Re: Dragging my feet about the ending

In article <nYOdnRL6T7gVujnUnZ2dnUVZ_jyWnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Bill Swears <wswears@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Duty, I write about duty, about self-sacrifice, of commitment to another
deep enough to take the spike, of the glues that hold society together.
Buchan would understand, Kipling, even Golding, but it's a world that's
gone, forgotten, left behind in the pursuit of individual gain and
self-advancement, reaching for the peaks and the devil take the
hindmost.

There are still folks writing about personal honor and duty, but I'm not
sure they're linking it to the kind of ornate, rhythmic language you
tend to default to, and I've no idea how it sells on your side of the pond.

Speaking of which ... .

I've just read Stirling's _Court of the Crimson Kings_, Flint and
Weber's _1634: The Baltic War_, and reread Stirling's _Peshawar
Lancers_. All are in large part about honor and duty, I expect all sell
well.

I enjoyed all three of them, but was struck by how much better _Peshawar
Lancers_ was than the other two and, as a writer, trying to figure out
why. Somehow the honor, and duty, and heroic deeds by those who are
motivated by such, seemed more believable, more things that followed
from the characters, in that book. The plots of all three are contrived.
It's possible that the difference is in the degree to which _Lancers_
has characters that, while they may in some sense be based on
stereotypes, feel like real people you care about.

At a tangent, has anyone tried to spot all the implicit references in
_Lancers_ to other literature? The obvious ones are Kipling--not only
the Indian background but at least one poem ("Harpsong of the Dane
Women"), Flashman, and Burroughs, but I expect there are a lot
more--probably including Rider Haggard, although I read him too long ago
to spot anything specific.

--
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/ http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
Author of
_Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World_,
Cambridge University Press.
.

Relevant Pages
Loading