Heartland

Maisey wrote:Oh, and rather more to the point. I've recently finished Dante's Inferno, and am have yet to pick up another book.

So far it's a toss up between Dante's Purgatorio (an obvious follow up), Lewis Carrol's Alice In Wonderland or Michiavelli's The Price.

Haven't read any of them, and all three are sitting on my desk, waiting to be read.

timsinister wrote:Well said. Continuity references are any self-respecting (and self-deprecating!) geek's wet dream.

Maisey wrote:

timsinister wrote:Well said. Continuity references are any self-respecting (and self-deprecating!) geek's wet dream.

You're talking to a man who came into all this via Tolkien. Not The Lord Of The Rings per ce, but the entire saga of Middle Earth, Westernesse, Aman and ultimately back on Middle Earth again.

For me the holy grail of Tolkien back story was finding out about the mysterious far East lands, of which almost nothing is known.

Dr Who has the same kind of scope for obsessive attention to background that could keep even a Tolkienite happy. Of course, the fact that it has had many writers, all shaping the history of the universe around their own stories means it doesn't have even a fraction of the gloriously imagined continuity that Tolkien's world has - but it's a lot of fun none the less.

markfiend wrote: but are the dr who books any more coherent than the star wars "extended universe" books?

i read a few of them when i was younger and most of them were so hack they wouldn't even get into print if they weren't featuring han, luke & co. dreadful.

Quite the same problem applies to DW, as does to any franchise auctioned off to a separate publishing house which has hundreds of different retainers on hand.

If anything, SW continuity is more coherent, as it has more core and unassailable facts at the heart of it - DW, by its nature, does not! And there are some terrible Who books out there, just as there are some dire and directly contradicting Star Wars novels.

The common denominator is the 'Lucas Doctrine' whereby you flog rights for every penny you can bleed, and let everything else go hang.

Maisey wrote:In a related note, I always thought Pratchett's discworld improving significantly when he started tying backgrounds, people & places together more consistently across his novels. Although some characters and themes remain the same from the start, it's only about a third of the way in that he really starts to solidify the supporting cast and geography.

Maisey wrote:For me the holy grail of Tolkien back story was finding out about the mysterious far East lands, of which almost nothing is known.

timsinister wrote:
There is an essay from him at the start of either Discworld Mapp, or Streets of Ankh-Morpork, where he describes his reluctance to give solid geography to the places in his stories - he rebelled against Tolkien's concept of 'map the story, then write it'. He thought it would rob a lot of spontaneity from his writing.

Instead, he found it quite liberating and now follows his plans carefully when writing stories! Basically put, whenever a series introduces a deeper, arcing plot or continuity, it creates a special kind of loyalty amongst consumers.

Because we're all anal geeks who like to be able to trace one character's family back a thousand generations, when we should be out meeting girls or something.

James Blast wrote:is this a Dr. Who forum now?

markfiend wrote:

Maisey wrote:For me the holy grail of Tolkien back story was finding out about the mysterious far East lands, of which almost nothing is known.

Of course the East Lands didn't even really exist in the earliest conception. The little "map" in one of the Books of Lost Tales (I forget which) is a lot narrower in the East-West direction than the world later became; the Blue Mountains on the eastern edge of Beleriand were almost the eastern edge of the whole world IIRC.)

Big Si wrote:All we know is that 2 blue wizards were sent there, while a White (Saruman), Grey (Gandalf) and Brown (Radagast) wizard are the only ones he's really written about.

markfiend wrote:

Big Si wrote:All we know is that 2 blue wizards were sent there, while a White (Saruman), Grey (Gandalf) and Brown (Radagast) wizard are the only ones he's really written about.

Indeed, Tolkien himself didn't know the number of the Istari until Saruman, in the ruins of Isengard, accused Gandalf of wanting the staves of the Five Wizards.

You're not going to out-Tolkien-geek me

Big Si wrote:
All we know is that 2 blue wizards were sent there, while a White (Saruman), Grey (Gandalf) and Brown (Radagast) wizard are the only ones he's really written about.