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I finished the last Demon Prince book. Not bad, if lighter than I'd have expected. I also finished The Delicate Dependency, a very low key vampire novel. The premises are interesting, but I'm not sure the story necessarily follows logically from them. I've started Baker's The Anvil of the World. So far, it's delightful. While I think it's probably got a completely different plot from a book by a completely different author, reading the Baker is making me realize some of why I couldn't get past chapter one of the other book, even though ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mnemex read it and recommended it.
Part of it is a style issue. Baker's writing is light enough to seem effortless, and it drew me in. Part may be the actual plots. The Baker book starts off being "about" nothing more than a simple caravan run, while the other introduces an odd sort of Epic Quest. This isn't surprising, as the Baker was recommended by people at the panel on Fantasy of Manners at WorldCon this year. It makes sense that this would be a book where the author starts with a bunch of people going on a trip.
This may be part of what makes those books I consider fantasy of manners (regardless of what the current or accurate definitions may be) highly enjoyable. They tend to start grounded in character, where I don't need to ask, "Why is X person going on Y quest?" That's not fair to good quest books, though. True, the grounding is useful, and Tolkien knew all about that, and that's no small part of what makes Lord of the Rings work for me, and what sets it above all of the bad imitations.
Enjoyable characters help, too. "enjoyable" often means "likeable", but it can also mean "interesting". I think that may explain some of why Peter Watts' Starfish disappointed me. I understand why many people liked it, and I liked parts of it myself. But, I also had a few issues with it, and I think one of those is that I didn't really like or sympathize with any of the characters. I'm not sure how interesting any of them were to me.
mnemex read it and recommended it.Part of it is a style issue. Baker's writing is light enough to seem effortless, and it drew me in. Part may be the actual plots. The Baker book starts off being "about" nothing more than a simple caravan run, while the other introduces an odd sort of Epic Quest. This isn't surprising, as the Baker was recommended by people at the panel on Fantasy of Manners at WorldCon this year. It makes sense that this would be a book where the author starts with a bunch of people going on a trip.
This may be part of what makes those books I consider fantasy of manners (regardless of what the current or accurate definitions may be) highly enjoyable. They tend to start grounded in character, where I don't need to ask, "Why is X person going on Y quest?" That's not fair to good quest books, though. True, the grounding is useful, and Tolkien knew all about that, and that's no small part of what makes Lord of the Rings work for me, and what sets it above all of the bad imitations.
Enjoyable characters help, too. "enjoyable" often means "likeable", but it can also mean "interesting". I think that may explain some of why Peter Watts' Starfish disappointed me. I understand why many people liked it, and I liked parts of it myself. But, I also had a few issues with it, and I think one of those is that I didn't really like or sympathize with any of the characters. I'm not sure how interesting any of them were to me.
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I was disappointed by Watts's Starfish too. Granted that the characters are deliberately difficult to like, I was interested in their situation and their interplay. I just found the end of the book very flat and unbelievable.
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