Re: MST does subvert a few tropes and has some strong points. - Edit 1
Before modification by DomA at 06/06/2010 01:15:12 AM
His standalone Fantasy novel is fun to an extent, but I found MST terribly formulaic, derivative and boring and never got past the first book (even though I bought all the trilogy at once). Same for his more recent Fantasy series, I abandonned it after the first book.
Probably not enough to get you to force your way through it, but it does get more interesting later on imho. The protagonist isn't all that, true, and there certainly are some massive clichés, but there's a number of more interesting secondary characters, and things don't play out as predictably as you might expect from the first book.
I agree that Otherland is better, though.
Maybe one day I'll get the taste to retry it, as I have all four PBs.
I'm not a *huge* fan of Fantasy, though. I'm not a fan of genres, so much as writers. Some I love, a lot leave me totally indifferent, and it's often very hard for me to pinpoint what I like and don't. It's not always about originality, or good writing, or realism, or a sub-genre I like and another I don't. I love Tolkien, Jordan and Martin, Erikson, Miéville, Lynch, Wolfe - all terribly different writers, and often people who like one or two of these will really hate the others (eg: not a whole lot of people who enjoy literary writers like Wolfe will also have much fun with reading Jordan). OTOH, I can't stand Monette, Brooks, Goodkind, Hobbs, Eddings - and everything King wrote that touched Fantasy (though some of his other books, I've liked). I'm not that big a fan of quests/epics, but some of what I like is that, and a lot of what I don't like isn't. *shrugs*. I enjoy long stuff, and details, but then Miéville has interesting stuff, but his books are hardly a panorama of worldbuilding, and his stories are stand alones, and yet he's one of my favourites and I love his prose and it's a fair part of my enjoyement of his novels. Jordan's hardly a master of prose, but that doesn't bother me one bit when I read him. I'm really not a huge fan of military stuff, yet I like Erikson. With non-genre fiction, which I read more of, it's even more complicated, going from very literary writers to others judged to be very light and popular (usually the "guilty pleasures" stuff, though I frankly don't feel guilty one bit. If it's fun it's fun, period). I'm not really a good person to whom recommend books on the "if you liked X, you'll enjoy Y" basis. Very often, it doesn't work.
I don't know exactly what bored me with Williams's Fantasy. I think in part I really enjoyed how he woved mythology and Fantasy-inspired characters into a near future SF series, but I really couldn't connect so far to any of his "real deal" Fantasy characters.