Michael Martinez wrote:
>
> I don't believe I've read any of the Conan pastiches, although I have
> certainly read many of the early Marvel comics. Other than the fact that
> these authors have mangled Howard's hero, is the extra detail the greatest
> sin they commit. i.e., is their departure from Howard's compressed writing
> style part of what makes the reading experience unpleasant?
Not so much directly as through loss of intensity -- energy squandered.
Drifting. Howard is predicting the reader's state of mind, I think, and putting
his punches where he thinks the reader will be. He can't let the reader wander,
argue, rest, or wonder if the fridge needs defrosting. He has to be careful of
what he reminds the reader to think about. I don't think he worries about
physical detail if there is emotional detail to nail down.
>
>
> I did read most of the first Andrew J. Offut Cormac Mac Art book before I
> finally had to put it down. Part of the problem for me may indeed have
> been that he just dragged it out. I don't really remember much about the
> story, although I do recall he bashed on Christians at every opportunity,
> which also bothered me.
Well, besides having enough faith in their reading ability to take their piece
of Conan for Howard's Conan, the pastiche writers want to buttonhole you and
argue with you about things. they want to subdue you. Howard wants to lure you
over the cliff, jump out of the cave and scare the crap out of you, shove you
into Belit's arms and make you feel the scars on the warm skin, see the dark
fire in someone who is flying through life toward death like a catapult shot. He
doesn't want to tell you about it, he wants you to touch it, as best you can. He
wants to sell you this story, and another one. He wants you to buy the next
thing you see that he wrote, and call it good luck. There's no substitute for
having a plan.
Bob Howard does sell you a position from time, but he separates preaching from
yarning, and pays cash so to speak for the digression. It comes in a little set
piece at the beginning (my god is Crom, little use it is to pray to him...) or
at the ending, thunder at curtain call time (Barbarism must always triumph...).
He will not put the big message in with the action. You might not agree, and
then he loses you. And he does not want to lose you . . .
>
>
> When I think about it, Edgar Rice Burroughs' novels are very short but
> packed with action and characters. He, too, seems to have left out the
> mundane details. If he stops to describe the landscape or to explore a
> facet of Barsoomian (or whoever's) society, he is providing information
> which is used later on in the story.
As a high school student just shown Burroughs for the first time, I was really
charmed. What I saw was something like a man very skillfully playing ping pong
with himself. The stories were the first two Tarzan novels. I'd looked for them
years before, but the libraries either never had them, or they had discarded
them, They were pretty hostile to junk literature, which they clearly regarded
ERB as being. Anyway, this madman I knew gave me these two books. I learned how
to get a bucket full of martian novels a year or two later.
I found the legit Tarzans loaded with nifty conceits and brilliant poses. The
idea of Tarzan, Lord Greystoke, only being able to converse with humans in
French was delightful. His complete unconcern with the distant and his total
absorption with the immediate was equally so. The scene of Paris street thugs
and police attacking the ape man, unaware of the awful mistake they are making
that the reader knows all about and relishes, is a brilliant moment in the
development of reversal of fortune plot furniture, something that is always
appreciated. But back to ping pong.
Burroughs takes a piece of the story, whacks it over the net, dashes to another
table, fields a plot point there, runs back to the first or a third table,
whacks again, and generally keeps everything in the whole story in the air at
one time, if not one location. Later he has three or four balls aloft at each
table and bats balls from one table to another, like the maniac juggler. Then
suddenly he's ripping off the table legs to juggle them overhead while he's
hitting balls, table lamps and pet cats holding cigar boxes across the white
line and roaring around like the Flash on amphetamines to knock 'em back. He's
everywhere. Then comes the finale, where everything crashes, the tables
themselves ignite from friction, and a jetliner and a military balloon with
dwarf dancing girls on board crash through the ceiling and justice is served -
yes, a pun . After this ERB writes a few pithy things about nature and and its
inexorable law, and leaves for the next book, carrying the girl. I loved it.
Never seen anything like it before or since, and it was a shame to grow up and
make it all invisible. I saw those books just in time.
>
>
> Howard and Burroughs may not be topping the best-sellers lists but their
> works still sell decades after their deaths. Is the compressed writing
> style going to outlast the fully-detailed pseudo-realism that Anderson
> advocated?
Yeah. And moon colonists will dream of campfires and buy leather saddles. Count
on it.
>
>
> \\ // Science Fiction and Fantasy [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> \\// Andromeda, Dark Angel, Farscape, Lexx, Roswell, Star Trek...
> //\\ http://www.xenite.org/forums/science_fiction_tv/
> // \\ENITE.org......................................................
