I read Naomi Novik's His Majesty's Dragon over the past week. It held my interest; it was competently written and lacked any of the quirks that might trigger my idiosyncratic rejection.
That being said, there is nothing remotely original in the work; it is the child of Patrick O'Brien and Anne McCaffrey. Novik is said to have cut her teeth as a writer on fanfic, so a work so completely lacking in unborrowed elements does nothing to vindicate that ghetto.
One might as well mash up Nero Wolfe and Fuzzies, or mid-late Heinlein and John Grisham, or Tolkien and the X-Men; apply competent writing; and reap the crossover audience without doing more than sipping at your own creative well. I smell a National Novel-Writing Month project!
Or, more likely, 3.8 million ones, ranging from the bleeding-eyes level of suck to the merely inoffensive.
Anyway, you'd probably like His Majesty's Dragon. It's painless and probably harmless. Just don't expect to read, y'know, anything new.
Posted by Greg at October 25, 2006 12:52 PM
FYI, the movie rights have been sold to Peter Jackson.
Yeah, I just saw that myself. Pardon me while I fan myself to overcome the vapors.
Fanning doesn't overcome the vapors, it just moves them into someone else's personal space.
Try lighting a candle.
That Tolkein/X-Men concept sounds really good to me, as long as Warren Ellis did it.
I actually know a guy who wants to do a superheroes-in-fantasy project.