The offerings of huge doses of gore, zero character development, and the good and evil nature of characters (authoritarian right-winger [usually also an impossibly multi-skilled Übermensch] = good; sappy left-wing environmentalist pinko wimp = bad) have made me stop reading most MilSF.
If I'm going to read fiction set in wartime, authors like Joe Haldeman, Patrick O'Brian, and John Biggins are much better. They have characters with real motivations, and can show the true cost, horror and absurdity of war.
]]>On the other hand, some stories would completely lose their impact if you tried to spin them out any longer - I can see no way of spinning out Dick's "Roog," for instance.
]]>Unless you mean a CP novel where you have to have some radical bod mods for the classic razor girl archetype.
And I am sure if Bob and Mo had a binge of the fringe box sets on rainy weekend that Mo would be sweet talking harry/alan for a DMR Rifle as a backup to the violin – as bolivia does :-)
]]>More seriously, it's now at the point where I automatically buy anything with "Charlie Stross" listed as the author, so please don't feel like you have to keep churning out the series. Of course, I want to read the rest of the Laundry (and the Merchant Princes, etc.) as much as any other rabid fan, but new stuff is also most welcome.
]]>( In the "trouble Twisters" series in the days of the "poleosotechnic empire" IIRC ... )
In other words, so damned obvious, that everyone just looked straight past it.
]]>But the offender in question is Kim Harrison from the Hollows. A major character is murdered in the main series and his killer is discovered in a short story. Mind you, this isn't a teaser story released six months before the main novel, it isn't included as a bonus at the beginning of the novel. Many, many fans who aren't regulars of message boards had to go online to figure out what had happened.
Other stunts writers will pull is introducing characters in short stories and then bringing them into the main continuity without much of a reintroduction. It makes readers feel like they must have skipped a chapter or have a failing memory.
I would have to say its been a long while since I've encountered a long series that ends well, the newer stuff I mean. It's like American television. The tendency is to run a property until people stop caring rather than tell a number of good stories and gracefully end it once the premise has been thoroughly explored. It's pretty much enduring that we will be working with the limitations of a discovery writer who doesn't outline. The pieces may be exquisite but the whole will be a shapeless mess.
]]>John Michael Greer is currently having a contest about peak-oil related stories : http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2014/01/return-of-space-bats.html (scroll a bit down for the details, he also explains why he thinks stories are important)
Now, I understand that as an acclaimed author you don't have any trouble getting yourself published, and that the submission limits expire soon, and that you might not be interested in the subject anyway... But if there's a possibility of my first favorite author in any way collaborating with my second favorite author, I just cannot let that opportunity pass.
And who knows, maybe that lack of creating brand new stories you're talking about might just spawn something, like what happened with the "Putin as Republican candidate for 2016".
Greer happens to sometimes write fiction himself (more for reasons that he find them important to communicate than for the artistic urge to create?), here's a sample : http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2012/10/how-it-could-happen-part-one-hubris.html http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/12/man-conqueror-of-nature-dead-at-408.html http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.fr/2013/09/the-next-ten-billion-years.html And the one I've already linked in the Putin thread : http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-christmas-speculation.html
Not sure if this is important, but exceptionally, he's going to be present in the UK next month, at the Economics, Energy & Environment course and conference by the The School of Economic Science (in London) : http://www.eeecourse.org/
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