Thoughts on Flex
Mar. 17th, 2015 02:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackFlex is theferrett's novel. I'm always excited when someone I read online has a traditional novel published.
The central characters: the protagonist Paul Tsabo, an ex-cop insurance investigator who loves methodical paperwork, his reserved young daughter, his ex-wife are very movingly painted, and much more involved with the main character and the plot than most families in urban fantasy. I was really moved by his description of how paperwork makes civilisation.
In the acknowledgements at the end, he describes specific improvements to the novel people suggested, not just that they helped a lot, that was really interesting.
He does what I always try to do, to make a magic system that's dramatic and cool and full of cool ideas (make something from a videogame! make anything from paperwork!) but also clear what's going on so it's clear when the hero has an instant-win button and when he doesn't. Not out of arbitrary pedantry, but so there's actually any form of tension in the story whatsoever. Ferrett describes why this usually makes a better story very very well here: Avoiding Doctor Strange Syndrome. And he does it much better than most books. Although, unfortunately, I felt he didn't succeed as well as I'd hoped: in the vast majority of scenes, it was clear what the possibilities were, what was easy, what was possible with a cost etc, so naturally you didn't even think about it. But some of the big "this is how the magic system works" moments I felt relied too much on "some sense of fairness drawn from the practitioner's subconscious", when honestly, it could have been made up either way and made as much sense.
Did other people post reviews yet?
The central characters: the protagonist Paul Tsabo, an ex-cop insurance investigator who loves methodical paperwork, his reserved young daughter, his ex-wife are very movingly painted, and much more involved with the main character and the plot than most families in urban fantasy. I was really moved by his description of how paperwork makes civilisation.
In the acknowledgements at the end, he describes specific improvements to the novel people suggested, not just that they helped a lot, that was really interesting.
He does what I always try to do, to make a magic system that's dramatic and cool and full of cool ideas (make something from a videogame! make anything from paperwork!) but also clear what's going on so it's clear when the hero has an instant-win button and when he doesn't. Not out of arbitrary pedantry, but so there's actually any form of tension in the story whatsoever. Ferrett describes why this usually makes a better story very very well here: Avoiding Doctor Strange Syndrome. And he does it much better than most books. Although, unfortunately, I felt he didn't succeed as well as I'd hoped: in the vast majority of scenes, it was clear what the possibilities were, what was easy, what was possible with a cost etc, so naturally you didn't even think about it. But some of the big "this is how the magic system works" moments I felt relied too much on "some sense of fairness drawn from the practitioner's subconscious", when honestly, it could have been made up either way and made as much sense.
Did other people post reviews yet?
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Date: 2015-03-19 07:40 am (UTC)Yes. In fact some of my favourite cases of books that achieve this are done with a well explained magic system – and the dramatic extra bit is basically a puzzle, in that there turns out to be a loophole in the presented rules that you can get some really good effects through, so the implicit challenge to a reader that way inclined is the puzzle game 'Can you spot the way to beat this system before I reveal it 3/4 of the way through the book?'. Not that you always have all the facts, but you usually feel as if you could at least have spotted the possibility of a loophole in this area. (Or better still, you actually did spot it, and then get to feel smug.)
With a not-explained system, if you want a magician character to go beyond some previous apparent limit without it looking like blatant plot-bodging, you tend to have to fall back on some other way of making the reader expect that they've got more power. For example, they just had a close encounter with a very powerful entity and absorbed some extra magicalnessness, or they've spent the last year on another planet getting extra tuition from super-elves, or they died and an archangel resurrected them with more welly, or whatever. You don't just get to say 'and then they had a really neat idea, aha!', because unlike the puzzly case above, if the author doesn't have to explain the idea then that's clearly a plot device they can whip out any time it happens to be needed, so it's unsportingly easy.