![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oneirophreniaLet's talk about gigantic, immersive fantasy worlds and language for a little bit, shall we? The semester's coming on and the English major in me is beginning to rise again like werewolf genes summoned up by the waxing moon. So strap yourself in--here we go!
I'm currently re-reading China Mieville's Perdido Street Station for, like, the ninth time. I just picked up his third book set in the world of Bas-Lag, Iron Council, so that's why I'm re-reading it and will soon progress on to the second book in the millieux, The Scar. Each book is a complete entity in and of itself, but they are all still loosely tied together...not as an ostensible trilogy like, say, The Lord of The Rings or any of the twelve billion useless fantasy trilogies that come out every year, but more as different windows in a common world--a world so beautifully drawn and original, so completely NOT derived from Middle-Earth, that reading about Bas-Lag is tantamount to reading travelogues of an adventurer in a parallel universe as rich and diverse as our own.
Mieville's world is 100% believable and internally consistent--a world with a deep past hinted at here and there, a world with a convincing and understandable presence founded on a wide variety of "magical" laws and a diverse biology of human and nonhuman races that leads to all manner of cool scenarios and characters. I could go on about the structure of Bas-Lag endlessly, but I won't, even though I'd like to. Why? Because China Mieville doesn't rattle on endlessly about Bas-Lag himself--and he created the fucking place.
Mieville's fiction is incredibly dense, with new concepts, bits of world-building, character generation, and the like tossed in at least two or three per page. He informs you of the lineaments of his world in select small bites--just as much as you need to know for the current scene or for a previous bit of information to make sense. He does this in a wonderfully rich, quasi-Victorian language that is one dense in vocabulary but very, very well-paced. Exposition occurrs in lots and lots of small, machine-gun-quick stabs of language that complement rather than detract from the tension and the fluidity of the prose. That's why I love the man's writing so much. Anyone can create an incredibly creative, immersive fantasy or sci-fi world in which a reader can literally get lost, can literally feel like you're there...but it takes a real masterful writer to deliver all that information to us in a convenient, palatable fashion that does not slog down a reader's attention.
Tolkien was a great writer--a great linguist, a great poet, and a great intelligence. But he was a linguist and a historian first and foremost, not a fiction writer, which is why I've often found The Lord of The Rings tedious: sooooooooo much exposition, soooooooo much backstory, sooooooooo much third-party material that often the story itself gets lost in the richness of the history and structure of Middle-Earth. But I still love it, because ultimately Tolkien does a good job of keeping the actual plot-movement sections of the trilogy advancing with a fairly steady progress.
Not so for Stephen King. I am, quite simply, fucking sick of that man's writing. I cannot finish The Dark Tower. I literally cannot. Here's why: The first book was a masterpiece of short, powerful, direct prose--each sentence was like a bullet fired from Roland's gun: right on target and well-balanced. There was exposition, sure, but it was done in meaningful, manageable doses that pointed forward to the remainder of the series and kept you wondering what was to come. The second volume, The Drawing of the Three, was a bit over-written and boring in parts, but not very long and it still did a good job of advancing the story. The Waste Lands (book 3) was BRILLIANT--a wonderful adventure yarn that introduced all manner of new concepts and kept the story going wonderfully even as it was explaining a lot about Mid-World.
Everything fell apart with book 4, Wizard and Glass. Simply put, it was three hundred pages too long. Hundreds of pages were wasted stretching the story out by an almost obsessive-compulsive layering of details that could've been summed up in a paragraph or two rather than dragged out over twenty fucking scenes and a hundred-fifty pages. I literally felt myself running out of steam when I read certain parts, thinking: I know exactly how this is going to turn out, so for christ's sake get to the goddamned point already. I finally skimmed the last hundred pages because I was so goddamned sick of reading about Roland's mooning over that chick and the million tiny Castle moves involved in his tet's dealings with the Big Coffin Hunters that I just wanted to get to the end and move on.
Which bringsus to book 5, Wolves of the Calla. I've been trying to read this bitch since it came out months ago. The first two hundred pages were lean, sharp, and ready to rock--they introduced the story, set the tone, got the characters in place, and got things going...then completely stalled when King started rattling on and on and on and on and on and on and on about Father Callahan's story. Jesus F. Christ, he could've condensed that stupid old priest's tale into ONE CHAPTER which would've contained everything we need to know...but instead he stretches it out over nearly two hundred pages. I can't go any further. The story is going nowhere: it's wallowing in King's endless descriptions of Calla Bryn Sturgis and its characters. The dialogue is interminable and fatally round-about--can't someone just come out and ask a simple question instead of making a goddamned Mid-World parable out of it?!
Simply put, between King and Mieville we have two world's with roughly the same level of complexity. But Mieville manages to tell an incredibly dense and moving tale that involves just as much exposition and character development in 700 pages that it takes King 7 books to do. I'll definitely be picking up the last Dark Tower book, but I doubt I'm going to read it. I'll probably just skim it. King's prose is just too tedious and bloated for me to stomach anymore. The climax of a book should not take three hundred pages to resolve itself, unless there's a lot happening (as is the case with Perdido Street Station).
I don't have the time or the patience anymore to slog through bloated prose. Give it to me fast, give it to me dense, but don't waste my time with pointless conversations and descriptions of some fucking yokels' front yards or dinner plates. I only have so much bandwidth, so give me details in dense packets properly spaced to keep me interested, otherwise my brain's hard-drives just keep spinning trying to swallow all the useless cruft while straining out the actual information. FUNK DAT.
I'm currently re-reading China Mieville's Perdido Street Station for, like, the ninth time. I just picked up his third book set in the world of Bas-Lag, Iron Council, so that's why I'm re-reading it and will soon progress on to the second book in the millieux, The Scar. Each book is a complete entity in and of itself, but they are all still loosely tied together...not as an ostensible trilogy like, say, The Lord of The Rings or any of the twelve billion useless fantasy trilogies that come out every year, but more as different windows in a common world--a world so beautifully drawn and original, so completely NOT derived from Middle-Earth, that reading about Bas-Lag is tantamount to reading travelogues of an adventurer in a parallel universe as rich and diverse as our own.
Mieville's world is 100% believable and internally consistent--a world with a deep past hinted at here and there, a world with a convincing and understandable presence founded on a wide variety of "magical" laws and a diverse biology of human and nonhuman races that leads to all manner of cool scenarios and characters. I could go on about the structure of Bas-Lag endlessly, but I won't, even though I'd like to. Why? Because China Mieville doesn't rattle on endlessly about Bas-Lag himself--and he created the fucking place.
Mieville's fiction is incredibly dense, with new concepts, bits of world-building, character generation, and the like tossed in at least two or three per page. He informs you of the lineaments of his world in select small bites--just as much as you need to know for the current scene or for a previous bit of information to make sense. He does this in a wonderfully rich, quasi-Victorian language that is one dense in vocabulary but very, very well-paced. Exposition occurrs in lots and lots of small, machine-gun-quick stabs of language that complement rather than detract from the tension and the fluidity of the prose. That's why I love the man's writing so much. Anyone can create an incredibly creative, immersive fantasy or sci-fi world in which a reader can literally get lost, can literally feel like you're there...but it takes a real masterful writer to deliver all that information to us in a convenient, palatable fashion that does not slog down a reader's attention.
Tolkien was a great writer--a great linguist, a great poet, and a great intelligence. But he was a linguist and a historian first and foremost, not a fiction writer, which is why I've often found The Lord of The Rings tedious: sooooooooo much exposition, soooooooo much backstory, sooooooooo much third-party material that often the story itself gets lost in the richness of the history and structure of Middle-Earth. But I still love it, because ultimately Tolkien does a good job of keeping the actual plot-movement sections of the trilogy advancing with a fairly steady progress.
Not so for Stephen King. I am, quite simply, fucking sick of that man's writing. I cannot finish The Dark Tower. I literally cannot. Here's why: The first book was a masterpiece of short, powerful, direct prose--each sentence was like a bullet fired from Roland's gun: right on target and well-balanced. There was exposition, sure, but it was done in meaningful, manageable doses that pointed forward to the remainder of the series and kept you wondering what was to come. The second volume, The Drawing of the Three, was a bit over-written and boring in parts, but not very long and it still did a good job of advancing the story. The Waste Lands (book 3) was BRILLIANT--a wonderful adventure yarn that introduced all manner of new concepts and kept the story going wonderfully even as it was explaining a lot about Mid-World.
Everything fell apart with book 4, Wizard and Glass. Simply put, it was three hundred pages too long. Hundreds of pages were wasted stretching the story out by an almost obsessive-compulsive layering of details that could've been summed up in a paragraph or two rather than dragged out over twenty fucking scenes and a hundred-fifty pages. I literally felt myself running out of steam when I read certain parts, thinking: I know exactly how this is going to turn out, so for christ's sake get to the goddamned point already. I finally skimmed the last hundred pages because I was so goddamned sick of reading about Roland's mooning over that chick and the million tiny Castle moves involved in his tet's dealings with the Big Coffin Hunters that I just wanted to get to the end and move on.
Which bringsus to book 5, Wolves of the Calla. I've been trying to read this bitch since it came out months ago. The first two hundred pages were lean, sharp, and ready to rock--they introduced the story, set the tone, got the characters in place, and got things going...then completely stalled when King started rattling on and on and on and on and on and on and on about Father Callahan's story. Jesus F. Christ, he could've condensed that stupid old priest's tale into ONE CHAPTER which would've contained everything we need to know...but instead he stretches it out over nearly two hundred pages. I can't go any further. The story is going nowhere: it's wallowing in King's endless descriptions of Calla Bryn Sturgis and its characters. The dialogue is interminable and fatally round-about--can't someone just come out and ask a simple question instead of making a goddamned Mid-World parable out of it?!
Simply put, between King and Mieville we have two world's with roughly the same level of complexity. But Mieville manages to tell an incredibly dense and moving tale that involves just as much exposition and character development in 700 pages that it takes King 7 books to do. I'll definitely be picking up the last Dark Tower book, but I doubt I'm going to read it. I'll probably just skim it. King's prose is just too tedious and bloated for me to stomach anymore. The climax of a book should not take three hundred pages to resolve itself, unless there's a lot happening (as is the case with Perdido Street Station).
I don't have the time or the patience anymore to slog through bloated prose. Give it to me fast, give it to me dense, but don't waste my time with pointless conversations and descriptions of some fucking yokels' front yards or dinner plates. I only have so much bandwidth, so give me details in dense packets properly spaced to keep me interested, otherwise my brain's hard-drives just keep spinning trying to swallow all the useless cruft while straining out the actual information. FUNK DAT.
