Timewaster's Guide Archive

There is not a redshift. It would have had too many other implications. Instead, you should probably think of a realmatic explanation.

He claims on Twitter that Tagg is his brother who just happened to register that day and posted that comment when fardawg was at work, but I have absolutely no reason to believe that. The above comment makes sense in the context of being a sock puppet. In any case he shows no inclination to apologize.

fardawg had a condescending know-it-all attitude throughout that thread but he was not openly insulting. The above comment is insulting in the context of that thread, and is very difficult to read any other way.

fardawg has been banned for 7 days for posting the previous comment under an assumed name. (Both for the comment and for the violation of the one forum account policy.)

And I'm seriously considering making it permanent. How about I do that unless he apologizes for this comment to each and every member who posted in that Tolkien thread, who he has so callously insulted above? Comments from the involved parties?

Your smilies make you seem like a rude know-it-all jerk, not like a nice person trying to have a conversation. As do phrases like "sorry that you think that." That points the finger at the other person. The neutral way to say the same thing is "I did not mean to give that impression." And when you bold tons of things to give emphasis so people don't skip points you're saying we're too stupid to follow the conversation. Your entire spirit from the post title itself has not been one of conciliation but of attack. You refuse to acknowledge any points we make but keep insisting we are wrong even when we agree with you.

That said, it sounds like you have a point about Brandon's statements regarding Tolkien. So thank you for the information. What the rest of us have said is what he should have said, and I'll try to mention it to him sometime.

There is no good way this conversation will continue, so I am closing the thread. You can consider this your victory.

--He didn't "build a world for years instead of writing a novel"

Different usage of "instead." I can rephrase to: build a world for years and not write a novel. Which is what happened. Of course his day job was as a university professor. No one has a day job worldbuilding.

Maybe Brandon gave that definition of worldbuilding. Do you have exact quotes? Or can you refer me to the episode number so I can look at the transcript?

Maybe I've been using a different definition. But I can assure you that in a face-to-face conversation, or if Brandon were posting in this thread, he would agree with me on the important points. The podcast is off-the-cuff and the language can fail to be precise at times.

Ultimately it still seems to me, from what you are saying, that we are agreed on pretty much every point about Tolkien's intentions and results. The only disputes left are what Brandon said and meant.

fardawg, you seem to be getting far too angry for this conversation to continue. Take some deep breaths.

You are using a different definition of worldbuilding than me. You're assuming that when I say worldbuilding I mean writing a background document for a novel. But I have said multiple times that that is not what I mean. Token certainly did intend the Silmarillion to be worldbuilding. Not the kind that serves as a backstory, but the kind that builds a world (his "mythology for England"). Therefore the argument is not "completely invalidate[d]."

The Silmarillion is not successful in its own right. There may be a dozen people in the world who picked it up and liked it without having read the Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings first. It is successful only when viewed as a companion piece to the novels. It is only due to the overwhelming popularity of the novels that the Silmarillion reached bestseller status.

You say: "it has to detract from the intended novel to be WBD." I disagree. Maybe I should call it worldbuilder's syndrome or "different ability" instead of disease (but I won't). The upshot is that you build a world for years instead of writing a novel, whether or not you intended to write a novel in the first place. However, you win the point about Tolkien being an eternal rewriter rather than an outliner.

You say that you have said all along that Tolkien's mythology project only later became worldbuilding (when thought of as backstory for the novels). We do not claim (and Brandon does not claim) that Tolkien intended it as backstory from the beginning. This seems to be the gross misrepresentation you seek to redress in this thread: that Tolkien spent too much time writing something he knew was only backstory. But none of us ever said that. Brandon did not say that. Worldbuilding is not the same thing as backstory, though to a novelist it is usually used as backstory--at its heart it is just building a world. Tolkien did spend too much time worldbuilding, but it was worldbuilding for its own sake. Which we have already said is fine. It is "too much time" only in the respect that if he had written novels instead, those could have been more lastingly popular and touched people's lives, doing things that the mythology itself could never do. But those novels would have just as much failed Tolkien's goal, which was to build a mythology. He succeeded in his goal where he himself was concerned, but failed in his goal where it concerns the population at large. His myths are not told around the fireside late at night by grandfathers to their grandchildren. They have no life outside the Tolkien-novel fan community. It is within a subset of the Tolkien-novel fan community where he succeeded in this goal. Indeed, I say that his novels made his worldbuilding a success. Without his novels, his worldbuilding would have been a failure everywhere beyond his circle of family and friends. Yet because of his novels, his worldbuilding reached an audience it would never have reached. And a portion of that audience does appreciate it in its own right (though not without the context of already having read the novels). Tolkien should appreciate having been given the opportunity for his magnum opus to reach those people. If he wants to ignore the (larger?) amount of people who say he should have written more novels instead, he is free to do so.

If the Way of Kings were perceived as a worldbuilding document the way people perceive the Silmarillion as such, then it would probably be justified. In fact, there are people who hate the Way of Kings who loved everything else that Brandon wrote. Brandon knew going in that this was going to be the case for some readers. No book that an author writes is going to appeal to everyone. There are some readers to whom the Way of Kings is simply too epic in scope and pacing. They want something like the first Mistborn book instead. Some of those people ask where the plot is in the Way of Kings, because there is no clearly defined goal from the beginning the way there was in Mistborn. They don't like how the plot comes together only in the end of the book, and accuse it of being backstory. From the point of view of those people, their criticism is valid. They want a different kind of book than Brandon wanted to write. And that is perfectly OK, and Brandon has said that is perfectly OK. But so far the market has not shown Brandon's strategy to be wrong: Way of Kings sold twice as much in hardcover as Warbreaker did. (Mistborn became popular in paperback.) The market did not show Tolkien's strategy to have wide appeal: the Silmarillion did not similarly outsell the Lord of the Rings. But because Brandon knows different books appeal to different readers, he continues writing different sorts of books. The new Mistborn novel is an example of this.

Brandon is also creating his own mythology, the mythology of the Cosmere, with Hoid and Adonalsium. Yet from the start he does not expect this to have a life outside the novels or to become popular beyond a small subset of Sanderson readers. He is taking a much more realistic and pragmatic view of the whole matter than Tolkien took.

Both of them would do the job.

When I read Will Power it comes across to me as the kind of 'fantasy book for the masses'. It pokes fun at the high fantasy genre, and doesn't make the magic so in the reader's face that literary snobs won't necessarily put it down because it has magic in it.

If that makes any sense. It seems to me that's what he's trying to do. As a result the books will have a broader base than if he'd taken the magic and worldbuilding and etc seriously. Kind of like Wicked (McGuire), where the magic/worldbuilding is a second-thought kind of thing to the character interactions, and as a result it reaches a wider audience than 'regular' fantasy. Or am I mistaken?

Well, I suspected after reading it that perhaps I was not the intended audience. But I don't think the book is reaching its intended audience; the total number of Amazon reviews is a good indicator of a book's popularity (unless they are fake reviews), and judging by that these books have sold terribly.

Right now I'm reading the Dervish House. Karen gave up on it in the third chapter or so, but so far it's still interesting to me (Stanza says I'm 7% into it). Ian McDonald writes rather dense books; I've only read Brasyl before. I liked some things about it but am not sure I enjoyed the experience.