short and bookshops are expensive.
Generally speaking, my favourite English-language authors are Tolkien, Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, George Orwell, Mark Twain, and perhaps Fielding. Malory makes beautiful reading for short stretches, but it's easy to lose your way through the story. (Obviously Martin took some pointers from the Morte Darthur!)
I'm quite taken with Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll, and I've always had a soft spot for Robert A. Heinlein. (I consider Tunnel in the Sky his most perfect book, but I freely confess there are still several I haven't read. 'The Man who Travelled in Elephants' is the best story ever written in the style of Ray Bradbury, and it was written by Heinlein! The man had hidden depths.)
Mervyn Peake is an essential occupant of my mental library, but like most Peake fans I was bitterly disappointed by Titus Alone. (I'm one of the minority, by the way, who think the miniseries of Gormenghast was downright wonderful.) Douglas Adams was very amusing indeed before he got tired of writing — say, up until Life, The Universe, and Everything and The Meaning of Liff.
As you can tell, most of the fiction I really like has some fantastic element to it. Plain mimetic realism just bores me, I'm afraid — and I cheerfully concede that this is a fault in my own taste. I do rather like Jane Austen, and wish she had been freer with her stiletto wit. (The opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice, considered as a trenchant one-liner on human nature, beats any comparable passage in Swift.) It helps with Austen that the everyday civilized life she wrote about is so long gone and so completely effaced by change that it might as well be set in an alternate world. Fielding is very good, especially Tom Jones. I actually liked The Great Gatsby. I respect and admire Hemingway but find him a bit of a bore. Henry Miller had some very interesting techniques if you can just wade through all the pseudo-intellectual porn.
Speaking of long-gone civilizations, Colleen McCullough's Roman books are one of my chief guilty pleasures.
Lately I've been going through an enthusiasm for P.G. Wodehouse, though I haven't yet read anything but the Jeeves books. If this seems odd, bear in mind that Bertie Wooster's version of England is as much a fantasy world as King Arthur's Britain, and Jeeves as a wizard is quite up to the Oz standard if not the Gandalf. ('Pay no attention to that man in the butler's pantry!') Actually it's the sheer joyous felicity of language that carries me along through Wodehouse. The botched quotations, daft similes, and the sheer buzz and burble of Bertie's first-person narration simply make that series one of the leading pyrotechnic displays in the history of English prose style. And I laugh myself hoarse while reading it. The only American author of that era who was as consistently funny, I think, is Damon Runyon.
Re Anthony: I haven't read any Xanth, but I have read three or four of Piers Anthony's other books. I was too old when I came to them — 17 or 18 — and except for On A Pale Horse, which was fairly good, they all struck me as complete and utter tosh. And the effrontery of the man! The Color of Her Panties, indeed! 1-800-HI-PIERS! There are ways to be cheerfully self-promoting (see Robert Sawyer) or self-appreciative (see Isaac Asimov, another author I still have a fondness for); but Mr. Anthony does not seem to me to have the knack.
Oh, and by the way: If you haven't read Silverlock by John Myers Myers, you have missed the most concentrated delight in the literature of the English language. Those words are strong, but Jerry Pournelle, Jim Baen, and Poul Anderson all agree with me.
So there you are. Query to the Powers That Be: Is that enough on a positive note to keep this thread open?
(Of course I'm a man of incredible discernment. I am a Farseer, after all!)
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