"the Velvet Underground album of 1980s fantasy novels"

[jazzfish]

As of today The Dragon Waiting is back in print. It's got a lovely introduction by Scott Lynch, in which he draws the obvious-in-retrospect comparison above. (I think it was Brian Eno who said that only around a hundred people bought the first Velvet Underground album when it came out, but all of them went on to start their own band.)

As a reminder, rydra_wong has a better review of the book than I have ever been able to put together. Also skygiants has accurately and hilariously broken down the book's structure.

Also it turns out that one can get Josephine Tey ebooks for a buck apiece, which means that (once I get through The Black Count) I will be reading The Daughter Of Time and then rereading TDW for the nth time, just to see how the one plays off the other.

Comments

[sartorias]

I cherish my old yellowed paperback, but I will get the new one.

[jazzfish]

I have a hardback I dug up in a used bookstore somewhere, but I did buy the new one in ebook.

[malkingrey]

As John M. Ford plots go, The Dragon Waiting is positively transparent.

If the man had a flaw as a writer, it was a deep-seated fear of being obvious.

(In fact, the answer to a writer's question, "Am I being a bit too obvious here?", is almost always, "No," but good luck getting any of us to believe it.)

[jazzfish]

Mm... I'd say middle of the pack? The Trek books were relatively straightforward, and I found Scholars of Night comprehensible. (Fugue State makes sense to me but I adore that sort of structure anyway, Hot Time took me a second read, and I am still never sure I've fully gotten all the behind-the-curtain maneuvering in Weightless.)

I have, I think, absorbed "you are not being too obvious" after decades of running overly-complex-plotted roleplaying games and watching people fail to pick up on Just Barely Less Than Obvious Clues in real time. :)

[malkingrey]

I never could get behind all the stuff in Weightless either.

[magedragonfire]

Oh, so the opposite of Neal Stephenson.

[malkingrey]

My stumbling-block with Stephenson is that I'm never able to get attached to his characters for long enough to keep on reading.  I did finish and enjoy /Cryptonomicon/, but I think that had as much to do with reading it on an eight-hour plane trip from Huntsville, Alabama to Boston as it did to any special virtue in the book itself.  (The trip wasn't supposed to take that long, but airport delays happened.  As a book to read while confined to an airport for several hours, /Cryptonomicon/ worked just fine.)