[Dragaera] Steven Erikson (was: Reading series)

[Philip Hart]

On Mon, 19 Jan 2009, Konrad Gaertner wrote:

> Erikson does have some similarities to Brust: he's also a follower of 
> the Cool Stuff Theory of Literature, and his characters are very good 
> at what they do.

Not sure whether I've argued the following here before and been refuted,
but I don't think Brust actually is a CSTOL writer.  Gene Wolfe is if I 
understand correctly the founder or anyway leading practitioner of that 
school, and his construction of large works (since say _The Fifth Head 
of Cerberus_) tends more to the kitchen sink than the extreme economy of 
most of SKZB's novels.  Wonderful as say _The Book of the New Sun_ is,
there are big stretches which are of questionable necessity to the
overall plot. This is even more marked throughout _The Long Sun_ -
whole episodes are devoted to showing how smart a character is or how 
some soon-to-be-entirely-moot problem might be approached, as if several 
Chesterton short stories spontaneously metastasized in a large work 
already barely able to cover its huge subject within its natural extent.

I can't recall any filler in the Vladiad and hardly any in the early 
Paarfiad, even though the latter is modelled on a very uneconomical
archetypically CSTOL work.  There's no slack in _TRIH_; there's hardly
an extra word in _Agyar_.