Friday 22 July 2011

Aeeiiiih! It burns! It burns!


Blizzard have just posted an excerpt from the latest Warcraft novel, "Thrall: Twilight of the Aspects".

Seriously, is this thing intended to make buy the novel? The writing is unimaginably ponderous. Whatever happened to "show, don't tell"? Perhaps in Azeroth the commandment has been reversed. I can't think of a single blogger in my reading list (many of whom don't have English as a first language) who couldn't do a better job than this.

Scarily, Christie Golden is apparently one of the better Warcraft writers. If what I've read in other reviews is correct, Richard A. Knaak is even worse. I'm starting to see why some fantasy fans revere Tolkien so. I'd always thought of him as a rather mediocre plodder who couldn't write character. Compared to the lazy, unimaginative novel-a-month genre-fiction writers, though, he's like Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Ishiguro rolled into one! It's a sad state of affairs when game designers can write better dialogue than a "New York Times bestselling author".

The sad thing is, I'd quite like to read a well-written novel set in the Warcraft universe. Twilight of the Aspects isn't it.

Right, I'm off to read "The Comeback Girl". It's got five stars on Play.com,  so it must be good!

2 comments:

  1. I tried to read a Warcraft book in German. It started off with *Krieg* and then I spent the next few hours going *Krieg* in a deep voice and never got round to attempting the rest.

    I laughed my head off when I read the blurb to your next literary choice :P

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  2. Oh, no! I've got Krieg! in my head now as well!

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