Brandon Sanderson's Towers of Cash

[DaveSumm]

It was a flippant point, I know it’s not good comparing authors in such a way. I was just staggered how much an author could cram in while another works on the same novel for 13 years. 

I also usually defend Sanderson at these junctures, purely because I held off on reading him for years because of comments like the previous ones and assumed he churned out any old garbage. But he really doesn’t, no he hasn’t written anything as good as aSoIaF at its best, far from it. But he’s written some excellent books, many far more focused and better paced than Feast and Dance. And he’s built a hell of a shared universe in the Cosmere.

Ice and Fire is better, but it’s not “oh I reckon he takes 13 times longer to write one of these” better.

[Kyll.Ing.]

2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Quantity will never ever be superior to quality.  Sanderson may have written… more… but what GRRM has written while lower in quantity is better in quality to anything Sanderson has written.

Keep in mind that they are comparing what Sanderson and GRRM have written since A Dance with Dragons. Nothing of ASoIaF goes under that definition, although some minor spin-off stories do.

By the way, one more week now (March 16, to be precise), and The Winds of Winter will have taken longer to write than A Clash of Kings, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons combined. Just mentioning it here because there doesn't seem to be any other active discussions on the matter at the moment. On the official ASoIaF boards themselves, nobody has made a substantial post in the TWoW forum for almost two months. That shows how dispirited the fans have become at this point. I mainly come here to check the news about other series now.

Edited March 9 by Kyll.Ing.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

18 minutes ago, Kyll.Ing. said:

Keep in mind that they are comparing what Sanderson and GRRM have written since A Dance with Dragons. Nothing of ASoIaF goes under that definition, although some minor spin-off stories do.

By the way, one more week now (March 16, to be precise), and The Winds of Winter will have taken longer to write than A Clash of Kings, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons combined. Just mentioning it here because there doesn't seem to be any other active discussions on the matter at the moment. On the official ASoIaF boards themselves, nobody has made a substantial post in the TWoW forum for almost two months. That shows how dispirited the fans have become at this point. I mainly come here to check the news about other series now.

I don’t care.  The Big Macs produced en masse by Sanderson will never equal the fine meals crafted by GRRM.

I’ll eat a Big Mac… but I’m never going to get excited about having done so.

Edited March 9 by Ser Scot A Ellison

[IlyaP]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

Erikson used to write a Stormlight Archive-sized novel in nine months, not four years, and usually superior in quality, if we quickly elide over Dust of Dreams

Speaking of which - how is The God is Not Willing in comparison to the mainline Malaz novels? Any good?

[VigoTheCarpathian]

3 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Speaking of which - how is The God is Not Willing in comparison to the mainline Malaz novels? Any good?

In a word - yes.  Much less discursive and still keeping with the humor and epic stuff that the MBotF series did at its peak.  I thought it was a good blend of what I liked about the OG and the Esselmont books, and I’m excited about the next one.  

Will go on record to say that I like Brandon Sanderson’s books fine, but I have never been excited about one.

[baxus]

17 hours ago, Rhom said:

I can't agree with you here.  They are different sports.  Sanderson and GRRM play the same "sport."

Well, they do and they don't. Sure, they both write fantasy but they write very different kinds of fantasy.

13 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Quantity will never ever be superior to quality.  Sanderson may have written… more… but what GRRM has written while lower in quantity is better in quality to anything Sanderson has written.

I think that you have a lower opinion of Sanderson and higher opinion of GRRM than they deserve.

While I do love ASoIaF as much as the next man, let's be honest and say that parts of it are a slog. Sure, Brienne's travels with Jaime through war torn country have their purpose in the overall story but they are a drag and no amount of praise GRRM may get for "quality of his prose" or whatever will make it any easier to read.

11 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

I also usually defend Sanderson at these junctures, purely because I held off on reading him for years because of comments like the previous ones and assumed he churned out any old garbage. But he really doesn’t, no he hasn’t written anything as good as aSoIaF at its best, far from it. But he’s written some excellent books, many far more focused and better paced than Feast and Dance. And he’s built a hell of a shared universe in the Cosmere.

Comparing authors to other authors is just dumb. If you read Stormlight Archives and expect it to be like ASoIaF, it will be crap. Guess what? If you read ASoIaF and expect it to be like Stormlight Archives, it will be crap, too. We're talking about two different worlds, two different stories, two different styles of writing etc. We can talk about personal preference, but that's a different story.

11 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

Ice and Fire is better, but it’s not “oh I reckon he takes 13 times longer to write one of these” better.

This metric is nonsense. How would you scale the duration of writing to quality of the book? Could an author say "I'll take a year longer but my book will be twice as good as it would be if I released it now"?

Edited March 10 by baxus

[Werthead]

14 hours ago, Kyll.Ing. said:

By the way, one more week now (March 16, to be precise), and The Winds of Winter will have taken longer to write than A Clash of Kings, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons combined. Just mentioning it here because there doesn't seem to be any other active discussions on the matter at the moment. On the official ASoIaF boards themselves, nobody has made a substantial post in the TWoW forum for almost two months. That shows how dispirited the fans have become at this point. I mainly come here to check the news about other series now.

I could be wrong but I think the board might have had some, "wow, George is taking a long time with these books, huh?" discussions before. Possibly thousands of times since around 2002.

[Derfel Cadarn]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

I could be wrong but I think the board might have had some, "wow, George is taking a long time with these books, huh?" discussions before. Possibly thousands of times since around 2002.

Also worth noting that while it looked like he wrote the first three books really quickly, he was already writing A Storm of Swords when A Game of Thrones was published.

[Werthead]

3 hours ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Also worth noting that while it looked like he wrote the first three books really quickly, he was already writing A Storm of Swords when A Game of Thrones was published.

ACoK, but yes. The first three books took nine years to execute and write (various asterisks there). But clearly even splitting that into three years per book still gives a production time per book far in excess of the time of TWoW.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

11 hours ago, baxus said:

Brienne's travels with Jaime through war torn country have their purpose in the overall story but they are a drag and no amount of praise GRRM may get for "quality of his prose" or whatever will make it any easier to read.

I enjoyed that.  I also enjoyed Brienne’s  travels in “A Feast for Crows”.  Her naivete, her sense of honor, her closeted view of the world being confronted by… the world make for fascinating reading to me.