Due to endless delays in actually creating this page, this mailbag was compiled and captioned in early September, 2003.

Mails are presented chronologically.

Date: March 1, 2003
From: PD
Subject: no halloween for me

Just a wonderin..have u ever read Terry Pratchett books? Like the discworld series?

ok, firstly, in an attempt to save my ass from whatever, i will say, yes, they can come off a bit "fantastic" and a little immature. but these books are great. I love the humour in them. Its beautiful. Subtle. And its happy. most books we seem to read nowdays, for intellectual stimulation of sorts, is really fucked up, really interesting, but doesn't make u happy (doesn't brighten your day) or really sad. or probably really <insert book classification thingy here>. I love the discworld series myself, because it is so positive, so funny (and witty) and just generally fun to read. They r the kind of books that u can read at 15 and get half the jokes, or u can read them at 30 and get them all (but dont appreciate the simple humour as much...but thats okay, cos u got them all right? er, bla bla?).

I have not read any of them, but like most fans of fantasy, I've heard of them via a sort of osmosis.  Reading the reader reviews of them on Amazon.com, starting with the first book, Colour of Magic, I see that 1) they are quite popular with the fans, garnering a 4.5/5 average reader rating, 2) that the common RPG forum user name of "Rincewind" originates with Prachett's series, 3) that they are madcap comedies, apparently sort of a fantasy version of the SciFi Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with endless jokes on the genre archetypes and clichés, and 4) he's cranked out 25 of them in about 15 years.

It doesn't sound much like my usual preference in fantasy, since while I'm not adverse to some humor, I tend to like my fantasy darker and with more horror and gothic elements.  However I'm curious enough to probably check out something by Pratchett, just for the hell of it.

Lastly, why did he call his email "no halloween for me"?  It came in March, and it has nothing to do with the holiday... ?

On a related topic; I have long considered making up a page in the writing section called "Reader Recommendations." On that page I would list... reader recommendations, along with my reactions to them, and my reviews or comments on the work, when I actually got around to reading them.  If I ever did.

I might yet do that page, but mostly what I do is keep the recommendations in mind and eventually stick my review or comments into the blog when I eventually read the material. And then, in theory, add those to the horror or fantasy reviews pages.  (Which need to be enlarged greatly, and broken up by author, since I've got far more to say about the novels and authors discussed on those pages than you'll currently find on those review pages.)

_________________

Date: March 1, 2003
From: Mike
Subject: Various Stuff 

The Thousand Orcs, by R. A. Salvatore. I've never read anything by him before, and from the looks of the first 30 pages of this novel, I probably never will again. It's very bad.

I endured his novelization of Star Wars Episode Two, hoping that it would be better than the movie. That's a toss-up.

I have some friends who are more into fantasy, and they love him. But the public also likes John Grisham.

This sort of thing (the Orcs book, the Diablo novel rating, everything) really makes me want to not write Fantasy, since such utterly mediocre crap can be a big seller and appreciated by the non-discerning fans. Bleh.

That's one way to look at it. I think you should look at it like this: it's a wide-open field crying for some quality material.

I have never been a fantasy fan. But I was surprised at the quality of your book excerpt. I'll look it up again and let my fantasy-fan friends have a gander, just to make sure. Perhaps the fans are non-discerning due to a lack of available quality.

Mike's mail quotes my blog from March 1st in two places; where I have it indented here. There isn't a whole lot of amazingly-original material in this mail, but since it ties in with the general book recommendation/fantasy theme thing from the first email of the month, I thought it was worth including. Plus he is at least trying to give me strength to carry on in my chosen profession, despite the legions of hacks who are more successful at it 

I wrote about R. A. Salvatore in the blog on March 1st, saying that his new book, The Thousand Orcs, was pretty much shit, at least based on the first 30 pages, 1/3 of which I skimmed over due to the deadly slow pace and dreadful writing. And I wrote about it again on March 12, saying that I'd given up on it since it was due back at the library and I was clearly not interested enough to go back and read more of it.

I suppose that all authors (at least the ones who are trying to write at a decent level of quality) constantly bristle at the hackery that prevails on the best seller lists in their genres. Sure, R. A. Salvatore is a total hack, and the fantasy genre has an embarrassing number of never-ending series, RPG serializations, and other such things, but is it really that much worse than other genres?  (Probably.) The horror genre is stuck with the utterly-repetitive and untalented Dean Koontz, along with the comic book-styled Lovecraft rip off Brian Lumley and dozens of lesser-known word-churners. Mystery has a prouder heritage, but the line between "further adventures of the well-loved character" and "never-ending series of hackery" is pretty narrow.  Plus when you throw in the related courtroom mystery/dramas you get people like John Grisham, who is forever busily churning out the same formulaically-amateurish novel every 18 months, with a few names and details changed. And I'm sure that the spy thriller genre, and westerns, and certainly romance are clogged with much more of the same; I'm just not familiar enough with those to single out the worst offenders, or to mention additional authors in the previously-mentioned genres.

But yeah, Fantasy is probably the worst, given how many quickie novels get churned out, especially the really janky ones that are just based on something.  Usually a video game, ala the Dragonlance ones, and the Icewind Dale ones, and the Diablo ones, which I've read some of (in dismay). And horror is probably the second worst, due to the easy crutches of sex and violence and monsters always available, and even expected to prop up the tottering writing of most of the practitioners.  There are some good horror writers, but even relatively good authors like Steven King get shat upon by the critics, while pretty much the whole rest of the genre, at least the best selling parts of it, suck far worse than King does.  While most fans feel that King passed his prime a decade back, at least he comes up with a new story each time, rather than continuing a tired series of novels, all written in painfully florid prose, ala Anne Rice, or recycling the same plot and character archetypes every novel, ala Dean Koontz.

And when you consider that my original novel inspiration was all in horror, and that I've currently moved onto a fantasy novel with a lot of horror elements... well you can see why Malaya is trying to keep me away from any sharp knives, firearms, or 19th story windows.

_________________

Date: March 9, 2003
From: Joe T
Subject: whoa 

and i wanted to recommend a couple books to you... i believe you've mentioned going to the library before, so checking out any of these books shouldn't be a big deal, if you can find them...

Chris Bunch "The Seer King" - its the first of a trilogy, followed by "The Demon King" and "The Warrior King"... its pretty good stuff, great fighting scenes, plenty of *fun* scenes, and its a really entertaining book. I've checked out some of Chris Bunch's other stuff, and it all sucks, but I really enjoyed this trilogy

Dennis L. McKeirnan the Mithgar Novels - these are a series of about 10 to 12 novels taking place in a world called Mithgar, and it is an extremely good series, in my opinion. if you check a book out from this, I strongly suggest either starting with the first book, "The Dragonstone", which is a little slow, but lays some foundation for some of the following books (although you can read them in any order, they all exist independently, while being tied together at the same time), the last book "Silver Wolf, Black Falcon" which is a very neat read, and is the end of a saga involving 2 or 3 other books in the series, while at the same time being a great independent read, or the one I first picked up, and maybe my favorite of them, "Dragondoom". excellent series, IMHO, and I think it is definitely worth a look to anyone interested in fantasy literature.

Michael Crichton "Timeline" - this is prolly my favorite Crichton work that I've read, but I also liked Sphere and The Andromeda Strain a lot. all three are very neat books.

Yes, more book reviews.  I'm not sure why so many mails in early March were from readers offering their book choices, and I'm rethinking my "should I do a reader recommendation book review page" decision.  Then again, at this point the March Mailbag is a reader recommendation book review page, come to think of it.

_________________

 

Date: March 12, 2003
From: Niall Blair
Subject: What is a theory?

I was reading your February mailbag, where you were talking about evolution being a theory.

I'd just like to point out that, strictly speaking, attaching the word "theory" to something is to assume it's true. Unproven theories are called conjectures.

For example, Theory of Pythagoras. This has been proved true, and cannot be false unless there is something wrong with fundamental mathematics. But people don't/can't go around saying: "I don't believe the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the square of the other two sides in a right-angled triangle, because after all, it's just a theory."

The Theory of Evolution is slightly different, though, since it's an inference to the best explanation, like most physical laws (Relativity, Gravity, etc.). These theories describe everything so well that they are assumed true unless a better theory can be found.

It is a fact that Evolution can describe the world far more easily and completely than the bible or creation science or whatever else is out there. In fact, nothing even comes close.

I'm actually a University student studying Maths, and I've done Logic and Philosophy of  Science courses too, so this kind of misunderstanding annoys me.

Some Creationism types harp upon the "Theory of Evolution" as if by pointing out that it's called a "theory" even by its proponents, they can discredit science.  This really just shows off their ignorance of what a "theory" really is, which is pretty much what Niall's email here is all about.

Sometimes I'm in the mood for this sort of thing, and with this email as a springboard I'd really get into this topic and go off in a long discussion about it.  Other times, I'm not in the mood.  And this is one of those other times.

_________________

Date: March 13, 2003
From: Matthew
Subject: Miscellaneous

I've been visiting your site for a good few months now, and something in your February mailbag motivated me to send you an e-mail. The mail from Doom-Black Time-Train races into Hell with entire Mankind was hilarious, especially if you take the time to decipher the whole thing (that's a neat picture of the 'Brandenburger Nazigate', though, I think).

The thing that really made me mail you was James M's e-mail, though. I'm 18, myself, and I've had similar thoughts. I've always seemed to agree with your articles and invective and such, and like James there, I used to relate quite profoundly to that quote. Less so now that I've hit university, but still; James and I can start a Young Flux Society. ;)

The email from James that he mentions was posted on February 8th, and you can scroll down and see it on the February 2003 Mailbag.

And it's interesting for me to read these now, writing this caption in September 2003, after I met Malaya early in 2003, was getting to know her during the Feb-March months, realized I was in love with her (and she with me) during my first visit to her condo in late May 2003, and have been living with her since July 11th.  The history in a nutshell dispensed with, my point is that my attitude towards pretty much everything is radically different now than it was in early 2003, and the decade or so before then.  And when I see the quote from me in James' email about being alone and lonely and unhappy, I can remember feeling that way, but I certainly don't feel that way anymore. And no, I don't miss it very much.

I also don't want this to sound like "I was alone and unhappy and now I'm not alone and therefore not unhappy." since I'm not saying that a person can't be happy on their own.  I was, some of the time, and my unhappiness was not due to me being alone; it was due to my frame of mind and attitude towards things, and the going nowhere direction that my life was taking.

It's very possible for a person to be happy alone, and lots of people who aren't alone are quite miserable.  It's just that for me, more happiness came as a result of my being with someone else, since that someone else was a woman I was (and am) in love with.  And that woman inspires me to be a better person and to do more work and to live a life that I'm much happier living. I wish I'd made the lifestyle changes she's motivated me to make while I was still alone, since I would have been a lot happier, and would be happier still now that I'm not alone.  But better her then happy than neither of the above, eh?

And if I'm going to give advice, it's to do what you want to do in a positive way, and make the changes you want to make in your life, even if you're alone and you don't think anyone cares. Don't wait around to meet that special someone and think that you'll change once you do. You probably will, but the odds are that you'll never meet her/him in the first place, especially if you're in a negative and unhappy place in your own life.  You'll drive that other person away, the same way you yourself would not be attracted to someone who liked you, but was clearly miserable and bitter on their own.

Yes, life improvement and relationship advice from someone who lived a decade alone, was unhappy during most of it, and has now been in a relationship for a whole two months. Take it for what it's worth.

_________________

Date: March 13, 2003
From: Rick
Subject: Random comments 

Let me add a recommendation of Pratchett and a justification. You have implied that you don't care about sales, so I'll gloss over the fact that he's sold slightly more than a bajillion books in the UK. He is writing humorous fantasy, but he's also managing to weave in some social commentary while writing novels that are amusing to both kids and adults. There may also be something to be learned from his evolution as a writer; his first 2 Discworld novels are fairly bad, but he improves steadily from there, and you can watch the improvement fairly easily.

Rick had a few other things to say, but I thought this was the most interesting portion of his mail, as it ties into the other writing recommendation mails on this page.  Rick also echoes what most of the intelligent reader reviews on amazon.com said about Prachett's first novel and series; that he started off slowly and wasn't a very accomplished writer, but that he got a lot better as he went along. While you'll miss out on the introduction to everything, it sounds like a better idea to start reading him somewhere in the middle, maybe by book 3 or 4 in the Disk World series, when he's hit his stride in terms of story and prose.

As for sales, of course I care about them, and they are an interesting way to measure a writer's success.  It's just that sales aren't any kind of gauge of writing quality in books.  Not even an inversely proportional one, as they seem to be when it comes to popular music.

I certainly want to sell a Harry Potter'esque amount of books myself, though I don't for an instant think I will.  (And I've never read any of the Harry Potter books, so I can't insert a comment on the quality of the writing found in them.) Where I pretty much disregard sales is when it comes to evaluating quality, since readers don't go for writing quality, at least not in the popular genres like fantasy and horror and mystery.  Readers like a good story and interesting characters, and will gloss over or never recognize at all the actual writing quality.  After all, you have to know what good writing/prose is in the first place before you can evaluate whether or not something is any good, and most people, even people who read a lot, can't.  Or simply choose not to, since it would drag them out of their enjoyable emersion in the world they are inhabiting as they read a novel.  I certainly choose to overlook poor writing in a lot of the stuff that I read, if the story is interesting enough to keep me going.  It's just that when something has a good story, and it's well-written, I enjoy it so much more, and on multiple levels.

And that is, of course, what I strive for in my own writing.  Though I have to be honest and say that if I had to choose between being critically-loved or selling a million books and getting a huge movie option deal, I'd take the money. *cough* At least until I had enough for a couple of nice houses for Malaya and I to live in, and some nice cars, and a big enough nut invested to live the rest of our lives in comfort off of.

Then I'd want the respect and critical acclaim. And more money.

_________________

Date: March 13, 2003
From: Jimmy
Subject: Spice Girl on Good Day Live 

Geri Halliwell was on Good Day Live this morning and was looking highly whack-able. I'm sure little Flux would have been excited to see her.

This mail was prompted by my comments on Geri in the blog from this day. You can see them on the page, but basically I talked about my inexplicable and unrequited lust for Gerry Halliwell, ex of the spice Girls.  And went on about how unattractive I find her now, even though she's gotten into super shape, and despite the fact that I, generally speaking, prefer women who have tight bodies to women who have more curvy figures.  Which is why I find it interesting that I prefer the old, slightly-plump Geri to the new and yoga-tastic skinny Geri.

Not that either of them are exactly on my to-do list anymore, and that's only partially since I have a real life girlfriend to occupy me, these days.

_________________

Date: March 15, 2003
From: Donnie
Subject: Re: Wow, way different than DiabloII.net!

I did notice that you quoted me there on the page, and then speculated on my meaning. Here I will tell you exactly what I mean, but try to keep it quick..

It did not have anything to do with being obese, or particularly into star trek, or comic books, or being a slave to the PC. It was all about your knowledge of extremely trivial things in the game. Here I will mention a certain example. There is evidently a second "large tomb of tal rasha" (i have never explored that, I just play by the quests, and have the symbol for the quest by that point. So I just go on to the next level.) but there is evidently a real bad-ass in that second tomb. I have never seen that monster and don't know his name...You do...And so do the others that sent you feedback about that particular monster.

As you can tell from the subject, this is a reply to an email.  The original one Donnie sent can be seen on the First Time page, dated March 14, 2003.

In this reply, he is elaborating on his comment that he figured I was something like the Simpsons' Comic Book Guy, a comment that I quoted and pondered in the March 15th blog.  And you can see what he says here, and why he associated me with that character.

_________________

Date: March 22, 2003
From: Mike
Subject: books 

I used to solely read fantasy, but began having difficulty finding anything really good to read starting about four years ago. I did read the Martin books and thought they were good, but not great. Anyway, the dearth of interesting fantasy books forced me to look elsewhere -- I started to read sci-fi. Some I liked, some I didn't, but I read a ton of stuff (actually every Hugo Award winner ever and most of the Nebula ones -- yes I know what this says about my life). Anyway, a couple stand out as truly fantastic novels:

Hyperion by Dan Simmons
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Both technically are the first books of multi-book series, but the following books are pretty mediocre. Additionally, and this is key for me (and was my biggest complaint about Martin), the books are completely solid stand-alone stories.

Another fantastic novel which you may want to check out is Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. It is more of a fantasy/sci-fi cross than the other two and may, in fact, appeal more to you.

Yet another of the slew of March book recommendation emails.  Mike mentions two novels here, and says that both are great, while the rest of the series they spawned suxor.  I have never read Hyperion or anything else by Dan Simmons, so I can't comment on it (though I'm now curious) but as for Ender's Game, I think that's the single best SciFi story I've ever read, with the possible exception of Speaker for the Dead, which was the sequel to it.  So no, I don't agree with the emailer that the rest of the series sucked; in fact I think it's as good or better than Ender's Game in a lot of ways.  Far more thought-provoking and intelligent, though less interesting and fun to read and with less adventurous plots.

In fact, I just read the first 40 pages of the most recent in the series, Shadow Puppets, in a used book store yesterday, and it was pretty interesting, but not interesting enough to motivate me to drop $6 on it.

As for the Dan Simmons book, I have no opinion, at this time, but any book that anyone would compare in the same breath with Ender's Game pretty much has to be worth a read, IMHO.

________________

Date: March 22, 2003
From: Miss Mio Tabaka
Subject: question 

Dear Editor,
thanks for your work.
got one question. i'm writing Eng-JP slang dic.
when your US people say "suck at it" or "suck at something", what does it actually mean?
after lots of survey @ Net pages, i've come to conclude
that it means "i dislike it" "Hell with it" or something like that....
But i want a killer definition from native people.

i'm a japanese with standard English speaking ability.
i'll register your honored info @ the monster EG-JP dictionary EIJIRO here.

thanks for your cooperation.

I assume this one was prompted by the slang page, or dirty slang, or some such thing.  I replied to this, but never heard back and never looked into it more to see where the information went.  One of the mysteries of the Internet.

_________________

Date: March 22, 2003
From: Donnie
Subject: fantasy authors 

I went back through your link to read on what you were saying about fantasy authors. I was able to find mention of a few mediocre authors, but I could not find mention of Terry Brooks. I have not read any of those books for years (Terry Brooks) but as I recall they were pretty good. The single thing that I really loved about the first (Sword of Shannara) trilogy, was that each one of books had an actual end, with a slight hint to the future. The first book in that trilogy is over 700 pages, and when I read it it was the longest book I had ever read (by 400 pages) and I read it faster than most all of the other books.

Anyway, my recollection of the books is vague, and you may have read them already, but if not, perhaps you could check one out.

I knew I'd written about the first book in Brooks' Shannara series at some point, but couldn't remember when, and of course it's not been added to my long-fallow Fantasy Author's page, since I'm as bad at archiving and organizing old content as I am good at creating new. (A charitable way to put it, eh?)  When a Google search came up dry, I feared that I had deleted it, or was remembering something that existed only in email, since I knew I'd written on it at some point.

Fortunately, google is not the only search engine out there, since it frequently fails to archive things I want archived.  I tried alltheweb.com and searched for "brooks" and one of the results was this self same mailbag section, and the entry from October 25, 2002

And yes, it was an email I wrote, but one that I'd quoted on the mailbag page. Here's a portion of my mail that's closest to a book review:

I read the first one earlier this year, and found it just terrible. Not so horrible, but such a Tolkien-light, with elements of every other fantasy series mixed in. Young male clueless orphan boy somehow ends up in the middle of this huge adventure (and he's inevitably the one of some ancient prophecy), there's a Gandalf-like mysterious wizard, lots of evil ravening beasts, a stout friend, they set off on a quest pursued by strange black demons, get lost in some long long walk through an evil forest, etc. I'm not even sure I finished it, every element was so familiar and less well done than LotR that I was sort of disgusted. I don't think I even bothered to mention it on the site, it was so unremarkable.

I haven't read any more of that series since (for obvious reasons) so my opinion on it hasn't changed.  Of course taste is an entirely subjective thing, and what I find boring and slow and derivative, some other people might find fascinating and clever.  And vice versa. That certainly seems to be the case in this example, anyway.

_________________

Date: March 24, 2003
From: Gregor
Subject: sort of a guest book entry 

Hi Mr.Flux!

I just visited your home-page, and I think it's a remarkable feat. I found the link in diabloii.net - do not be sad people only know you from that page - it is a good game and advertisment is where you find it. By the way, I do not know if you remember me, but I am the guy from Germany who always calls you "Mr.Flux" and stubbornly mails e-letters to the dodecahedron feedback page out of a sick desire for exhibitory self-expression. Anyway, as you seem to aspire wit and humor in your writings, I want to give you a bit of constructive, yet egoistic advice: For best results in humor, be evil, cynical and subtle. I think nothing is better than black mean humor, and your not mean enough by far! Try sarcasm bordering on sadism, and you will have me rolling on the floor. As is, I regularly crack a smile and that's it. If you want to see the real good stuff, try watching the "Monty Python's Flying Circus". I know it's British, and I know it's from the 70's, but gods these guys know the joke!

This is sort of a "My First Time" email, but as it's more about his sarcastic advice than his initial reaction, I figured I'd stick it here.  Plus there are a ton of "I read the d2 site and love your site!" mails on the First Time page already, to the point that it's looking ridiculous, or like I'm making them up or only posting that type, when I really do post just about every one that comes in with anything interesting or different to say.

Would I lie?

Well yeah, I would. But not about this!

_________________

Date: March 31, 2003
From: Mikkel
Subject: My first time...

What I really enjoy are the Daily Blogs. Some of the news stuff I just skimp over lightly, as I'm not very interested in (and can't relate to) "local" american news. Of course we (in Denmark) are also bombarded with news and information from the Iraq crisis, and get to see Bush standing with very concerned eyebrows trying not to sound like he is just reading from his paper. But I guess that after 12 days of virtually exactly the same news crossing the tv-screens, I'm just fed up with it (who said "cynical"?).

They're having a war, fine. Actually, we're in the war as well. Denmarks government sent one submarine (from about 1960 or so) and one corvette-class cruiser (just as old, I think) down there. The funny thing is that it wasn't unanimously decided, so now we have a bit of politic turmoil here.

I guess I strayed a bit from the subject at hand there, but whatever.

So, apart from the news stuff, it's interesting (believe it or not) to read about what you are doing. When I started visiting BlackChampagne, I think I hit one of your more depressed periods, but it seems you are in a better mood now (wonder why...). Some of the events you tell about seems somewhat trivial (I read an old blog today, about you buying new shoes to wear at work), but are nevertheless interesting. And in the example with the shoes, it's funny to read about clueless employees in a shoe store, that don't know a damn thing about what they're doing, or just plain courtesy. Iknow them all too well. I imagine you have a lot of those in the US (just one of my prejudices), but what can I say... When I come across some American tv show (some of the Danish tv-channels transmit them, although probably not "live"...) all I see is stupid (and for about 85-90%, grossly overweight) people talking bullocks. Now I'm straying again, dammit!

So I'm glad to find out that there are sympathetic, sensible people in America as well (meaning the author of BlackChampagne).

I skipped over his introductory paragraphs to begin where it gets more interesting. He came from the D2 site, like most people back in early/mid 2003, and grew to like the blog as well, as many others have said.  I mostly like his description of US TV.  Reality TV, I assume.  "Fat people spouting bullshit."  It's basically impossible to top that one, for succinctness and accuracy.  Of course it's not 100% accurate, since they aren't all fat...

If you would like to be included in a future mail bag, give it a try.

<-- February 2003 -- April 2003 -->
Mailbag Index Page

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.