[Dragaera] Extreme economy (was Re: Steven Erikson (was: Reading series))

[Johne Cook]

One of the things I like best about Zelazny was that extreme economy, and
it's interesting that you identify it in SKZB. Walter Jon Williams is
another Zelazny protege, but he's not as given to economy, and so I think
less of him as Zelazny's protege than Brust.

I wonder - is economy something Steve accomplishes deliberately, or is it
simply how he writes? I was reading the introduction to Zelazny's Last
Defender of Camelot collection and he recounted there how he arrived at his
own economy when he went through and identified one common element in
stories of his that didn't sell. He realized he was overexplaining, and made
a deliberate effort to knock that off.

On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 12:00 AM, Philip Hart <philiph at slac.stanford.edu>wrote:

>
> 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_.
>
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-- 
johne cook - wisconsin, usa
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