The Book Thread

[Ionathus]

It's related to your point, because the argument went that the problem with unsystemised magic in fiction is that it can easily end-up a deus ex machina but the only specific thing mentioned was Silver Age Superman. To wit: if this is a noticeable problem with unsystemised magic, then you'd expect arguments in favour of systemised magic would be able to present specific examples of this. Which they don't.

I brought it up not because I'm challenging you to compile a list (and even if I was, I'm just some faceless nobody on the internet; you don't owe me homework), but to highlight an issue with this 'avoiding the deus ex machina' argument. Because I've run into formulations of this argument repeatedly over the last couple of decades and they consistently do not have examples of this 'common problem' of unsystemised magic.

Yep. Even if the rules of magic are uncertain, the rules of drama are still the same. Even a story with a hazily-defined magic system needs to tell a satisfying sequence of events, resolving conflicts in ways that don't feel like a cop-out. The lack of definition doesn't prevent that.

[Batcathat]

The thing everyone forgets about "The Colour of Magic and Light Fantastic aren't as good as his later works" is that "his later works" are some of the greatest pieces of fiction ever written. "Not as good as Hogfather" isn't a sin!

Very true, even the worst Pratchett is certainly better than a lot of authors. And yeah, Hogfather is pretty damn good, the reason I mention Death as my favorite sub-series is probably like 60 percent thanks to that particular book.

Yep. Even if the rules of magic are uncertain, the rules of drama are still the same. Even a story with a hazily-defined magic system needs to tell a satisfying sequence of events, resolving conflicts in ways that don't feel like a cop-out. The lack of definition doesn't prevent that.

Sure, there are obviously lots of works with undefined magic without a trace of Deus Ex Machina as well as the opposite (for example, the bending in the Avatarverse is fairly well defined, but that didn't stop the Deus Ex Turtle which I hate with the power of a thousand exploding firebenders...), but I'm still convinced that "magic does whatever" leaves more room for lazy resolution by authors than "magic does X, Y and Z".

[warty goblin]

Sure, there are obviously lots of works with undefined magic without a trace of Deus Ex Machina and as well as the opposite (for example, the bending in the Avatarverse is fairly well defined, but that didn't stop the Deus Ex Turtle which I hate with the power of a thousand exploding firebenders...), but I'm still convinced that "magic does whatever" leaves more room for lazy resolution by authors than "magic does X, Y and Z".

Sure less defined magic has more potential for lazy resolution, but mostly because it has more potential for almost everything. Really the only thing that it can't do is the clever use of very specific pre-defined abilities plot. Since I think this is mostly just hard sci-fi warmed over into something safe for superheroes and authors who are bad at math, that's a loss I don't mind.

But what is gained is a gloriously rich universe of metaphor and feeling and WTF moments. Personally I love a good solid WTF moment, what it loses in plot cohesion it more than gains in getting me invested in seeing what lunatic thing the author will think of next. Elizabeth Haydon' Symphony of Ages books are full of these, for instance the bit where the protagonists spend six hundred years or so walking along a giant tree root that runs through the core of the planet, the time a side character's innards turn into an evil plant, or weaponizing what is basically Moria's sewage system against a dragon.

[Rynjin]

The issue is for every good/funny WTF moment like "bathwater dildo" in a series, 10 other different series just feel floaty and weird all the way through, like nothing really matters.

Not due to any particular Deus Ex machina moment but just because I have no idea what anybody can actually do at any given time. It usually manifests in the opposite, actually, where a character suddenly CAN'T do something because the plot would be ruined if they could...but there's not real reason for WHY they can't do i when they were able to do all this other stuff earlier. What do you MEAN you can't heal a gunshot wound, "Doctor" Strange?

I like a good undefined magic system but it requires the author to overall be MUCH better at writing to pull off a satisfying story.

[Ionathus]

The issue is for every good/funny WTF moment like "bathwater dildo" in a series, 10 other different series just feel floaty and weird all the way through, like nothing really matters.

I mean, that's just Sturgeon's Law. There are great and terrible examples of books with both defined and undefined magic systems, no argument there. Unless you think that ratio is unique to this one fantasy subgenre?

Not due to any particular Deus Ex machina moment but just because I have no idea what anybody can actually do at any given time. It usually manifests in the opposite, actually, where a character suddenly CAN'T do something because the plot would be ruined if they could...but there's not real reason for WHY they can't do i when they were able to do all this other stuff earlier. What do you MEAN you can't heal a gunshot wound, "Doctor" Strange?

In any good book, the audience should have a clear picture of who's the strongest, the smartest, the most charismatic. Whether or not your spells are prepackaged with distinct power levels and number of uses doesn't really affect that. An author can demonstrate every bit of info the audience needs to follow the action, simply by the way characters react and interact with each other in each scene.

If you need more explicit details than that to feel immersed in a story, no judgment from me, but that's edging into "personal preference" territory.

I like a good undefined magic system but it requires the author to overall be MUCH better at writing to pull off a satisfying story.

This is true for the reverse too, though: you need to be very good at writing to pull off a defined magic system, because otherwise you'll use it as a crutch. People like learning the rules and limitations of a fantasy system, so if your writing is shaky you can usually pad your story with long explanations of how your magic system works, and that will build investment in your audience because it's easy worldbuilding. Throw in a few cool interactions you thought of and you can resolve the plot entirely on the strength of the magic system and create a feeling among readers that you gave a satisfying resolution because all the pieces technically fit together...even though you didn't really do any serious work with the characters or themes or writing.

[GloatingSwine]

Sure, there are obviously lots of works with undefined magic without a trace of Deus Ex Machina as well as the opposite (for example, the bending in the Avatarverse is fairly well defined, but that didn't stop the Deus Ex Turtle which I hate with the power of a thousand exploding firebenders...), but I'm still convinced that "magic does whatever" leaves more room for lazy resolution by authors than "magic does X, Y and Z".

Yeah, vaguely defined magic is good for causing problems, it's not so good for fixing them because the reader doesn't get the satisfaction of understanding how and why it worked (or being able to guess at what might happen on the next page).

See: The One Ring. What it really does and how is very vaguely defined, and that's okay because how to break it is very clearly defined and breaking it is how you solve the problem.

[Batcathat]

Whether or not your spells are prepackaged with distinct power levels and number of uses doesn't really affect that. An author can demonstrate every bit of info the audience needs to follow the action, simply by the way characters react and interact with each other in each scene.

I know this wasn't aimed at me, but I want to underscore that to me at least, something like "prepackaged spells with distinct power levels and number of uses" is very far from what I'm looking for in a magic system. Something like D&D magic is just a very undefined magic system (while it's usually very clear what an individual spell can do, what magic in general can or can't do and how hard it is to do it is basically "whatever the designer feels like") hiding under a layer of complexity.

[Sapphire Guard]

Seems like an arbitrary distinction. If something unexpected happens, you need to have a reason why the characters didn't expect it. Goes for all magic systems, no matter how well defined the rules are.

The person who did the most story breaking use of a magic system I've seen was actually Brandon Sanderson. It didn't break the rules of the magic system, but it did break the story, because you were left instantly wondering 'why not do that again?'

Spoiler: wheel of time

Show

volcano trick

[Mechalich]

Seems like an arbitrary distinction. If something unexpected happens, you need to have a reason why the characters didn't expect it. Goes for all magic systems, no matter how well defined the rules are.

D&D style magic has reasonably complete rules for practices, but essentially no underlying theory. 'What D&D magic can do?' is just 'anything the author can imagine,' because even if there's no existing spell to do that, spell research and the endless proliferation of splat books means a new one can just be made up. As a result how spellcasters act and the forms of magic are bounded a certain way, but magic can do anything the story needs it to do.

A key issue with magic systems is bounding the overall power of the system, regardless of whether there's a hard or soft underlying construction. Significantly, as overall power increases the distinction between the two systems breaks down anyway, because even a reasonably well-defined power like 'super strength' when cranked up to nigh-infinite proportions, transforms into 'do anything' anyway (see Hulk, the for all the examples you could ask for).

[warty goblin]

The issue is for every good/funny WTF moment like "bathwater dildo" in a series, 10 other different series just feel floaty and weird all the way through, like nothing really matters.

Not due to any particular Deus Ex machina moment but just because I have no idea what anybody can actually do at any given time. It usually manifests in the opposite, actually, where a character suddenly CAN'T do something because the plot would be ruined if they could...but there's not real reason for WHY they can't do i when they were able to do all this other stuff earlier. What do you MEAN you can't heal a gunshot wound, "Doctor" Strange?

I like a good undefined magic system but it requires the author to overall be MUCH better at writing to pull off a satisfying story.

Eh, I find I'm less interested in failure modes than the successes. Like, for somebody writing a book how their particular approach can fail very much matters, but I'm not writing the thing, I'm reading it. All that I really care about is if it's worth reading or not. If it isn't, I'm going to stop reading it, so the sins of the rest of the series don't really matter.


In some ways a sort of flaccid, predictable success is even worse. I'll stop reading something genuinely bad, something really good will grab me, a partial failure or something else inexplicable can be fascinating, but what I really truly find the most disappointing is a sort of B+ there's nothing really wrong with it act of marginally sufficient competence. To pick on Book of Shadows from my year end list, structurally and thematically and plot wise the book works fine. But there's no surprises - all the twists occur when you think they will and are carefully foreshadowed so they aren't plot holes - nothing shocking, or memorable, or even trashy fun. It has themes and everything, but they're extremely obvious and so on the nose you can't miss them or use them as a reflection tool, but it also doesn't go over the top hard with them until it makes it into camp or satire or surrealist absurdity. The only memorable thing about the book was how completely unmemorable it is. I hate that.

[Ionathus]

In some ways a sort of flaccid, predictable success is even worse. I'll stop reading something genuinely bad, something really good will grab me, a partial failure or something else inexplicable can be fascinating, but what I really truly find the most disappointing is a sort of B+ there's nothing really wrong with it act of marginally sufficient competence. To pick on Book of Shadows from my year end list, structurally and thematically and plot wise the book works fine. But there's no surprises - all the twists occur when you think they will and are carefully foreshadowed so they aren't plot holes - nothing shocking, or memorable, or even trashy fun. It has themes and everything, but they're extremely obvious and so on the nose you can't miss them or use them as a reflection tool, but it also doesn't go over the top hard with them until it makes it into camp or satire or surrealist absurdity. The only memorable thing about the book was how completely unmemorable it is. I hate that.

Interesting! I feel it's rare for me to come across this kind of book lately -- probably because I only read books that were strongly recommended by close friends and thus are heavily vetted for my interests. Hard to think of the last one that felt this way for me...maybe Neverwhere a few years back.

I've definitely hate-read a series or two recently, both out of a hope that it would stick the landing and also a bit of morbid fascination to see how deep the rabbit hole went. The Scythe series started out decent-to-promising but by the end I was definitely just reading that one for the baffling logical leaps and slapdash plotting. I think "entertainingly bad" is almost always gonna be better to read or watch than the totally bland stuff.

[LibraryOgre]

Back to Brust's "Baron of Magister Valley", which I'd put down for a week or so. It's one of his Paarfi books, and I am endlessly entertained by Paarfi's language... three paragraphs explaining that he's not going to waste anyone's time by explaining this thing any further.

[Ionathus]

I finished The Echo Wife last night and it did not end up where I was expecting. The pulpy premise (estranged husband clones a more subservient version of his wife, then dies) quickly turns into a dark and tense character drama, and it focuses heavily on abuse, trauma, and parent-child relationships. I would recommend it if you can stomach the subject matter, but don't go in expecting a fun speculative sci-fi story.

Scattered thoughts:

• I like how the main character is allowed to be kind of a ****head the whole book. Lots of books wimp out on this, but Evelyn stays a deeply flawed person while remaining sympathetic. All of her reactions feel believable and relatable.
• In general the pacing and dialogue is good. Some of the introspection was a little heavy-handed, but never got to full eye-roll territory.
• I like how the sci-fi premise is taken to its logical conclusion and really mined for its full potential. I feel like it's rare to see a book commit fully to a single core "question," and this book kept that focus beautifully.
• It also didn't get distracted by all the boring clichés of clone stories -- there was no "which of us is the real one" BS, nor were there any tired "shoot her, she's the clone" or "but what even IS identity, ya know???" scenes.
• The character dynamic between Evelyn and Martine is excellent, for a number of reasons both obvious and spoilery. Probably the most rewarding part of the book for me is Evelyn observing and comparing herself to Martine.
• The worldbuilding left me with a few nagging questions. The story talks us through the mechanics of clone conditioning so it can get us to the juicy parallels, but because it fixates on those mechanics, I need them to feel a little more fleshed out than they are. Case in point: they talk about implanting very specific and detailed memories in a clone as if that's possible with basically-modern technology and the real world just hasn't figured out the process, which is so laughable as to pull me out of the story.

[warty goblin]

Finished the Elak of Atlantis stories. These are really fun if you enjoy 90 year old pulp sword and sorcery. Very fast moving, lots of action and strange peril and just general stuff going down. They're very short and simply written, but paradoxically almost slower reads because you can't skim read any of it.

(One of the major reasons I suspect the word count in fantasy novels has ballooned over the last 30 years or so is the triplex emphases on originality, detail and show don't tell. Your old pulp story could do a huge amount in a very small page count because they very often used a sort of common setting which simply told the audience most of the background info right off the bat. If you're on Mars, it's dry, dying and decadent. That gets a huge amount of exposition out pf the way in a word, and then the author is generally content to let a lot of things ride on suggestion and implication. Now you can't do that, every series needs to have its own magic system and world and it all need to be described in detail but it has to be show not told so here's some schmuck explaining food imports for four paragraphs instead of the author just saying "With the besiegers blocking the roads,, food started to run short.")

[Mechalich]

(One of the major reasons I suspect the word count in fantasy novels has ballooned over the last 30 years or so is the triplex emphases on originality, detail and show don't tell. Your old pulp story could do a huge amount in a very small page count because they very often used a sort of common setting which simply told the audience most of the background info right off the bat. If you're on Mars, it's dry, dying and decadent. That gets a huge amount of exposition out pf the way in a word, and then the author is generally content to let a lot of things ride on suggestion and implication. Now you can't do that, every series needs to have its own magic system and world and it all need to be described in detail but it has to be show not told so here's some schmuck explaining food imports for four paragraphs instead of the author just saying "With the besiegers blocking the roads,, food started to run short.")

This sort of thing also has to do with technological change. In the 19th century major novels tended to be immense - because they were published serially a few thousand words at a time over the course of many months or even years (Dickens and Dumas being major proponents of this approach). In the early 20th century this changed and novels moved to a shorter format because there were limits to editing capabilities and the size of a book that could be effectively printed in a mass-market format was also limited leading to many longer series being split apart into a huge number of thin little paperbacks (if you've ever seen the old white-bordered Narnia editions that's a good idea of the common scale). It's only in the last 30 years that producing these giant doorstoppers in any sort of reasonable timeframe even became possible due to shifts in technology like the word processor and modern printing technology that allows for thousand-page paperbacks to be output en masse. This had made shoveling huge quantities of material out the door possible in a way that was never doable before. This has perhaps reached its most extreme expression in East Asian webnovels, some of which run to thousands of chapters and over ten million words.

[Eldan]

I would suggest the equivalent of a Dickens or a Dumas today is the web novel. (I remember when some of the more famous ones considered traditional publishing and calculated that even if they got an editor (which some of them sorely need) to cut about 50% of the content, they'd still have to print 20-30 books.)

[Ionathus]

Finished the audiobook of As You Wish - the Princess Bride memoir written by Cary Elwes. Very lighthearted and fun, Cary narrates it himself which is nice because the man's got a soothing voice, and it had plenty of fun stories and little details. My favorite one is that Cary Elwes spent most of the shooting schedule with a broken toe after injuring himself on Andre the Giant's ATV

I'd say there were no great insights and maybe too much self-congratulation from Cary and the other cast members who contributed. It reads kind of like an overlong victory lap at times, but everyone is so earnest and goodwilled about the whole thing and there's not a single second of meanspiritedness or ego which really lightens up the experience. A light snack of a book, nice to read for anyone who liked the movie.

(One of the major reasons I suspect the word count in fantasy novels has ballooned over the last 30 years or so is the triplex emphases on originality, detail and show don't tell. Your old pulp story could do a huge amount in a very small page count because they very often used a sort of common setting which simply told the audience most of the background info right off the bat. If you're on Mars, it's dry, dying and decadent. That gets a huge amount of exposition out pf the way in a word, and then the author is generally content to let a lot of things ride on suggestion and implication. Now you can't do that, every series needs to have its own magic system and world and it all need to be described in detail but it has to be show not told so here's some schmuck explaining food imports for four paragraphs instead of the author just saying "With the besiegers blocking the roads,, food started to run short.")

Isn't the bolded part...the opposite of show-don't-tell? Like, having a character spend paragraphs explaining something is definitely telling.

Overall I agree though. I don't need to know the logistics of how your cybergovernment micromanages their robot mailpeople or whatever. Just give me enough aesthetics that I can fill in the gaps for myself, and then we can cut straight to the romance/war epic between the android mailman and his star-crossed alien lover.

[Psyren]

I just finished an audiobook on the history of D&D leading up to 5e (Of Dice And Men by David Ewalt) and it was really fascinating. I'm definitely craving more geekdom documentary style content like that I can listen to while grinding in Diablo or working on presentations

[Rynjin]

I just finished an audiobook on the history of D&D leading up to 5e (Of Dice And Men by David Ewalt) and it was really fascinating. I'm definitely craving more geekdom documentary style content like that I can listen to while grinding in Diablo or working on presentations

A bit off-topic for the thread since it's not a book, but SFDebris puts out really good "documentary" style material every now and then. He did what is basically a biography of George Lucas that was solid (this 12 episode "Hero's Journey" series is followed up with a Hermit's Journey and Shadow's Journey), a history of the comics industry, and a few that are started but not finished yet like a rundown of The Hulk's entire comics run (with a special emphasis on how each different writer interprets the character very differently) and a dual history of D&D (starting with the very first wargames in the late 19th century and the boardgame boom of the 60s) and Wizards of the Coast/Magic the Gathering.

[Psyren]

A bit off-topic for the thread since it's not a book, but SFDebris puts out really good "documentary" style material every now and then. He did what is basically a biography of George Lucas that was solid (this 12 episode "Hero's Journey" series is followed up with a Hermit's Journey and Shadow's Journey), a history of the comics industry, and a few that are started but not finished yet like a rundown of The Hulk's entire comics run (with a special emphasis on how each different writer interprets the character very differently) and a dual history of D&D (starting with the very first wargames in the late 19th century and the boardgame boom of the 60s) and Wizards of the Coast/Magic the Gathering.

Thanks! I'll look into those, especially the last two.

[theangelJean]

One of the major reasons I suspect the word count in fantasy novels has ballooned over the last 30 years or so is the triplex emphases on originality, detail and show don't tell. Your old pulp story could do a huge amount in a very small page count because they very often used a sort of common setting which simply told the audience most of the background info right off the bat. If you're on Mars, it's dry, dying and decadent. That gets a huge amount of exposition out pf the way in a word, and then the author is generally content to let a lot of things ride on suggestion and implication. Now you can't do that, every series needs to have its own magic system and world and it all need to be described in detail but it has to be show not told so here's some schmuck explaining food imports for four paragraphs instead of the author just saying "With the besiegers blocking the roads,, food started to run short.

That "common setting" makes me wonder. How much of it relies on assumed knowledge among the readership? "Mars, dry, dying and decadent" brings certain images to mind - how many of them were part of the cultural consciousness at the time? Some of them, at least, would have piggybacked off existing science fiction settings. Were those settings themselves richly described in there books, or did they rely on visual media, or maybe stereotypes of far-off places? Maybe I'm getting too much into memetics here, as I can't dissect the words themselves from all the associated images. It's just interesting to examine where they originate.

[warty goblin]

Isn't the bolded part...the opposite of show-don't-tell? Like, having a character spend paragraphs explaining something is definitely telling.

We usually you'd do ot as a discussion where three or four characters hash out what the problem is and why X, Y or Z doesn't solve it. Which can matter if the problem is one the protagonist can directly solve, but a lot of the time this sort of thing just comes off as padding and worldbuilding to keep nitpickers online from being all "why didn't they do X? Plot hole found!"

Overall I agree though. I don't need to know the logistics of how your cybergovernment micromanages their robot mailpeople or whatever. Just give me enough aesthetics that I can fill in the gaps for myself, and then we can cut straight to the romance/war epic between the android mailman and his star-crossed alien lover.

Indeed. Leaving things for the audience to imagine on their own is a good thing!

That "common setting" makes me wonder. How much of it relies on assumed knowledge among the readership? "Mars, dry, dying and decadent" brings certain images to mind - how many of them were part of the cultural consciousness at the time? Some of them, at least, would have piggybacked off existing science fiction settings. Were those settings themselves richly described in there books, or did they rely on visual media, or maybe stereotypes of far-off places? Maybe I'm getting too much into memetics here, as I can't dissect the words themselves from all the associated images. It's just interesting to examine where they originate.

I think quite a bit. For the Mars example, pretty much all planetary romance/sword and planet is some sort of Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiche, and IIRC A Princess of Mars does a pretty good job of describing stuff in reasonable detail. And that of course drew pretty heavy on Percival Lowell's whole Martian canal theory, which was pretty well known. Anybody reading C.L. Moore or Ed Hamilton or Henry Kuttner or Leigh Brackett probably had read Burroughs already, or was familiar with old, dying Mars out of sheer cultural inertia.

Which means that a story set on Mars has a built in sort of atmosphere and expectation. But because it isn't a concrete setting actually shared between authors, it isn't like three different people all writing Star Wars novels where there's definitely an empire and Luke and all that. All that's shared is the high level idea of the setting. This works brilliantly for adventure stories because you know the big picture more or less, but like a shape in fog, there's only a silhouette based on your expectations, and no particular detail or feature can be assumed.

[Ionathus]

We usually you'd do ot as a discussion where three or four characters hash out what the problem is and why X, Y or Z doesn't solve it. Which can matter if the problem is one the protagonist can directly solve, but a lot of the time this sort of thing just comes off as padding and worldbuilding to keep nitpickers online from being all "why didn't they do X? Plot hole found!"

Indeed. Leaving things for the audience to imagine on their own is a good thing!

Definitely agree with that last statement! And as for the "overexplaining to pre-empt nitpickers" -- I dunno, sometimes depending on the work I understand and appreciate why they explain it. But usually, I don't want the nitty-gritty logistics to interrupt my flow of the storytelling or characters, and I often just straight-up respect any author who's clearly not insecure about plotholes. "Yeah my setting does XYZ and it all barely holds together if you push hard enough, but if it feels right, then who the **** cares? Deal with it, continuity nerds "

Of course this only works if you can get audience buy-in! If your world isn't charming and interesting, or if it doesn't even hold together enough to build stakes around, then those gaps are going to become a structural integrity problem.

I think quite a bit. For the Mars example, pretty much all planetary romance/sword and planet is some sort of Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiche, and IIRC A Princess of Mars does a pretty good job of describing stuff in reasonable detail. And that of course drew pretty heavy on Percival Lowell's whole Martian canal theory, which was pretty well known. Anybody reading C.L. Moore or Ed Hamilton or Henry Kuttner or Leigh Brackett probably had read Burroughs already, or was familiar with old, dying Mars out of sheer cultural inertia.

Which means that a story set on Mars has a built in sort of atmosphere and expectation. But because it isn't a concrete setting actually shared between authors, it isn't like three different people all writing Star Wars novels where there's definitely an empire and Luke and all that. All that's shared is the high level idea of the setting. This works brilliantly for adventure stories because you know the big picture more or less, but like a shape in fog, there's only a silhouette based on your expectations, and no particular detail or feature can be assumed.

The Mars literary stuff is so interesting to me. I've had people explain the ERB canon to me and it's totally alien (pun intended), I'd just never heard any of that lore or aesthetic ever before. To me, Mars is a dusty red rock completely devoid of all life -- my first media depictions of it were the Calvin & Hobbes strips where they go to Mars in their wagon and prank the old Viking landers. I think I completely missed the "secret society living underground in decadence" thing.

[Rynjin]

Thanks! I'll look into those, especially the last two.

No problem! It's not the majority of content on his channel (he got started doing Star Trek reviews), but it's some of the best. I suggest checking out his other stuff too though.

Re: "Show don't tell" discussion: It really depends on the story. Some are served by a strategic use fo lower detail, when it's not relevant to the plot. Others (most, I would argue) are better served by actually detailing those elements as long as they fit the tone and world of the story. If raising the tariffs is going to have a huge impact at some point, having people regularly discuss it early on is a good thing.

[warty goblin]

Definitely agree with that last statement! And as for the "overexplaining to pre-empt nitpickers" -- I dunno, sometimes depending on the work I understand and appreciate why they explain it. But usually, I don't want the nitty-gritty logistics to interrupt my flow of the storytelling or characters, and I often just straight-up respect any author who's clearly not insecure about plotholes. "Yeah my setting does XYZ and it all barely holds together if you push hard enough, but if it feels right, then who the **** cares? Deal with it, continuity nerds "

Yeah, the eternal quest for plotholes as a source of criticism/internet points has definitely not done fiction any favors.

The funny thing is, when I read old stuff from well before plothole hunting was a communal sport, it so often just doesn't care about furnishing explicit information about why Bob doesn't do X in this scene and just solve the plot, and I don't even think about it. Or if I do, it's kinda just "huh, whatever" and I don't care. But something about the relentlessly insecure tone of more modern stuff makes it really hard not to get nitpicky.

This is probably unfair on my part.

Of course this only works if you can get audience buy-in! If your world isn't charming and interesting, or if it doesn't even hold together enough to build stakes around, then those gaps are going to become a structural integrity problem.

Right, it's not that I don't think that you can't have a big enough structural issue to doom a story, so much as it us that I think the threshold for that is generally pretty high. And in terms of making a good, engaging story an author is almost always better off thinking about tone and character and prose than they are, like, how farming works in a world where some people can conjure rain or whatever.

The Mars literary stuff is so interesting to me. I've had people explain the ERB canon to me and it's totally alien (pun intended), I'd just never heard any of that lore or aesthetic ever before. To me, Mars is a dusty red rock completely devoid of all life -- my first media depictions of it were the Calvin & Hobbes strips where they go to Mars in their wagon and prank the old Viking landers. I think I completely missed the "secret society living underground in decadence" thing.

This is really too bad, the genre tradition that comes out of ERB and the pulp magazines between 1912 and the 1950s/60s is extremely influential (you don't get Star Wars, Avatar or arguably Superman without John Carter,) and aesthetically unique and compelling in its own right. There's a lot of the western in there, but there's also a lot of strange and singular things peculiar to American (and it is overwhelmingly and American genre) pulp sci-fi of this period. It's well worth checking out, the combination of lapsing copyright and cheap printing/e-publishing has made it much easier to get into in the last couple years.

[IthilanorStPete]

The Mars literary stuff is so interesting to me. I've had people explain the ERB canon to me and it's totally alien (pun intended), I'd just never heard any of that lore or aesthetic ever before. To me, Mars is a dusty red rock completely devoid of all life -- my first media depictions of it were the Calvin & Hobbes strips where they go to Mars in their wagon and prank the old Viking landers. I think I completely missed the "secret society living underground in decadence" thing.

You'd also probably find older works set on Venus to have an interestingly different sort of setting - the classic view of that era was of Venus as a hot, swampy, but still habitable world. (warty goblin, correct me if I'm wrong on this, and you can probably elaborate more on the associated tropes of Venus as a setting.) It took a while to find out exactly how hostile Venus actually is; IIRC the first couple of Venus probes were not remotely capable of handling the heat and pressure.

[Eldan]

Yeah, I probably read like 20 stories all set on some variant of Sword and Sorcery Mars. Love them all.

Venus was assumed to be our best chance for another inhabitable planet for quite a while, because we could see that it had clouds and an atmosphere before we could really tell how hot it was.

[warty goblin]

You'd also probably find older works set on Venus to have an interestingly different sort of setting - the classic view of that era was of Venus as a hot, swampy, but still habitable world. (warty goblin, correct me if I'm wrong on this, and you can probably elaborate more on the associated tropes of Venus as a setting.) It took a while to find out exactly how hostile Venus actually is; IIRC the first couple of Venus probes were not remotely capable of handling the heat and pressure.

There was an entire not quite shared solar system of aliens and inhabited planets, which existed from let's say 1912 (publication of A Princess of Mars) to pretty much the minute the Viking spacecraft landed.

So you had Mars, dry and slowly dying, filled with dangers from its vast and often terrifying past. Venus, the jungle planet, inscrutable under the clouds, teeming with new and often primitive life, but with its own ancient dangers. Mercury, which was thought to be tidally locked to the sun, was a half frozen, half incinerated ball of rock, only populated along the twilight belt. Farther out, the asteroids were full of weird little worlds, and also space pirates or very alien things from still farther out. One of the oddities of this brand of sci-fi is that evolution often converges to human, or very nearly human, form, at least on the inner planets. The moons of Jupiter and Saturn are where you find very cruel and inhuman aliens.

But there was no effort to make these consistent between authors, they're really just conventions and broad tropes. Even within a single author's work things might vary enormously. In one Leigh Brackett story Venus is populated by dragon riding natives, in another its controlled by entirely native powers and also has a sea of breathable liquid where slaves labor in subaquatic mines. In yet another, most of the planet us covered in oceans of entirely normal water.

You could say these are on different parts of the planet, or at different points in the timeline, but I think that's a very post-hoc effort to jam disparate stories into, ugh, continuity when they don't need it. It'd be like deciding every story that had New York in it was in the same universe.

[Eldan]

By the way, this is probably the right place to recommend people who are interested in that to look into Space 1899, an RPG kind of based on those idea plus a heavy dose of Steampunk, which I think recently got a new edition (or at least a new German translation? There was a fancy collector's edition). Britain has built aetherships and is excavating the ancient desert ruins of Mars, while the German Empire is building an economy of jungle plantations on Venus. There's dinosaurs, of course. And weird natives.

Edit: googled it. So, the German version is an entirely different game. The English game was published in the 80s by Game Designer's Workshop (famous for Traveller and a lot of wargames) and was seen as fun, but extremely clunky with bad rules. 2012 a German publisher bought hte rights and put out an entirely separate line of game books, with heavily edited background and an entirely different, simpler game engine based on Hollow Earth expeditions.

[Ionathus]

Took people's advice and picked up The Light Fantastic on audiobook -- almost immediately it seems like there's an actual "main plot" in this one, which gets a big thumbs up from me. Looking forward to it.