Knights & Knaves Alehouse

Le Noir Faineant wrote:What's your opinion on the *Dread Empire* series, by Glen Cook, guys?

Not nearly on par with Black Company, A Passage at Arms or even Instrumentalities of The Night (which is far behind BC even, but decent enough).

If you're looking for some more good Cook, and haven't read them,, then A Passage at Arms and The Dragon Never Sleeps (both scifi) are pretty good. Passage is better than Dragon.

I'm reading _Agent of Vega and Other Stories_ by James H. Schmitz: excellent and fun pulpy space opera stories!

Some Psych 101 voodoo bullshit. Fuck the APA.

- Wheggi

TRP wrote:

Le Noir Faineant wrote:What's your opinion on the *Dread Empire* series, by Glen Cook, guys?

Not nearly on par with Black Company, A Passage at Arms or even Instrumentalities of The Night (which is far behind BC even, but decent enough).

If you're looking for some more good Cook, and haven't read them,, then A Passage at Arms and The Dragon Never Sleeps (both scifi) are pretty good. Passage is better than Dragon.

Thanks! I'll check them out, then! Lately, after this year's GoT, I find myself in the mood for some epic fiction - which is something I am usually not. The whole Starfishers concept, I found interesting enough to at least mark it on my reading list.

But, wooohoooo, MS&T by Tad Williams will get a sequel! It just got announced a few days ago. Epic fantasy, all the way, and of the way I like it!

Reading OA3 - Ochimo The Spirit Warrior by Jeff Grubb.

I just finished James H. Schmitz's _Agent of Vega and Other Stories_ and am starting in on _The Witches of Karres_, which is widely regarded as his best work. Definitely looking forward to it! =)

Making my way through the complete Sandman compilations.

Reading two 700-page non-fiction tomes, "The Book of Basketball" by Bill Simmons (fun) and "Capital in the 21st Century" by Thomas Picketty (well-written, interesting, horribly flawed, and ultimately wrong).

I'm beginning to think it's not a coincidence that my desire to re-read Stranger in a Strange Land manifested as I was wrapping up Colin Wilson's The Outsider. I didn't make the connection at first, and I thought it was based on the notion about just wanting to re-read a classic. Wilson's book precedes Heinlein's by half a decade, and the former book's analysis of outsider personalities is like a blueprint for VMS. In fact, while Wilson's book can achieve a level of dullness in long stretches as only textbooks can often achieve, I'd recommend it as a read for anyone interested in 20th Century anti-heroes. Paul of Dune and the Mule of Foundation and Empire are another 2 good examples. Of course, we all already know they're outsiders, but Wilson's book does a pretty good job of deconstructing and analyzing the personality.

So, yeah, it's all just one more level of navel gazing over old books.

TRP wrote:
If you're looking for some more good Cook, and haven't read them,, then A Passage at Arms and The Dragon Never Sleeps (both scifi) are pretty good. Passage is better than Dragon.

Passage is amazing...it's like "Das Boot" in space.

Le Noir Faineant wrote:What's your opinion on the *Dread Empire* series, by Glen Cook, guys?

I actually really liked these especially the first three. I think they are a little harder to wrap your brain around than the Black Company books but a lot of what I like about Cook is there - the meandering stream of consciousness plotting, the odd characters that you think you understand by archetype but don't actually run true to form. I always imagine him just writing with no real plan and then ending up with whatever story takes place with no real editing. I'm sure that's not the case. Also if your a fan of "A Distant Mirror" by Barbara Tuchmann (and essential book to read BTW) you can see that Cook is or has just read it in the second or third book.

Actually, yeah, TRP and I differ here - which is interesting, because, over the years, I have learned that our taste in books in pretty similar.

Found the three omnibuses by Night Shade Press, in English, in mint condition, and at a special price, in a store over here in Germany, and decided it was fate. - Got to be honest, I LOVE them. I even like them better than The Black Company, so far.

...But then, I am only half-way through, at this point.

Am I the only one who thinks Cook is a terrific plotter and a terribly mundane writer? For example, a much more skilled wordsmith could have turned Cook's Black Company series into a truly amazing epic, but it just doesn't hit the mark. I cringe at a lot of his word choices and syntax and even grammer, and particularly the very contemporary way the has a lot of his characters talk (I swear in one book he had a character yell "Good Christ!" or something similar). I have read the entire BC series, the Dread Empire trilogy, and (to my regret), the prequels to Dread Empire, Fire in his Hands and With Mercy Toward Noon (IMO, absolutely terrible). To be charitable, I thought the Garrett P.I. series is fun and irreverent without taking itself too seriously and perfect for his style.

Mike B.

Badmike wrote:grammer

You were saying...?

Actually, I agree with you - especially, when compared to many contemporary (post-2000) writers, all too often falls flat. Now, I will argue that, compared to a lot of 70s' and 80s' fantasy fiction, Cook manages to stand his ground. - And I am not even thinking, "Midkemia", or "Dragonlance", I am thinking, compared to "Jamie the Red", and "Shadow, the Elvan Thief".

Cook is surely a guilty pleasure of mine - I read him for the bits of dark humor, and the (comparatively) original characters. But outside of that, yeah, I agree, it's not like one is dealing with a Nobel Prize candidate. In fact, I doubt that an author like Cook would even be published in our time.

Le Noir Faineant wrote:

Badmike wrote:grammer

You were saying...?

Actually, I agree with you - especially, when compared to many contemporary (post-2000) writers, all too often falls flat. Now, I will argue that, compared to a lot of 70s' and 80s' fantasy fiction, Cook manages to stand his ground. - And I am not even thinking, "Midkemia", or "Dragonlance", I am thinking, compared to "Jamie the Red", and "Shadow, the Elvan Thief".

Cook is surely a guilty pleasure of mine - I read him for the bits of dark humor, and the (comparatively) original characters. But outside of that, yeah, I agree, it's not like one is dealing with a Nobel Prize candidate. In fact, I doubt that an author like Cook would even be published in our time.

That's bad spelling.....

While fascinated with his ideas and the scope of his stories, I don't think I'd ever re-read the BC series because of the almost juvenile style of Cook's writing. Characters in the stories all seem to speak with the same voice, his sentence structure is confusing in some spots and overly simplistic in others (especially Dread Empire, which has entire passages you have to read over a few times just to understand who said what or what exactly happened), and as you say his writing style would definitely be pounced on by a good editor (and probably improved, although I despair that editors do anything nowadays but rubber stamp books, I see some really fundamentally bad writing nowadays).

But you could fuel an entire campaign on the the overall subject matter of the BC series (especially the first trilogy and Books of the South).

Mike B.

Hehe, even though it is unflattering to my own literary tastes, I have to say - I agree: The main difference between Cook, and many of more contemporary writers is, he very obviously made things up as he went along. So, to expect worlds and settings of a complexity like we have today is going to leave most readers frustrated. Add to that his less than stellar writing style, and you have - well, something that wouldn't necessarily sell well today.

That said, I also agree with you that Cook, while not necessarily "good", is still a different league than many other, "really" bad writers. His settings, although often inconsistent, and his storylines, although often cheap, at least manage to entertain. - When I look at most second-tier fantasy today, the gap between the few head honchos á la GRRM, and the exploits of... Whoever it was that wrote "Prince of Thorns" is petty baffling. Without the likes of, say, Tad Williams, there would be no middle ground, at all.