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It is a slow day on the net, it seems, so I have lots of time for reading my new books which I finally received this week. Jack Vance is my favourite author (he more or less has to be with the name that I use *smile*) but his Lyonesse books are not, in my taste, his best books. I used to read a lot of Fantasy[1] in the past, but I stopped because I was reading one bad Tolkien-clone too many[2]. I moved to more hard-core SF. And Lyonesse is definitely Fantasy, unlike most of Vance's other books. There is also not a clear single protagonist; the one who names the first book dies halfway through it. There are so many people in it that it is hard to keep track of; I even gave up making my usual crib sheets for it is difficult to determine who should be on them. Nevertheless, Vance's brilliant dialogues still keep popping up.
[1] I found a good way to separate F from SF by looking at the technology in the story. If the technology is progressing, growing, in an upward line on a graph, it is SF. If on the other hand technology is in decline or has declined a long time ago (which includes if there are still machines in use but no-one can repair them so they might as well be magic) and magic may have taken its place (or is mostly forgotten too), it is Fantasy.
[2] FYI, it was part 5 in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever that did it, about halfway through I got really sick of it. I started out reading the first book which started out as a stand-alone Quest to defeat some Evil One. Then it changed into a trilogy. And then into a trilogy of trilogies[3]. And the Quest restarted and restarted and restarted every time you thought they were finally done. They also kept picking up new companions, until the group was too big even in the eyes of the author, and then some "Rocks fell and all died", more or less, to bring the group back to manageable proportions. This does tend to get tedious after a while.
[3] Apparently it isn't even all written yet, but I stopped halfway through the middle book of the middle series... and I don't often stop reading a book in the middle.
[1] I found a good way to separate F from SF by looking at the technology in the story. If the technology is progressing, growing, in an upward line on a graph, it is SF. If on the other hand technology is in decline or has declined a long time ago (which includes if there are still machines in use but no-one can repair them so they might as well be magic) and magic may have taken its place (or is mostly forgotten too), it is Fantasy.
[2] FYI, it was part 5 in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever that did it, about halfway through I got really sick of it. I started out reading the first book which started out as a stand-alone Quest to defeat some Evil One. Then it changed into a trilogy. And then into a trilogy of trilogies[3]. And the Quest restarted and restarted and restarted every time you thought they were finally done. They also kept picking up new companions, until the group was too big even in the eyes of the author, and then some "Rocks fell and all died", more or less, to bring the group back to manageable proportions. This does tend to get tedious after a while.
[3] Apparently it isn't even all written yet, but I stopped halfway through the middle book of the middle series... and I don't often stop reading a book in the middle.
