John Campbell Would Like It, I Suspect
Mar. 15th, 2009 01:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
billroperOk, so I've just finished reading all four books of Lois Bujold's The Sharing Knife series. And having done so, I've concluded that I wasn't actually reading a fantasy series. I was reading an SF series with fantasy trappings.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
You see, what this looks like to me is a post-apocalyptic tale following a great war where psionics were used. That's the source of the malices. And the blighted areas. And the Dead Lake, which looks to me like a slightly expanded version of the Great Lakes. Heck, you can still see the tip of Lake Michigan in the map. And the Great North Road looks an awful lot like I-80, while the Grace River sure looks like the Ohio, etc.
All of the magic that we see in the story is pretty much garden variety psionics. Some of it isn't too different from Gil the ARM.
Seriously, they're fine books and I greatly enjoyed them.
But John Campbell could have printed them in Analog (modulo some of the not-very-explicit sex which might have been a problem for him).
It's probably easier to sell a fantasy series than it is to sell SF though.
*sigh*
Anyway, I suspect that these thoughts aren't new with me. Anybody else either trip on this themselves or see someone who did?
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
You see, what this looks like to me is a post-apocalyptic tale following a great war where psionics were used. That's the source of the malices. And the blighted areas. And the Dead Lake, which looks to me like a slightly expanded version of the Great Lakes. Heck, you can still see the tip of Lake Michigan in the map. And the Great North Road looks an awful lot like I-80, while the Grace River sure looks like the Ohio, etc.
All of the magic that we see in the story is pretty much garden variety psionics. Some of it isn't too different from Gil the ARM.
Seriously, they're fine books and I greatly enjoyed them.
But John Campbell could have printed them in Analog (modulo some of the not-very-explicit sex which might have been a problem for him).
It's probably easier to sell a fantasy series than it is to sell SF though.
*sigh*
Anyway, I suspect that these thoughts aren't new with me. Anybody else either trip on this themselves or see someone who did?