[mocker]

there's a new book comin out from Subterranean with authors writing short stories set in Vance's dying earth called 'songs of the dying earth'.

Authors — stories in hand:

* Dan Simmons
* Robert Silverberg
* Kage Baker
* Terry Dowling
* Phyllis Eisenstein
* Glen Cook
* Elizabeth Hand
* Matt Hughes
* Tanith Lee
* Elizabeth Moon
* Mike Resnick
* Lucius Shepard
* Jeff Vandermeer
* Paula Volsky
* Liz Williams
* Walter Jon Williams
* Tad Williams
* John C. Wright

Authors — slated to contribute:

* Neil Gaiman
* George R. R. Martin
* Howard Waldrop

the fact that he influenced all of these authors says a lot

This post has been edited by mocker: 30 September 2008 - 12:42 AM

[lord of tragedy]

don't know if influencing tad williams is something i would celebrate. or robert silverberg. and my opinion of the hyperion cantos has already been posted .personally never read him but i can see what you mean. is george martin still alive?

[Use Of Weapons]

No slating Robert Silverberg! The Madripoor Chronicles are just fantastic, and getting even one book into either Masterworks series is an accomplishment. I believe he has two. _Lord Valentine's Castle_ is a great book, full of hugely influential ideas. And _The Book of Skulls_ is a great read -- the first SF road-trip, possibly. To have written both it and _Dying Inside_ in the same year is an astonishing acheivement. It's for the latter two that I reckon RS is on the list -- and deservedly so.

Phyllis Eisenstein: if only she had written more! I loved the Sorceror's Son universe.

[lord of tragedy]

didn't get majipoor. it tried too hard i thought. am i right in remebering it centered around him being lord valentine and not realising it? that plot sounds even worse when you type it.

This post has been edited by lord of tragedy: 30 September 2008 - 08:19 PM

[Crow Clan Baby]

A lot of it's personal taste, but it's good to see books you don't really hear too much about these days like Gateway, Cities In Flight and The Stars my Destination in there. I personally found the Foundation books deathly dull, but they are recognised as classics by a lot of folks, so that's fair. It's missing some Brian Aldiss though, and leaving The Broken Sword off the list is inexplicable and inexcusable - for shame!

[Use Of Weapons]

lord of tragedy, on Sep 30 2008, 09:16 PM, said:

didn't get majipoor. it tried too hard i thought. am i right in remebering it centered around him being lord valentine and not realising it? that plot sounds even worse when you type it.

No, completely wrong. He was the heir of the current Pontifex, ruler of all Majipoor, pretty much throughout the entire book. IIRC (it's been a while), there was some question as to who would succeed the old Pontifex, and there may have been some abduction->memory-loss->revelation plot shenanigans. So it's kind of what you're saying, I guess, a bit of 'revealed monarch' (to use Encyclopaedia of Fantasy terminology), but different from most fantasy in that the reader always knew who he was.

[lord of tragedy]

pontifix smontifix. it was shite. and i thought the whole gimmick was his amnesia. yawn. almost as bad as enders video game training. think i'll start a new thread. worst pieces of shite ever written. its more fun to be unpleasant.

[Vengeance]

While Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light was on the list I was very surprised not to See the Books of Amber. I would have thought that they would have been on.

I don't really have to many problems with the list. But it is all relevant to who influenced which ever author you happen to be reading at any given time. If you go back far enough a lot of authors of early SF were probably influenced by Shakespeare.

[lord of tragedy]

and shakespeare borrowed heavily from the bible and classical greece. i'd say homer is probably the father of fantasy. i've no doubt someone will correct me by pointing out gilgamesh or something earlier. never read lord of light. read something about light by someone called oliver johnson, theres hours of my life that i can never have back. what a waste. can never put it down once i start. except sparhawk.

[Use Of Weapons]

Haha, I remember seeing that Oliver Johnson book loads in bookshops -- kinda like the cover to MOI, large columns of soldiers converging on a temple/city in the distance, right?

[Myshkin]

mocker, on Sep 29 2008, 03:56 PM, said:

how can Anne McCaffrey and Terry Brooks be in there? thats just plain damn wrong, their influence on the genre was telling but imo not as significant as the influence made by many other books and other authors.

As for Brooks, he may not be a good writer, but his influence really can't be questioned. The Sword of Shannara was a terrible book, and a complete rip-off of LotR, but it's significance undeniable. The Sword of Shannara was the first fantasy novel ever to make the NYT bestseller list. Many fantasy fans only discovered LotR after being turned onto fantasy by The Sword of Shannara. Brooks' popularity and commercial success was a major contributor in the expansion of the fantasy genre, and the genre would not be the same today without the influence of Brooks. In fact, while The Sword of Shannara is indeed crap, I think it can be argued that its publication was more significant than LotR.

[polishgenius]

That's probably partly true, but I think it's far from a coincidence that a lot of these books (in fact pretty much every author thought of as a Tolkien ripoff) came out shortly after Star Wars did. Brooks just happened to be the first.

[Myshkin]

polishgenius, on Oct 4 2008, 05:03 PM, said:

That's probably partly true, but I think it's far from a coincidence that a lot of these books (in fact pretty much every author thought of as a Tolkien ripoff) came out shortly after Star Wars did. Brooks just happened to be the first.

Whether his influence was due to fortuitious timing or not has no bearing on the fact that he was influential.

[polishgenius]

What I'm really trying to say that the influence is as much if not more down to SW than Brooks. I think it'd have happened anyway. Taking a look at later authors like Eddings or Feist, they have at least as much in common, storywise, with SW as with Tolkien/Brooks (although there's similarities between those too, in fairness).

I'm not saying Brooks wasn't influential, because his being the first of that time did obviously impact later authors, but I don't think you can say he was more influential than Tolkien, and as I say, I think the wave that Brooks was first of would have happened without him.

[Myshkin]

polishgenius, on Oct 4 2008, 06:59 PM, said:

What I'm really trying to say that the influence is as much if not more down to SW than Brooks. I think it'd have happened anyway. Taking a look at later authors like Eddings or Feist, they have at least as much in common, storywise, with SW as with Tolkien/Brooks (although there's similarities between those too, in fairness).

I'm not saying Brooks wasn't influential, because his being the first of that time did obviously impact later authors, but I don't think you can say he was more influential than Tolkien, and as I say, I think the wave that Brooks was first of would have happened without him.

This is an old argument made many times before: does man make the event or do events make the man? I think my favorite example of this argument was carried out between Leo Tolstoy and Feodor Dostoevsky. Both using Napoleon as an example, Tolstoy argued that events make the man, and that had Napoleon never been born someone else would have taken his place and the world would have moved in the same direction. Dostoevsky, arguing that man makes the event, was convinced that Napoleon was, as we all are, a singular human being, and had he never been born no other would or could have done as he did, and the world would now be a much different place. So, did Brooks make the event, or did the event make Brooks? We could argue all day about it, but I don't think we'll come away with any clearer conclusion than did Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. In any event, I don't think it matters whether or not Brooks simply got there first. His commercial success paved the way for the future generation of fantasy, and therefor he was both significant and influential; not in how he impacted other authors, but in how he impacted the publishing practices for the genre.

[lord of tragedy]

yes all welll and good. genius' point is very relevant to brooks success. with starwars fantasy went mainstream. as a mainstream medium it would therefore be easier to appear on the new york times best seller list. the fact that he did appear on it was in no way due to his quality. the book was limp, as were all the others. turgid sub tolkien trash.

[lord of tragedy]

jitsukerr, on Oct 2 2008, 12:01 PM, said:

Haha, I remember seeing that Oliver Johnson book loads in bookshops -- kinda like the cover to MOI, large columns of soldiers converging on a temple/city in the distance, right?

thats the one. never judge a book and all that. it was terrible something about vampires or something and some kind of ex priest. there's even a sequel. seemingly he had written the first one years before he decided to try have it published. cunt. wish he'd never bothered. its my own fault i suppose for hanging round sleazy second hand bookshops. did anyone ever read camber the heretic? slightly worse than johson.

[Werthead]

I'm not sure about the Shannara/Star Wars comparison. The Sword of Shannara was published in March 1977 and shifted hundreds of thousands of copies before the original Star Wars came out in May of that year, so clearly there was an appetite for that fiction before Star Wars came along. Shannara itself followed in the Tolkien tradition, and starting in 1966 Lord of the Rings had been a massive-seller in the USA, so that appears to be by far the bigger and more notable influence.

This post has been edited by Werthead: 05 October 2008 - 03:17 PM

[Myshkin]

lord of tragedy, on Oct 5 2008, 01:45 AM, said:

yes all welll and good. genius' point is very relevant to brooks success. with starwars fantasy went mainstream. as a mainstream medium it would therefore be easier to appear on the new york times best seller list. the fact that he did appear on it was in no way due to his quality. the book was limp, as were all the others. turgid sub tolkien trash.

I never said it made the NYT list because it was good. In fact I believe I said the exact opposite, several times. But its quality has absolutely nothing to do with its significance. Let me restate the point I've been trying to make as regards Brooks: the significance of The Sword of Shannara is its commercial success, not its quality. Its importance is due to the way it influenced publishers, not writers. A books does not have to be good to be significant.

[lord of tragedy]

point taken myshkin. i hadn't thought of it like that. apologies.