Comment by permo-w 3 days ago
it has four, going on five, esoteric proper nouns in one sentence. it's not hard to parse, but it isn't something I love reading either.
I'm reminded of the Illuminatus Trilogy, which at times is barely more than proper nouns arranged into sentences at random. like Finnegan's Wake but with more flower power
except for 'Arda', every new word is defined/clarified.
I'm a huge LOTR fan and a moderate Silmarillion fan, and I can see how maybe Tolkien is guilty of this 'new words for familiar things' problem.. I guess when Tolkien does it, I'm enchanted, e.g. the first non-introduction line in _Fellowship_:
> When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
To me this immediately evokes: we're in a foreign land, but it's going to be vaguely small-town England in its manners and interests.
> it has four, going on five, esoteric proper nouns in one sentence.
F'lar is unexplained within that sentence. Mnementh is also unexplained, but sounds like a constellation.
Fax and the High Reaches are explicitly marked as the names of a person and a place. Those are going to appear as proper nouns no matter what genre you're reading. It's the only possible way to do things. This is like complaining that Robin Hood's primary antagonist is the Sheriff of Nottingham. What's the complaint?
Not surprisingly, Robert Anton Wilson, one half of the writing team behind Illuminatus, was a huge fan and scholar of James Joyce. Indeed in the first volume, the character Epicene Wildeblood writes, a damning dismissal of what is obviously meant to be the trilogy itself, describing it as "a very pretentious imitation of Faulkner and Joyce"[1]. I can't think of anything more Joycean. (Epicene doesn't think much of science fiction either, even when she transitions into a more relaxed Mary Margaret Wildeblood in the later Schrodinger's Cat trilogy.)
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Illuminatu...
> it has four, going on five, esoteric proper nouns in one sentence. it's not hard to parse, but it isn't something I love reading either.
Even so. If the sentence was something like "Kowalski's Mosquito soared high above the Führerbunker, Hitler's final redoubt in Berlin," no one would find that problematic. McCaffrey's sentence is only troubling if you've already assumed that made-up names are inherently bad writing.
The thing about the alternative you offer is that none of the names in it are made-up, other than that Kowalski may be a fictional character.
There is nothing inherently wrong with made-up names, and some genres will require more than others, but I suspect that sentences in the style of McCaffrey's are partly intended to draw in the reader who feels, vaguely and probably subconsciously, as someone who has the inside scoop on esoteric knowledge from having deduced what sort of entities these names denote. To be clear, I am not immune to the effect, and it can be pleasant in small doses if the rest of the story is engaging.
That maybe very well be true, but it still doesn't indicate any problem with the McCaffrey sentence.
Also note that it's the start of the second chapter, so some of those nouns may have been introduced already.
My first paragraph is very well true. The second one says "there is nothing inherently wrong with made-up names", which seems to be in agreement with what you hold to be true.
I am also entirely in agreement with the position that no significant criticism of the author can be made from a single sentence, especially when presented without context.
Made-up names are bad to read for me too. I don't like too many things in my head with unfamiliar names. I can't think of things with unfamiliar names, and it bothers me.
That sounds very unpleasant. I'm sorry. With all respect, though, I think we can agree that that's an issue with the reader, not the writer? If I read a novel with a lot of Vietnamese characters and locations, say, I might well have some difficulty telling them apart, but that doesn't mean that Vietnamese names are bad writing.
> but that doesn't mean that Vietnamese names are bad writing.
Not everybody agrees: https://www.jesusandmo.net/wp-content/uploads/2011-05-31.png
On a more serious note, I watched a Chinese drama with my parents, and the fact that the characters' names were in Chinese caused enormous problems for them.† This is hard for me to empathize with, but clearly it's something that some people can't handle.
† Another thing that caused them problems is that Chinese characters are addressed differently by different people, sometimes by name, sometimes by title, sometimes by a kinship term that will vary with the relationship between speaker and addressee....
That's easier for me to empathize with; it causes difficulties for me too, but those difficulties are mostly in the nature of nailing down a bunch of different pieces of information about each character, not in the nature of "why are you speaking a language that isn't English?!?"
Compare with the first sentence of The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien:
> There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Iluvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made.