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SaviourX posted:I liked the dude because of his podcast, but ~140 pages into the first Mistborn novel, all it was was cliches about young rogues and mysterious magic strangers with the blandest possible prose. Having a magic system that you have to exposit like a DnD manual doesn't help, either. Eh, after about the halfway point into Mistborn the cliches seem to wear off a bit. I distinctly enjoyed the second half more than the first half. Granted, his prose isn't that great, but it is (I think) definitely above the line of mediocrity within the genre--not that he has any truly stiff competition there. Besides, I like my magic systems [unnecessarily?] complex, thank you very much.  Though, I guess, I like them nearly as much as starting each sentence with a single word followed by a comma.
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Aug 30, 2010 04:01
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Haraksha posted:I'm about halfway through Elantris and enjoying it well enough. It's pretty obvious that it's a first novel, though. There's a lot of telling and exposition that's either unnecessary (as in, it would be better to let the read puzzle out the meaning of something) or would be better as action (as in, we are told more how characters are than we really see them do). Still, I have book one of Mistborn waiting for when I finish this and I also downloaded Warbreaker when I finish that. I thought Elantris was OK. The only thing that was at all novel (heh) was his incredibly depressing setting. The characters were, by and large, cliches, and were uninteresting--perhaps with the exception of the Lightsong ark, which was actually enjoyable for me. Unsurprisingly, though, I did enjoy his magic system(s).
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Aug 31, 2010 15:46
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fed_dude posted:It is nice to have a really good, big epic that's not written by a fat old man likely to die in the near future. Yeah, it's written by a younger guy who will probably give himself a heart attack before he finishes the series.  Just kidding. He'll probably finish his ten book series in about twelve years. Shine on you crazy bastard.
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Sep 8, 2010 03:38
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Che Delilas posted:It seems to be that he's possessing someone in each dream sequence so he can experience things from a first-person perspective, while the Almighty's voice narrates over top of things in a non-interactive fashion. We don't know if he's actually astral projecting back in time, or if he's just participating in a 'copy' of events that occurred (so he wouldn't be able to pollute the timeline). I'm guessing and hoping for the latter, plots with time travel in them can feel like cheating. What about the spontaneous training some of those characters show, though? If it were all just from the perspective of those characters, it makes no sense for a farmer to have the skill in battle that a member of a warlike aristocracy would have.
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Oct 15, 2010 13:34
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Che Delilas posted:The price was apparently permanent and persistent memory loss about his wife. I thought the question was: for what did he need the old magic (was this one answered in the book?). If I were to guess, I'd say it's something cliche like he wished for her to live or something of that sort, and that was his price. Also, the eyes thing: I would assume it has something to do with legends of using Stormlight to cast magic. As we found out with Kaladin, their eyes (and whole bodies, for that matter) glow when the use it. Stormlight is divine in nature, due to religion, and their eyes glow; therefore, people with bright eyes are closer to stormlight, and are therefore better.
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Oct 19, 2010 00:56
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