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[bloodyrosemccoy]

With all these books I have to read for the first time, I probably shouldn’t spend so much spare time rereading my old Sector General novels. But I can’t help it! There’s an irresistible lure to them for me: their content is very similar to my own idea for Doctors! In! Space!, which I thought was totally original forty years after these stories started appearing. DAMN YOU, JAMES WHITE!

 

Another wonderful thing about these books is that I can then console myself that I’m still a damn sight better author on technical merit than James White, King of Expository Dialogue, is. Not that my writing is particularly magnificent; it’s just that his sucks. He’s got all these great ideas, but I just want to strunk the hell out of the way he presents them.* I could spend hours detailing his dreadful writing,** but I truly love the stories told in there and thus am reading that instead of better-written things right now.

 

Plus, how can you resist a series that has this on its Wikipedia page? “The series is remarkable in unusually diverse and believable non-humanoid aliens. It is also possibly the only sci-fi series where the most sympathetic character closely resembles a giant wasp.”

 

Favorite part of that sentence?  That it’s possibly the only sci-fi series with that distinction.  Never mind all the sympathetic giant wasps you find in hard crime fiction.

 

Ah, yes, ’tis my kind of trash, all right.

 

 

*strunk v. 1: to correct grammatical errors in a textual body 2: to submit a textual body to editing.  Refers to William Strunk, Jr., co-author with E.B. White of The Elements of Style, which is inflicted on all writing students everywhere. Coined by Amelia in revenge, since one of the rules laid down in the book is to never, ever, under any circumstances, make a noun into a verb. Mr. Strunk, you got verbed.

 

**In the names of the mother of God and all her wacky nephews, the man literally CUTS AND PASTES giant blocks of infodump into each book! As DIALOGUE! Do these sonuvabitches all have to memorize these pages and pages of exposition? And why the hell do they keep reciting them to each other? If I could go back in time I would track him down and hand him a thesaurus.

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

They're doctors and medical students. I've actually heard people doing that. Even junior zookeepers do it sometimes, learning the animals. It's kind of amusing.

Re: Thoughts

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Still doesn't work. It's done in classic "As you know, Bob" style. It would be like beginning every single brain surgery with one surgeon saying, "This would be a good time to review first-year neurology. As you know ..." and then recapping things you learn in elementary school--in a way the other surgeon has memorized.

I notice it because I really wrestle with exposition myself (clumsy exposition runs rampant in all of the early drafts I write; I wind up paring it down later). And James White is the MASTER OF THEM ALL at doing it awkwardly.

(Of course, science fiction presents even more of a problem with exposition, too, since things we would take for granted cannot be taken for granted in the world, and things THEY take for granted need to be explained. Mark Rosenfelder wrote a pretty funny parody of that: If All Stories Were Written Like Science Fiction Stories. Cracks me up every time.)

Re: Thoughts

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

LOL! love it. I had a post about that, about the different ways sf/fantasy authors handle information about unfamiliar settings, technologies, etc.. But I can't find it to link to right now. Bother.