Back on the blog, and maybe it's just becauuse I think I have a bit more to say of recent... or that I have a new tablet.
Allow me to begin by plugging the app Hoopla Digital: Free eBooks, audiobooks, comics & movies through your library! Their limited selection is a gamble (but better than Overdrive/Libby, which is alsmot entirely Cat Lady Fic), but you can stumble across some real gems.
These four stories, however, are not. Ands in the interest of discussing modern fic on the whole, for larger, I'd like to dive into these examples and relate how each illustrate the problems of current year sf/f lit, and how they pale in comparison to The Pulps.
Dante King's Immortal Swordslinger is an combination Isekai/GameLit/Cultivation novel (with supposed Harem elements) with stuttering flaws from each style of book combining into a masala of boredom. I'll confess, though, that I lasted longer where than the other three. Hence why I comment on this first.
The main character is an secret agent for an undefined organization who is thrown from one world (ours) to a fantasy world during a mission. The narrative stumbles at the outset by... throwing away the climax of a perfectly acceptable spy as the prologue to a different tale. Which is oddly annoying. I can get a damned chestless nerd given uber powers by a trip to a fantasy realm or a dive into VR; but here we had an already perfectly good story of Roger Moore-era 007 featuring ninjas with machine guns invading a Himalayan temple where the Russkies have a magic sword McGuffin and you threw all that away for a tale that features level grinding, you merciless bastard!
And that's where I pulled the ejection seat on this book. At the three hour mark, after a pointless encounter with our hypercompetent protagonist waylaying some Orc bandits (protip: if your protagonist doesn't struggle, at any point, during the encounter, than there was no danger, hence no drama, hence no conflict, hence no encounter, figure out some other way to get your protagonist from point A to point B, okay?), encountering a Mr Miyagi-type (oh yeah, because our hero is from the modern era, he makes Harry Potter & Karate Kid references. It's real damned annoying.), then an Elf Chick who takes him Level Grinding, then a sex scene, then a second outing level grinding the narrative showed no signs of going... anywhere.
Dante King gave no clue in the first third of his book that there was even an Evil Overlord or Planet Killer antagonist, or even a reason to be there. The entire isekai world the protagonist is thrust into instead feels like a boring (and unecessary) side quest to the real plot of a different novel. One featuring Roger Moore and his gadgets.
I shattered my slaver's fetters and leapt from the hell-galley that was Marco Frazetta's Wolf Blade: Oath of the Slayer at the 1-hour mark. In the midst of a sex scene. Oh the plot, to that point, was straightforward enough to keep me semi-interested. Norse-ish barbarian guy a gladaitorial slave of some pseudo-Roman empire (with inevitable fantasy world things like Orcs & the like). But the sex scene was so poorly written, so passionless and criminally mechanical, thatg I found myself unable to go on. The author seriously first needed to study Stacia Kane's "Be A Sex-Writing Strumet" before tackling bedroom matters.
The lexicon employed were often too modern and unpoetic to convey any necessary emotion to drive the scene forward to its climax (Really? panties? You just gonna go with a word that brings to mind paisley print patterns & elastic waistbands and stick that into a hyperborean pastiche?).
All said, it was then that I realized that it wouldn't be worth it tohang around for 9 more hours of wannabe Conan. When you want the passionate barbarism of the Cimmerian, go to the original. Robert E Howard crafted sentences with artistry and all the weight of deep emotion, none of which I encountered in Frazetta (A tragic fall of a surname if that isn't a nomme de plume).
I didn't get to the hour mark of Chris Kennedy's Four Horseman outing, Golden Horde. I just felt robbed, then bored by the onset of sudden hoary cliche syndrome. What can I say about an intense battle between mercenaries & alliens that then turns out to be a training mission (So... just a dream. Thanks.), then gives way to what was set up to be a waif-fu Sergeant curb-stomping an out of control macho pilot who's dun dun dun not respeccting the wammen!
If anyone wants to explain how Mark Wandrey & Chris Kennedy aren't just more pozlit SJWs, they're free to start in my comments section. I could use the engagement here.
But quite frankly, if he isn't a believer, Kennedy's worse. He's a milquetoast capitulator turning in more "beeeg guns for bug wars" MilSF while patting himself on the back for introducing a stronk female protagonist in the first chapter, as if he was being original. Hell, David Weber is guilty of the same, delivering the torpid, tepid sexless Captain Amazon who don't need no man just her cats and expecting pariticpation ribbons for being less original than a decades deceased C. L. Moore or Leigh Brackett. Wandrey, Kennedy and the dozens of other writers churning Four Horsemen fic seem hellbent on delivering more of the same.
I suppose I'm just with John C Wright when it comes to opinions on writing dames (as opposed to , "Men with tits"). Because I'd rather dive into the passionate romance between star-travellling masculine men and feminine women than a digression on how many nuts & bolts go into drone fighters aboard the spindle-shaped torch ship UNSSF Space Nudnik (Gravity plating? What's that? Nah, we best just spin the ship around a bunch for gravity, and point that out because, realism! Now here comes yet another 120lb female to high kick a roomful of Navy SEALs to death.).
I didn't make it past the 7 minute mark of Vermont-based author Mike Luoma's AlibiJones. The authorial voice was that annoying. the man is likely this annoying. He's from Bernie & Ben & Jerry's country.
It was honestly everything wrong with postmodern writing, an expository introdution by way of a selfie vlog. Shifting perspective to 3rd person present tense.
I genuinely could not stand the voice the book was written from. And the writer actually reads his own material! You'd think a 4th novel that begins a new trilogy would have someone engaging in a touch of intropsection that, "Maybe a person who speaks like this sounds really annoying to anyone that isn't them.", but no. That's not going to happen anytime soon. Not with modern writers.
I bailed so quickly on this the flaming wreckage of the narrative had barely cleared the runway before my parachute settled to the ground and I was walking a back to the officer's club for a damn coffee and a chewing out from my superiors for quitting a flight in so spectacular a fashion.
Look, next blog, by way of apology, I'll recommend some (Not in my immediate circle of interweb frens, no need to show favorite 'tism here!) modern authors who are doing it right, and I mean dead to rights.