To paraphrase Damon Knight, “Tony Gonzalez is not a giant as often maintained. He's only a pygmy using a giant typewriter.”

That said, Heth is one of my favorite characters of all time. This character, despite the “EPIC!” Mary Sue chain of events, is rather likable (by me at least). The Broker breaks my “Gosseyn Paradox” figuratively, literally and multiordinally.

The telepathy thing… all I can say is it's easily explainable (within the context of Gonzalez's previous works). I figured it out yesterday and it blew my mind. >.<

I believe good romance tends to do an overall better job with character development (“good” = “stories that involve people who make credible choices based on credible information, setting and circumstances” and “credible” = “the cable repair guy is wearing pants and will wait outside the apartment for the heroine to get dressed from the shower he interrupted rather than insisting she finish up while he's working (cue Chapter Two boom-chicka-wow-wow)”).

When a science fiction or a fantasy author devotes some attention to the people roaming around inside their Big New Strange Ideas and Beautiful Weird Shit, it makes me a happy girl.

made me lol there. It's a fair point.

One thing I have noticed is that sci-fi tends to be (though isn't always) of a higher quality than other genres. that might possibly be preference rather than any difference in the technical quality of the writing… but I'll read damn near anything, and I've got to say, it's amazing how many very sucksessful (spelling intentional) authors are guilty of the exact same sins you're accurately ascribing to TonyG.

I chatted with him at Fanfest 2008 about this stuff actually, and he hinted that Jamyl Sarum's “telepathy” does have a valid in-setting “scientific” explanation. I think his attitude was that an incongruity is just something that hasn't been explained yet, and that he wanted to leave a few things open for his next stab at a novel by not explaining them – unfortunately, what were supposed to be mysteries and hooks to draw readers in to the second novel instead look like plot holes because, to be frank, he's not good enough an author to pull that trick off.

Still, with all this feedback about the place we can hope he'll take it all to heart and the result will be an improvement in the quality of his writing.

I find this interesting and more to the points I was making about how wrapped up we get in this game. Can I ask how he destroyed the universe of EVE? I have to also say I never read his book from the perspective of an EVE player, more from the perspective of one who likes the SciFi genre and it was sure cool to see places mentioned that I've been to in game.

I think the bias you state in having your EVE universe destroyed is enough to say we might indeed be mis-calibrated in how we view fiction centered around EVE. I think Stitcher has a valid point and it's not relating to spotting quality fiction at all.

I think Stitcher might be on to something here, most EVE players as fiction readers might be a bit jaded. Maybe holding fiction about the game to a very high standard, for several reasons I suspect; one would be the fact that the game really does affect us on a personal level (and isn't just a game) and the fact that those who comment on fiction about the game are also writing fiction and thus feel they can do better. Just some thoughts, grain of salt ok?

Also, I can't say I disagree with you, just maybe not to the same degree. Hence the discussion I was hoping to start.

On the other hand, I don't think that either of us approach our reading and criticism purely from the perspective of an EVE player. If I did that, I'd probably more or less like the book, since I did feel like it expanded my understanding of this fictional universe. broadening it in ways I might not have anticipated. Rather, we expect quality because of other material we read. When we choose what we want to read, though, that pretty much defines “bias” in the sense of selecting a sample, so it may be that you have a broader view and thus see a lot of stuff that's worse than this book. Personally, I don't really read crummy stuff if I can avoid it, but then that might just make me an elitist snob so I don't attach any sort of valuation to either approach. :p

Though it strikes me that if liking well-written stuff makes us “mis-calibrated for quality”, then maybe the calipers shold get re-adjusted.

All that aside, I interpreted your first comment as an attack on me as a writer, hence my response. If I did indeed misunderstand and miss your point, I apologize.

I'd say it's about average, to be entirely honest. EVE players just tend to be fairly jaded. We expect quality in all things and when it's not delivered, we tend to overreact. We're mis-calibrated for quality, in other words.

The problem EA suffers from is that it falls inside that band of writing where it's merely “not good”, but doesn't fall low enough to become entertaingly bad.

of course, I've said this several times by now and people still think I'm completely wrong, so maybe I should read it again in a more skeptical frame of mind. Then I can come back and burn TonyG in effigy along with the rest of yez.

“the writing itself struck me as about on the level of a university freshman creative writing class.”

I'm sorry you missed my point, maybe you should re-read the comment. Is there a possibility that you made these wide reaching comments about a book yet you can't cite examples in a discussion about “good writing”? Or is it possible that this discussion isn't want you had in mind with “like-minded players”? I took your post as the introduction to an intelligent conversation on writing, my apologies for mis-reading it.