On Mon, 17 Feb 2003 15:54:57 -0800 (PST), Dennis Higbee <den at epia.monger.net> wrote: > On Mon, 17 Feb 2003, Gomi no Sensei wrote: > >> On Mon, 17 Feb 2003 13:05:49 -0800, Richard Malena >> <rmalena at softhome.net> wrote: > > [Terry Goodkind and bad books] > >> OTOH, Tad Williams could have been a decent author at some point. >> Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn is a solid duology spread out over three >> books. Given that after its success he's probably less subject to >> editing than before, I have little interest in plowing through the >> verbal underbrush for 'Otherland'. > >> In fact, a lot of the junky fantasy on the shelves today can be laid at >> editorial feet, or the absence thereof. > I think that's brutally unfair to editors. They're not miracle workers, > you know and turning a 900-page doorstop into a tightly plotted story a > third that size in the time frame that most editors have isn't bloody > likely. Would you consider it unfair to say that most fantasy today reads as if it has been lightly edited, to the detriment of the quality of the storytelling? I don't think it's unfair to say that most authors don't turn out their best work on the first draft, and that a good editor plays a large part in polishing material to a high standard. Or that a lot of near-miss fiction could have been good with a few more revisions -- Tad Williams' 'Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn' has a number of excellent moments. And a great deal of sloppy plotting and sheer gratuitious bulk that needed to stay home, and nobody told Tad 'hey, you could cut a few of these subplots and improve the flow of the story'. > Not to mention the fact that people LIKE doorstop fantasy. Just because > your taste doesn't match the market doesn't mean that editors aren't > doing their jobs. That's perilously close to saying value judgements on good vs. bad literature are impossible, nu? paul e.