Lord of Rhinos

Thanks for the posts, Pat. Just bought Yoon Ha Lee's trilogy for three bucks.

Thanks for posting that. It is amazing what China can get away with.

I don't think there's much of a critique going on nor does it matter if there is. Like I said before the concept of Thirteens is ridiculous at a glance. Setting up a unscientific premise that no one believes and then critiquing it isn't going to cause anything more than a "no, duh" reaction from me. Neither side of the debate about things like paleo are founded on the genetics argument that this book is putting forth. If it is trying to critique these ideas than it badly misunderstands the arguments being put forth by the people involved. As it is we hear the unscientific BS from different sources and the book is quite clearly asking the readers to take it seriously.

I don't see it. I think the Afterwards shows quite clearly that Morgan knows the book doesn't have a leg to stand on scientifically. Even the most basic knowledge of humanity will make a reader realize that the idea behind Thirteens is silly. The novel wants us to believe that they are some sort of throwback from the past, that before humans become Agrarian men where hyper violent and macho loners that were a step away from being sociopaths. But that doesn't describe hunter gatherer societies at all. Social relationships are the core of hunter-gathering societies and violence has strong societal guidelines. Which makes clear that the idea behind the book is ridiculous. Humanity has never been in a position where such behavior would be considered acceptable.

I just finished Thirteen the other day. Morgan can write well sentence to sentence, but this book was incredibly flawed beyond that. This book takes itself completely seriously and thinks it is saying profound things but the center of it is evopsych nonsense and world building based on memes. Adding to that a completely generic thriller plotline with twists you see coming a mile away and ends up being a mediocre read that is at times deeply silly.

GOTM is the best!

Are you folks trying to debut with someone who has a literal troll as his avatar?

That no one cares line was about old author's who are no longer popular except for their legacy series. I mean the Beachboys are still touring. People show up for the old hits. Authors that are very popular now will have a lot of interest in their other work. I'm sure back in the eighties when Brooks's was one of the top dogs in the field their was a lot of interest in Landover and similarly when Eddings switched to Sparhawk people came along. I'm sure of it. Everyone has their hidden gems they've found. I think Bakker and Erikson are going to stick around longer than most. Just because of their more ambitious take on the field. There's always going to be some young reader who is wondering what the else is out their and some veteran of the genre that cocks an eyebrow and says "Have you tried the hard stuff, man?"

They're both smart enough to know that this discussion isn't about whether or not Brooks once sold a lot of books.

The Path of Daggers was the first Wheel of Time book to hit number 1 on the New York Times bestseller lists. I remember Tor reps popping up on the old WOTism message boards to thank us. Every subsequent book was also number 1 (excluding New Spring, and Jordan was allegedly pissed off about that). The hardest thing for an author to do is get read in the first place. Once people are invested in the story they'll come back. Obviously, one of the great things Jordan did from a publishers prospective was take popular fantasy series from being a series of interlocking trilogies into being just one long mega-series which makes it harder to disengage. Most of the eighties authors are still popular when writing in their famous settings, but Sword of Shannara sold 125,000 copies in the first month. Last time I saw numbers Brooks was selling 50,000ish copies of his new books in a year, which is a great number but it shows the numbers of his fans are a fraction of what he used to have. When writing outside their famous settings no one cares. I'm guessing most people in this thread couldn't even tell me which eighties heavy weights wrote "Child of a Mad God", "Seventh Decimate", and "King of Ashes" which are all recently released first books in new series.

The popular authors of the eighties are running on fumes. They have sections of their fan bases still buying their work, but they aren't getting new blood. The fans still sticking around are the fans these authors are going to die with. New fantasy fans are not being steered towards their work. They are being recommended stuff that the current popular authors are putting out. Eddings used to be the internet's whipping boy back around 2000. People hated his books. Back when there were people that actually thought his books were good stuff and they belonged to be in the conversation when discussing the "good stuff". The push back against that was very heated. Everyone hated the Dreamers, though. That series had no fans.

To be remembered you have to write something unique or ground breaking. It also helps if you write something short and self contained. The problem for a lot of classic fantasy is that it is just to darn long. People still read classics but most of the time classics are pretty short and if they are part of a series it tends to only be the first that is really well known. The big authors of the eighties are all on the way out. Eddings, Feist, Salvatore, Weiss and Hickman, Brooks, Williams. They're populists that aren't popular any more. All of them are running on fumes.

I think we should just acknowledge that pretty much everything that was popular in the eighties and through at least the mid-nineties was YA. Trying to hold them up against adult literature is just going to make them come up short.

Thanks, been meaning to read that for a while.

That Paris Adrift cover is really pretty.