Ask the Bloggers Series: Question #4 (I’m in it!)
Yet another batch of answers has been put up on Grasping For the Wind. This time the question was: What has been your most rewarding moment as a blogger? So check it out here and enjoy! (Don’t click the read more, there isn’t any more after this!)
Media Tie-ins: Good or Bad?
Jim C. Hines has recently been berating himself over his bias against media tie-in novels here and here. I think he’s being a little hard on himself. Granted, it’s probably “unfair” to have this bias, but he’s not the only one.I’ve had this bias for years. When I was younger I used to read media tie-ins all the time: Star Wars and Dragonlance mostly. Now, I don’t read any media tie-ins and here’s why: I’m mostly uninterested in the worlds they are presenting. I don’t care about the Magic the Gathering universe, or Star Trek, or Forgotten Realms, or any of it. I don’t. They’re old news to me and boring. There are too many damn books in those series anyway. I think of media tie-ins as lesser forms of literature. Yes, I understand this is silly, much for the same reasons that Mr. Hines stated about his own relationship with this particular form of bias. My problem is that I’ve read quite a few media tie-in novels, and only a small handfull have even been worth my time. Yes, there probably are many great media tie-in novels, but I’ve never read them and I don’t have the patience to wade through the crap to find them. I got turned off after reading three or four horribly written books in a row. Think of it like food: you eat something that looks good, but it tastes like crap, and every time you try a different version of that something, it’s crappy; would you keep eating that food or eventually pass it off as something you’re just not going to eat? Yes, this is probably a terrible bias to have, because there are likely dozens of great authors who write media tie-ins, but it has a reason to exist. I like original worlds better. I get the impression that authors who create their own worlds subsequently create better stories. The exception might be the Star Wars stuff set in the future (cause we all mostly hate the milking of the prequel era stuff). There’s a lot of room for originality there because, for the most part, none of that story has been told or established, and Star Wars has hundreds of planets that were never written about or discussed in the movies. There are quite a lot of good Star Wars books (I’ve read four that I really enjoyed and then one about Han Solo which was crap, but I was younger and I just loved it, so it has a special place in my heart). There’s too many of them. The most popular shared universes are flooded with stories by dozens of authors. Where do I start? Who is good? Who isn’t? Which series are more interesting? There’s just too much there. Even the Star Wars universe is flooded, and now with a lot more stuff I really don’t want to touch anymore. That all said, I understand that I probably have a rather silly bias towards media tie-ins. Authors who write in shared worlds probably put a lot of work into it, or at least I hope they do, because that wouldn’t look good for media tie-ins if they didn’t do any work at all.At the same time, however, I don’t think it’s all that silly to have a bias, or to dislike a particular form of literature. If you just don’t like something, you can’t force yourself to like it. I don’t like practically all literary fiction novels, because they put me to sleep, and you can’t really force me to like them (the occasional few novels will wow me, but most of them make me wonder how it got published). Disliking media tie-ins doesn’t make you a bad person. There are plenty of people reading such books, so it really doesn’t matter if you’re one of those who doesn’t read them–there will probably be a market for them for a long time. There are loads of people reading literary fiction, even though I mostly don’t like it (some of it is growing on me though). This is just the way it is. Some of us only read mystery novels, while others only read mainstream fiction, or romance novels, etc. It can’t possibly be expected of all of us to read everything, can it?So…What forms of literature are you biased against?
100 Favorite SF/F Authors Meme
Alright, so I have another meme (yeah, I know, I’ve been doing a lot of them lately). But this one might be more interesting for you folks. It’s a list of 100 favorite authors I found here. And here’s what we’re going to do: Bold the authors whose work you have read (even just one book or story). Italicize authors you don’t want to read. Leave everyone else unmarked. I’m tagging anyone who wants to do this! Here goes: 1. Terry Pratchett 2. JRR Tolkien 3. Neil Gaiman 4. Douglas Adams 5. George RR Martin 6. Isaac Asimov 7. Iain M. Banks 8. Philip K. Dick 9. HG Wells10. Robert Rankin 11. Ursula K. LeGuin12. David Gemmell13. Peter F. Hamilton14. Frank Herbert15. Robert Heinlein 16. JK Rowling17. Robert Jordan 18. Arthur C. Clarke 19. Ray Bradbury 20. Stephen King 21. Robin Hobb22. Philip Pullman 23. John Wyndham24. Diana Wynne Jones 25. CS Lewis 26. Guy Gavriel Kay 27. William Gibson28. Steven Erikson29. Anne McCaffrey30. Roger Zelazny31. Lois McMaster Bujold32. Raymond E. Feist33. China Mieville34. Gene Wolfe35. Stephen Donaldson 36. Orson Scott Card37. Alan Moore38. David Eddings39. Michael Moorcock40. Trudi Canavan 41. Kurt Vonnegut 42. Tad Williams43. Jim Butcher44. Clive Barker45. Neal Stephenson46. Alastair Reynolds 47. Jules Verne48. Mervyn Peake49. H.P. Lovecraft50. Sherri S. Tepper51. Robert E. Howard52. J.G. Ballard 53. Octavia Butler54. Jasper Fforde55. Harlan Ellison56. CJ Cherryh 57. Mercedes Lackey58. Jennifer Fallon 59. Stephen Baxter60. Richard Morgan 61. Terry Brooks62. Elizabeth Haydon63. Dan Simmons64. Richard Matheson65. Marion Zimmer Bradley66. Harry Harrison67. Jack Vance68. Katharine Kerr69. Alfred Bester 70. Larry Niven71. Stanislaw Lem72. Susanna Clarke73. Robert Silverberg74. Edgar Rice Burroughs75. Julian May76. Charles de Lint 77. Samuel R. Delany 78. George Orwell79. Simon Clark 80. Joe Haldeman81. Joe Abercrombie82. J.V. Jones83. Theodore Sturgeon84. Kim Stanley Robinson85. Jacqueline Carey86. M. John Harrison 87. David Weber88. Scott Lynch89. Jonathan Carroll90. Christopher Priest91. Jon Courtney Grimwood92. Michael Marshall Smith93. Olaf Stapledon94. Ken MacLeod95. Brian W. Aldiss 96. Terry Goodkind97. Charles Stross98. Sara Douglass99. Gwyneth Jones 100. James Herbert So, I’ve read twenty-four of the authors on this list. Not bad considering I’ve not heard of quite a few of these authors. Yeah. Anywho!