Pixel Scroll 10/12 Paladin of Pixels

(1) If today is The Martian’s birthday remember that…

…in nine days Marty McFly arrives from the past

(2) Can you pass HowStuffWorks’ “Real Tech or Star Trek?” quiz?

Confession: I bombed.

(3) Jeffro Johnson has completed his Appendix N survey. Keep reading and he’ll explain what that means —

So it’s all up now.

With this piece on Tolkien going up, I’ve done forty-three posts on Appendix N now. I read every book Gygax mentioned by name, at least the first book of each series, and I picked out one representative work for each of the entries that consisted of an author’s name alone. I also wrote about two thousand words on each book.

(4) A bit more from 2013 on how journalists exploited Gravatar to identify online commenters.

“Crypto weakness in Web comment system exposes hate-mongering politicians”

Investigative journalists have exploited a cryptographic weakness in a third-party website commenting service to expose politicians and other Swedish public figures who left highly offensive remarks on right-wing blogs, according to published reports.

People have been warning of the privacy risk posed by Gravatar, short for Globally Recognized Avatar, since at least 2009. That’s when a blogger showed he was able to crack the cryptographic hashes the behind-the-scenes service uses to uniquely identify its users. The Gravatar hashes, which are typically embedded in any comment left on millions of sites that use the avatar service, are generated by passing a user’s e-mail address through the MD5 cryptographic function. By running guessed e-mail addresses through the same algorithm and waiting for output that matches those found in comments, it’s possible to identify the authors, many of whom believe they are posting anonymously.

“Disqus scrambles after leak fuels Swedish tabloid expose”

Disqus is updating its widely-used comments platform after a Swedish tabloid exposed politicians and other public figures for allegedly making highly offensive comments on right-wing websites.

The Swedish daily Expressen, working with an investigative journalism group, said it uncovered the identity of hundreds of people who left offensive comments at four right-wing websites through their email addresses. It then confronted the authors of the comments, many of whom freely admitted to writing them.

(5) “Dinner and a Movie with Vincent Price featuring Victoria Price” is in Toronto on November 18 and 19. The event at the Gladstone Hotel features a four course meal created by Gladstone Chef Katie Lloyd and inspired by the late actor’s 1965 cookbook, A Treasury of Great Recipes. Tickets are available.

And for nostalgia’s sake, here is a video of Vincent Price guesting on a cooking show with Wolfgang Puck.

(6) Jerry Pournelle reports that the new There Will Be War collection, volume 10, is filling faster than expected:

There are still a few fiction slots open, and we are looking for serious previously published non-fiction on future war; previous publication in a military journal preferred but not a requirement.

Oddly, some of the aspiring contributors don’t seem to understand what the collection is about. Publisher Vox Day warned

PLEASE STOP SUBMITTING straight SF, urban fantasy, SF romance, and anything that is not clearly MILITARY SCIENCE FICTION. A submission will be rejected out of hand as soon as it becomes apparent that it is not mil-SF. We’ve received a startling number of submissions that are not even remotely relevant to one of the most famous anthology series in science fiction.

(7) Mascots meet under the Hugo at Octocon.

(8) Ah, Sweet Marketing!

https://twitter.com/APiusManNovel/status/653544755507372032

(9) Nathan Barnhart’s review of Ancillary Mercy for Speculative Herald is touted as its “first 10 star rating”:

Along the way we get a few surprises. Most noticeable for me is the humor that is present more than at any other point of the series. Breq herself gives us some lighter moments; including padding a report with results of radish growing competitions. But most of the humor comes from the translator to the mysterious Presger (an alien group that once treated humans as their own ant farm but is now confined by a treaty). Zeiat, while acting as a translator between two races provides the humor by some humorous cultural misunderstandings. In lesser hands Zeiat could have been nothing more than a cheap form of comic relief but here she serves a very real purpose within the story.   Beneath the humor of the misunderstandings is the constant reminder that even a culture as expansive as the Radch are at risk. The Presger are held in check only by a treaty they signed; a treaty the Radch still doesn’t completely understand the implications of.

(10) Io9 posted a detailed infographic “Get To Know The Incredible Starships of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Trilogy” a couple of weeks ago, which is even more fun now that I have read the third book.

(11) Screen Rant presents “10 Movie Outtakes That Made It To The Big Screen.”

(12) And here is my Get Out Of Literary Jail Free card, sent by somebody who thinks I will need it, because of the way I phrase Frankenstein stories in the Scroll.

[Thanks to Will R., Brian Z., and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day ULTRAGOTHA.]

333 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 10/12 Paladin of Pixels

  1. In the same year as Sword of Shannara, there also appeared Lord Foul’s Bane. This, too, looked like a response to Tolkien, but more inventive than SoS.

  2. @Rev. Bob: You’re bundling standards of quality with the concept of influence and transformation, and if you insist on doing that, I can’t stop you. I resist it because I think it leads to the same trap one falls into by saying “literary fiction” must be good or “poetry” must be.

  3. Michael Eochaidh: I haven’t done anything about the wrong-year display in draft comments. I’d really like to work in here what Sgt. Markoff said in Beau Geste about the tribes outside Fort Zinderneuf, but it’s completely irrelevant. Let’s just say, imagine someone with my proofreading anti-acumen turned loose on raw code…

  4. Mike Glyer: I haven’t done anything about the wrong-year display in draft comments.

    I consider File770’s time machine to be a feature, not a bug. 😉

  5. re #6: Wow, that is Pure Comedy Gold.

    There we see a Hugo-nominated editor publicly complaining that his job as editor is requiring him to look at submissions that aren’t what he is looking for.

    Did he even read the job description for “editor”?

  6. Darkness on His Bones by Barbara Hambly: Book 6 in her James Asher series (started by the classic “Those Who Hunt The Night”), a series that any vampire-loving (but Twilight-hating) reader should definitely grab. I enjoyed this installment, but not as much as earlier books in the series. (I liked it better than Book 5, but that may just be because I read Books 1-5 one after another, and I thought Book 5 suffered in comparison to Books 1-4). This felt like a transition book, moving us from the ‘gathering storm’ atmosphere of the earlier books to the outbreak of WWI. Not my favorite installment, but still very competent; I’m very excited to see where we go from here. (Don’t start with this book if you haven’t read the others. Definitely start withThose Who Hunt the Night.)

    Wait wait what? There are FIVE books that follow Those Who Hunt the Night? I only knew of one! And I adore (and translated!) tye first.

  7. You’re bundling standards of quality with the concept of influence and transformation, and if you insist on doing that, I can’t stop you.

    But influence and transformation are bundled up with quality.

  8. Yay! Peace, you’re back!

    And now I’m gonna rant.

    Best books with Christians in: The Mitford Series, starring Father Tim and the folks of his small town.

    I wanted to like these books. I really did. And the character was so damn passive in the first book I wanted to kick him. His dog is kidnapped? Pray. Diabetes? Pray. Don’t DO anything, just pray, and then your neighbors will fix it. Drove. Me. Batshit.

    I finally realized that the author and I had a fundamental disconnect on the subject of whether prayer counted as “doing something.”

    Now, I am of the camp that when you have done everything humanly possible, and there is no longer anything to be done, you then utter some brief heartfelt variation on “(Deity), let this work!” The author, however, apparently felt that praying was an active step. For her, he must not have been a passive character–he was actively praying! For me…no.

    I am able to respect this as a philosophical position on grace, but I can’t read it in my fiction without wanting to go in and fiddle with things.

  9. The thing about Donaldson is that while he sold a truckload early on, essentially nobody set out to write the next Donaldson-like story, and essentially nothing got marketed as in the same style/tradition/whatever. Donaldson is right up there with Howard Waldrop. Whereas the Del Reys found it feasible to sell a bunch of other people’s work as connected to what Brooks had done.

    (And I’m really interested in who shapes the social environment in which books are written, published, sold, read, and reacted to, and how.)

  10. – ‘As You Know’ Bob –

    Doesn’t the job description for editor include managing a squad of minions who do the actual reading from the slushpile?

  11. @Jim: “You’re bundling standards of quality with the concept of influence and transformation, and if you insist on doing that, I can’t stop you. I resist it because I think it leads to the same trap one falls into by saying “literary fiction” must be good or “poetry” must be.”

    No, I’m not. I’m resisting your attempts to blend the concept of publisher-influence together with writer-inspiration. Jeffro was quite obviously speaking of the latter, and you are trying to shift the conversation to the former. I see you trying to move that goalpost, and I’m not falling for it.

  12. Bruce Baugh: Donaldson is right up there with Howard Waldrop.

    I would be interested in hearing you elaborate on this.

  13. JJ: In terms of not spawning imitators? It seems fairly straightforward. Donaldson writes with a pretty unique blend of utterly uncompromising fictional morality, where there are never, ever any escape codes, of truly magic-soaked landscapes that aren’t just magic sprinkled on top of conventional physics, of taking really thoroughly seriously the question about how real any of the fantasy experience is, and a few other elements. I really can’t think of much work anywhere in his intellectual/aesthetic neighborhood.

    (He also wrote pretty badly early on, with the out-of-control thesaurus, but that was and is more common. Cf. Gig.)

    Rev. Bob: I was the one who wanted to talk about a related subject, feeling that the initial one had been settled. It was not my intent to deceive or offend. Sorry to have let down other File 770 commenters, again. 🙁 I guess that’s my cue to get back to other stuff where I don’t set up friends to be scolded or treated as manipulators. Sorry, Jim.

  14. @Aaron: “But influence and transformation are bundled up with quality.”

    I can disprove that statement in four words, and the first one is “Fifty.”

    That trilogy exerted a profoundly transformative influence on the field of erotica, its acquisition by a major publishing house is a milestone in the history of indie publishing, and it has arguably done more than any other single work to bring BDSM out of the shadows and into the mainstream…

    …but it’s still dreck.

  15. @Peace is My Middle Name,

    Star Wars is arguably the most derivative sf work of the 70s. It is also the most transformative.

    For all the focus on Brooks, the published novel is more than just his contribution — ask any art director of a publishing house regarding the power of the cover. Lester Del Rey credited launching his eponymous publishing house with Sword of Shannara and so the Del Reys had quite the stake in its performance. It was Lester and Judy-Lynn who procured the Brothers Hildebrandt as the cover artists, specifically because their careers exploded 1976-1978 with their iconic LotR calendars; they engineered SoS to exactly feel like LotR. Call it the Thomas Kinkadization of fantasy literature. That precise moment could be credited with SoS. It didn’t just sell to fantasy hobbyists — for the first time, fantasy was a bestseller to the mass market.

    And it was occurring at precisely the same moment Gygax was finishing up his Appendix N and seeking to get the Dungeon Masters Guide completed and published. I think Brooks is one of the candidates because I don’t think Gygax could have ignored it if he tried.

    Silly But True

  16. Bruce Baugh: Donaldson is right up there with Howard Waldrop.

    JJ: I would be interested in hearing you elaborate on this.

    So would I; Waldrop’s a much better writer in a different form. Waldrop’s also been avoided by commercial success to an extent that makes me wonder exactly what entities attended on their naming ceremony.

  17. Wait wait what? There are FIVE books that follow Those Who Hunt the Night? I only knew of one! And I adore (and translated!) tye first.

    We have:
    1) Those Who Hunt The Night (1988)
    2) Traveling With the Dead (1995)
    3) Blood Maidens (2010)
    4) Magistrates of Hell (2012)
    5) Kindred of Darkness (2013)
    6) Darkness On His Bones (2015)

    They’re all in print (Severn House). (The bibliography on Hambly’s website hasn’t been updated in forever.) And story-wise, it reads as if she’s planning more.

  18. Emotions are high tonight. Transformative, derivative, publisher influence (marketing?) vs author influence, what sells and why, can imitation be both transformative & derivative?, which mostly male authors changed fantasy in the 1970s and is still impacting us today, who was equal to JRRT in the 1970s.

    I’m not sure people are using the same definitions and connotations for the words being used.

  19. @Mike Glyer: I don’t know what to say. I’ve got the correct date now in Chrome, Safari and Firefox. Why have you forsaken me, Time Lords?

  20. Bruce Baugh: Donaldson writes with a pretty unique blend of utterly uncompromising fictional morality, where there are never, ever any escape codes, of truly magic-soaked landscapes that aren’t just magic sprinkled on top of conventional physics, of taking really thoroughly seriously the question about how real any of the fantasy experience is, and a few other elements. I really can’t think of much work anywhere in his intellectual/aesthetic neighborhood.

    I’m not a gamer of any sort (a choice made very early on to prevent too much dilution of my time and energy), so it is very interesting to me to hear perspectives like this.

    My introduction to Donaldson was another SFF fan handing the books to me and raving about them, and me reading them and wondering what was wrong with me that I did not go gaga over them (bear in mind that I’ve never been gaga over Tolkein, either <gasp!>).

    I have not yet read any Waldrop but have his two new collections on Mount File770.

  21. And it was occurring at precisely the same moment Gygax was finishing up his Appendix N and seeking to get the Dungeon Masters Guide completed and published. I think Brooks is one of the candidates because I don’t think Gygax could have ignored it if he tried.

    And yet ignore it he did, as Brooks does not appear in Appendix N.

  22. On a topic slightly orthogonal to the prevailing stream of conversation, but perhaps relevant on several levels to the general discussion. Heads up, there is a LOT of swearing. I particularly liked the bit about what to get the (medieval) man who has everything.

    Chivalry is Not Dead

  23. The late ‘70s/early ‘80s were exactly when I got interested in fantasy and Dungeons and Dragons. I remember lots of Xanth, Thomas Covenant, Jack Chalker and Shannara – you could find those in the racks at every grocery and drugstore, along with Heavy Metal and Omni on the magazine racks.

    I also remember the little shop at the mall that sold black light hobbit posters, and marijuana accessories, and Zap Comix, and Hildebrandt calendars, to people who drove vans decorated with Frazetta art and listened to Blue Oyster Cult. Fantasy had a hippie-stoner-biker kind of cachet just before Brooks and Donaldson brought it a little more mainstream.

    I was fortunate in that I lived in San Jose, a big nerd town even before computers (it also had plenty of hippies, stoners, bikers and gamers). I have fond memories of the amazing science fiction and fantasy section in bookstore across the street from the Winchester Mystery House, where I used to kill time waiting for movies to start. They even had “zines.”

  24. David Shallcross on October 13, 2015 at 7:19 pm said:

    – ‘As You Know’ Bob –

    Doesn’t the job description for editor include managing a squad of minions who do the actual reading from the slushpile?

    Sure – at an actual publishing house.
    I think THIS particular Hugo-nominated editor is surprised and irritated because he’s being required to expend effort.

  25. bookstore across the street from the Winchester Mystery House
    Wait, there was a bookstore by the Century theaters? How did I miss it?

  26. Shannara may have sold, but it was widely derided at the time for being a watered-down, dumbed-down Tolkien ripoff. Its reputation hasn’t gotten any better, at least amongst people who weren’t tweens/teens when it came out (both on the older and younger end). Despite its problematic parts, “Lord Foul’s Bane” was way more imaginative and exciting. The only thing “transformational” about Shannara is that publishers realized they could sell giant books of Extruded Generic High Fantasy Product to the masses. LOTR was Coca-Cola; Shannara was that store brand cola that the least popular kid in school drank, if I may put it in terms that were relevant to me at the time. 😉

    Interesting how when Gannon posted over at arch-SJW Scalzi’s blog, people said “I don’t think so, Chuck, but you’ve made a great argument, you’re a really smart guy, and thanks for coming.” Whereas Puppies are all “He insulted our dear leader and must be cast into outer darkness!!1!”

    I want to go back to LunarG’s dream.

  27. “A half dozen authors would have easily been considered on par with Tolkien in the seventies.”

    Since Tolkien wasn’t, I didn’t assume Jeffro meant the other half dozen were necessarily still writing in the seventies.

  28. Brian Z: I didn’t assume Jeffro meant the other half dozen were necessarily still writing in the seventies.

    You mean, you read Jeffro as saying that readers/writers in the 1970s were as influenced by earlier writers as much as they were influenced by Tolkien? Or–that there were a half-dozen earlier writers who should have been regarded as equivalent to Tolkien in quality?

    Okay. That’s got me interested. Who are we talking about? Thorne Smith, James Branch Cabell, E.R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake, um, Evangeline Walton? C.S. Lewis would seem an obvious candidate. Are we limiting this to 20th century writers?

    The problem is, aside from the authors republished in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, I’m not sure just how many of these would have been widely known in the 1970s. I mean, I’d certainly read Thorne Smith, just to take the first name that popped into my head, and I’m sure some other people had too . . . but how many other people? Which authors is Jeffro referring to? If he doesn’t specify any examples–well, I wish he would. It is an interesting discussion.

  29. Mary Frances,

    His essays are specifically about how fantasy influenced game design, so I would imagine his mental list includes several from Appendix N and he thinks of them as being evaluated in terms of their stunning world building, epic quests, imaginative creatures, etc., not just by some drab yardstick of literary quality. I would imagine.

    He’s written a long post on each book – I haven’t read them all but when I did they were worth reading.

  30. Yes, I think Jeffro is talking about “on a par with Tolkien” in terms of defining the genre of fantasy from the viewpoint of 1970’s readers, particularly Gygax and his audience of the time, not in terms of literary quality. So I think the list is probably authors like “de Camp & Pratt, Robert E, Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H. P. Lovecraft, and A. Merritt” as he quotes Gygax.

    and Quarmall is all.

  31. @CKCharles

    Chivalry is Not Dead

    Thanks for the pointer, that was a fantastic article.

    On the Gannon post at Correia’s, my fav comment is the following by Larry, in response to someone saying “…there is a lot of anger on both sides of the issue…:

    correia45
    Lots of anger on both sides?

    I’d invite you to compare and contrast this comment thread with the one linked. 🙂

    Keep in mind that Larry has said that he hasn’t read the linked comment thread, and “this thread” has someone calling Gannon “a coward and a liar” near the beginning, with things getting even more exciting subsequently…

  32. Brian Z: His essays are specifically about how fantasy influenced game design, so I would imagine his mental list includes several from Appendix N and he thinks of them as being evaluated in terms of their stunning world building, epic quests, imaginative creatures, etc., not just by some drab yardstick of literary quality. I would imagine.

    Hm. Okay, so not Smith. Cabell, Eddison, Peake, Walton–maybe. I dunno. Anyway, if we are talking only influence on game design, rather than literary quality and more general influence on fantasy, I don’t think I’m as interested as I thought I was . . . if you see what I mean. Oh, well.

    Frankly, I find myself thinking that examining influence in the other direction–D&D’s influence on literature of the fantastic–might be more interesting, even though I’ve never been much of a gamer. It seems both more intricate and recursive. That isn’t Jeffro’s subject, though, I gather, which is of course fine, but has anyone else has done that?

  33. Mary Frances,

    Literary coevolution post-D&D sounds fascinating. I think I’ve seen some stabs in that direction, but nothing really jumped out at me.

    But don’t give up on Jeffro’s project just yet. Has anyone started building that alternate Appendix N of what Gygax left out? I wonder how gaming might have played out slightly differently if other works had been emphasized.

    I’ll start. While thinking about Goethe, it struck me that growing up in Chicago, Gygax would have taken in some great opera, ballet and modernist theater.

    When I noticed that Gygax chose not to name-check classic children’s fantasy, I wondered if he found time to hang out with those Paul Sillis players at the Compass tavern in Hyde Park in the late 50s, so he was more thinking of his Brothers Grimm as being interpreted a la Second City.

  34. @redwombat

    Egad! Rose Embolism, you okay? Shelter in place does not sound easy on the nerves!

    It actually was fairly low key. We got the alerts on our phones of a suicidal guy with a gun, rather than an active shooter. And of course I was in the secure building where we could use the bathrooms- my partner was the one in the building next to the incident, where they had to lock the office door and sit in the hallway. Honestly, the main worry I had was not knowing how long it would last.

    Basically, everything went as it was supposed to, the guy was talked down, nobody got hurt. So a kind of quiet, restrained sort of massive stress. It went much more smoothly than the one last spring did.

  35. Yes, I think Jeffro is talking about “on a par with Tolkien” in terms of defining the genre of fantasy from the viewpoint of 1970’s readers, particularly Gygax and his audience of the time, not in terms of literary quality

    I agree, but by that metric there are writers on a par with Tolkien today – Martin, Jordan, Gaiman, and so on.
    Things have changed. The writers Johnson points to wrote swords and sorcery fantasy, which is not so common today. But that’s because of changes in the publishing world. The writers back then are primarily known for their short fiction, fantasy writers today are known for novels and series.

  36. Nice to see you back, Peace. 🙂

    Re: Transformative

    Chill, everyone. I think we can have both of those conversations without any difficulty or upset, right? It doesn’t hurt anyone to talk about Jeffro’s comments in the specific ans it doesn’t hurt anyone for people to move to a more general conversation about the genre. No need to get tetchy with each other.

    @Bruce

    *gentle jedi hug*

    @Rose Embolism

    I’m glad you and everyone else is okay.

  37. With regard to D&D’s effect on fantasy, has anyone catalogued the number of books that were derived from D&D (and other similar fantasy roleplaying games)? I mean, there’s all the R.A. Salvatore stuff, and the Weiss & Hickman stuff, and Raymond Feist, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Moon’s Sheepfarmer’s Daughter had RPG roots although I’m not sure she’s ever explicitly said so….

  38. Cassy B.: With regard to D&D’s effect on fantasy, has anyone catalogued the number of books that were derived from D&D (and other similar fantasy roleplaying games)?

    That’s kind of the initial survey I was talking about, I think. I also remember a few games in which the protagonists were avid D&D players, who found their fantasies (sort of) becoming real . . . though I can’t add any titles, at the moment.

    Meredith: I think we can have both of those conversations without any difficulty or upset, right?

    I certainly don’t object to it. Multiple semi-related but divergent conversations on the same thread is part of the fun I find here at File 770 . . .

  39. Don’t feel too bad about that Trek/Real quiz, Mike; the authors are, in my opinion, very arbitrary in their assessment of what research & development counts as “real life” and what doesn’t. I stopped guessing which way they’d go by question 12.

    On another note, I just spent some time reviewing the SP4 “suggestion slate” with an eye towards contacting everyone whose works are “suggested” and asking them whether or not they want to be included on the latest slate.

    One thing stands out: despite it’s obvious bias (heh), File 770 is given a lot of credit for its coverage of the puppy kerfuffle, 2015. In fact, it appears to be the front runner in the fanzine department.

    That inclusion largely confirms my speculation that this year’s puppy slate will mostly consist of works that would have been nominated any way (absent puppy participation), a tactic designed to give them a “win” before the new voting rules cut in (as I’m pretty sure they will for 2017).

    We’ll all have to wait and see whether or not SP4 is promoted as a slate or not (it’s definitely leaning that way what with still being politicized), but those of us who are disinclined to see the Hugos become synonymous with mundane politics and popularity contests would do well to keep an eye on those lists and speak out if and when its appropriate.

  40. Cassy B.: With regard to D&D’s effect on fantasy, has anyone catalogued the number of books that were derived from D&D (and other similar fantasy roleplaying games)?

    Michael R Underwood’s Ree Reyes series (Geekomancy, Celebromancy, Hexomancy, Attack of the Geek) definitely falls into that category.

  41. steve davidson: That inclusion largely confirms my speculation that this year’s puppy slate will mostly consist of works that would have been nominated any way (absent puppy participation), a tactic designed to give them a “win” before the new voting rules cut in (as I’m pretty sure they will for 2017).

    Or it may be designed to try to head off EPH being passed next year by luring Hugo voters into a false sense of complacency, to get them to think that the Puppies’ bad behavior is over and EPH is no longer needed.

    It also may be that the Puppies think that Hugo voters are stupid enough to vote against things they love because they show up on the Puppy slate. Given what happened with Guardians of the Galaxy, you’d think they would know better than that — but based on a lot of comments I saw, Puppies mistakenly really do believe that Hugo voters nominate and vote based on ideology rather than love, so they’re stupidly convinced that slating “SJW” things will get Hugo voters to vote against those things.

  42. I know Feist acknowledges his rpg campaign roots. Oddly enough, Steven Brust has mentioned something similar. I’m not sure about Moon but the comparison between Paks and an unusually well-played paladin is clear.

    Brookes may have popularised his version of post-Tolkein fantasy for publishers to follow, but I tend to blame TSR for showing how to refine that formula and produce a truly epic number of AD&D trilogies. They used to get a section all to themselves in Waterstones.

  43. Andre Norton’s Quag Keep was kind of the original D&D novel, but it’s … strange.

    Joel Rosenberg’s Guardians of the Flame series was one of the first examples of which I’m aware of the “players sucked into their game world” story. And/or would Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry count? It’s been so long since I read it that I don’t remember the details.

  44. Mark on October 14, 2015 at 6:39 am said:
    I know Feist acknowledges his rpg campaign roots. Oddly enough, Steven Brust has mentioned something similar. I’m not sure about Moon but the comparison between Paks and an unusually well-played paladin is clear.

    Brookes may have popularised his version of post-Tolkein fantasy for publishers to follow, but I tend to blame TSR for showing how to refine that formula and produce a truly epic number of AD&D trilogies. They used to get a section all to themselves in Waterstones.

    And man, I used to love all that TSR stuff when I was kid. It was exactly what I wanted. Especially Forgotten Realms (TM).

  45. JJ on October 14, 2015 at 6:38 am said:

    It also may be that the Puppies think that Hugo voters are stupid enough to vote against things they love because they show up on the Puppy slate. Given what happened with Guardians of the Galaxy, you’d think they would know better than that — but based on a lot of comments I saw, Puppies mistakenly really do believe that Hugo voters nominate and vote based on ideology rather than love, so they’re stupidly convinced that slating “SJW” things will get Hugo voters to vote against those things.

    The Puppies spending all their time and energy slating the nominations to include stuff that would probably have been nominated anyway is a total win situation as far as I’m concerned. And it would be funny.

  46. @rob_matic

    Oh, I read plenty too, and there were some real gems in there, with some good authors getting a start. Obviously there was the drive to write oodles of trilogies, but I seem to remember some good single novels in Ravenloft, for example.

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