# Breaking the Author/Reader Contract.



## nikolai (Aug 6, 2004)

This is inspired by a post made by takyris elsewhere. When you start reading a book, the author and the reader have a sort of contract. The author has to work within certain limits, which are set by the readers expectations. So the main character can't wake up to find everything's a dream, and so on. This is particularly the case in genre literature: detective fiction, fantasy, etc. 

So, what moves by authors have totally ruined your enjoyment of a book or series you otherwise liked?


----------



## Cthulhu's Librarian (Aug 6, 2004)

nikolai said:
			
		

> The author has to work within certain limits, which are set by the readers expectations.



 I have to disagree with you on this. If an author has to work within the constraints set up by readers, there would never be any innovative books written. I actually LIKE when an author makes me push the boundaries of my expectations. Sure, reading books that are comfortable and predictable can be enjoyable as well, but I'd much rather read something that makes me think outside the box. The author is the one leading the reader, not the other way around. When an author ends up writing only what their readers expect, the quality of the writing usually drops. You can often see this when an author continually comes back to older series that sold well, because he knows that new books in the series will sell as well. But the stories are often unoriginal, frequently written only to bring back a familiar character or place because the author & publisher know that it will sell. 

 I'm not just making things up here. I used to work as an assistant editor at HarperCollins Publishers in the science fiction division. We had several authors whose books were purchased only with the guarantee in their contracts that they would write another book set in XYZ series that they had already finished, because we knew that while the new book might not sell, a return to a familiar series would be a guaranteed money maker. 

 I am not by any means saying that there are not authors who can't return again and again to a series and continually surprise and delight me. the one that springs to mind right away is Terry Pratchett and the Discworld series. Each book, while set in the same world with the same revolving set of characters, is a new and unique story. He rarely treads the same ground, and thats why his fans are rabid about the books. Familiar, but at the same time unique in some major way. 





			
				nikolai said:
			
		

> So, what moves by authors have totally ruined your enjoyment of a book or series you otherwise liked?



  Orson Scott Card-Heartfire
 OSC took a series that had been exciting and original in the first 3 books, ok in the 4th book, and made it downright boring in the 5th book. I haven't bothered to pick up the 6th, and doubt that I ever will.


----------



## takyris (Aug 6, 2004)

nikolai said:
			
		

> This is inspired by a post made by takyris elsewhere.




Hey, I inspired something other than mild exasperation and a healthy fear of Pepsi!

[quote[ When you start reading a book, the author and the reader have a sort of contract. The author has to work within certain limits, which are set by the readers expectations.[/quote]

I'd add to that the idea that the author is free to break any of those that he can get away with.  The ultimate decision rests with the individual reader.  If it all turns out to be a dream, and most of the readers say, "Wow, he did that so skillfully, and it completely works in the context of this story," then that's fine.  



> So, what moves by authors have totally ruined your enjoyment of a book or series you otherwise liked?




- The ones I mentioned in the other thread, to start with -- Dan Brown's breaking of POV rules in order to hide information that we should have had based on whose viewpoint we were in, and Feist's "Oh, wait, I made all that stuff from the earlier book up," monologue when he brought Macros the Black back from the dead.

- Midichlorians.  Get your pseudo-hard-SF garbage out of my space fantasy.


----------



## Welverin (Aug 6, 2004)

takyris said:
			
		

> - Midichlorians.  Get your pseudo-hard-SF garbage out of my space fantasy.




I believe he did, note they weren't mentioned in Ep2 and I suspect we'll never hear of them again.


----------



## Mouseferatu (Aug 6, 2004)

> and Feist's "Oh, wait, I made all that stuff from the earlier book up," monologue when he brought Macros the Black back from the dead.




Oh God, don't remind me.

I'm still not 100% convinced that the world doesn't have two Raymond Feists. Or maybe he was replaced by a cloned twin doppleganger from the mirror universe. It's inconceivable to me that the same man who wrote the Riftwar Saga--perhaps a bit cliched and traditional, but still one of the better fantasy series from my youth--is the same man who produced the nigh-unreadable Serpentwar Saga.

I've actually enjoyed some of his other later stuff (like the Legacy of Krondor series, although I'm furious at him for moving on to something else before finishing it), so I know it's not that his talent deserted him. I don't know what the deal was with that.

Another book is _Villains by Necessity_. Can't think of the author off-hand. The premise is that all the evil in the world has been defeated except for a small group of vilains, who are responsible for bringing things back into balance. Leaving aside the fact that I've always hated that twee and artificial definition of "balance," the book doesn't deliver on its promise. The villains don't come across as evil, just arrogant, spoiled, and annoying. The author finds every possible excuse to keep them from doing evil things, probably so that the reader will continue to sympathize. (Which I didn't.) And the forces of "good" are pretty much jerks themselves, which throws the entire setup into question. So the author fails to deliver on the very premise of the book.

Bleah.


----------



## takyris (Aug 6, 2004)

Welverin said:
			
		

> I believe he did, note they weren't mentioned in Ep2 and I suspect we'll never hear of them again.




But that's not what I want.  "Not mentioned" doesn't satisfy me, because I know that it's still the default.  In "Empire Strikes Back", Master Yoda should help Luke gain confidence by saying, "There, there.  Readings I have taken.  Enough midichlorians you have the X-Wing to lift."

What I *want* is for Episode 3 to have Senator Palpatine *say*, "Ignorant fools!  You had no idea how powerful I was, because you measured the power of the Force in midichlorians.  They are only microorganisms attracted to the Force, not a measure of the Force itself.  By simple medical treatments I cleansed them from my system, so that none of you would ever know the extent of my dark power!"  Explain it and then give us a legitimate reason to put it in the closet and never look at it again.

And while we're on the subject of ruining the Star Wars universe...

*Kevin J. Anderson.*

This is probably a matter of taste.  I was so jazzed after the Zahn books came out -- the Force was handled well as a beautiful and mysterious thing.  And then Anderson comes in and gives us a headset that can measure the Force in people, as well as Luke throwing out inappropriate Yoda quotes and letting his Jedi students become Sith masters under his nose, all the while throwing out more and more powerful Force stuff that turned Star Wars into Dragonball Z.

One of my favorite comebacks is the Zahn two-book series that essentially serves as a response to Anderson.  Luke gets ready to mind-control some Imperials or rip their Tie-Fighter control systems apart from miles away, and he sees the ghost of the Emperor laughing at him.  And when he talks to Mara Jade about it, she says, "Duh!  Look at all the screwups you've had while using the Force in more and more physical ways.  You let your students turn into Sith masters!"  Zahn also retcons the entire section where Anderson ignores what Zahn had previously set up between Mara and Luke in order to have *Lando* and Mara hook up by having Mara inform Luke that it was just a big trick they were using to travel incognito.

*That* is how you redeem a universe.

(At least until the prequels came out.)


----------



## Berandor (Aug 6, 2004)

"Die rache des Samurai" (Revenge of the Samurai) from Jürgen Dallüge is such a book. It details the last contract of a killer. Not only is it written excrutiatingly bad, but the killer has NOTHING to do with Samurai, their code, not even ties to Japan, he does not take Revenge... nothing.

And to top it off, amazon didn't publish my bad review for it (0 stars), so that this book still has a 4-star rating with one review.


----------



## Umbran (Aug 6, 2004)

nikolai said:
			
		

> When you start reading a book, the author and the reader have a sort of contract. The author has to work within certain limits, which are set by the readers expectations.




Yes and no.

There is a sort fo contract, but it is only partially binding.  There are some expectatiosn and conventiosn the author is expected to fulfill - except when he has a really good reason to break them.  Some of the greatest prose, poetry, music, theatre, TV, etc. was created by the selected breaking of the rules.  

The question isn't whether the author broke the rules and defied expectations.  The question is if they did it well.


----------



## Harp (Aug 6, 2004)

nikolai said:
			
		

> So, what moves by authors have totally ruined your enjoyment of a book or series you otherwise liked?



Well, I'd only modify the question slightly with "otherwise _would have_ liked".  But the language you used in setting up your question is nearly the exact language I've used to describe why I couldn't make it through the first book of Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant books, despite the series' accolades.  I realize that the author was challenging the reader with the...well, let's just call it "unpleasantness" of the protagonist, but I just wasn't up to the challenge.  I respect the effort, but Donaldson just took it out of my comfort zone.


----------



## Wombat (Aug 6, 2004)

I expunge many such books (and, more often, movies) from my mind.

OTOH, I feel the need to tell of a book that _succesfully _ drops the wall between author and reader -- If On A Winter's Night A Traveler...  by Italo Calvino.  The book is a series of "first chapters" from a variety of styles of books, with the author occasionally breaking in with commentary about how you might or might not be enjoying the books -- perhaps this part confuses you, do you have the right mood music on?, what happened to that interesting character back a couple of chapters ago?, I have assumed up until know that you are a male reader, but if you are male, you might have a different appreciation, etc.

Then again, I like Calvino mainly _for _ his playfulness -- his writings by themselves might still convince me to learn Italian!


----------



## capn_frank (Aug 7, 2004)

I'd like to nominate the "Chung Kuo" series of books by David Wingrove.
The Chung Kuo series consists of eight novels about a future in which the Chinese have dominated the world, rewritten history, and built enormous indoor continent-spanning cities three hundred levels in height. 
I loved the first 4 books and read them several times.
I finally got books 5-7 and liked them too.

Book 8 was published in England in hardcover and had one very limited print run in paperback in the US, but has been out of print since 1999.

I found a copy of book 8 in a used bookstore in London on a trip in 2002 and read it on the plane ride home.

Then I had to read it again to confirm my first impression.

It totally pulled the rug out from under everything that occured in the first 7 books. It seemed to be from a totally different series altogether, with the characters acting differently and an ending that was totally unsatisfying.

It was like a middle schooler's paper that ended with the words "And then he woke up."

I read recently that it was going to be 9 books but the publisher made him finish it in 8 but it still leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

I would recommend the first 7 to anybody though, it's well worth your time and could very easily be translated into a d20 Future campaign.

Frank


----------



## takyris (Aug 7, 2004)

How about Weiss and Hickman's third *Darksword* book?  When I first read it, I felt utterly dissatisfied with the ending.  I might feel differently now -- I read it in the 8th grade and, well, I'm nearing 30 these days, so maybe the destroy-it-all antihero aspect would appeal to me...

Still, at the time, bugged me batty.


----------



## Severion (Aug 8, 2004)

A few examples of this come to mind.  The first was the Hickman & Wies Death Gate series; the labrynth was described as a truely awful place where only the absolute most powerful sorcerers had even a chance of surviving and even at that it took several generations to get to the exit, come to find out it was fairly benign and one flying boat could navigate it at will.

Another was "The Wizards First Rule" (forget the author).  The main charecter spends the better part of the book lost in a strange land cut off from his homeland for millenia. His friends from back home never seem to have much trouble finding him.

The last was the re-release of the Elric Saga by WW where a major charecter (Moonglum) was written out. that was just wrong


----------



## ShadowX (Aug 8, 2004)

The Death Gate Cycle has a horrid ending, but that seems par for the course with Weis and Hickman.

Now about Thomas Covenant, I have heard a few people say they could not read past the rape scene and I never understood why.  Maybe you can help me understand.


----------



## mmu1 (Aug 8, 2004)

ShadowX said:
			
		

> Now about Thomas Covenant, I have heard a few people say they could not read past the rape scene and I never understood why.  Maybe you can help me understand.




I've tried reading it a while ago, but as I remember it, the beginning of the book is mostly about a lot of self-pity and bitterness, which culminates in a rape, followed by more self-pity and self-loathing... Why is it surprising that people don't want to read about a bitter, angry, lonely rapist?


----------



## mhacdebhandia (Aug 8, 2004)

I don't necessarily agree with the premise that a contract exists between the author and their readers - however, it takes a very talented author to pull a bait-and-switch of any kind off effectively and pleasingly.

Robert Charles Wilson is not that author; his *Darwinia* pulls off the worst bait-and-switch I have ever had the misfortune of reading. It's a shame, because I kinda liked the story I was reading.


----------



## Darrin Drader (Aug 8, 2004)

takyris said:
			
		

> *Kevin J. Anderson.*



I don't care how good your shields are, NO SHIP SHOULD EVER BE ABLE TO FLY THROUGH THE MIDDLE OF A STAR AND NOT BE DESTROYED.

EVER.


----------



## Mouseferatu (Aug 8, 2004)

ShadowX said:
			
		

> Now about Thomas Covenant, I have heard a few people say they could not read past the rape scene and I never understood why.  Maybe you can help me understand.




I can think of very few things I consider more despicable, horrific, and vile than rape. Nobody capable of commiting rape has any business as a "hero." Ever.

Any book that asks me to sympathize with a rapist gets put down, quick.

The fact that I found it relatively boring and uninteresting even before that point probably didn't help, either. But the rape scene guaranteed that I wasn't about to give it another chance.


----------



## James Heard (Aug 8, 2004)

I think that Card's Ender universe basically got bazooka'd by Card right when he decided to not leave well enough alone and write a second book. The first book was perfect. The rest? When they weren't putting me to sleep they mostly made me angry at Card for writing them in the first place and ruining the perfection of the original book.

And while I'm at it, even though he had nothing to do with it I hate whatever unhappy accident allowed the studios to get a hold of Starship Troopers and put someone who hadn't read the book or understood it to push out that garbage. At least with Star Wars I was pretty prepared for it to be mediocre, with Starship Troopers it was like hoping beyond hope that I was wrong - and then not being wrong but actually underestimating how low they could go.

I also liked the Covenant series though, though I thought the second series wasn't quite the same because the main character had suddenly failed to be quite the self-interested evil villain that he was in the first series.


----------



## Viking Bastard (Aug 8, 2004)

takyris said:
			
		

> *Kevin J. Anderson.*



 Thank. You.

 I just can't stand KJA. I can't stand his work and it's completely beyond
 me why he keeps gettin' such high-profile work. He's terrible!


----------



## LostSoul (Aug 8, 2004)

mmu1 said:
			
		

> Why is it surprising that people don't want to read about a bitter, angry, lonely rapist?




I enjoyed reading American Psycho...


----------



## nikolai (Aug 8, 2004)

ShadowX said:
			
		

> Now about Thomas Covenant, I have heard a few people say they could not read past the rape scene and I never understood why.  Maybe you can help me understand.




I've never been able to get into the Covenant books. Too be honest it isn't so much the rape (not that that helps), but the hoaky "pulled from your mundane life into another world" cliche. That and the heaping up of misfortunes on the hero. It just seems trite. For all I know the middle and end of the series may be brilliant, but the begining just rings so many alarm bells I've never been able to get past it.


----------



## Umbran (Aug 8, 2004)

James Heard said:
			
		

> I think that Card's Ender universe basically got bazooka'd by Card right when he decided to not leave well enough alone and write a second book.




The thing is, the first book is the second book, in a sense.

Card very much wanted to write _Speaker for the Dead_.  But to make it work, he had to develop Ender's past.  He started with a short story, and it just grew too large to be anything but a separate book, which became _Ender's Game_.  

As for Covenant - I can certainly see why many people end up stopping at the rape scene.  Most folks like their main characters (be they hero or villain) to be at least somewhat sympathetic.  Many simply can't have sympathy for Covenant after that.  In theory, he's supposed to think he's hallucinating, and he's perhaps half-mad from having a sense of touch again.  But he comes across as just a bit too lucid, and the crime just too nasty, for people to forgive him and be able to sympathize.  It was a case where Donaldson simply overplayed his hand.


----------



## Janx (Aug 8, 2004)

There's no such thing as an author/reader contract.  Maybe an author/publisher contract.... 

It's all survival of the fittest.  If the author writes a crappy book, sales will flop and the author will be forgotten.  Wait 50 years and see which books (like Tolkien) remain as "classics" and which are forgotten.

Janx


----------



## Fast Learner (Aug 8, 2004)

Umbran said:
			
		

> As for Covenant - I can certainly see why many people end up stopping at the rape scene.  Most folks like their main characters (be they hero or villain) to be at least somewhat sympathetic.  Many simply can't have sympathy for Covenant after that.



My lack of sympathy stemmed from his _incessant whining_. Even after he's all healed and super-powered and all that, it's still whine-whine-whine.

It's particularly frustrating because I really like the world of the books and a lot of the characters. Just not the protagonist.


----------



## Umbran (Aug 8, 2004)

Fast Learner said:
			
		

> My lack of sympathy stemmed from his _incessant whining_. Even after he's all healed and super-powered and all that, it's still whine-whine-whine.




I can see that, but for me the whining seems reasonable.  This guy has had to build his life around a particular structure of behavior, lest he _literally_ go to pieces.  The amount of discipline required borders upon what we'd call madness.  So, when faced with a situation that challenges that, he doesn't deal in the most sane of ways.


----------



## Templetroll (Aug 8, 2004)

takyris said:
			
		

> - Midichlorians.  Get your pseudo-hard-SF garbage out of my space fantasy.




YES!  If it hadn't been for Natalie Portman I would have left the theater.  I actually hated the midichlorian garbage more than JJB!


----------



## Templetroll (Aug 9, 2004)

nikolai said:
			
		

> I've never been able to get into the Covenant books. Too be honest it isn't so much the rape (not that that helps), but the hoaky "pulled from your mundane life into another world" cliche. That and the heaping up of misfortunes on the hero. It just seems trite. For all I know the middle and end of the series may be brilliant, but the begining just rings so many alarm bells I've never been able to get past it.




I read the first trilogy, loved the world, hated Covenant enough to not want to ever read about him again.  He makes Elric a fun guy to hang around with.


----------



## Desdichado (Aug 9, 2004)

Umbran said:
			
		

> As for Covenant - I can certainly see why many people end up stopping at the rape scene.



I stuck through the first rape scene.  The second one, though, y'know with the daughter he had from the first rape scene?  That's when I decided I'd had _way_ too much of that.


----------



## barsoomcore (Aug 9, 2004)

There is a contract, whether you like it or not. The way a book begins sets up expectations in the reader's mind -- THAT'S the contract. A beginning is a promise. It says, "Here's what kind of story I'm going to tell you."

Nothing says that by subverting that expectation, however, that a writer won't be successful. You can either subvert or fulfill the expectation -- or fail to do either. There are no other options.

So this isn't really the same as "The first book was great but the second sucked" kind of complaints. This is more along the lines of "When it started I thought it was going to be X, but it turned out to be Y for no reason at all. Bummer."

I wouldn't say, for example, that Donaldson fails the contract. What gets set up for you at the start is pretty much what you get. You may not like that, that's fine, but it isn't the same sort of failure as a "contract violation".


----------



## Khynal (Aug 9, 2004)

takyris said:
			
		

> And while we're on the subject of ruining the Star Wars universe...
> 
> *Kevin J. Anderson.*




*cheers*    The man mangles anything he touches. I read a book he wrote under a pseudonym, couldn't believe how bad it was. When I read the author's blurb and saw the name was a pseudonym for him and someone else, it all made nightmarish sense.


----------



## Barendd Nobeard (Aug 9, 2004)

Harp said:
			
		

> Well, I'd only modify the question slightly with "otherwise _would have_ liked".  But the language you used in setting up your question is nearly the exact language I've used to describe why I couldn't make it through the first book of Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant books, despite the series' accolades.  I realize that the author was challenging the reader with the...well, let's just call it "unpleasantness" of the protagonist, but I just wasn't up to the challenge.  I respect the effort, but Donaldson just took it out of my comfort zone.



 Omigosh--ditto.  I read the first 250 pages and could not finish the book.  If I read 50 pages or more, I finish the book.  This was the one exception.

And it had no to do with the "unpleasantness" of the main character (at least, not consciously).  I mean, I don't even remember the rape.  I just remember being bored to tears.


----------



## Dark Psion (Aug 9, 2004)

Well, as I am re-reading the Dark Sun "Tribe of One" books, I would point out the "Fourth" book in this trilogy , the Broken Blade, as an excellent example of how to truly piss off a reader.

Let's kill off the characters we learned to love in the three previous books, completly change the hero into someone else and ignore all that came before.

I can't belive it was written by the same author as the prevous three, Simon Hawke.


----------



## takyris (Aug 9, 2004)

barsoomcore said:
			
		

> There is a contract, whether you like it or not. The way a book begins sets up expectations in the reader's mind -- THAT'S the contract. A beginning is a promise. It says, "Here's what kind of story I'm going to tell you."




Exactly.  That's a great way of putting it.  I don't really enjoy romance novels as a general rule -- my wife does, and I don't intellectually think that a good romance novel is in any way worse than a good fantasy or mystery novel -- but it's not what I choose to read.  So when a story starts off as a fantasy novel, talking about a magical kingdom and spells and such, and then turns into a magnanimously cheesy romance novel with a few fantasy trappings, that breaks the contract.  (And this is coming from someone who tries to write stuff that crosses genres -- I try to make something work in *both* genres, not start in one and then change into another halfway through teh book.  I don't always succeed, either.)

On the Feist-irk, Macros' speech (and subsequent revision thereof) broke the Mentor's Story trope -- if an ancient and mysterious figure who has taken on a mentorshop role for the heroes finally tells his life story, and it's longer than a page or two, you should be able to trust that.

Anderson, I think, breaks the contract by changing the rules and tropes the other authors (Lucas included) established.  He tosses in a few flavor-bits that show he's watched the movies, but nothing that shows any of the sense of wonder of Lucas or even Zahn (who often made the Force a bit more rational and reasonable, but who nevertheless kept it deliberately mysterious in a few areas).

In the Spelljammer series -- the one with, erm, Teldin Moore? -- I felt that the contract got broken in enough small ways over the course of the books that I ended up giving up.  I think I got through book three or four -- the one where some elves turned into monsters because of gems in their heads or something.  All I really remember is looking at the author's section and realizing that the books had been written by different people, and they apparently didn't want to play nice together.  The hero's friends at the end of one book would have simply decided to leave at the beginning of the next book, and I think I recall powers that worked in the last book would mysteriously fail in the next book.  It felt disjointed -- possibly not a major break in any way, but enough tiny breaks that it never established a consistent feel or any consistent characters except for the protagonist...


----------



## kerakus (Aug 9, 2004)

*Dragonlance and breaking the contract...*

I think a series of books holds to the same contract principle as a single book.  The first few books, you learn to expect certain things.  Again, breaking the contract in a good way that takes the series in an interesting new direction can work, but sometimes it just all goes wrong.

Dragonlance, for example.  Chronicles and Legends got me into the fantasy genre and D&D.  They form the cornerstone of my fantasy mindset the way Tolkien does for most people.  But I never got a chance to read Dragons of Summer Flame until a couple years ago....and it is one of those books I wish I had never read.  It seems, to me, that Weis Hickman wrote the book with the specific intent of killing the setting.  And the book itself breaks the expectation contract by setting up a potentially interesting epic battle with Chaos in the beginning...and then ruins it completely with cheesy deaths for heroes from the original series, letting evil overrun the world and allowing the main bad guy to get taken down by dumb luck and a kender.  It is my belief that the book was written because Weis and Hickman wanted to ruin their world for TSR.  I have never read anything Dragonlance published after Dragons of Summer of Flame, nor do I intend to.

Q


----------



## Cthulhudrew (Aug 9, 2004)

Severion said:
			
		

> The last was the re-release of the Elric Saga by WW where a major charecter (Moonglum) was written out. that was just wrong




Just out of curiosity, this is the second time I've heard of this happening recently, but I don't know anything more. How did they write out Moonglum, and was this a decision by Moorcock?


----------



## Cthulhu's Librarian (Aug 9, 2004)

Cthulhudrew said:
			
		

> Just out of curiosity, this is the second time I've heard of this happening recently, but I don't know anything more. How did they write out Moonglum, and was this a decision by Moorcock?



 Moorcock made the decision. He has a habit of tweaking his books when they are rereleased, and for this release, he wrote new sections connecting the novels, changed the order of a few things, and rewrote a few things. Sort of like George Lucas. 

 If you look at the different editions of almost any of Moorcocks books, especially between the US & UK editions, there are small changes all over the place. This time, he made a few bigger changes, probably for the worse.


----------



## jasper (Aug 9, 2004)

Cthulhu's Librarian said:
			
		

> ... But the stories are often unoriginal, frequently written only to bring back a familiar character or place because the author & publisher know that it will sell.
> 
> I'm not just making things up here. I used to work as an assistant editor at HarperCollins Publishers in the science fiction division. We had several authors whose books were purchased only with the guarantee in their contracts that they would write another book set in XYZ series that they had already finished, because we knew that while the new book might not sell, a return to a familiar series would be a guaranteed money maker.
> ....



Jasper grabs his long handle pewter spoon and whacks Cthulhu's Librarian. over the head.
 Bad bad bad boy. 
So you are part of reason for so many car payment books. As in author had to make a car payment so he dash out a story for a series which sucks.


----------



## Umbran (Aug 9, 2004)

kerakus said:
			
		

> But I never got a chance to read Dragons of Summer Flame until a couple years ago....and it is one of those books I wish I had never read.  It seems, to me, that Weis Hickman wrote the book with the specific intent of killing the setting.
> ...
> It is my belief that the book was written because Weis and Hickman wanted to ruin their world for TSR.




Um, quite the opposite, I expect.

Dragons of Summer Flame was published in 1996.  That's the same year that TSR converted Dragonlance over to the SAGA rules system.  Seems to me the novel was designed to facilitate the rules change, rather than to kill the setting.

Mind you, as far as I've heard, changing Dragonlance over to SAGA was a bad idea, but that's a separate issue.  It looks like Weis and Hickman were doing pretty much what TSR wanted them to do.


----------



## Cthulhu's Librarian (Aug 9, 2004)

jasper said:
			
		

> Jasper grabs his long handle pewter spoon and whacks Cthulhu's Librarian. over the head.
> Bad bad bad boy.
> So you are part of reason for so many car payment books. As in author had to make a car payment so he dash out a story for a series which sucks.



 Hey! Stop it! That hurts! 

 I was just trying to make a living, I didn't negotiate the damn contracts! I was an Assistant Editor, not one of the big guys. 
 (But I often got requests from authors to rush their signing payments through so they could make their mortgage payments...)


----------



## nikolai (Aug 9, 2004)

Severion said:
			
		

> The last was the re-release of the Elric Saga by WW where a major charecter (Moonglum) was written out. that was just wrong




How on earth did he manage to write out Moonglum? He's an absolutely vital part of many of the stories!

For those of you who have called me out on the Author/Reader contract. Yes, I concede the point. I do think there is something about the author destroying reader expectations, or runing a good book into the ground, or just doing something stupid. But I didn't verbalise it too well.


----------



## Gomez (Aug 9, 2004)

Joshua Dyal said:
			
		

> I stuck through the first rape scene.  The second one, though, y'know with the daughter he had from the first rape scene?  That's when I decided I'd had _way_ too much of that.




 It's been a long time since I read the books. But didn't the daughter throw herself at him and he said no way?

As for a author breaking a contract, I think Robert Jordan broke his contract by not giving us a ending to the _Wheel of Time_ series. To run a great series of books to the ground like he is doing is very very very sad!


----------



## buzzard (Aug 9, 2004)

nikolai said:
			
		

> So, what moves by authors have totally ruined your enjoyment of a book or series you otherwise liked?




Julian May really ticked me off in the book Magnificat when she took the Metapsychic rebellion described in galaxy shaking terms in her Pliestocene Exile series, and turned it into a tempest in a teapot. 
It was pathetic. 
After reading The Nonborn King and The Adversary, you had the feeling the the rebels led by Marc Remillard commanded massive fleets and engaged in huge battles. Nope. Not really. So sorry. 

I still re-read the Pliestocene books periodically, but the follow-up series (which are rather a prequel) sit and gather dust. 

buzzard


----------



## Harp (Aug 9, 2004)

barsoomcore said:
			
		

> I wouldn't say, for example, that Donaldson fails the contract. What gets set up for you at the start is pretty much what you get. You may not like that, that's fine, but it isn't the same sort of failure as a "contract violation".




I would agree with this.  My expectations were not set by anything the author did early in the book, but rather reviews and opinions of other readers.  So, while Donaldson broke no unwritten contract (real or perceived), he took what I thought was a rather big risk with the audience and, in my case, lost a reader.  I have to think he understood the significance of the risk going into it, and I really have to respect him on that level.  Not enough to finish the book, however, let alone buy the others in the series.


----------



## Desdichado (Aug 9, 2004)

Gomez said:
			
		

> It's been a long time since I read the books. But didn't the daughter throw herself at him and he said no way?



I dunno; it's been a long time since I read them too.  I do remember fairly clearly, though, that when they finally do "make it" it's because he rapes her.


			
				Gomez said:
			
		

> As for a author breaking a contract, I think Robert Jordan broke his contract by not giving us a ending to the _Wheel of Time_ series. To run a great series of books to the ground like he is doing is very very very sad!



Haha!  Yeah, I agree with that one.


----------



## Storm Raven (Aug 9, 2004)

Joshua Dyal said:
			
		

> I dunno; it's been a long time since I read them too.  I do remember fairly clearly, though, that when they finally do "make it" it's because he rapes her.




Then you must have read a different version of _The Illearth War_ than the one that was published, because in the version published, Covenant never "makes it" with his daughter Elena.

I still don't get the fact that people can't read a story in which the protagonist does something horrible at some point in the story. There are dozens of stories that revolve around this sort of plot point, many good, many bad, some indifferent. Whether the protagonist does something terrible isn't really a marker of quality or not.


----------



## Harp (Aug 9, 2004)

Storm Raven said:
			
		

> I still don't get the fact that people can't read a story in which the protagonist does something horrible at some point in the story. There are dozens of stories that revolve around this sort of plot point, many good, many bad, some indifferent. Whether the protagonist does something terrible isn't really a marker of quality or not.




Well, I suppose I'd have to say that everybody has a different threshold for "something horrible".  Depending on the horrible thing (killing an unarmed opponent, kicking puppies, not paying taxes, etc.), I may be able to work my way past it and enjoy the story.  Rape, however, is a deal-killer for me; I can't watch it in movies, I can't read about it in books.  And that isn't necessarily an indictment of the quality of the story or the author's ability.  It's just a subject matter that I can't stomach for entertainment purposes.


----------



## billd91 (Aug 9, 2004)

Storm Raven said:
			
		

> I still don't get the fact that people can't read a story in which the protagonist does something horrible at some point in the story. There are dozens of stories that revolve around this sort of plot point, many good, many bad, some indifferent. Whether the protagonist does something terrible isn't really a marker of quality or not.




For me, it wasn't that the protagonist did something vile. It was that he was so Fing annoying that I couldn't get past the first book. The world, while it had a few interesting points, was nowhere near good enough for me to overcome completely disliking the main character. And life's too short to read irritating fiction for fun.

For what it's worth, I don't think the writer has a contract with the reader at all beyond "Here's my story and I hope you find it entertaining enough to have been worth the money you shelled out for it." As far as I'm concerned, that's it. Even if it's part of someone else's original continuity, I don't think major changes or shifts are a problem if they work. Midichlorians didn't really work too well. They kind of broke the tone of the series too much without adding enough value or taking off with a cool new direction. 
If an author takes the plunge with both feet and swims well, then I'll play along.


----------



## Cthulhudrew (Aug 9, 2004)

nikolai said:
			
		

> How on earth did he manage to write out Moonglum? He's an absolutely vital part of many of the stories!




That's what I'm wondering, myself. Did they replace him with Rackhir or something? (Not that that would really work, either- Moonglum's optimism is a necessary counterpoint to Elric's pessimism, and Rackhir wasn't all that pleasant.)

You'd have to rewrite a *lot* of the stories to get rid of Moonglum, and I really cannot fathom why MM would do such a thing. He's used Moony in Elric stories as recently as the comic series Multiverse, so what would possess him to write him out.


----------



## Spatula (Aug 10, 2004)

Joshua Dyal said:
			
		

> I dunno; it's been a long time since I read them too.  I do remember fairly clearly, though, that when they finally do "make it" it's because he rapes her.



I do believe you are 100% wrong about this.  It's been a long time since I've read the books but my recollection matches Gomez's and Storm Raven's.  Elena throws herself at Covenant and he says, not a chance.  The two characters never "make it."


----------



## Michael Tree (Aug 10, 2004)

It's not a book, but "Connor McCloud of the Clan McCloud of the Planet Zeist" is the pinnacle of filmmaking breaking the contract IMO.


----------



## Hypersmurf (Aug 10, 2004)

takyris said:
			
		

> *That* is how you redeem a universe.




Looo-ove Zahn.

Loved him since long before he touched Star Wars, too.

_The Blackcollar_ is still my favourite book.



			
				Michael Tree said:
			
		

> It's not a book, but "Connor McCloud of the Clan McCloud of the Planet Zeist" is the pinnacle of filmmaking breaking the contract IMO.




I have no idea what you're on about.

And neither does anyone else, _if they know what's good for them_.

-Hyp.


----------



## Cthulhudrew (Aug 10, 2004)

Hypersmurf said:
			
		

> I have no idea what you're on about.
> 
> And neither does anyone else, _if they know what's good for them_.




Speaking of Highlander, did anyone else here ever wonder if the Queen of Hearts (from Alice in Wonderland) was a Highlander?


----------



## cignus_pfaccari (Aug 10, 2004)

Gomez said:
			
		

> As for a author breaking a contract, I think Robert Jordan broke his contract by not giving us a ending to the _Wheel of Time_ series. To run a great series of books to the ground like he is doing is very very very sad!




(tugs on braid)

Men!

(sniff)

Seriously...he's fixing to go off my hardcover list.  In fact, he may already be off it, since I'm not touching _A New (and Extended) Spring_ with a 10-foot pole.

Brad


----------



## Viking Bastard (Aug 10, 2004)

Cthulhudrew said:
			
		

> Speaking of Highlander, did anyone else here ever wonder if the Queen of Hearts (from Alice in Wonderland) was a Highlander?



 Why?

  Can't say I have.


----------



## mmu1 (Aug 10, 2004)

Viking Bastard said:
			
		

> Why?
> 
> Can't say I have.




"Off with his head!"


----------



## Villano (Aug 10, 2004)

How can a writer break his "contract" with the reader?  Spend the entire book setting up a conflict and then have it be solved by someone other than the hero.  

I won a lot of all 6 of the Red Sonja book series on eBay.  I've read the first two and both do that.  I'll eventually try to read the others, but, man, the author really betrayed my trust.  

In the first book, an ancient wizard is looking for a magic ring.  He curses an underling, "Duke Peledies" I believe his name was, with a deformity for failing him.  The ring is also being sought by clerics of an evil god.  Naturally, Sonja finds the ring.  

Now, Sonja spends the entire book protecting the ring from the clerics, the wizard's monsters, and the Duke, whom she doesn't trust.  Also, Sonja discovers that the ring protects her from the wizard's magic.  

The climax seems obvious, doesn't it?  Sonja will use the ring to stop the wizard, right?  Wrong!  Amazingly enough, the author chooses instead to 



Spoiler



have Sonja's followers give up on her and tell her to just give the ring to the Duke.  He disappears and, shortly therafter, Sonja ends up fighting the clerics.  

In the middle of the battle, they announce that they sense that the wizard is dead.  That's right, a supporting character kills the villain..."offscreen" no less!   

But wait, it gets worse!  She forms a truce with the clerics and they go to the wizard's castle.  They find the wizard and the Duke dead.  They killed each other.  Suddenly, the Duke's body rises up and tries to kill them!  Oh no, he's possessed by the wizard!  

At this point, you'd expect Sonja to stop the zombie.  Nope.  The whining girlfriend of a supporting character stabs him in the back, killing him forever.

Finally, the clerics seal up the wizard's spirit and Sonja gives them the ring and they leave.

So, let's review.  She doesn't kill the wizard (in fact, we never even see his death), and she gives the ring to 2 of the 3 parties she's supposed to keep it away from.  And let's not forget that the clerics are evil!

Plus, the zombie Duke is killed not just by a supporting character, but a supporting character's girlfriend!  How much worse can you get?

The best way to sum up this story is to ask you to imagine playing D&D.  After spending all your time fighting the minions and gathering clues, you make it to the wizard's castle...only to discover another party of adventurers there.  They killed the wizard already and took his treasure.  The end.

You would never speak to your DM again.


  :\ 

Even if you skipped the above spoilers, don't read the book.  Trust me.   

In the second one, Sonja is framed for a murder and takes shelter in a city which is conducting human sacrifices to some sort of alien spirits (it's kind of Lovecraftian).  She ends up being pursued there by the real killer and his army.

However, halfway through the book, Sonja 



Spoiler



has to hide from her enemies in a wizard's cave, where she stays for the remainder of the story.  

The wizard (with no help from Sonja) drives back the army when it attacks the cave, the spirits destroy the city, and the spirits are driven back by a temple virgin who has some sort of magical power.

So, about halfway through the book, Sonja does nothing but hide in a cave.

On top of that, neither the wizard or girl are that good of people.  The wizard wants the spirits to destroy the city, and the girl uses them to do just that.

Sonja doesn't clear her name or protect the city or drive off the spirits.  What kind of hero is she supposed to be?  

As you can see, Sonja is nowhere near the locations of the climaxes in either story.



And that's how you betray your contract with your readers.

No wonder there were only six books.  Who the hell wants to read a series about a heroine who doesn't matter?


----------



## Viking Bastard (Aug 10, 2004)

mmu1 said:
			
		

> "Off with his head!"



 Hyuck hyuck hyuck.


----------



## Black Omega (Aug 10, 2004)

The rape from Covenant is icing on the cake for not liking a book where the protogonist is a unlikable, unsympathetic, uninteresting bastard.  Great world, unreadable hero.

The Chung Kuo series lost me far before book eight.  When he pulled the clone switcharoo when a main badguy seemed to die, that really annoyed me.  Add in a too perfect villain who is so far ahead of the heros it's not even a race.  Too many young kids who are far far superior to their elders in all things. It took 4-5 books but the mounting irritations simply drove me away.


----------



## Jeremy Ackerman-Yost (Aug 10, 2004)

Storm Raven said:
			
		

> I still don't get the fact that people can't read a story in which the protagonist does something horrible at some point in the story. There are dozens of stories that revolve around this sort of plot point, many good, many bad, some indifferent. Whether the protagonist does something terrible isn't really a marker of quality or not.



As others have said, it's more that the character was so completely unsympathetic.  If a hero breaks down and does something dreadful in the heat of the moment, you can forgive it or look past it if necessary, particularly if the hero is cognizant of how awful it was.  Heck, there are entire books based on that kind of angst.  Not my favorite fiction, but its out there.

If, on the other hand, a dreadful person of a protagonist does something dreadful, well, I can see dreadful people doing dreadful things by turning on the news or walking down the street.  No need to invest my leisure time in more of it.  I like my fantasy fiction to provide me some heroes fighting against evil.  It's something increasingly unique to the genre 

Personally, I've never been a big one for antiheroes in general.  Can't stand Elric.  Took me a while to get into the Vlad Taltos books from Brust, because I see a career as an assassin as something of a gaping character flaw, but Vlad does seem to come around to being a more complicated and interesting character over time, at least that's the trajectory he's on where I am in the books now.  But that's neither here nor there...

As far as the contract goes... I hadn't really thought of it as a contract before, but the idea fits.  Nothing's more irksome than reading 2/3 of a book or watching 3/4 of a movie and then having to mentally retcon the entire thing because the author decided to change the laws of physics.  I'm failing to think of specific examples right now, but that might be lack of sleep.  Some will come to me with more coffee, I'm sure.


----------



## Frostmarrow (Aug 10, 2004)

This reminds me of Ivanhoe. In the beginning he is a mysterious stranger, besting all the Normand knights in jousting. Then he gets wounded and Robin Hood and King Richard has to sort everything up. Huh? In the very end the villain gives up his life to save Rebecca from the inquisition, as he allows her champion Ivanhoe to kill him in the duel he was winning.

My memory of the book might be blurred from watching the 1980s movie every New Years Day (A TV-tradition in Sweden).


----------



## Paragon Kobold (Aug 10, 2004)

Black Omega said:
			
		

> The rape from Covenant is icing on the cake for not liking a book where the protogonist is a unlikable, unsympathetic, uninteresting bastard.  Great world, unreadable hero.




I agree. I only read the second book of the Covenant series, so I didn't 
read the rape scene. Still after a while I found the protagonist so annoying 
I started rooting for the villain.


----------



## Storm Raven (Aug 10, 2004)

Canis said:
			
		

> As others have said, it's more that the character was so completely unsympathetic.  If a hero breaks down and does something dreadful in the heat of the moment, you can forgive it or look past it if necessary, particularly if the hero is cognizant of how awful it was.  Heck, there are entire books based on that kind of angst.  Not my favorite fiction, but its out there.




But that's not the issue I'm talking about. I'm talking about the people who say: "I can't read the Covenant books solely because of the rape scene". Whether or not the rest of the book is good or not, the existence of this scene apparently drives numbers of people away from the book.

But what they miss is that this is _exactly_ what the book is about, which is why its in there. Covenant is a messiah by popular acclaim, and doesn't want to be. He is the predicted saviour of the world, and the book has as a major subtext the true extent of the things people will put up with for the promise of a saviour who will deliver them from evil. He's not a nice guy, that's the point. If he were a nice guy, then the whole thrust of the story would be lost, it would be easy to understand why the other characters put up with him.


----------



## wedgeski (Aug 10, 2004)

Storm Raven said:
			
		

> But what they miss is that this is _exactly_ what the book is about, which is why its in there. Covenant is a messiah by popular acclaim, and doesn't want to be. He is the predicted saviour of the world, and the book has as a major subtext the true extent of the things people will put up with for the promise of a saviour who will deliver them from evil. He's not a nice guy, that's the point. If he were a nice guy, then the whole thrust of the story would be lost, it would be easy to understand why the other characters put up with him.



Yup, well put. In the interests of full disclosure, the first trilogy is probably my favourite set of novels *ever*. The rape scene shocked me (as it was meant to); I read it with a sneer of hatred for Covenant (as I was meant to); from that moment on, the fate of the Land took second place to my revulsion for the protagonist (as his own self-loathing does). Sounds like good writing to me. And how anyone can describe him as 'uninteresting' is wholly outside the scope of my understanding.

Hijacked thread alert.

No, I do not believe there are any contracts between author and reader. The author writes. I read. If I like, I finish. If I am bored, I put down. Let him break every convention in the book and challenge every expectation and assumption I bring with me. As long as the words are good, I will continue reading to the end. I guess that would constitute more a letter of intent than a contract..?


----------



## Jeremy Ackerman-Yost (Aug 10, 2004)

Storm Raven said:
			
		

> But that's not the issue I'm talking about. I'm talking about the people who say: "I can't read the Covenant books solely because of the rape scene". Whether or not the rest of the book is good or not, the existence of this scene apparently drives numbers of people away from the book.



There are perfectly good reasons for that.  It is widely considered one of the most vile acts a human being can commit.  It's perfectly reasonable to decide that you have no possible common ground with a person who would commit such an act.  And it's tough to be entertained or enlightened without empathy with the protagonist.  Not impossible, sure, but a heck of a lot tougher.



> But what they miss is that this is _exactly_ what the book is about, which is why its in there. Covenant is a messiah by popular acclaim, and doesn't want to be. He is the predicted saviour of the world, and the book has as a major subtext the true extent of the things people will put up with for the promise of a saviour who will deliver them from evil. He's not a nice guy, that's the point. If he were a nice guy, then the whole thrust of the story would be lost, it would be easy to understand why the other characters put up with him.



That's all well and good, but again, I can watch people rationalize away their responsibilities every day.  I can watch people bend over to be screwed by the person who's supposed to be helping them _every day_.  I can watch people put up with the lesser of two evils _*every day*_.  Doesn't improve my life or provide me with entertainment.

I'm not saying you shouldn't like it, but I am saying that it's wrong of you to assume that the rest of us are wrong or are missing the point.  I get enough of that kind of cynicism just reading the paper or dealing with the red tape necessary to do my job.  When I read about a messiah figure I want to see that person _doing their job_.  If nothing else, it gives me hope for the real world.


----------



## Storm Raven (Aug 10, 2004)

Canis said:
			
		

> There are perfectly good reasons for that.  It is widely considered one of the most vile acts a human being can commit.  It's perfectly reasonable to decide that you have no possible common ground with a person who would commit such an act.  And it's tough to be entertained or enlightened without empathy with the protagonist.  Not impossible, sure, but a heck of a lot tougher.




Sure it is, that's the _point_. It's up there with murder as one of the _malum in se_ crimes that we recognize. But people put up with murderous protagonists all the time. Simply because they have been conditioned to accept them. Is rape truly worse than murder? Do you react the same way to say, Mackey from _The Shield_, the Corleones from _The Godfather_, and the Sopranos from _The Sopranos_? Because in those cases the main characters are all murderous thugs.



> That's all well and good, but again, I can watch people rationalize away their responsibilities every day.  I can watch people bend over to be screwed by the person who's supposed to be helping them _every day_.  I can watch people put up with the lesser of two evils _*every day*_.  Doesn't improve my life or provide me with entertainment.




Yet, other than this one act, what does Covenant do that is so reprehensible? He complains about having responsibilities he does not want and never asked for thrust upon him. Those around him expect him to be their saviour, simply because it was prophecied that he would. Why is a protagonist who is forced into a role he didn't want so repellent? Is it because everyone believes that if they were asked to save a world they would do so cheerfully?



> I'm not saying you shouldn't like it, but I am saying that it's wrong of you to assume that the rest of us are wrong or are missing the point.  I get enough of that kind of cynicism just reading the paper or dealing with the red tape necessary to do my job.  When I read about a messiah figure I want to see that person _doing their job_.  If nothing else, it gives me hope for the real world.




But you _do_ miss the point. The fact is that saving the world "as his job" is a responsibility Covenant didn't want, didn't ask for, and wants to go away. He reacts like many people would when told the fate of the world rests on his shoulders: he doesn't like the burden. The story is about a man who didn't want to save the world, and never wants to, doing so.


----------



## Mouseferatu (Aug 10, 2004)

Storm Raven, let me address your points from my own perspective, since I can't speak for anyone else.

I don't _care_ what the point of the book was. If a book reaches the point where I'm so annoyed by the characters that I'm literally not enjoying the read, why should I continue? Even fantasy books that have a "message" are entertainment, first and foremost. I'm not going to read something that I'm not, _on some level_, enjoying. I wasn't enjoying the Thomas Covenant books, on any level. So I stopped reading.

The rape entered into that, yes, but it wasn't the only reason. I literally couldn't stand the main character, and the others annoyed me as well. The fact that I wasn't meant to like him may indicate that the writer accomplished what he wanted, but it also meant that I had no motivation for reading any further.

There are enough books out there that I can get into and enjoy reading that it simply isn't worth my time to _force_ myself through something I'm not.


----------



## Mouseferatu (Aug 10, 2004)

Some further thoughts...

I think it actually _is_ easier for many readers to justify/forgive a murderous character than a rapist. See, there are times where killing _is_ justified: Self-defense, defense of others, during war, if the victim is truly evil and dangerous... Even if the murders committed by a specific character don't fall into those categories, the fact that some killing _is_ justified may mitigate an element of the horror.

But rape? Rape is never justified. _Never._ Under no circumstances. Period.

It's also, by definition, a much more personal crime. Murder can be committed impersonally, at a distance, or swiftly. Rape cannot.

Finally, there's the simple fact that I can accept evil actions from evil characters more than I can from supposedly good, or even morally ambiguous characters. I've read and enjoyed novels that were basically about the villains, but that's because the author was clear about the fact that they were villains. I cannot accept a "hero," no matter how reluctant a hero he may be, committing rape. I don't _want_ to read about a character like that, no matter how realistic he might be.

Don't know how much any of this enters into people's feelings about Covenant. I'm not even saying it impacts _my_ reactions; I honestly don't know. It was just a thought that occurred that I figured I'd share.


----------



## Storm Raven (Aug 10, 2004)

Mouseferatu said:
			
		

> Some further thoughts...
> 
> I think it actually _is_ easier for many readers to justify/forgive a murderous character than a rapist. See, there are times where killing _is_ justified: Self-defense, defense of others, during war, if the victim is truly evil and dangerous... Even if the murders committed by a specific character don't fall into those categories, the fact that some killing _is_ justified may mitigate an element of the horror.




And yet murder is so much more final for the victim. Awful as it is, rape is survivable; murder, in contrast, by definition, is not. Yet many seem much more willing to root for characters portrayed as murderers, which to my mind is an odd position to take.



> Finally, there's the simple fact that I can accept evil actions from evil characters more than I can from supposedly good, or even morally ambiguous characters. I've read and enjoyed novels that were basically about the villains, but that's because the author was clear about the fact that they were villains. I cannot accept a "hero," no matter how reluctant a hero he may be, committing rape. I don't _want_ to read about a character like that, no matter how realistic he might be.




Which position, when applied to the Covenant books, demonstrates that you missed the true issue: Covenant isn't a hero. He is never portrayed as a hero, never wants to be a hero, and never becomes one (in the first series at least). Troy is a hero. Foamfollower is a hero. Elena is a hero (although she falls from grace). Mhoram is a hero (there is a reason why Mhoram is remembered and honored in the second series). The Bloodguard are heroes. But are heroes enough? Are heroes what is needed?


----------



## Desdichado (Aug 10, 2004)

No, Storm Raven, I don't think those of us who put down the book in disgust missed the point.  We got the point very well.  That didn't make the book or the main character any less odious.  And although the point may be that he's odious, I have no interest in reading about an odious protagonist.  It's not a case of missing the point, it's a case of it being a point I don't care to have thrust in front of me when I'm trying to read what's supposed to be entertainment.  It could be said that Donaldson missed the point, if he thought that his point was entertaining, or interesting, or worth reading.


----------



## takyris (Aug 10, 2004)

Or it's a legitimate difference of opinion, and anybody making value judgments on either side should probably cool off.  I can watch fight scenes and be impressed by their choreography, whereas my wife can't get over the fact that it's two people trying to hurt each other, and can't enjoy them at all.  Neither one of us is wrong.

My personal feelings about rape, based on experiences with women close to me in my life, would prevent me from reading such a book.  That doesn't mean that it's a bad book.  It just wouldn't do it for me.  I'm not even sure that it would break the implied contract, since it seems that the character is pretty awful for most of the book, yes?  Breaking the contract would be having a good, nice hero who suddenly and for no reason rapes somebody in chapter nine.



> And yet murder is so much more final for the victim. Awful as it is, rape is survivable; murder, in contrast, by definition, is not. Yet many seem much more willing to root for characters portrayed as murderers, which to my mind is an odd position to take.




Only for those viewing it from a different perspective.  Do you watch "Monk"?  People get murdered just aboute very episode, but it's a mystery show, so that's expected, and the murders are a matter of intellectual curiosity, bereft of any of the real-world emotion of having somebody suddenly and violently killed.  But if somebody got raped in an episode of Monk, I'd be shocked, and I'd probably have to turn it off.  It's a different kind of crime.

I don't root for murderers, either, though, at least, not as far as I recall.  Fitz in the Assassin trilogy is the closest I come, I think, and he's killing for a political cause -- and most of the people he kills in his assassin role are Forged, which mostly qualifies as putting them out of their misery and protecting the innocent.


----------



## Richards (Aug 11, 2004)

This is only peripherally related to the topic at hand, but I think Gene Wolfe did a fantastic job in creating a likeable protagonist who is a torturer of all things...Severian, from his _Book of the New Sun_ novels.  I never would have believed it possible to be rooting for the torturer.  (Of course, I suppose it helps that his conscience gets the better of him and he allows a "client" to escape through assisted suicide...)

Johnathan


----------



## Mouseferatu (Aug 11, 2004)

> Which position, when applied to the Covenant books, demonstrates that you missed the true issue: Covenant isn't a hero.




I didn't miss that at all. That's why I said "good or morally ambiguous" characters.

I _know_ that Covenant isn't meant to be a hero. But he's also not meant to be the villain of the series.

And frankly, I find him, his actions, and his general personality so repugnant and unpleasant that I _wasn't enjoying reading about him_. I don't know how to say it any clearer than that. The part of the book I read was, IMO, _bad_.

It has nothing to do with "getting" it. It has to do with _not liking it_.

I know that asparagus is good for me, and that many people like it. I "get" that fact. Doesn't change the fact that I hate asparagus, and won't eat it because, to me, it tastes bad.

Thomas Covenant, to me, tastes bad. The rape is a perfect example of how it tastes bad, but it's not the cause or the sum total effect. Just part of the whole thing.


----------



## Umbran (Aug 11, 2004)

Joshua Dyal said:
			
		

> It could be said that Donaldson missed the point, if he thought that his point was entertaining, or interesting, or worth reading.




As we discuss, we need to remember that taste is subjective.

The Thomas Covenant books have been in print (continuously, I belive) since 1977.  That's better than most authors can claim.  I don't think there's a solid argument that Donaldson missed any points, given that people are still buying and reading it.  There's plenty out there who find it interesting and worth reading, even if it isn't entertaining, _per se_.


----------



## Desdichado (Aug 11, 2004)

Umbran said:
			
		

> As we discuss, we need to remember that taste is subjective.
> 
> The Thomas Covenant books have been in print (continuously, I belive) since 1977.  That's better than most authors can claim.  I don't think there's a solid argument that Donaldson missed any points, given that people are still buying and reading it.  There's plenty out there who find it interesting and worth reading, even if it isn't entertaining, _per se_.



Well, yes, I thought that went without saying.  Obviously the folks who are saying that _I_ missed the point find Donaldson's work entertaining, but my point was that just because I intensely disliked the books doesn't mean I missed the point, it just means I intensely disliked the point.  My attempt at making a semi-humerous turning around of the thread by claiming that it could said Donaldson missed the point obviously didn't work.


----------



## FreeTheSlaves (Aug 11, 2004)

I have to pipe up for my dig at Robert Jordan. 

Man, this is one guy (George Lucus is another) that should have to answer to an editor. He cannot be trusted if left to his own devices as he will pad out his books with gratuitous scenes of the most trivial and repetitive order. 

He has systematically assassinated his characters with neurotic and banal behaviour. The level of mindless, reactionary (almost reflexive) antagonism between the good guys faced with an imminent armageddon-like threat defies sensibility. Okay they have different cultures but get real.

Last book of his I 'read' I skipped the unlikeable character's chapters; I read half the book.

With RJ the deal is off, he won't give an ending, I'll just move along.


----------



## Umbran (Aug 11, 2004)

Joshua Dyal said:
			
		

> Well, yes, I thought that went without saying.




On the internet, nothing goes without saying  

I got your semi-humorous point.  However, I've seen far, far too many cases where someone didn't get such a point, and reacted badly.  I figured if I stated the obvious in a non-inflammatory way, there'd be much greater probability of things continuing on in an interesting manner.  Nipping hotheads in the bud, and all that. 

I now return you to the discussion of the relative merits (or lack thereof) of Donaldson's work.


----------



## billd91 (Aug 11, 2004)

Umbran said:
			
		

> I now return you to the discussion of the relative merits (or lack thereof) of Donaldson's work.




As for me, I got past the rape scene (my wife didn't, she stopped reading with that very chapter). What got me was the absolute tediousness of Covenant's constant griping. Every time it came up I was like "Yes, yes. We know you're no hero. On with the point." 
Trying to soldier on with an open mind through that first book was a chore. I'd rather watch paint dry.

Fortunately, I had checked the book out from the local library and so didn't feel cheated out of the price I paid.


----------



## Jeremy Ackerman-Yost (Aug 11, 2004)

Umbran said:
			
		

> I now return you to the discussion of the relative merits (or lack thereof) of Donaldson's work.



You know, I should feel bad about the gross hijack, but I don't.    

But in any case, this isn't about the merits in an objective sense.  I never read enough of the thing to develop a good sense of its literary merit outside of my complete inability to empathize with the protagonist in any way, shape, or form.  It's about the ability to dislike something that someone else likes without being told you're wrong and/or missing the point. 



			
				Storm Raven said:
			
		

> Is rape truly worse than murder?



Yup.  I'd give you my reasons, but ultimately, there is no more subjective question in the world.  But I think we can proceed without concensus on that one, because it really is besides the point.


> Do you react the same way to say, Mackey from _The Shield_, the Corleones from _The Godfather_, and the Sopranos from _The Sopranos_? Because in those cases the main characters are all murderous thugs.



Yup, Nope, and Yup.  In that order.  Some of the Corleones were indeed, mere thugs.  Others (Vito, Michael) had a strong sense of morality and a code of behavior.  It differed from that of the society around them, but they did have one.  And they tried to do what was right for their family/their people, even if it involved murder, etc.  It doesn't make them right, or just, but it does make them something other than mere thugs.  But again, beside the point.  I guess I'm just feeling argumentative today.


> Yet, other than this one act, what does Covenant do that is so reprehensible?



Wait for it...


> He complains about having responsibilities he does not want and never asked for thrust upon him.



Bingo.  The mark of an adolescent, and a generally petty, ignoble human being.  Everyone has responsibilities thrust upon them.  Very often they are responsibilities they didn't want, and sometimes the inheritance of said responsibility is grossly unfair.  That's life.  A hero goes above and beyond their mere responsibilities.  A decent human being at least tries to fulfill them without making everyone around them miserable and commiting vile crimes.


> Those around him expect him to be their saviour, simply because it was prophecied that he would. Why is a protagonist who is forced into a role he didn't want so repellent?



I've read about _hundreds_ of protagonists thrust into roles they didn't want.  Just to pull out one rather famous example: Frodo.  He wasn't exactly tickled pink about what he had to do.


> Is it because everyone believes that if they were asked to save a world they would do so cheerfully?



No.  Not at all.  I would probably curl up into the fetal position and cry like a kid with a soiled diaper.  Right after I soiled myself.  To use my previous and more appropriate example, Frodo was distinctly un-cheerful.  But he soldiered on.  Just in case there's someone living under a rock for the last few decades: 



Spoiler



He even personally failed at the very end, though he most certainly didn't kick any puppies or rape Sam along the way.  He may have despaired of his task many times, but he didn't use that as an excuse to become as vile as anything he fought





> But you _do_ miss the point. The fact is that saving the world "as his job" is a responsibility Covenant didn't want, didn't ask for, and wants to go away. He reacts like many people would when told the fate of the world rests on his shoulders: he doesn't like the burden. The story is about a man who didn't want to save the world, and never wants to, doing so.



So, if I'm ever going to sell my autobiography to fans of the Covenant books, I'd better start kicking orphans because of how unfair it is that I inherited a big fat chunk of debt.  And I'd better start beating my fiancee to rail against the responsibilities I've had dropped on me at the lab since two grad students unexpectedly quit.  And I really need to work on vocalizing my self-pity.  I don't particularly like my burdens, either, and I wish they would go away (if nothing else, it would leave me a lot more time to game), but I deal with them.  I don't feel any need to read about someone who can't even live up to my meagre level (within the context of our respective worlds and responsibilities, fantasy is, after all, life writ large).

You keep saying that we miss the point.  No.  We got the point.  He never wanted his responsibilities.  Been done.  Most heroes don't want their responsibilities.  Heck, not even Superman _wants_ his responsibilities.  But he goes above and beyond them.  Normal people at least meet them.  Tom Covenant is the fantasy equivalent of a guy who sits at home watching TV all day and beats his wife when she has to stay late at work because it means his dinner is late.  Assuming Covenant does save the world at the end, perhaps my little metaphor does run into the burning trailer to save his beer and grabs one of his kids while he's at it, but he probably beats his wife when she gets home for leaving the coffee pot on when she left that morning.

Sorry.  No appeal here.  It may be a perfectly acceptable piece of fiction.  It may even be as wonderful as you're suggesting.  But I can't stomach that behavior in real life (and I've seen my share, and probably yours too), so I feel no need to subject myself to it in my leisure time.


----------



## Umbran (Aug 11, 2004)

Canis said:
			
		

> Most heroes don't want their responsibilities.  Heck, not even Superman _wants_ his responsibilities.  But he goes above and beyond them.  Normal people at least meet them.




Thomas Covenant is not a hero, nor is he a normal person.  He's a leper, literally.

In order to survive, Covenant has, effectively, inflicted himself with a form of monomania.  At the start of the books, he's not what you or I would consider sane.  It isn't the story of a normal guy forced to carry a heavy burden.  It's the story of a man who already has a burden heavier than most folks can manage, pushed beyond the brink.  To hold him up to the measuring stick of a Normal Man simply isn't fair.


----------



## jester47 (Aug 11, 2004)

Mouseferatu said:
			
		

> I can think of very few things I consider more despicable, horrific, and vile than rape. Nobody capable of commiting rape has any business as a "hero." Ever.
> 
> Any book that asks me to sympathize with a rapist gets put down, quick.
> 
> The fact that I found it relatively boring and uninteresting even before that point probably didn't help, either. But the rape scene guaranteed that I wasn't about to give it another chance.




The modern world greatly misunderstands what a "hero" is.  I think there is a difference between a "Hero" and an "American Hero."  The "American Hero" is a morally flawless person who sacrifices him or herself.  This is largely a myth exemplified by Superman.  

Hero's are not and were not intended to be role models.  They were people that rose to the occasion when needed.  Some examples- Achilles could be argued to be guilty of rape of sorts.  Clint Eastwood's character in High Planes Drifter, another rapist, is the town hero.  The Grey Mouser commits rape when he is attacked by a gladiatorial woman teleported to his apartment.  The greek word for "Hero" was "ex-pyrosis" meaning "From the Fire."  In other words these were not pleasant Clark Kent Comic Book "American Heros."  They were the real thing.  They become heros when serving their own self interests, or just going about their business as soldiers, vigilantes, thieves or whatever, they did somthing that just happens to benefit others.  Typically, the hero is someone despicable that you put in the way of the other despicable people coming after you.  

The morally flawless "American Hero" image has slowly begun to replace the morally flawed true "Hero" and is pushing that archetype into the role of "Anti-hero."  Still, I would wager the "American Hero" as a reality is truely so rare that it is still somthing for the politicians, news media, storybooks, and early 80's TV.  

Aaron.


----------



## Storm Raven (Aug 11, 2004)

Mouseferatu said:
			
		

> I didn't miss that at all. That's why I said "good or morally ambiguous" characters.




And Covenant is neither a good nor morally ambiguous character.



> I _know_ that Covenant isn't meant to be a hero. But he's also not meant to be the villain of the series.[/b]




Are you certain of that?



> And frankly, I find him, his actions, and his general personality so repugnant and unpleasant that I _wasn't enjoying reading about him_. I don't know how to say it any clearer than that. The part of the book I read was, IMO, _bad_.




The books aren't about Covenant though. They are about those around him.


----------



## Storm Raven (Aug 11, 2004)

Canis said:
			
		

> It's about the ability to dislike something that someone else likes without being told you're wrong and/or missing the point.




Except that your posts indicate that you continually miss the point.



> Yup, Nope, and Yup.  In that order.  Some of the Corleones were indeed, mere thugs.  Others (Vito, Michael) had a strong sense of morality and a code of behavior.  It differed from that of the society around them, but they did have one.  And they tried to do what was right for their family/their people, even if it involved murder, etc.  It doesn't make them right, or just, but it does make them something other than mere thugs.  But again, beside the point.  I guess I'm just feeling argumentative today.




No, not beside the point. The Corleones "protect their family", but the point of protecting their family is to allow them to engage in the greedy pursuit of illegal money. Dress it up all you want, but they still remain murderous thuigs willing to kill for nothing more than profit.



> I've read about _hundreds_ of protagonists thrust into roles they didn't want.  Just to pull out one rather famous example: Frodo.  He wasn't exactly tickled pink about what he had to do.




Not a good example: Frodo explicitly asked for the responsibility, voluntarily accepting his role as ring-bearer. He had a choice in the matter, he could have deferred the task to someone else.



> No.  Not at all.  I would probably curl up into the fetal position and cry like a kid with a soiled diaper.  Right after I soiled myself.  To use my previous and more appropriate example, Frodo was distinctly un-cheerful.  But he soldiered on.




Soldiered on with a task he asked to undertake. Or have you forgotten the events of the Council of Elrond?



> So, if I'm ever going to sell my autobiography to fans of the Covenant books, I'd better start kicking orphans because of how unfair it is that I inherited a big fat chunk of debt.  And I'd better start beating my fiancee to rail against the responsibilities I've had dropped on me at the lab since two grad students unexpectedly quit.  And I really need to work on vocalizing my self-pity.  I don't particularly like my burdens, either, and I wish they would go away (if nothing else, it would leave me a lot more time to game), but I deal with them.  I don't feel any need to read about someone who can't even live up to my meagre level (within the context of our respective worlds and responsibilities, fantasy is, after all, life writ large).




No, you accept those responsibilities because you have something to gain from them: continued employment helps you support yourself and your fiancee for example. They are responsibilities thrust upon you that result in something redounding to your ultimate benefit. Covenant is in a position where he is being asked to save a world he doesn't believe exists, for no reason other than he is supposed to. Responsibility not only without reward or recompense, but also without a point (from his perspective).



> You keep saying that we miss the point.  No.  We got the point.  He never wanted his responsibilities.  Been done.  Most heroes don't want their responsibilities.  Heck, not even Superman _wants_ his responsibilities.  But he goes above and beyond them.




No, Superman does want his responsibilities, he voluntarily shoulders them. There is no requirement that he do so, he does it because he wants to. _Most_ modern fictional heroes want their responsibilities, or at least voluntarily assume them. Covenant doesn't want them, and never did.

But the story isn't centrally about Covenant. It is about Mhoram, Troy, Foamfollower, and so on. It is about the Bloodguard. It is about heroes, the heroes just aren't named Covenant.



> Normal people at least meet them.  Tom Covenant is the fantasy equivalent of a guy who sits at home watching TV all day and beats his wife when she has to stay late at work because it means his dinner is late.  Assuming Covenant does save the world at the end, perhaps my little metaphor does run into the burning trailer to save his beer and grabs one of his kids while he's at it, but he probably beats his wife when she gets home for leaving the coffee pot on when she left that morning.




And not having read the books, you demonstrate here that you did , indeed, miss the point.


----------



## Mouseferatu (Aug 11, 2004)

> The books aren't about Covenant though. They are about those around him.




Utterly irrelevant. He's the focus character. He's the lens through which we see the world. He's the character the reader has to deal with.

And I got no enjoyment out of dealing with him, plain and simple.



> The modern world greatly misunderstands what a "hero" is. I think there is a difference between a "Hero" and an "American Hero." The "American Hero" is a morally flawless person who sacrifices him or herself. This is largely a myth exemplified by Superman.




As part of the "modern world," I don't misunderstand that at all. I like flawed heroes. I like interesting villains. Hell, most of the novels I've written are about people you wouldn't want to invite over for tea, and who are either forced by circumstance into doing the right thing or--in a few cases--who _don't_ do the right thing.

That doesn't change the fact that there's a line for me, just like there is for everyone else. Covenant crosses that line in two different ways.

1) Rape.

2) He's _effing annoying_. Under the circumstances, I don't care how many burdens he's had, I don't care how realistic it is, I don't care what the author was trying to get across. The bottom line, for me, is that reading about him (or through him, or with him, or whatever) was an unpeasant experience. And not in the Schindler's List "this movie is unpleasant because of subject matter but is very important" way, but in the "Wow, I'd rather be folding laundry than reading this book, it's so bloody irritating" way.

Evil characters or flawed characters, good. Characters that are irritating to read and turn the novel from a joy to a chore, bad.

I can't count the number of times I've said "for me" or "in my opinion" in my posts on this thread. I'm not trying to tell people they shouldn't like this series, just explaining why I don't. I'm frankly getting a little sick and tired of people telling me "Oh, you didn't understand it." I understand it fine. I just don't like it. Kindly respect that fact.


----------



## Storm Raven (Aug 11, 2004)

Mouseferatu said:
			
		

> Utterly irrelevant. He's the focus character. He's the lens through which we see the world. He's the character the reader has to deal with.




Not utterly irrelevant: you want a story about heroes, and the books deliver. The focus character just doesn't happen to be that hero.



> I'm frankly getting a little sick and tired of people telling me "Oh, you didn't understand it." I understand it fine. I just don't like it. Kindly respect that fact.




No, every post you've put up demonstrates quite clearly that you _don't_ understand the books. Not liking them is fine. However, pointing out that everything you've posted about the books indicates that you missed the point is not the same thing as saying you should like them. And everything you've posted indicates that you didn't understand what the books were about.


----------



## ragboy (Aug 11, 2004)

capn_frank said:
			
		

> Book 8 was published in England in hardcover and had one very limited print run in paperback in the US, but has been out of print since 1999.
> 
> I found a copy of book 8 in a used bookstore in London on a trip in 2002 and read it on the plane ride home.
> 
> Then I had to read it again to confirm my first impression.



I was reading this thread trying to think a book that betrayed me bad enough to remember... This one was so bad, I must have put it out of my mind. I absolutely loved the Chung Kuo series. It was so full of intrigue, punctuated by intense action, beautiful plot twists and all done up in an absolutely masterful world. He spent 7 books steadily building a case for a massive civil war, then at the end of book 7 all Hell broke loose. Everything he'd built was coming to a climactic conclusion.

Then book 8 appeared. I'm impressed that you read it again. I got 3 chapters in and hurled it across the room. That has to be the greatest reading tragedy ever. 

And I agree about 1-7. Great material for a totally immersive d20 Future campaign. So diverse a cast and so many stories.


----------



## jester47 (Aug 11, 2004)

the one that kills it for me is Kerr's flashbacks in the Nevyn novels.  I understand that she is conveying that Nevyn keeps messing up, but it could work fine where we are told he kept messing up until the time that the main story is about.  What annoys me about her flashbacks is not so much that they are flashbacks, but that they are her chance to go all quasi historical and celtic.  Where we go from the events where Nevyn Screws up the first time to Fantasy and flashback to quasi-historical just kind of messes it up for me.

Aaron.


----------



## Jeremy Ackerman-Yost (Aug 11, 2004)

Umbran said:
			
		

> Thomas Covenant is not a hero, nor is he a normal person.  He's a leper, literally.
> 
> In order to survive, Covenant has, effectively, inflicted himself with a form of monomania.  At the start of the books, he's not what you or I would consider sane.  It isn't the story of a normal guy forced to carry a heavy burden.  It's the story of a man who already has a burden heavier than most folks can manage, pushed beyond the brink.  To hold him up to the measuring stick of a Normal Man simply isn't fair.



I have a mildly autistic friend who would probably want to deck you for saying that (among his boatload of problems is poor impulse control).  I have a friend who dealt with the kind of abuse in his youth that turns people into psychopaths.  He has more than his fair share of problems as a result.  He would never, EVER ask to be judged as anything other than a Normal Man.  These guys, and others like them who I've worked with and befriended, are easily as disadvantaged as Covenant.  They decided not to let that define them.  And they don't spend all their time whining about it.


----------



## Mouseferatu (Aug 11, 2004)

Back on topic, I remember feeling this way when I finished the Iron Tower trilogy. I don't remember the details--it was a _long_ time ago--but I remember somehow feeling that the author had lied to me.

Or maybe it was just because I hated the last book. Don't really remember. 

I've been told that the writer only wrote the Iron Tower as he did because he'd been denied permission to write a story set in Tolkien's Middle Earth. Anyone know if that's accurate?

Oh, yes. And _any_ book that doesn't clearly indicate on the cover that it's the first of a series, and only informs you of that when you reach the last page of the book, is a betrayal of the reader. (Though it's more the fault of the publisher than the writer.) I'll make the occasional exception, but for the most part, I won't buy the sequal to a "hidden cliffhanger" just on principle.


----------



## Jeremy Ackerman-Yost (Aug 11, 2004)

Storm Raven said:
			
		

> No, not beside the point. The Corleones "protect their family", but the point of protecting their family is to allow them to engage in the greedy pursuit of illegal money. Dress it up all you want, but they still remain murderous thuigs willing to kill for nothing more than profit.



You keep accusing me of not reading the Covenant books (well, I read portions of the first one, and nothing beyond that, which I readily admit to), but have you even seen Godfather II?  If you think all they were doing was protecting their money, you completely missed the point (wow, that would have been fun were I less petty... well, it was a little fun).  Yes, it eventually degenerated to something close to that, but the slippery slope and Michael's attempts to get off of it is one of the things that makes the movies interesting.  A shallow analysis of the first movie could come away with the impression you're suggesting.  The second one blows it apart.

As for Superman, Frodo, etc. being given Great Power (or a unique resistance to Great Power) IS a responsibility.  Both are uniquely suited to their tasks, much like Covenant is to his.  There's an implicit responsibility there.  Given your logic, if someone got AIDS from a blood transfusion, it's not his fault and he didn't ask for it, so there's nothing wrong with him having unprotected sex with a different person every night.  After all, he didn't ASK to be given the ability to inject a death sentence into every person he sleeps with, so what he does with it is immaterial.



> And not having read the books, you demonstrate here that you did , indeed, miss the point.



Perhaps I didn't read enough of them to "get the point" and perhaps it was so long ago and I was so turned off by the incident that I don't have a clear memory of what I did read, but the fact remains that I am allowed to dislike a rapist, regardless of his handicaps and regardless of whether you like him.  And I am allowed to dislike a book centered on such a character, even if it is a slightly different take on the whole prophesied messiah angle, and even if you like it.

Next you're going to tell me that I suxxor because I have a GameCube and your X-box pwnz it.


----------



## Tsyr (Aug 11, 2004)

Storm Raven said:
			
		

> No, every post you've put up demonstrates quite clearly that you _don't_ understand the books. Not liking them is fine. However, pointing out that everything you've posted about the books indicates that you missed the point is not the same thing as saying you should like them. And everything you've posted indicates that you didn't understand what the books were about.




I've been silent so far; I mostly lurk these days, sadly. But I have to chime in here.

What mouse (and others, and now myself) I think are trying to tell you is this:

We understand the story isn't about a "hero".

We understand that the main character isn't a hero, and he doesn't want any of the stuff he's going though.

We understand that Donaldon is trying to do 'deep' fantasy here, making us question standard assumptions about character roles and such.

_We get that, thank you very much._ 

The thing is, the book leaves me with *nothing*. It certainly doesn't inspire me. It doesn't entertain me. It doesn't make me stop to think about anything (I'm perfectly aware of what Donaldson is trying to show, thank you). It provides no revelations. It doesn't even present a view of a signifigant event (Unlike, say, Shindler's List). 

To me, the entire series is a waste. I derive nothing from them, save for a general sense of distaste, a revulsion towards the main character I can rarely muster for anyone, and a renewed apathy for mankind. 

See, here's the thing for me.

I can read a novel about a pretty terrible person. I've done that. 

I can read a novel about a whiney person. I've done that.

But a novel about a terrible person who is whiney is too much. 

I cannot *stand* the character. At all. 

_Any so called 'point' of Donaldson's work becomes irrelivant; I refuse to suffer through the books to get it. _ I don't care how important the message is, dealing with the insufferable human waste that Donaldson uses as a vehicle for the story turns me off. 

Likewise I do not care that Covenant was a leper; I do not have real-world 'sympathy' as such for a novel character; Every facet of his character is defined by Donaldson. I do not grant him a pardon for being vile because of unfortunate life circumstances, because Donaldson wrote those life circumstances into him. They exist to give backdrop for the character obsensibly, but all they seem to be used as is an excuse to make a vile character, and try to get people to look at him in a more understanding light.

Yes, I read paste the rape scene. I made it nearly to the third book. And saw no reason to continue. Of course, no, I didn't finish it, so your response will be, "Well, because you didn't finish it, you missed the point".

Here is my point, summed up:

I don't _care_ about the "point" of the book enough to deal with the absolutely vile main character long enough to get it.

This is where Donaldson failed.


----------



## Cthulhudrew (Aug 11, 2004)

I, for one, would like to see this thread get back to the pertinent subject at hand.

Specifically-

How could Moorcock have written Moonglum out of the Elric novels? I just don't get it...?


----------



## Umbran (Aug 11, 2004)

Canis said:
			
		

> They decided not to let that define them.  And they don't spend all their time whining about it.




Yes.  And I had a brother with cerebral palsy and a Master's degree who couldn't get a job because nobody wanted to hire a cripple.  You've no need to lecture me about the disadvantaged.

I am very glad your friends have managed to overcome their problems.  They were lucky.  Not all disadvantaged people are strong enough to avoid having their disadvantages define them.  Some of them do whine about it incessantly.  Normal people don't always win out over adversity.  If you want to treat Covenant as a normal person, stop whipping him for failing to be superhuman.

As it is, my point wasn't about disadvantaged folks in general.  It was about Covenant, specifically.  His is a very peculiar case, chosen specifically because it woudl be outside the realm of most reader's experience.  He isn';t your friends, or my brother.  At the start of the book, he's not exactly sane.  To expect him to react as Joe Average on the street might (as if we even knew how Joe Average would react!) is simply not reasonable.


----------



## Umbran (Aug 11, 2004)

Storm Raven said:
			
		

> No, every post you've put up demonstrates quite clearly that you _don't_ understand the books. Not liking them is fine. However, pointing out that everything you've posted about the books indicates that you missed the point is not the same thing as saying you should like them. And everything you've posted indicates that you didn't understand what the books were about.




Storm Raven, you are copping to a major fallacy - that there is a single "what this book is about" that one can point to. That there's a unique "what this book means" that a person can understand or not understand.

An author sets out to get some things across to the reader, sure.  But in any novel-length work, it surely isn't just one thing.  It is many things.  In a series of six it is even more than many.  In addition, no modern author worth his salt (and OCvenant notwithstanding, Donaldson is one), who believes that what he writes into a work is the only thing that a reader should get out of it.  Each reader is a unique individual, and will get some unique things from a work.  

You got some things out of Covenant, fine.  The fact that others did not get the exact same experience from the books doesn't make you right, and them wrong.  Or them misunderstanding.


----------



## Desdichado (Aug 11, 2004)

Canis said:
			
		

> Next you're going to tell me that I suxxor because I have a GameCube and your X-box pwnz it.



Let's not get carried away.  It's self-evident that an xbox pwnz a gamecube...


----------



## barsoomcore (Aug 11, 2004)

Tsyr said:
			
		

> A novel about a terrible person who is whiney is too much. I cannot *stand* the character.



I'm going to go out on a limb here and bet that you're not trying to make an absolute statement here -- rather, you're trying to express what it was about the Covenant books you found so annoying.

I bet that you don't mean to say that novels that are about terrible people who whine are a priori bad novels. I bet you'd agree that it's possible IN PRINCIPLE for a novel about a terrible person who whines to be a thrilling, wonderful story that you would love and cherish.

The books of Stephen Donaldson happen to not be those novels.

But any argument to the effect of "Good novels can be about bad people," while you may agree with the truth of it, won't change your opinion of Thomas Covenant.

I bet.

There's a distinction my wife and I make when talking about why we liked one story or another -- that between "identification" and "sympathy".

We enjoy stories through identification when we admire and wish to be like the hero of the story. Their triumphs become our triumphs and their struggles become our struggles. Stories like this usually feature characters whose personal traits are very pale, easily brushed aside -- so that they don't interfere with the audience's identification with the character.

"Neo", from _The Matrix_, is a great example of a character who practically has no personality whatsoever -- and that fact is key to understanding the popularity of the stories. His lack of personality makes it easier for the audience to identify with him. What kind of music does Neo like? Whatever you want him to like. What kind of food does Neo like? Whatever YOU like, I guess. That movie was designed for people to identify with the main character.

We enjoy stories through the process of sympathy when we care about and understand the hero of the story. They may hold very different ideas than we do, but we nevertheless care about them and their struggles. Stories that seek this sort of connection feature characters that are detailed and provide strong descriptions of their likes and dislikes, their loves and their fears and whatnot.

Thomas Covenant only makes sense from the point of view of sympathy. For most of us, anyway. If you usually enjoy stories through identification, these books will be repugnant to you because they appear to be asking you to participate in horrid crimes and behave in weak and selfish ways. Donaldson is asking his reader to sympathize with someone that they might ordinarily condemn out of hand. Not to approve of the conduct or overlook the crimes, but to care about them as a human being and agree to consider their struggle.

I make no claim that he succeeded at that, but I do think it's important to understand the distinction between those two approaches. They are approaches to READING, be it understood, not WRITING. You cannot WRITE a "identification" story -- though you can write a story that draws its power from the reader's tendency to identify (or sympathize).

Steven Brust, in his third Vlad Taltos book, suddenly insists that his readers stop identifying with his hero. Vlad does some very bad things for not very good reasons, and it was a little shocking to me as a teenager when I first read _Teckla_ -- up to then I'd been largely identifying with Vlad and suddenly he was sort of a bad guy. Sort of annoying, actually. I had to sympathize with him rather than identify with him in order to enjoy the story.

The point is, a sufficiently skilled writer ought to be able to make us sympathize with ANYONE -- and that means that a great story can be made out of any human being's struggles. No writer, however, no matter how skilled they may be, can get us to identify with someone whose conduct we find repugnant.

I submit that Donaldson wanted his readers to sympathize with Thomas Covenant. Each of us has to decide if he succeeded or not at this task.


----------



## GSHamster (Aug 12, 2004)

Very well put, barsoomcore.

Back to the original topic, I don't think that Donaldson broke the reader/author contract.  You pretty much got what he promised in those (Covenant) novels.

I'd argue that one novel that does meet the criteria is the science fiction novel _Calculating God_ by Robert J. Sawyer.  In the novel, humans make contact with aliens that completely believe in God.  To them, the existence of God is axiomatic, and there is no doubt at all.  So anyway, this sets up a lot of neat tension between humans and the aliens that is explored.  But at the end of the novel, 



Spoiler



Sawyer reveals that a "God" does actually exist and has a purpose in mind (giving birth to another God, IIRC) , thus destroying the argument or debate between the two main characters


.


----------



## Particle_Man (Aug 12, 2004)

jester47 said:
			
		

> The modern world greatly misunderstands what a "hero" is.  I think there is a difference between a "Hero" and an "American Hero."  The "American Hero" is a morally flawless person who sacrifices him or herself.  This is largely a myth exemplified by Superman.
> 
> Hero's are not and were not intended to be role models.




Modern?  What about King Arthur and his knights?  Or the Saints?  They were heroes, often with no moral flaws, and the latter were explicitly meant to be role models.

Anyhow, I am now going to reveal the ending of the Thomas Covenant series.  Spoiler alert. 



Spoiler



At the end of the second series, it is revealed that the world is in fact fantasy, and the villain was the part of the hero's mind that hates lepers, and the whole thing was some sort of self-therapy, I guess.  So for what it is worth, it was rape fantasy rather than rape.


  This may shed light on why someone thinks someone else misses the point.  Personally, I just think that it might turn out to be a betrayal of the reader's expectations after all, but then what do I know?

Anyhow, didn't Donaldson do another nasty rape scene in a sci-fi series based on the Ring of the Nibelung?  Weird fetish, that Donaldson.  Almost as bad as Anthony's pedophilia-fetish.


----------



## Alzrius (Aug 12, 2004)

Umbran said:
			
		

> Um, quite the opposite, I expect.
> 
> Dragons of Summer Flame was published in 1996.  That's the same year that TSR converted Dragonlance over to the SAGA rules system.  Seems to me the novel was designed to facilitate the rules change, rather than to kill the setting.
> 
> Mind you, as far as I've heard, changing Dragonlance over to SAGA was a bad idea, but that's a separate issue.  It looks like Weis and Hickman were doing pretty much what TSR wanted them to do.




Weis and Hickman have a history of writing books at the direction of TSR/WotC. I heard that at some point after the first few books, they began to write the DL novels which then were used as the template for the "Dragons of..." adventures (instead of the other way around, which is how it had been at first).

Then, as you noted, _Dragons of Summer Flame_ (which they wanted to actually make into a trilogy. Oi would that have gone on forever) for the express purpose of the SAGA system.

And finally the War of Souls trilogy, which was written because Peter Adkison wanted to undo all of the damage that _Dragons of Summer Flame_ and the SAGA system had inflicted.

Frankly, knowing how much TSR/WotC directed and commissioned their work, it becomes impossible for me to understand then why Weis & Hickman threw such a gigantic hissy-fit when Lord Soth was moved to Ravenloft. I mean, did they not realize that there was more going on here than just their books? Did they forget that the intellectual properties of all of these characters weren't owned by them? It's not like any pet projects of theirs were being ruined by this. 

Instead, they try and slip this little scene into _Dragons of Summer Flame_ specifically to counteract _Knight of the Black Rose_, and not only do they fail utterly in that regard, but they also end up making the fans wonder about answers...which leads to TSR firmly and loudly telling everyone that Soth is, indeed, in Ravenloft.

The final slap in the face came in _Dragons of a Vanished Moon_ in the scene where 



Spoiler



Mina asks Soth to join Takhisis in taking over the world, Soth, apparently having come into enlightenment and accepting responsibility for everything he did - in other words, being completely out of character -  refuses, and Takhisis kills him in a petulant fit. The chapter didn't even fit that well into the rest of the story, coming across as more of an aside where the authors decide to kill off the character in a fit of pique for having had someone else besides them use him.



I just can't stomach the level of hypocrisy involved in that whole debacle. They knew it wasn't their sandbox anymore, so they had no right to bitch when someone else played in it. 

Now that's a serious breach of author/reader contract, IMHO.


----------



## ssampier (Aug 12, 2004)

*The Implied Contract of Roots*

Speaking of vile acts and characters, is the slave ship captain in _Roots_ redeemable? In the movie, he doesn't like the idea of hauling slaves from Africa. He does it anyway. He rejects the offer of a 'belly warmer'. He then gives in and rapes that young girl because she could not speak English.


----------



## ShadowX (Aug 12, 2004)

Great insights and discussion on Covenant.  Even being a fan, Covenant's whining is irritable in the second book, which is a reason it's my least favorite of the first three.  I think that Donaldson realized that and changed over to Hile Troy, which is another reason I don't like the second book.


----------



## jester47 (Aug 12, 2004)

Particle_Man said:
			
		

> Modern?  What about King Arthur and his knights?  Or the Saints?  They were heroes, often with no moral flaws, and the latter were explicitly meant to be role models.




Sorry P-Man, gotta shut you daown there.  The only member of the round table that was what we today would call a hero was Percival.  In mallory's version Arthur was proud and put himself before god.  He broke broke the sword of the lake, and lost excalibur (there were two swords in Mallory).  Lancelot was an Adulterer.  Gawain was a victim of self doubt and abandoned the grailquest.  In almost all stories each knight of the round table has a major moral character flaw, except Percival.  King Arthur and his kngihts were a bunch of rat bastards, trying to defend and create a place that was not full of rat bastards like themselves. 

Lets take a look at some saints:

St. Francis of Assisi was a pleasure seeking fighting man.
St. Augustine is known for his vices. 
St. Christopher was a coward.

Most of the saints, when we know about thier lives have moral flaws.  What makes them a saint is that eventually they overcame these flaws at the call of thier god.  They are _sanctus_ meaning holy, not _ex-pyrosis_ meaning from the fire.  Holy hardly means flawless.  Saints are reformed.  They are role models, and in todays definition of hero, they are heroes.  But that is my point, originally the concept of hero and saint were almost opposites.  Today we have made the word angel, saint and hero almost synonymous.  Thus necesitating the concept of "Anti-hero" to encompas what hero originally meant.  

Aaron.


----------



## Particle_Man (Aug 13, 2004)

Wow, I guess I missed the part where King Arthur and his knights gang-raped that maiden.  Oh wait, that never happened.  

Look, the fact that few of them were completely flawless does not change the fact that they pursued an ideal of being completely flawless (a prerequisite of getting the Holy Grail).  And their character flaws, when there, were singular (that is, the knight was brave and noble, courteous to ladies, etc., except for X, which was that knight's tragic undoing) and did not include rape.  Heck, that very willingness to pursue the moral ideal might be the quality to emulate, if one is seeking a role model.  Think of these guys as more like Spiderman than Superman (the Percival of the comic book world).  Spiderman is more of an Everyman hero, and he does make mistakes, lose his temper (ah, those comic book hero on hero fights...  ), gives up on being a hero for a while (a sign of the reluctant hero that is way more enjoyable to consume than the Thomas Covenant version), etc., but is still a hero in the same sense of trying to do the right thing.

With Saints, I think a lot of them had rough pasts, and then became good, approaching the ideal, etc. That is when they became heroes.  The point of Saints, partially, was the "if they can do it with their pasts, there is hope for you too to become morally good". 

But more importantly, people later (but before the american novel) looked at these guys as role models because they were seen as heroic, pretty close to morally flawless, and pursuing an ideal of being morally flawless.  The "Man of la Mancha" is an example of a man who pursues this ideal of goodness as a knight, because he has read of and been inspired by these knights.  He was portrayed as mad, but that is hardly a moral flaw.

I also think that the old concept of hero, if it includes rape, should be retired from literature, quite frankly, and would hope that the modern hero, if in fact it is a modern hero, should completely replace it.  I don't want my heroes raping anybody.  I don't even want my anti-heroes raping anybody.  (Han Solo was an anti-hero in the first version of Star Wars...he shot first -- but he never raped anyone).  There are many people who feel like me, and I would bet that over time our numbers will grow, not shrink, as a proportion of the population that consumes stories (in whatever form they take).  So, given all of that, it is not surprising that some people, even if they understand that Donaldson is trying to resurrect a old concept of "hero" that includes a "hero" that can rape people, is not interested in that kind of story.

Frankly, if any kind of "hero" is still a "hero" after raping somebody, one wonders if there is a meaningful distinction between that sort of "hero" and villains.  There surely were people that wanted their heroes to be in the mould of at least King Arthur, Galahad, Lancelot, etc. (in the sense of pursuing an ideal, sometimes failing, but certainly not raping people, torturing babies, or other "villain" stuff), that lived before Superman and other American heroes were invented.  The classic "White Knight" hero is a genuine hero, as much if not more so than any "From the Fire" hero.

So I think that King Arthur, and his knights, are a heck of a lot closer to Superman than to Thomas Covenant, or even Achilles.  And since King Arthur stories predated the American heroes like Superman, it is arguable that heroes as moral ideals (even flawed heroes trying and sometimes failing to achieve those moral ideals, but still pursuing *moral* ideals), including the moral ideal of attempting to achieve moral excellence, existed before the American Hero.

If "the point" is that Thomas Covenant the rapist is meant to be a "From the Fire" hero, bringing back an old trope that has fallen into disuse (the rapist hero?), then in my and others' opinions that point is not sufficient to justify reading that series of novels.  I and others are not interested in that particular type of hero being brought back into the foreground of our minds.  I think that the King Arthur is a better type of hero, hands down, and I think that his pursuit of moral ideals makes him different from the "from the fire" guys.

This is one place where D&D alignments actually make more sense.  Rape is evil.  I and others don't want to read about evil heroes.  We don't mind lawful good heroes, chaotic good heroes (Robin Hood?) and anti-heroes, and some neutral heroes and anti-heroes, and some reluctant heroes and anti-heroes are fine if done well, but no rapists, please.  The parallel for "from the fire" guys would seem to be high-level characters.  But some high-level characters are villains.

And if you want to read about reluctant heroes who sometimes do terrible things for the greater good, try L.E.Modesitt, Jr.  He has his heroes sometimes level entire continents in order to save the majority of innocent people in the world.  While I find Modessitt's novels repetitive as a canon, any one of them standing alone is a book I would like to read.  And he did it without any non-villain raping anybody.


----------



## SableWyvern (Aug 13, 2004)

*On the original topic:*

I was greatly upset by the ending to a Michael Kube-McDowell's _Trigon Disunity_ series. It was a great read, building humanity up from the ashes of apocalypse to a star faring face set for a final confrontation with a mysterious and powerful dark enemy from the depths of space and time.

Oh, hang on, turns out they'll only become more powerful if we fight them, and if we just leave them alone there will be peace. The End.

Dan Simmons' _Endymion_ walked a very fine line, but IMO managed to pull it off. There was some retconning - but it was handled fairly well, and the retcons often enabled multiple lose ends from the first two books to be skilfully tied together in surprising but believeable ways.

In some ways, the ending was similar to the _Trigon Disunity_ - conflict was turned aside by pacifism. But, while I'm not particularly fond of that theme, Simmons managed to do it quite well, and -- importantly -- without a huge anticlimax.

*On Thomas Covenant:*

Comments on Particle Man's summary of the ending -



Spoiler



_Anyhow, I am now going to reveal the ending of the Thomas Covenant series. Spoiler alert. At the end of the second series, it is revealed that the world is in fact fantasy, and the villain was the part of the hero's mind that hates lepers, and the whole thing was some sort of self-therapy, I guess. So for what it is worth, it was rape fantasy rather than rape.Personally, I just think that it might turn out to be a betrayal of the reader's expectations after all, but then what do I know?_ 

I must say, I don't agree with this interpretation at all. The fact that Linden Avery and Hile Troy, and Covenant's wife (other _real_ characters) interact with the Land mean it is more than some hallucination. While I believe it was a form of therapy, I don't think it is less than real.



Personally, I don't really understand the depth of hatred for Covenant (the character, not the series). Most of his detractors seem to be holding him up to the standards of sane people in the real world. Covenant, however, is a character who is plunged into a *fantasy* world, where the laws by which he has no choice but to live are torn apart. So, he assumes (as quite probably a lot of people would) this world is not real. If he told anyone in the "real" world about the Land, they too would tell him it's not real. Yet, people expect him to just accept on faith that it is, and act acordingly? That doesn't make sense to me.

Hate the books if you wish. Holding the character up to ideals suited to reality, however, makes no sense in a world where reason and a critical, ingrained instinct for survival tell you that everything around you is a delusion.

BTW, four more Covenant books are in the works, the first (_The Runes of the Earth_) due in a few months. According the Donaldson, the Final Chronicles were planned at the same time as the Second Chronicles.


----------



## Tsyr (Aug 13, 2004)

SableWyvernPersonally said:
			
		

> fantasy[/b] world, where the laws by which he has no choice but to live are torn apart. So, he assumes (as quite probably a lot of people would) this world is not real. If he told anyone in the "real" world about the Land, they too would tell him it's not real. Yet, people expect him to just accept on faith that it is, and act acordingly? That doesn't make sense to me.
> 
> Hate the books if you wish. Holding the character up to ideals suited to reality, however, makes no sense in a world where reason and a critical, ingrained instinct for survival tell you that everything around you is a delusion.




I am judging the character by the simple standard of "decent human being". A lot of basicly decent people do some pretty bad stuff. Rape is not something a "decent human being", to my mind, does. It doesnt matter if the world is strange, or he thinks hes having a delusion, or whatever excuse you want to try... Had he been a decent human being to start with, raping her, even under the saftey of "It's just a dream" or something, *wouldn't have entered him mind*, much less come to fruitation.


----------



## evildmguy (Aug 16, 2004)

*In the FWIW category*

I recently picked up a series of books on how to write.  I got them for the purpose of improving my own game writing, not because I had any delusions of becoming a full time writer.  (Okay, I did, but that's neither here nor there.  )  In these books, the authors all say that writing IS a contract between the author and the reader.  That usually, very quickly on, the author tells the reader what they are writing about so the reader can decide if they want to read the book or not.  In short stories, it should be done in the first paragraph.  In novels, usually within the first chapter.  

Now, many of the people who wrote the books do say that there are times when to break the contract or to set up something different, usually as long as there are story reasons for doing so.  It can't be completely in the dark that something big changes.  However, the suggestion for starting authors is not to attempt to do that until they get more experience and confidence.  

Interesting about TC.  I haven't read them, and my wife won't let me since she figured she wasted her time for both of us, but I found the discussion interesting.  

Here are some of the people and books I didn't like because I felt they broke the contract:

Tolkien - I hope the flames will be kept to a minimum but I don't like Tolkien.  I am basing this on the movies, which is not the books, but I have (unsuccessfully) tried to read the books for 15 years now.  I never feel pulled into them.  However, in the end, the promise given to me was that Frodo was the only one able to carry the burden of the ring and he couldn't do it in the end.  In the end, imo, there is NO hero, at least with regard to the ring, because of how the ring is destroyed.  There were other things in the movie that I didn't like, that are supposed to be directly from the books, but that ending really made me mad.  Again, contract broken for me.

Jordan - Ugh.  This is one of those situations where I am embarrassed that I liked him and defended him, even got some people to read him, and after book ten, I refuse to read him again.  He was good up through book six of WoT but after that, he seemed to be milking the series rather than writing what he started to write.  I mean, he went from 2-3 major things happening per book to sometimes nothing important happening!  It was a book of plot that moved nothing else along!  Ugh.  

KJA - I hated his Star Wars books and was flabbergasted when he became the authority.  I thought that it was obvious what Zahn had done in setting up Jade and Skywalker and when KJA didn't have them together, it didn't make sense.  (I LOVE Zahn!  Love his books!)  I loved how Zahn made that more definitive, lest that happen again.  However, in this case, the contract he broke felt more that he wasn't writing in the Star Wars universe.  It wasn't even good in some books.  He never seemed to get the characters down as well as others.  (In contrast, Kathy Byers (Truce at Bakura) didn't have good science but the characters and plot were good.)  KJA did the same thing with the X-Files books he wrote.  I never felt he got the characters of Mulder and Scully down compared to some other authors.  I also didn't think much of his ideas for the books themselves.  

I agree with Weiss and Hickman assassment as well.  I liked Chronicles and Legends but nothing else after.  Death Gate was so anti-climactic that I was pissed they wrote what they had.  I knew that they had written Summer Flame for the SAGA system and that's probably why the books starts as it does, to get the reader in the mindset that this isn't DND anymore.  However, it was too big of a change and I think they should have done it another way.  They wrote heroic books and it felt as if they were trying to be "more real" later on but it ended up feeling like they broke the contract compared to what they had done before.  

Simon Hawke never got me with his Dark Sun books.  In fact, even within fantasy, I had such a hard time buying the underlying premise of his Dark Sun books that I never finished them.  I always felt he made it too easy for his main character and felt cheated that I didn't see the hero struggle more.  

Clancy let me down in becoming more about the battles and the fighting rather than the characters and in what they were caught.  I think it was the Bear and the Dragon that I didn't like and so stopped reading them.  They aren't reading like my thriller/suspense novels that I liked but novels on tactics and battles with too much detail.  

Grisham is still interesting to me, although I haven't read Painted House and maybe one other, but they are starting to be the same.  However, the last book was done well and was different from his usual lawyer novels such that I will probably check out his next book.

Crichton probably let me down when he wrote a sequel to Jurassic Park, more than likely due to publisher influence.  That just isn't how he writes.  While I liked the book okay, I think he should have refused, as he did for number three.  Otherwise, I think I get exactly what I expect from Crichton and I enjoy reading him.  (Too bad the movie Timeline SUCKED!  I really hate it when they change his movies (Timeline for Walker and Rising Sun for Snipes) for the stars they have.)    

Of the writers I like whom I think follow through on the contract, it would be, in no particular order:  Elaine Cunningham, R.A. Salvatore, Margerat McCollough, Lyndon Hardy, Thomas Reid, Lisa Smedman, Katherine Kurtz (adept series), Wurtz and Feist (Empire), Troy Denning, and a few others.  

There are authors I don't like but I can't say if they break the contract or not.

Good discussion!  Thanks!

Have a good one!  Take care!

edg
Alternity Pimp


----------



## Storm Raven (Aug 16, 2004)

Particle_Man said:
			
		

> Wow, I guess I missed the part where King Arthur and his knights gang-raped that maiden.  Oh wait, that never happened.




I take it you are not familiar with the story of Uther and Igraine? Or Lancelot and Elaine?



> I also think that the old concept of hero, if it includes rape, should be retired from literature, quite frankly, and would hope that the modern hero, if in fact it is a modern hero, should completely replace it.  I don't want my heroes raping anybody.  I don't even want my anti-heroes raping anybody.  (Han Solo was an anti-hero in the first version of Star Wars...he shot first -- but he never raped anyone).  There are many people who feel like me, and I would bet that over time our numbers will grow, not shrink, as a proportion of the population that consumes stories (in whatever form they take).  So, given all of that, it is not surprising that some people, even if they understand that Donaldson is trying to resurrect a old concept of "hero" that includes a "hero" that can rape people, is not interested in that kind of story.




Donaldson isn't doing anything of the sort. Covenant is not a hero. He is a messiah, an _unheroic_ messiah. Much of the work is dealing with the difference between being a hero and being the "chosen one".



> Frankly, if any kind of "hero" is still a "hero" after raping somebody, one wonders if there is a meaningful distinction between that sort of "hero" and villains.  There surely were people that wanted their heroes to be in the mould of at least King Arthur, Galahad, Lancelot, etc. (in the sense of pursuing an ideal, sometimes failing, but certainly not raping people, torturing babies, or other "villain" stuff), that lived before Superman and other American heroes were invented.




And your assessment of the Arthurian characters in this vein demonstrates that it has been a long time since you read about them, and look back with rose colored glasses.


----------



## Storm Raven (Aug 16, 2004)

evildmguy said:
			
		

> Tolkien - I hope the flames will be kept to a minimum but I don't like Tolkien.  I am basing this on the movies, which is not the books, but I have (unsuccessfully) tried to read the books for 15 years now.  I never feel pulled into them.  However, in the end, the promise given to me was that Frodo was the only one able to carry the burden of the ring and he couldn't do it in the end.  In the end, imo, there is NO hero, at least with regard to the ring, because of how the ring is destroyed.




For Tolkien, that's the point - mortals can only be saved from the evil that Sauron represents by the grace of God. It is a statement driven by religious sentiment.


----------



## billd91 (Aug 16, 2004)

evildmguy said:
			
		

> Here are some of the people and books I didn't like because I felt they broke the contract:
> 
> Tolkien - I hope the flames will be kept to a minimum but I don't like Tolkien.  I am basing this on the movies, which is not the books, but I have (unsuccessfully) tried to read the books for 15 years now.  I never feel pulled into them.  However, in the end, the promise given to me was that Frodo was the only one able to carry the burden of the ring and he couldn't do it in the end.  In the end, imo, there is NO hero, at least with regard to the ring, because of how the ring is destroyed.  There were other things in the movie that I didn't like, that are supposed to be directly from the books, but that ending really made me mad.  Again, contract broken for me.
> 
> ...




Well, that's what you get for relying on a movie to convey the story, which is  in many ways worse than relying on Cliff Notes because a movie doesn't try to directly explain the themes in the work. I can see how you get this impression, in part, from the movie. But it also would constitute a misreading of the real contract (if you choose to see one as being there). To push the metaphor, all contracts have plenty of fine print that should be carefully examined, and that fine print is, of course, the text of the book.
Frodo isn't really the only person who can carry the ring. Any hobbit will probably do as long as they are sufficiently innocent and have their heads in the right place (Lotho Baggins or Ted Sandyman would be bad choices, for example, but Farmer Maggot would probably be an excellent choice being a tough, no nonsense kind of guy). But Frodo takes it up as his personal burden and not a burden for anybody else. Frodo has a bit of a maryr complex (which gets borne out at the end so maybe it's well placed).
As for the destruction of the ring, you were warned earlier in the movie that Gollem yet had an important part to play and the issue comes around in a couple of circles. Bilbo and Frodo's pity of Gollum allows him to survive so that he can not only betray Frodo to Shelob but also save the world by causing the destruction of the ring. So that very pity for pitiable creatures is what saves Frodo from the corruption of the ring in the end. In a certain light, Frodo therefore IS the architect of the destruction of the ring (had he followed Sam's advice, the quest would certainly have failed at this point). It's just that the destruction happens in an unexpected way. It isn't his strength and determination that win the day because those are spent (and it takes the strength and determination of his servant, Sam, to get him close enough). It's one of the very factors that makes him and hobbits so resistant to the ring in the first place: inherent kindliness and the ability to have pity and show mercy. 
Another interesting comment. When Gollum swears on the ring to serve the master, Frodo says the ring will exact a terrible price for breaking that promise. And it sure does. In his moment of triumph, Gollum is destroyed. 
All of this is a bit more clear in the fine print of the trilogy, I think, than the summarized version on the silver screen.


----------



## nikolai (Aug 16, 2004)

evildmguy said:
			
		

> Here are some of the people and books I didn't like because I felt they broke the contract:
> 
> Tolkien - I hope the flames will be kept to a minimum but I don't like Tolkien.  I am basing this on the movies, which is not the books, but I have (unsuccessfully) tried to read the books for 15 years now.  I never feel pulled into them.  However, in the end, the promise given to me was that Frodo was the only one able to carry the burden of the ring and he couldn't do it in the end.  In the end, imo, there is NO hero, at least with regard to the ring, because of how the ring is destroyed.  There were other things in the movie that I didn't like, that are supposed to be directly from the books, but that ending really made me mad.  Again, contract broken for me.




There are lots of fantasy fans who dislike Tolkien, for all sorts of reasons. You are not alone, and - even if you were - I wouldn't flame you for which books you do or don't like. The standard response to your points are:


The book is very slow to start. And isn't in the sword and sorcery prose style many people like. Tolkien takes a different path in having more evocation of the world and less action. This makes the book very rich, but also makes getting into it hard.
The "failure" of the quest is part of the atraction of the book for many people. It reinforces the power of the ring, and the fortitude of Frodo in making it as far as he did. It also (despite the books status) make LotR an anti-fantasy: the quest is to destory the artifact - not gain one - and the hero doesn't achieve the goal himself. The "failure" gives the book the bittersweet ending, as Frodo - even though he "succeeded" in destroying the ring - is broken in doing it.

I can see why you didn't like the book because of these aspects. But I guess my point is, without them, I wouldn't like it so much.


----------



## nikolai (Aug 16, 2004)

This is a response to Jester47 points about "what a "hero" is". 



			
				Jester47 said:
			
		

> Hero's are not and were not intended to be role models.






			
				Storm Raven said:
			
		

> Particle_Man said:
> 
> 
> 
> ...




The evolution of the word hero is very complex. I won't pretend to understand it all. You're right that there are two senses: (1) *people with abilities beyond those of normal men*; and (2) *morally worthy people*. Homer used sense (1), the Greek heroes have great prowess, but aren't morally worthy and are often complete bastards. This sense goes back a very long time.

I think it's a mistake to say sense (2) is very modern, and to write off Arthurian heroes as not being heroes in sense (2). I'd say sense (2) also goes back a long time. The heroes of medieval romances are exemplars living up to a moral idea (or trying to live up to a moral idea, with varying degrees of success). This idea of an hero is also old and has also been around for a long time. You can't just write it off.

As for the specific points. Uther (Arthur's father) wasn't one of Arthur's knights. His tricking of Igraine, is portrayed as a very morally dodgy thing to do. There's no suggestion he's a hero in either sense. And Lancelot, whatever his failings, didn't rape Elaine - at least in any of the core cycle I know and certainly not in Malory.


----------



## Sledge (Aug 16, 2004)

Wow more Covenant books coming.  I'm going to have to start rereading the first two series.

But anyways for a book that violates the "contract" try to avoid ever reading Wooden Sword.  It doesn't end.
Also as has been said the spelljammer series starts to fall apart very quickly.  Great individual worlds and characters, but pathetic storyline and zero continuity.


----------



## Particle_Man (Aug 17, 2004)

If I accept that the Donaldson's "point" in the Thomas Covenant series was to show that a messiah (world saver) is different from a nice guy, or even from a minimally decent person, will you accept that I, and many other people, simply don't want to read about messiahs that rape people?  Even if we get the author's point?  Can you accept that I for one would think the world would be a better place if no one ever again writes a book about a messiah that rapes people?  Even if I get the author's point?  Frankly, some points are not worth making in novel form, IMHO.

Oh, and my own point about moral heroes predating American heroes only needs one pure knight to be made, even if we granted you Uther, etc.  And that knight was Sir Galahad, I believe.  Since tales of Sir Galahad predated the first American written novel or short story, there we go.  Moral Heroes existed before the American written novel or written short story, and hence before the American hero.

Also, I am relieved to see that Mallory's Lancelot did not rape Elaine; my glasses might be rose colored but I don't think my memory is so clouded that I would forget that Lancelot was a rapist.  But if you have a quote from Mallory in which Lancelot does rape Elaine, please feel free to share it.  I might be wrong on that point (but not on the point of a moral hero predating American heroes.


----------



## Storm Raven (Aug 17, 2004)

Particle_Man said:
			
		

> If I accept that the Donaldson's "point" in the Thomas Covenant series was to show that a messiah (world saver) is different from a nice guy, or even from a minimally decent person, will you accept that I, and many other people, simply don't want to read about messiahs that rape people?




Which would be a fine sentiment if that mattered to the point of the story, which it doesn't. That's what people have been pointing out to you, and you just don't get it. Yes, there is a rape scene. No, Covenant is not a hero, and not held up as one. No, it's not something that should ruin the book - because the consequences of that act redound throughout the series and have palaple effects.



> Oh, and my own point about moral heroes predating American heroes only needs one pure knight to be made, even if we granted you Uther, etc.  And that knight was Sir Galahad, I believe.  Since tales of Sir Galahad predated the first American written novel or short story, there we go.  Moral Heroes existed before the American written novel or written short story, and hence before the American hero.




Galahad isn't a hero. Galahad is a pure knight who completes the grail quest, a bit player at best who doesn't show up for the first 75% of the tales. The heroes of the story are the veterans: Kay, Gawaine, Lancelot, and Arthur, all of whom are quite flawed.



> Also, I am relieved to see that Mallory's Lancelot did not rape Elaine; my glasses might be rose colored but I don't think my memory is so clouded that I would forget that Lancelot was a rapist.  But if you have a quote from Mallory in which Lancelot does rape Elaine, please feel free to share it.  I might be wrong on that point (but not on the point of a moral hero predating American heroes.




It is an open question, but either Lancelot rapes Elaine in an insane state, or Elaine takes advatage of and rapes Lancelot when he is insane.


----------



## mhacdebhandia (Aug 17, 2004)

On the general topic of novels with unlikeable protagonists who are nevertheless heroes in a classical and realistic sense:

James Ellroy.

Every one of his heroes is deeply morally flawed, and his novels are permeated with a strong sense of judgement against which they are measured. Their lives and characters are saturated with violence, and the extent to which they manage to rise above their personalities and circumstances is the extent to which they are redeemed or damned.

I'm absolutely spellbound by his work, and the ethos his novels evince and evoke is a major reason for that. It's really astounding.

Personally, I gave up on Thomas Covenant because it was dull.


----------



## evildmguy (Aug 17, 2004)

Greetings!

Thanks for the well thought out responses to my post.  I appreciate that!  I hope to emulate and live up to those standards that have been set.



			
				billd91 said:
			
		

> Well, that's what you get for relying on a movie to convey the story, which is in many ways worse than relying on Cliff Notes because a movie doesn't try to directly explain the themes in the work. I can see how you get this impression, in part, from the movie. But it also would constitute a misreading of the real contract (if you choose to see one as being there). To push the metaphor, all contracts have plenty of fine print that should be carefully examined, and that fine print is, of course, the text of the book.
> Frodo isn't really the only person who can carry the ring. Any hobbit will probably do as long as they are sufficiently innocent and have their heads in the right place (Lotho Baggins or Ted Sandyman would be bad choices, for example, but Farmer Maggot would probably be an excellent choice being a tough, no nonsense kind of guy). But Frodo takes it up as his personal burden and not a burden for anybody else. Frodo has a bit of a maryr complex (which gets borne out at the end so maybe it's well placed).
> As for the destruction of the ring, you were warned earlier in the movie that Gollem yet had an important part to play and the issue comes around in a couple of circles. Bilbo and Frodo's pity of Gollum allows him to survive so that he can not only betray Frodo to Shelob but also save the world by causing the destruction of the ring. So that very pity for pitiable creatures is what saves Frodo from the corruption of the ring in the end. In a certain light, Frodo therefore IS the architect of the destruction of the ring (had he followed Sam's advice, the quest would certainly have failed at this point). It's just that the destruction happens in an unexpected way. It isn't his strength and determination that win the day because those are spent (and it takes the strength and determination of his servant, Sam, to get him close enough). It's one of the very factors that makes him and hobbits so resistant to the ring in the first place: inherent kindliness and the ability to have pity and show mercy.
> Another interesting comment. When Gollum swears on the ring to serve the master, Frodo says the ring will exact a terrible price for breaking that promise. And it sure does. In his moment of triumph, Gollum is destroyed.
> All of this is a bit more clear in the fine print of the trilogy, I think, than the summarized version on the silver screen.




In terms of a contract, I would completely agree that I don't know what Tolkien promises.  The issue is that I don't like old style prose, which Tolkien writes.  It is very "heavy handed" to me.  I am not completely a product of current times, but the writings of the 19th and early 20th century are very tough for me to read because of the style.  (Dracula, Frankenstein, etc.)  I will also agree that many hobbits probably could have carried the ring and made it.  From what I saw of Samwise, he seemed a better candidate for it than Frodo, in that he wanted to share the burden.  It seems to me, though, that the contract was that Frodo could do it, whether through judgment or ability, and he couldn't.  There is no fine print to contracts like this, according to what I have read on writing.  

As to the specifics you mention, I will talk about that more later.  



			
				Storm Raven said:
			
		

> For Tolkien, that's the point - mortals can only be saved from the evil that Sauron represents by the grace of God. It is a statement driven by religious sentiment.




And that probably fits the times in which he was writing.  It also makes it very Greek, by having some sort of Deus Ex Machina come and save the day.  However . . .



			
				nikolai said:
			
		

> There are lots of fantasy fans who dislike Tolkien, for all sorts of reasons. You are not alone, and - even if you were - I wouldn't flame you for which books you do or don't like. The standard response to your points are:
> 
> 
> The book is very slow to start. And isn't in the sword and sorcery prose style many people like. Tolkien takes a different path in having more evocation of the world and less action. This makes the book very rich, but also makes getting into it hard.
> ...




My point here is not to bash Tolkien but to explain what I didn't like in what I have read and heard and what I saw in the movies.  I hope that is understand.  Even in that, I respect Tolkien for what he did even if I don't like it or agree with it.  

I still don't like what Tolkien did, sticking to the bare bones of what is probably in the books, in terms of how he resolved the issue.  There is no mention of gods that I have heard, only of evil through Sauron, and to say that it is God's grace that saved everyone comes out of no where for me.  Had it been set up or had Frodo been shown to be religious (to any god(s)) then it would be easier for me to accept that ending.  As it was, even for a Deus Ex Machina, it feels too heavy handed, more as if he wanted it to end with the rings destruction but wrote himself into a corner and wasn't sure how to do it.  

I haven't read the books, as I have said, but in what I have seen, I can't buy that the ring exacts its price on Gollum through its destruction.  Yes, you can read into this by saying Evil feeds upon itself and the moment of the rings glory was also its downfall.  Again, it feels TOO forced to me.  The ring, or Sauron, has shown too much intelligence to fail exactly when it did.  Again, the Deus Ex Machina feels too heavy handed.  

However, those aside, my issue is still Frodo.  Again from what I saw, he might not be happy that he couldn't do it, but he still received all of the accolades of being a hero.  What should be a tragedy, and if he had a martyr complex that should have come into play to destroy the ring, isn't because Frodo is still seen as a hero, regardless of how he perceives himself.  In the end, I don't think the Fellowship, because the soldier is always forgotten in large scale battles, sacrificed enough to complete the quest.  They were all changed, yes, but we always change and it can be argued about whether that change was enough.  However, in terms of sacrifice by the heroes, to me, it didn't feel like enough.  

Some examples of what I think was enough.  

Theseus killing the minotaur but it cost him his father because he forgot about the sails.  

Antigone burying her brother and then having to commit suicide.  

Othello losing everything because he was willing to listen to Iago.  

(For more modern examples, I can only think of Babylon 5 right now, but it has a lot.)

Marcus sacrificing himself so that Ivanova can live.  

The irony that is Mollari.  He wanted his people to be rulers as they were and everything he did caused their downfall, with him as the emperor of an even more weak and decaying empire.  

Kosh's willingness to die to give the rebellion what it needed.  

Sheridan's willingness to die to strike at the heart of the enemy.  (Okay, he came back so it isn't a tragedy but he was still willing to die.)  

In any event, my point is that all most character's change through the course of a story.  With few exceptions, the mother in Ordinary People comes to mind as one such exception, most characters go through a change by the end of their story.  The fact that Frodo changed isn't in question for me.  However, I didn't feel it was enough.  Again, though, perhaps the books would have given me what I was wanting to see in his character.  

Good discussion!  Thanks!  

edg
Alternity Pimp


----------



## Umbran (Aug 17, 2004)

*Joining the Thought Police?*



			
				Tsyr said:
			
		

> I am judging the character by the simple standard of "decent human being".
> ...
> Had he been a decent human being to start with, raping her, even under the saftey of "It's just a dream" or something, *wouldn't have entered him mind*, much less come to fruitation.




Whoa!

Do you really want to go there, Tsyr?  Stop and consider that.  Do you really want to start qualifying whether or not a person is a "decent human being" based upon what they do or do not _think or dream_?


----------



## Mallus (Aug 17, 2004)

Umbran said:
			
		

> Do you really want to start qualifying whether or not a person is a "decent human being" based upon what they do or do not _think or dream_?



Pardon the intrusion...

Tsyr, to illustrate Umbran's point, may I direct you to one of the all-time classic SF movies, _Forbidden Planet_ --if you're not already familiar with it. 

The film sports phenominal matte paintings, Robbie the Robot, and a timeless lesson about how much control we have over over subconscious minds [plus, its a credited adaptaion of Shakespeare's _The Tempest_].


----------



## billd91 (Aug 17, 2004)

evildmguy said:
			
		

> <snip>
> 
> In any event, my point is that all most character's change through the course of a story.  With few exceptions, the mother in Ordinary People comes to mind as one such exception, most characters go through a change by the end of their story.  The fact that Frodo changed isn't in question for me.  However, I didn't feel it was enough.  Again, though, perhaps the books would have given me what I was wanting to see in his character.




Didn't change enough? He lost more than Theseus did. He didn't lose merely a father. He lost his whole previous life of tranquility in the Shire. As he put it, he saved the Shire, but not for himself. He sacrifices pretty much everything, including his health. The real severity of the injuries Frodo sustains from the Witch King and from Shelob is only seen in the book and not the movie.

I don't know that I buy the argument that they can only be saved by the grace of god. Tolkien was a devout Catholic, but I don't think that's his message. He's got several in there including celebrating a good, pastoral and simple life, evil feeds on itself, and good consequences come from doing good (the mercy showed to Gollum saves the world in the end).

You know, I don't think I would lump both Frankenstein and Dracula into the same boat of readability. You can see the evolution in the English novel substantially when you compare the two books as far as readability. Dracula is far easier and flows much better than Frankenstein. And I generally find Tolkien easier than either of those two. 

I'd actually be interested in hearing what authors are saying that there is a contract and they have to lay it out in the first chapter.


----------



## Particle_Man (Aug 17, 2004)

Storm Raven said:
			
		

> Which would be a fine sentiment if that mattered to the point of the story, which it doesn't. That's what people have been pointing out to you, and you just don't get it. Yes, there is a rape scene. No, Covenant is not a hero, and not held up as one. No, it's not something that should ruin the book - because the consequences of that act redound throughout the series and have palaple effects.




If I accept that "the consequences of that act [rape] redound throughout the series and have palaple effects", will you accept that I, and others, do not want to read a book, or series of books, in which the main character rapes someone, even if "the consequences of that act [rape] redound throughout the series and have palaple effects"?  Will that do it?  Are you realizing yet that I am getting the point (or else you need to restate that point *yet again* so that I can form a similar question to the above *yet again*, unless your next restatement of the point convinces me (I am dubious)), and still don't feel benefitted from reading that series of books, and still think that the world would be a better place if there were no books with main characters that rape people?  That some artistic tropes are just not worth inventing, celebrating or resurrecting?



			
				Storm Raven said:
			
		

> Galahad isn't a hero. Galahad is a pure knight who completes the grail quest, a bit player at best who doesn't show up for the first 75% of the tales. The heroes of the story are the veterans: Kay, Gawaine, Lancelot, and Arthur, all of whom are quite flawed.




Really?  I think your definition of "hero" is unduly narrow (obviously).  You need to argue for your definition more than you have, I think, since I don't think that America invented the moral hero.

Had people, before American written novels or short stories existed, heard of the Holy Grail?  Were they inspired by the idea of the morally pure being who found the grail?  Did they call that being [Galahad in some of the tales] a hero?  Is the White Knight or Knight in Shining Armor or Chivalrous Hero or Gentleman a pre-American trope for morally good hero?  Have people, before American written novels or short stories existed, been inspired to try to be morally better because they wanted to imitate the morally good qualities of their heroes?  The answer to all these questions is yes.  Since there were such people (Again, Man of la Mancha provides a written example of one such), before the American written novel or short story, then the morally good hero existed, before the American written novel or short story.

And re: lancelot -- If whether he raped Elaine is an open question, then guess what?  Some people, historically, would have decided that question one way, and some would have decided it another.  That means that, for some people, existing before American written novels or written short stories, Lancelot did not in fact rape Elaine.  In that case, for them, Lancelot was a moral hero, whose tragic flaw was to fall in love with the wrong person (Guenevere).  (Awwww....  )

I can accept a moral hero who falls in love with the wrong person (Lancelot, for those who decided the open question the non-"Lancelot raping Elaine" way).  I can accept an anti-hero that shoots first (Han Solo).  I cannot accept an anti-hero that rapes anyone.  I cannot accept a messiah that rapes anyone.  I cannot accept any main character or even Point of View character in a book that rapes anyone.  I don't want to read books that contain the latter three as characters.  Even if there were some argument that these tropes were historically interesting to some.

I now eagerly await your next restatement of "the point" and how I failed to get it.


----------



## WizarDru (Aug 17, 2004)

Ahem.  

 Let's just remember to keep things pleasant, ok guys?  Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.

Regarding Donaldson and Covenant: No contract broken, with me.  I didn't like the character, I didn't like the rape and I didn't care for Dondaldson's writing.  He failed to engage me, but we had no contract failure.  Tastes differ, and that I failed to enjoy his work didn't invalidate it.  I find The Godfather and Sopranos series compelling, and assume the same for the Shield, not because I like the characters, but because I enjoy watching them interact in their world, and they are not the sole viewpoint characters.  Tony Soprano has a personal code of honor.  He feels bad about the terrible things he does, even if he still does them.  Covenant may have come to that point (although from what I'm hearing, it sounds like he never truly does)...but when I quit the book, he hadn't.  I might feel differently if I read the books now, but I have enough material to read that I won't seek out something I have a history of having notenjoyed.

 Regarding Robert Jordan: Contract Violation.  Jordan made me an implicit promise with his work: to tell a story about Rand al'Thor, and the events leading to the final confrontation with the Dark Lord.  For roughly four or five books, I got that story.  Then Jordan lost his way.  I remember when Mat killed the leader of the Shaido _off-camera_...that was when I literally heard the train go off the rails.  I had eagerly awaited a climactic showdown, and was cheated of it.  I got long baths and endless self-abosrbed reflection, but characters who disappear for several books, and get a quarter-chapter somewhere.  Jordan stopped telling his story, and started just passing time.  Like Bartelby the Scrivener, when asked to finish his tale, he simply replies "I choose not to."

 Tad Williams: Major Contract Violation.  I have never been angrier at an author than the 'conclusion' of _Memory, Sorrow and Thorn_.  Williams made me a promise...a promise that my investment of time and effort in plunging through his very long books would lead me to a satsifying ending, and that all of his foreshadowing had meaning; that a character who had been a viewpoint character on and off for three books had a great destiny...and that great destiny was 



Spoiler



to hold a door open for the main characters


 .  All of the omens and implicit details were utterly meaningless and without value....it was all hogwash.  Most of the efforts of the main characters were redundant and unneccesary.  



Spoiler



The incredibly powerful magic swords were, as it happens, utterly unimportant...not unlike the main character.


  I felt betrayed by the story.  Williams had provided me implications that the book would end in a much different fashion than it did, and I was left wondering why he had wasted all that time and all those words.

 Stephen Brust: In Dispute.  I love Brust, but I still harbor a resentment at how he changed the tone and identity of the Taltos books to read more like unfocused and unenjoyable political allegories, instead of witty romps.  It was several books before he undid the damage.  As for the charge of being an assasin, I find it much harder to dislike Vlad for doing it.  He is very rarely ever put into a situation where there is a clear moral impediement to performing his work.  Usually he's killing unpleasant folks to begin with (or later, for a cause)...and death is not terribly permananent for most folks in his world (hell, it's considered a way to warn someone...Vlad himself is killed in Taltos', iirc).


----------



## barsoomcore (Aug 17, 2004)

evildmguy:

I'll just say that each and every one of your issues with the story of LotR is very clearly and capably dealt with in the books. Many people have trouble getting through the first half of _The Fellowship of the Ring_ -- but it honestly is worth your time and effort. I don't personally know anyone who finished the story and wasn't completely satisfied with what they got.

Your problems have more to do with Peter Jackson's not-very-competent direction of the final two films than any failures on the part of Professor Tolkien.

And there is a very, very large amount of 19th and early 20th century writing that it is so amazingly good that it's practically criminal not to acquire a taste for it. You are discarding much of the greatest writing of all time. On behalf of the English language, I beg you to reconsider your position.



bill91: That Tolkien intended one of the fundamental messages of LotR to be that only through grace can we be redeemed is beyond dispute. He said so, many times. He may well have wanted to express other ideas as well, and he may not have succeeded in expressing this one, but that he intended to is certain.


----------



## jester47 (Aug 17, 2004)

Storm Raven said:
			
		

> For Tolkien, that's the point - mortals can only be saved from the evil that Sauron represents by the grace of God. It is a statement driven by religious sentiment.




I thought what he was saying that the anti-hero is ussually far more capable than the hero.  Look at Gollum, hes despicable, hes greedy, and insane, but its his desire for the ring that ultimately saves the world.  The CLASSICAL idea of the hero is finding one so selfish that they cannot be stopped in their course.  Granted Gollum did it accidently, but the CLASSICAL (NOT MODERN) idea of the hero was just that.  They save as a course of being.  Today, its called the Anti-Hero.  

I think one of the messages of the new testament is that people want heroes that can kick ass and take names, but are also morally strong.  "If hes our hero, our messiah, why isn't he sticking it to the romans?"  Thats the problem.  Its very rare to have your cake and eat it too.  Killing, rape and getting things done are the realm of the morally weak because they do not care who they hurt in the course of what they have to do.  Gollum did not care.  All he wants is the ring, and he will do anything to get it.  Making him the ex-pyrosis of LotR.


----------



## jester47 (Aug 17, 2004)

Particle_Man said:
			
		

> If I accept that the Donaldson's "point" in the Thomas Covenant series was to show that a messiah (world saver) is different from a nice guy, or even from a minimally decent person, will you accept that I, and many other people, simply don't want to read about messiahs that rape people?  Even if we get the author's point?  Can you accept that I for one would think the world would be a better place if no one ever again writes a book about a messiah that rapes people?  Even if I get the author's point?  Frankly, some points are not worth making in novel form, IMHO.
> 
> Oh, and my own point about moral heroes predating American heroes only needs one pure knight to be made, even if we granted you Uther, etc.  And that knight was Sir Galahad, I believe.  Since tales of Sir Galahad predated the first American written novel or short story, there we go.  Moral Heroes existed before the American written novel or written short story, and hence before the American hero.
> 
> Also, I am relieved to see that Mallory's Lancelot did not rape Elaine; my glasses might be rose colored but I don't think my memory is so clouded that I would forget that Lancelot was a rapist.  But if you have a quote from Mallory in which Lancelot does rape Elaine, please feel free to share it.  I might be wrong on that point (but not on the point of a moral hero predating American heroes.




PMan, 

I think our argument is semantical.  I am saying that in our language and times, many past "heroes" are in our terms anti-heros.  I thought it was Percival that actually got the Grail?  I thought Galahad got close, but it was his son Percival that actually got it.  I could be remembering wrong.  But I think what Malory was saying was a sort of "no one that lived in egypt can live in the promised land" WRT the grail.  No one that was not born into the round table could recover the grail.  As Malory's Arthur is a commentary on the politics of his time he is basicly saying that England needed to get its crap together but none of those living are going to be able to appreciate the benefits of the peace they may or may not achieve, but rather their children born to peace.  

With the idea of an american-hero, I simply mean that the late classical to the modern era has been a transition from the capable hero to the moral hero.  We have a very different morality than that of the Classical peoples.  And our heros have evolved with it.  This evolution reached a point of the moral hero.  So looking back it is easy to spot the ones that conform to the realised moral hero.  Medieval Saints and Knights from Arthurian Romance fit the bill better than most others.  Percival/Galahad are simply the great grandfather of Superman.  They are part of the evolution of the Moral Hero.  Its evolved to the point where we hold our own soldiers to that almost-impossible-in-war-time standard.  While I do think there are some earlier examples of nations holding their soldiers to higher standards, our are bordering on the unrealistic.  Thus as the capable hero evolves into the moral hero, we open up the idea of the anti-hero as a place for all those "heroes" that no longer fit the bill.  

About Rape.

I don't condone rape.  However, I have been raised to understand its somthing that happens.  And as long as there is sex, sex will be used as a weapon.  Do I think that makes it alright?  No.  Does that mean I think it has no place in literature?  No, quite the contrary.  I think if we were more open about rape and about how it happens more often than not (an aqaintence, or person in a position of trust) we might be able to actually do somthing about it.  However, putting in the context of the protagonist causes problems as the question arises of weather the author condones it or not.  And I think that is the problem that most people have with TC.  The central character is comitting the act.  

When a protagonist commits such an act, I simply say, "ah we have an anti-hero then"  

In the end I guess I am saying that the anti-hero is a very old and can be a viable literary figure.  Is TC one.  I don't know.  

Mainly because we find the flawless hero boring, and the flawed hero a little more interesting.  Our interest peaks as we get closer to the reality of the anti-hero.  I'm not saying the moral hero is a modern development, but I will say that the American Hero is a subset of the Moral Hero and may be its perfection.  

But personally I think no one can be a moral hero if they kill, or rape, or carry out similar actions.  Its just not possible.  So heroes (modern) IMO range the gambit from almost anti to almost moral.  

Aaron.


----------



## ShadowX (Aug 18, 2004)

One thing I hate about Lord of the Rings is that so much is hidden in other books.  You ask a question about it and someone cites the Silmarillion or some of his personal letters.  Books should stand alone without any required research. 

BTW, Bartelby "prefered not to."


----------



## Aeric (Aug 18, 2004)

_Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn_ by Tad Williams is one of my all-time favorite fantasy trilogies, but the end of the story completely ruined it for me.  I was really looking forward to seeing how they would resolve the relationship between Simon and the princess, since they came from different social classes and therefore were forbidden to marry.  This was a source of so much dramatic angst over the course of the story, so I figured that the resolution had to be something fantastic.

In one of the last chapters of the third book (maybe even *the* last chapter, it's been a while), Simon wanders into the Hall of Kings where, lo and behold, he spies a statue that looks...just like him!  Turns out that the orphan Simon is a descendant of some king, and therefore marriage material for the princess.  Talk about contrived!  It totally felt as if the author was stuck for a resolution to this plot thread and, with deadline coming up, took the cheap and easy way out.  If it wasn't the end of the trilogy anyways, I would have put the book down and never picked it up again.  I felt ripped off.

He made up for it in _War of the Flowers_, though.  I really liked that book, especially the ending.


----------



## Umbran (Aug 18, 2004)

Aeric said:
			
		

> It totally felt as if the author was stuck for a resolution to this plot thread and, with deadline coming up, took the cheap and easy way out.




Except that the author had raised the question of Simon's parentage multiple times throughout the books.  He was waving the whole "I'm an orphan, and folks said odd things about my father" from book 1.  Having noted that, the ending came as no surprise to me.


----------



## Squire James (Aug 18, 2004)

Actually, I thought the end of the _Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn_ series was refreshingly different.  It was the _villains_ working against the odds to (almost) pull off the impossible!  There was a bit of surprise for the sake of surprise going on, perhaps, but not enough that I considered it a "contract violation".  People have a low tolerance for endgame plot twists in that sort of tale, I guess.


----------



## Aesmael (Aug 18, 2004)

Now that is puzzling, Aeric. wert (With Respect To - my word, I made it up  ) that part of M, S & T, the ending of War of the Flowers is almost identical. Just as easy to see coming too, but was no real disappointment for that  
I will say I enjoyed the ending of Memory, Sorry and Thorn for precisely the reasons Wizardru did not. It acted as a welcome counterpoint to the Tolkien clones I was beginning to weary of (although it itself is closer to the Lord of the Rings in this than they are). Yes, there was a prophecy, but it has been misinterpreted by the characters and, presumably the reader (I did). It is a complacency induced by (IMO, of course) the reading of too many other unimaginative fantasies to take those things at face value. Although I will boast that one part of the prophecy's phrasing was niggling at the back of mind while reading (or maybe it is my memory playing tricks to make me feel clever  )
Well, an opinion. I have never been any good at english or dissecting literature so...

If anything in that would constitute a spoiler I would appreciate advice on how to black out the text. As a glance to the left of the message will tell, I am inexperienced on this board.
teh teh teh teh


----------



## SableWyvern (Aug 18, 2004)

This talke of _Memory, Sorrow and Rose_ (which I have not read) reminds me of the last Feist book I read - _Prince of Krondor_, I believe, although I could be mistaken.

All through the book, we have several relatively new characters struggling and striving to oppose and defeat the great big bad things that seek death and destruction.

Then, at the end, all the old, godlike heroes from the earlier books rock up and kick some posterior. _Everything_ the central characters did throughout the entire novel is rendered irrelevant to the story's conclusion, as Pug and Co. suddenly appear and save the world without breaking a sweat.


----------



## WizarDru (Aug 18, 2004)

SableWyvern said:
			
		

> _Everything_ the central characters did throughout the entire novel is rendered irrelevant to the story's conclusion, as Pug and Co. suddenly appear and save the world without breaking a sweat.



 That sums up a lot of the problems I had with MS&T...most of the series was irrelevant.  Most of the major subplots ultimately were unimportant, other than to show that the heroes were a disorganized, desperate rabble.  Williams could have told his tale in far fewer words. His writing is good, or I wouldn't have finished the series, but he needed to be edited down considerably.  'To Green Angel Tower' could have been ONE book.

 As for not being 'Tolkein-esque'...I got many impressions from MS&T, but that wasn't one of them.  Are the Sithi anything but Tolkien's elves with the serial numbers rubbed off?  That's how I read them.  The Storm King felts very much like a slightly more vocal Sauron, to me.  There were other parallels, of course, but that neither hurt nor helped my enjoyment of the series.  

 I realize that Williams may have been trying to convey a certain message with the ending...I just didn't appreciate the execution.  

 This reviewer on sffworld sums up my feelings pretty well:


			
				Ben@sffworld said:
			
		

> _However, after the first book, this trend not only continues, but it intensifies.  A great deal of trouble and intense effort is put forth by a variety of characters and subplots that are doomed to simply end in the death of the primary characters.  Subplots leading to a smidgin of hope end up in ashes.  Major subplots which seem to be absolutely critical to the resolution of the story are thrown away or made worthless, and there is a great deal of unrequited suffering and pointless hope.
> 
> The worst comes at the end of the book, where the final resolution is perfectly in keeping with the above flaws.  Without spoiling all three books, which despite their flaws are monumentally well written and fun to read, I can say that the final climax in the third book was certainly unexpected and for me unsatisfying.  Given where all of the other subplots in the other books eventually lead to though, it should have been obvious what was going to happen.
> 
> In short, extraordinarily well written, with fantastic characters and a dark story where madness and death are frequent visitors.  Ultimately a few too many deaths, a few too many pointless subplots where primary characters are simply snuffed, and a very disappointing (for me) climax in keeping with the disappointing subplots._



_ 
_Oh, and minor pet peeve: the phrase is "Eat your cake and have it, too", not the other way around.  The point being that you want to eat your cake and enjoy it, and still have it after you've eaten it, without actually sacrificing the cake.


----------



## Desdichado (Aug 18, 2004)

ShadowX said:
			
		

> One thing I hate about Lord of the Rings is that so much is hidden in other books.  You ask a question about it and someone cites the Silmarillion or some of his personal letters.  Books should stand alone without any required research.



They do stand alone quite well.  The reason people quote ancillary books is because they're anal Tolkien fans.  Very few other authors would have anyone _care_ to read their letters or rough drafts, but to a large group of Tolkien fans (myself included) that's part of the fun.


----------



## Umbran (Aug 18, 2004)

Aesmael said:
			
		

> If anything in that would constitute a spoiler I would appreciate advice on how to black out the text.




There's two basic ways to accomplish this task.  

In the post-editing window, there's a bunch of formatting buttons - one for *bold*, one for _italics_, one for underline, and so on.  One of those buttons says, "Hide Text" in small letters.  Use your mouse to highlight the text you wish to hide, then click the hide text button.

Or, if you like brute force, you can simply enclose the text between spoiler tags, thusly:

{spoiler}This text will be in black{/spoiler}

But use square brackets [, rather than curly brackets {.


----------



## Hypersmurf (Aug 18, 2004)

Umbran said:
			
		

> {spoiler}This text will be in black{/spoiler}
> 
> But use square brackets [, rather than curly brackets {.




[spoiler]Like this.[/spoiler]

-Hyp.


----------



## Aesmael (Aug 18, 2004)

Thanks for the advice. 



Spoiler



Let's see if I understand how it works


Wizardru (love the avatar, btw), was the remark about it being Tolkienesque in response to what I posted? If it was I think you may have misunderstood me. I meant that it is more like The Lord of the Rings than most of those other books commonly called Tolkien clones (perhaps I should have put the term in quote marks). In the parts you pointed out, yes, but especially in the resolution of the story. Those are the only two I can think of offhand with an ending like that.



Spoiler



I.e. the expected hero does not in the end complete the quest. Hey, this is fun!


----------



## cignus_pfaccari (Aug 19, 2004)

WizarDru said:
			
		

> That sums up a lot of the problems I had with MS&T...most of the series was irrelevant.  Most of the major subplots ultimately were unimportant, other than to show that the heroes were a disorganized, desperate rabble.  Williams could have told his tale in far fewer words. His writing is good, or I wouldn't have finished the series, but he needed to be edited down considerably.  'To Green Angel Tower' could have been ONE book.




Part of Williams' schtick is that his primary character is going to spend much of his time wandering around lost.  Every book of his that I've read (from Tailchaser's Song, MS&T, Otherworld, and War of the Flowers) has had that happen.

Brad


----------



## WizarDru (Aug 19, 2004)

Aesmael said:
			
		

> Wizardru (love the avatar, btw), was the remark about it being Tolkienesque in response to what I posted? If it was I think you may have misunderstood me. I meant that it is more like The Lord of the Rings than most of those other books commonly called Tolkien clones (perhaps I should have put the term in quote marks). In the parts you pointed out, yes, but especially in the resolution of the story. Those are the only two I can think of offhand with an ending like that.



 Puppet Angel is teh funney. 

 Sorry if I misunderstood you.  I agree that MS&T is certainly more like Tolkien in many regards, and in a positive way.  I enjoyed Williams writing (although I think he got long in the tooth, just like Jordan...at least I know when Tolkien did it, he was emulating a specific style, not lacking an editor).   I'm not an adovcate of reading a series all the way through, just to say I've finished a book...if I'm not enjoying it, I put it down.  So the fact that I finished the series (and that's a lot of pages) should be an indication that while I found the ending unsatisfying, I can understand how others might find it to be a good choice.

 And quite honestly, it's been over a decade since I've read the books, so I might change my mind if I read them again.  But at the rate I currently read, I'm not sure I'll ever get back to them.  Right now, I'm about to start Robin Hobb's "Assassin's Quest", and then I'll skip over to read Kim Newman's "Judgement of Tears" (Anno Dracula 1959).  And then?  Who knows.


----------



## Nellisir (Aug 21, 2004)

WizarDru said:
			
		

> But at the rate I currently read, I'm not sure I'll ever get back to them.  Right now, I'm about to start Robin Hobb's "Assassin's Quest",




Oo, that trilogy was one I *thought* broke the contract.

Quasi-spoiler alert 


Spoiler



See, I like series that resolve (and not to point and laugh, but I never read past book one of WoT.  I could see where that series wasn't going....namely, to an ending), and that one just sort of...ended.  He wasn't happy.  Things weren't perfect.  It was not a suitable ending.  But after a side sojourn with the Liveship Traders trilogy, she returned to the Farseers with Golden Fool, and lo, all was made well.  Contract restored.



Haven't read it in awhile, but the Drinker of Souls trilogy by Jo Clayton.  Drinker of Souls is a great fantasy book.  It's cool.  It's got magic.  



Spoiler



And then an astronaut falls through dimensions and hangs around for the next two books (Blue Magic and A Gathering of Stones).  It was annoying.



I read Thomas Covenant, and frankly, hated it for reasons already stated by others.  I don't even remember the rape scene -- the MAIN character was just too boring and whiny.

But it was a long time ago.
Cheers
Nell.


----------



## ledded (Aug 24, 2004)

Breaking that contract is not *always* bad.


George R.R. Martin showed me that.

Standard Fantasy book contract:  The Good Guys will be good.  The Bad Guys bad.  While one may tread towards the other side now and then, there will be, for the most part, some sort of line.  Great characters will be introduced, liked, invested emotionally in, then stay around through suffering and triumph, to stick it to the Bad Guys in a Big Climax.

Martin breaks many of these molds.  Good Guys are not always good.  Wonderful characters will be loved, cherished, invested in, then die ignobly.  Bad Guys are not always bad, and often turn out better than the Good Guys, or at best, merely cast in the light of misunderstanding.

I know a lot of folks aren't Martin fans but I do thank him for not following the formulae, and at worst writing an interesting series of fantasy books.


----------



## WizarDru (Aug 24, 2004)

ledded said:
			
		

> Breaking that contract is not *always* bad.
> 
> 
> George R.R. Martin showed me that.



 But I don't see that as a contract violation.  GRRM illustrates pretty clearly from the beginning that things aren't going to be nice, cut and dried or follow the classic fantasy tropes.  The minute that 



Spoiler



Jamie, having been caught in the act of incest with his sister, throws the young Stark heir to his near death


, you know that things aren't going to follow your classic gig.  That doesn't mean he doesn't kick you in the junk...but since there is no central viewpoint character, it's much harder to say that he's breaking the contract with you.  It's clear from fairly early on that he's not writing the classic 'young boy discovers he has powers, rises from tragedy into his own and then defeats the great evil' story, although there are elements of that to be found within it.

 Contrast that with over 2000 pages worth of believing that you're reading one thing, and then having the rug yanked out from underneath you at the very end.  The former says "_fasten your seatbelts_", while the second says "_Ha! Made you look!_"  :\


----------



## ledded (Aug 24, 2004)

WizarDru said:
			
		

> But I don't see that as a contract violation. GRRM illustrates pretty clearly from the beginning that things aren't going to be nice, cut and dried or follow the classic fantasy tropes. The minute that
> 
> 
> 
> ...



While I recognize that we're really talking about two things, I still saw the part where 



Spoiler



Jamie, having been caught in the act of incest with his sister, throws the young Stark heir to his near death, along with the Stark's abject dislike of him, set him up as a very dastardly bad guy, until a later book where you soon realize that he is not so 'bad' or inhuman, but possibly even made that decision in a point of panic or merely because he is not entirely evil, just flawed. You know, a person. I get the feeling by the end of the last book that he has been entirely misread by everyone who knows him/knows of him, and that while he has done grand and terrible things, they are mostly no less terrible than things done by almost every other character in the books (with some exceptions, of course), only made so much worse or grander by the hype surrounding him


. So to me, that is one of the good examples of what I was saying. Only the next book will hold whether that is actually true or not.



			
				WizarDru said:
			
		

> That doesn't mean he doesn't kick you in the junk...but since there is no central viewpoint character, it's much harder to say that he's breaking the contract with you.



I disagree *just* a little... I felt that Ed Stark and subsequently his Children were the central characters, especially Ed, until the end of the first book. That is when I realized, truly, that Martin was not playing around. But the buildup during the first half of the first book looked very much like a small set of very likable characters were going to drive the story throughout the series. 




			
				WizarDru said:
			
		

> It's clear from fairly early on that he's not writing the classic 'young boy discovers he has powers, rises from tragedy into his own and then defeats the great evil' story, although there are elements of that to be found within it.



Oh, it started becoming obvious it was different, but again the end of the first book was what truly punctuated that for me, made me realize completely that I was reading something _entirely different_. After wading through so much fantasy cliche, here was a guy who was not afraid to have the story be driven by _the story_, not the characters, which is something that the long-standing tradition of protagonist/antagonist in fantasy literature has not very often done in quite that complete of a manner, or at least in one that didnt seem disjointed and fragmentary, IMO. Don't get me wrong, I have often enjoyed well done stories of a hero or heros who, while maybe flawed, struggle against impossible odds while growing and making mistakes, etc. 

You don't cheer for heroes or boo bad guys in Martin's book. You grab onto the story and try to hold on while it twists and turns and tries to throw you off.



			
				WizarDru said:
			
		

> Contrast that with over 2000 pages worth of believing that you're reading one thing, and then having the rug yanked out from underneath you at the very end. The former says "_fasten your seatbelts_", while the second says "_Ha! Made you look!_" :\



Oh, I agree, though I still say it as a nicely done break away from the typical fantasy novel. However, it's pretty obvious in the first book that it is not the typical fantasy novel. I guess I'm not very bright , because it took me most of the first novel to figure out just how different it was going to be.


----------



## starkad (Aug 24, 2004)

Robert Jordan.

First 3 books were great. 4th book was eh. 5th-8th sucked, 9th made me perk up, but 10th was trash. Now I won't even bother with the series anymore.


----------



## Warrior Poet (Aug 27, 2004)

Severion said:
			
		

> ... The last was the re-release of the Elric Saga by WW where a major charecter (Moonglum) was written out ...




As you noted, this ... this is just wrong ...

 

Warrior Poet


----------



## Warrior Poet (Aug 27, 2004)

Severion said:
			
		

> ... The last was the re-release of the Elric Saga by WW where a major charecter (Moonglum) was written out ...




As you noted, this ... this is just wrong.

In fact, something the rogue himself said serves as a great commentary on that: "Ah, no! Elric, I had not expected this!"

 

Warriot Poet


----------



## Warrior Poet (Aug 27, 2004)

OK!  Who left the door open so the double post could wander in?

... oh ...

... right ... sorry.   

(How embarrasing)

Warrior Poet


----------



## Warrior Poet (Aug 27, 2004)

Cthulhu's Librarian said:
			
		

> Moorcock made the decision. He has a habit of tweaking his books when they are rereleased, and for this release, he wrote new sections connecting the novels, changed the order of a few things, and rewrote a few things. Sort of like George Lucas.
> 
> If you look at the different editions of almost any of Moorcocks books, especially between the US & UK editions, there are small changes all over the place. This time, he made a few bigger changes, probably for the worse.




Ah, I had not yet reached this part of the thread when I posted just moments ago.

I hadn't realized Moorcock had authorized such a change.

Still, it makes me sad.  Moonglum was a wonderful foil and charge for Elric, a delightful character to have along for (part of) the ride in a series that was, in many ways, such a triumph of strange fantasy storytelling.

Still, if Moorcock gave it the o.k., well, there's not much to be done, I suppose.  Perhaps Moorcock himself struggles much with Chaos and its incarnations, and his works reflect that ...

"... still would've left Moonglum in, were it my choice, though," he said, trying not to grumble too loudly.

 

Warrior Poet


----------



## WizarDru (Aug 27, 2004)

ledded said:
			
		

> I disagree *just* a little... I felt that Ed Stark and subsequently his Children were the central characters, especially Ed, until the end of the first book. That is when I realized, truly, that Martin was not playing around. But the buildup during the first half of the first book looked very much like a small set of very likable characters were going to drive the story throughout the series.



 That's a pretty reasonable point, actually.  It really does sort of start of that way, doesn't it?  Of course, then things go all to hell, but until that point, I could see how someone might find that as a contract violation.  It's certainly no failing on the reader's part....in point of fact, I think it was GRRM's intention.  After all, 



Spoiler



when Ned Stark is killed


 , it hits you like a ton of bricks.  "_That's NOT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN!_", you think to yourself.  The same is true of the third book's  



Spoiler



Horrific "_Red Wedding"_


, which made me put down the book, I was so distraught.



			
				ledded said:
			
		

> You don't cheer for heroes or boo bad guys in Martin's book. You grab onto the story and try to hold on while it twists and turns and tries to throw you off.



You ain't just whistlin' dixie, brother.


----------



## AdmundfortGeographer (Aug 28, 2004)

Resurrecting a nearly dead horse to beat some more. Regarding Thomas Covenent. I loved the books, but for me, before I ever read the series, I picked up an art anthology called _Realms of Fantasy_. It has various artists interpretations of what particular portions of  "The Land" looked like, interspersed with commentary about the books.

Right away, the commentary noted that Thomas Covenent was a different anti-hero surrounded by real heroes. Especially with regards to Donaldson's experience with lepers while in India influencing his choice of making the point-of-view character a leper. With this commentary about the character in mind, I grabbed the books.  I can understand how folks wouldn't like the trilogies going into the books cold. For me, I was under no assumptions about what Thomas Covenent would be like in the books.  Yeah, his complaining got tiring into the second trilogy. 

To bring this back on point: For me, the second trilogy verged on breaking the contract because it so felt like Donaldson was just trying to "break" his world, like Weis in Hickman did with Dragons of Summer Flame.

Speaking unconventional heroes, I heartily recommend reading the Icelandic Sagas.  Filled with drunk, violent, authority-hating, average-Joes... er... average-Olafs. Each story starts up right in the middle of what's going on, and often ends anti-climactically. Totally breaks the contract! Oh, wait... There was no implied "contract" back then... Gosh dern Snorri Sturluson! 

But if you have a hard time reading Tolkien, don't bother with Icelandic Sagas unless it is one filled with footnotes explaining kennings and other meanings.  And a thick dictionary handy because so many archaic words are used. I partly expected to read them as novels after hearing for so long how much influence the sagas had on the development of the modern novel, doing so will give a unprepared reader the sense of the "broken contract". Knowing ahead of time just what you are getting when you pick something up, like anything, is important to the sense of whether the author is breaking the contract.


Regards,
Eric Anondson


----------



## Naxuul (Aug 30, 2004)

I have two book series I can think of that broke the contract. But not for the normal reasons most people had, these two broke it because they diverged from the main theme of the original series to seemingly become exploration of creepy masturbatory fantasy time. Note that this will contain some spoilers for the Wheel of Time and Hannibal.

First is Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. I could deal with it not having a end in sight, a fantasy novel can just be a cashcow as long as it is a fun read. Not necessarily a good read, but something fun enough that I would read it on a road trip. In the last three or four books of the series I felt like the corny fantasy romp about the duality of sexes, along with enough Duneisms to choke a horse, slowly devolved into a very creepy place of mysogynistic sex values. It's like if a corny bad teen drama started splicing in the Spice channel in the latter half of the series.

Rand's constant sextastic polyamory storyline, the repeating descriptions of women's clothes and bath cycles, Matt going from trickster boy to oversexed fratboy with no explanation, the constant allusions to Green Aes Sedai having whole hosts of Warders who are either young pretty boys or older rugged types that they sex up constantly. But the straw that broke the camel's back was when all the evil females got raped and sex slaved by the main male villain and then Jordan constantly pointing out the giant jumblies on one of the female villain's new raped sex slave body. I just can't read another one of his books if it has one of those 'author masturbating next to you' feeling scenes.

The other series is the Red Dragon/Silence of the Lambs/Hannibal series.. which was great up until Hannibal. Instead of being a realistic depiction of violent insanity, psychology and murder.. I felt like it was a book of the writer going out of his way to Mary Sue the title character, giving him gobs of plot immunity and all his wildest dreams coming true.. without one bit of consequence either.

What was especially disturbing is that the violence of the previous books, which was clinical in it's nastiness and unrelenting in it's lack of sympathy or humanity, was completely changed. The violence was now Hannibal winning. Something the reader should be proud of, cheer on and hope for. I don't know why but the whole thing had a distinctly sexual tint to it, especially around the end where it was definitively sexual. I could only read another novel by the author if I was assured there were no Mary Sueish characters.

If I tried hard I could probably think of several other series of books I felt broke the contract, but those would be minor infractions to the slaps in the face of the above.

-Naxuul


----------



## Rhialto (Aug 30, 2004)

I just have to ask on the whole Elric/Moonglum thing--why'd Moorcock do it?  Does it work?  Could you give me a link to where you found out about this?

I'm just puzzled mind you.  I always thought Moorcock loved Moonglum (who is when you get down to it, a bit of a self-portrait).  I mean, he even showed up in the Multiverse comic he did a while back...

(Also may I state that this is the ONLY place I've read about this.  I cannot find a single reference to this anywhere else.  Not on the Moorcock fansites--not anywhere.  So really--I want some confirmation...)


----------

