On Wed, 12 May 2004, Joshua Kronengold wrote: > Dennis Higbee writes: > >As far as Martin v. Jordan goes, I'm not sure what you mean by "tinker > >with the formula." Jordan's not formulaic. Someone like Feist is > >formulaic; he tells the same story over and over. > > Is he? I'm annoyed by Feist because he's a mediocre writer, because > he stole (through a third party, but who cares?) outrageously from > M. A. Barker (and never admitted it), and because cutting Magician > where they did for the paperback edition was a crime against humanity, > but I wouldn't say that, say, Magician was particularly similar to > Mistress of the Empire, or that either was similar in any way to > Faerie Tale. But now he's well into his third Riftwar, and the last series at least had the same bad guys as the first series and THE KING'S BUCANEER. There are better examples of this than Feist, though. I should have used the example that first popped into my head, the Xanth books by Anthony. Those books are a textbook formula. -Dennis