association-list

I recently fin­ished read­ing Shad­ows of the Apt, Book 1 An Empire in Black and Gold (SoA1), on the rec­om­men­da­tion of sev­eral people. Sur­pris­ingly, I found that it was decent, although the prose was noth­ing spe­cial, verg­ing on bad (some of the dialog, like whoa). Still, it was mostly refresh­ing. There wasn’t a ton of vio­lence and there were even some family rela­tion­ships. The basic premise is noth­ing par­tic­u­larly spe­cial, although it’s enter­tain­ingly lit­er­al­ized. I wor­ried, at first that we’d see kinden piled atop kinden in an ever-​​escalating inven­tion fest, but it didn’t actu­ally pan out that way. On the whole, it could have been tighter, but as it was a first novel, and enter­tain­ing enough, I gave it a pass and moved more or less enthu­si­as­ti­cally on to the second.

Unfor­tu­nately, it was nearly unstartable. Rapidly, we get signs that there is going to be the kinden-​​escalation men­tioned ear­lier, we spend too much time with ninja badassery, and then to seal the deal there is some truly embar­rass­ing grade-​​school level concealed-​​information foreshadowing.

First, though, a deeply nerdy nit­pick of the series so far: Having your char­ac­ters wind a ‘clock­work engine’ is required to be less effi­cient than having them pow­er­ing their vehi­cles directly. I real­ize this is fan­tasy but it’s sci­ence so bad that it’s a major dis­trac­tion. What else are you get­ting incred­i­bly wrong?

OK, maybe another one. The major ninja-​​badass of the series uses some sort of mantis-​​claw blade gaunt­let thing which sounds really cool until you spend two sec­onds think­ing about it, then you real­ize that it’s a recipe for a broken wrist and has some dis­ad­van­tage com­pared to a more tra­di­tional sword of the same length.

All right, back to more seri­ous con­cerns and a gen­eral broad­en­ing of the topic.

Ini­tially we spend a lot of time in SoA2 with Tisa­mon and Tynisa watch­ing them fight each other and var­i­ous people and we spend little bit of time with a chilly (not really chill­ing) psy­chotic who has it in for the con­flicted baddy of the first book and seems to ninja every­one nearby to death. As far as I can tell these scenes add exactly noth­ing to the book, save the up the ninja quotient.

At some point, you have Too Many Ninjas. Epic fan­tasy series, this is your bane.

Glen Cook’s Black Com­pany books are arguably the model for all of the books under dis­cus­sion here. Inas­much as they were com­pelling, it was because they dealt pri­mar­ily with real people, albeit tough people in dire cir­cum­stances. If there were ninjas, they were rare and seldom called upon, only to resolve plot points of heav­ily fore­shad­owed near-​​impossibility. They were short and punchy and Cook is a ser­vice­able writer with a very clear con­cep­tion of what skills he does and doesn’t have.

The early Malazan books from Steven Erik­son were great fun. They had Cook-​​ian char­ac­ters that you could relate to as they went their grum­bling, competent-​​but-​​fallible way through this deca­dently over­built world. And Erik­son is a decent writer, so when you finally get to the point where the Ninjas come on screen, he just lets rip, and they tear shit up. It’s pretty great, the way that it comes together in those first few books. Unfor­tu­nately, we’ve only ever got a couple of people we can relate to, and we spend less and less time with them as we go on. More and more people become ninja badasses, which makes them harder to relate to, and ensures that their sto­ry­lines will be fol­lowed up on later, fur­ther bloat­ing a series of books that arrived already over­weight. Although at his best, Erik­son is a finer writer than Cook, he’s less clear on what he’s good at, and the bad stuff (the poetry, the mythopoeic origin/​gods-​​and-​​heroes sec­tions) seems to get more and more pro­tracted. Even­tu­ally you give up, if you’re me. The adjunct Crim­son Guard books fail from the first, because not only are they less well-​​structured and less well-​​written, every­one you meet from page one either dies promptly or is/​becomes a capital-​​N Ninja. It’s hard to share the author’s glee in their cre­ation, because there’s no hook (or rather, there’s the attempt at one, but you don’t get enough time with him because there’s so much other Neat Stuff the author just can’t help but share).

Joe Abercrombie’s First Law books work better, though I give them less weight since struc­turally, they’re not epic fan­tasy in the Cook mold. But while they trade heav­ily in Tolkien sub­ver­sion for struc­ture, they borrow lib­er­ally from the Cook inspired gritty fan­tasy oeuvre, which I think makes them rel­e­vant here. For the most part, Nin­jary is kept off-​​screen or invoked (in the case of Logen) at hor­rific cost to every­one nearby. The super­nat­ural in gen­eral is sparse here, and thus the author feels con­strained to limit his badasses to the merely human, or they’re used as ene­mies to sin­is­ter effect.

So, sug­ges­tions to future writ­ers of epic fan­tasy, be it gritty, dark, or light:

1. Ninjas: err on the side of too few! They may allow for cool scenes but, but they dis­tance your read­ers from the story that you’re trying to tell. The scenes that they allow are also too often hollow dis­plays of show­ing. Either they carry more weight than ‘X fought Y and was (slightly/greviously/un)hurt.’, or it’s just so much spe­cial effects wankery.
2. Ultra­vi­o­lence is near ter­mi­nally over­done! It’s OK to have char­ac­ters who have fam­i­lies and love people and care about things other than honor & skill. Writ­ing a little romance won’t kill you, either.
3. Don’t under­es­ti­mate the qual­ity of writ­ing in terms of making your books easier to read.
4. Shorten it up. I real­ize bloat is the tra­di­tion, but every­one will be better off if you can keep it down to 90-​​100k words or so. Take heart, it means you can sell 20 books instead of 5 – 10! But…
5. Pay atten­tion to the broader struc­ture of your books. You need mul­ti­ple entry points and books that could poten­tially stand alone, oth­er­wise you kind of dis­ap­pear up your own tailpipe when book one goes out of print.