[Dragaera] Steven Erikson (was: Reading series)

[Eugene Zaretskiy]

On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 1:00 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.

Disclosure: Wolfe is my favorite writer.

I'm pretty new to this concept of CSTOL but I think this list is the
only place I've read about it. I always thought it was an appropriate
joke about the approach Brust takes to his books. I've never thought
of it as a legitimate "school" which is what you appear to be saying
here (possibly in jest?). So if I'm reading you right, the school of
CSTOL, real or hypothetical, involves inserting cool stuff that
doesn't further the story. That's never what I imagined the theory to
encompass.

Early in The Book of the New Sun, Severian is arrested because he
looks intimidating, and before he leaves he's told to show the
soldiers who arrested him that he is what he says, a torturer.
Severian drops a guy and moves on. The sequence spends a lot more time
making it clear that Severian is an outsider in the city he's lived in
his whole life, and hardly a sentence showing off his skills.

On the other hand, every time Vlad needs to get out of a scrape, we
get some cool description of the situation. For example, if I recall
correctly, he nearly gets cornered one time in Phoenix and ends up
doing some cool-sounding manuevers involving throwing several daggers
in a single breath. Not to mention Vlad goes on long monologues about
effective assassination and so on.

Neither of these passages are fluff, in my opinion, but Wolfe isn't
trying to do anything cool, he's trying to build a compelling
character. I completely agree that TBOTNS, or any Wolfe book, in fact,
features entire chapters that can probably be removed without
affecting the story. In that sense, I don't think he's much of a
storyteller, but those chapters/sections/threads do contribute to some
emotional picture he is building. They are there for a reason, even if
that reason isn't to further the story. Does that make him less
economical? If so, I hardly think economy matters.

To me, CSTOL means writing something with a shiny coat on top just
because it creates something that's larger-than-life. The Vlad books,
with all their assassinations, teleporting, and floating castles,
seems rich in Cool Factor. Severian's tale, while certainly whimsical,
I can't really name much that I would use the word "cool" to describe.
He carries a thorn that randomly generates miricles? He sleeps with a
time-frozen version of his own mother? He unwittingly "back into the
throne" of his nation?

- EZ

>
> 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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