The series started out as pretty hard SF, then gradually moved into a magic and mysticism quest by the third volume. We also have some apparent paddingâinterminable descriptions of rituals and detailed menus of various feasts which add nothing to the story, but which do add to page count. Only Sterlingâs mastery of the medium rescues the series from unreadability, although I confess to some impatience for the hero to die and get the series over with.
Me, Iâll wait for the paper-back before buying the book. It is available in electronic form, but that has zero lendability or resale value, so weâll stick to hard copy.
This once great series jumped the shark into religious woo woo a long time back.
Gotta say the Nantucket stories were much better. Tying the later series to the first 3 was a stretch (even if he conceived them as one series) and a mistake on par with Asimov grafting his robot novels to his Foundation series. I had hoped that Nantucket would get explored more, in fact he seemed to set himself up for that with the fleeing of the surviving daughter of Walker to the Russian steppes and/or the crashing of the Nantucket attach dirigible somewhere in the near east hither land. Now it looks we will get more of west coast Emberverse stories. Disappointing to say the least
I assume he didnât continue the previous series because it wasnât popular enough or he couldnât line up anyone to publish it, not because he wasnât interested in doing so.
Have to agree with the poster and author of the article about preferring the original 3 novels, The first couple of the Emberverse novels were OK but not up the the Nantucket stories.
In my opinion S. M. Stirling is better than the 11 books he has committed to this, at best, YA fantasy.
Like many a series, this one has been overextended.
Iâll throw out the following hypothesis for discussion: No story needs more than three volumes to be satisfactorily told. (By word count, let us say no more than half a million words, max.)
Also much preferred the Island in the Sea of Time universe and wish that continued. Got bored withe the Emberverse a few volumes in, stayed with it a couple more just out of loyalty, and now just donât care. Agreed with others on too much mysticism in the series annoying me.
I would also prefer that instead of ripping off the Emberverse to create a TV series about humanity without power, NBC ripped off the Nantucket series and send a modern city back in time.
Iâve enjoyed the Island In The Sea Of Time books, and quite a few other things heâs written, but have never bothered to start this series because I just canât muster any real interest in a post apocalyptic series set in the ruins of present day America. I keep waiting for him to get back to something interesting.
You must hate virtually every play of Shakespeare.
I read Boyettâs sequel recently. Aside from the ideaâthe modern world stripped of technologyâthereâs not much similarity between the two.
Me, I like the Draka series and the Nantucket series. Love the book set in India (Peshawar Lancers). The Fire series started strong through the Protectorâs War, then itâs been âvamp till readyâ in plot, kinda like Martinâs series has gotten to be.
Bring back the Draka!
On the one hand, Iâll happily read it, on the other, the series needs to end, I want to read something new from him, Iâm kind of sick of it at this point.
Stirling started out strong in the Draka series and with the Nantucket books. But the Emberverse books (and the later Draka series) are just to damn depressing for me to get through.
What Iâd really like is another book in the same Universe as âThe Peshawar Lancers.â That was a fun read!
All right!
No, youâre the one who said you hadnât read the book youâre criticizing.
I never said that I hadnât read Ariel. I read it when it first came out. I read the sequel recentlyâbecause itâs only recently come out!
Do I have to diagram the sentences in order to enhance your reading comprehension?
Finally, yes, I compared Stirling to Shakespeareâin the sense that they both have borrowed. As Iâm sure you know, Shakespeare wasnât original in virtually any of his playsâhis plots, stories, and characters, as well as many of his famous lines, come from many other writers. But, as you probably hate Shakespeare for borrowing, as you hate Stirling, you probably havenât read Shakespeare either.
Cheers!
Yeah, but you also accused Stirling of theft, and, itâs obviously not theft, because Ariel is still there.
So why not stop playing around with definitions, and answer the actual point? That artists routinely borrow, steal, or whatever you want to call it, and modify, and advance the ideas of others, and that general ideas arenât special gems that belong to one person and must never be reproduced or touched by anybody else. Writers rarely create anything completely original, a lot of very good writing comes from writers looking at something and saying, âIâd very much like to play with a similar idea.â
Boyettâs probably done it himself. I donât know many of the specifics of his fantasy world, but Iâm sure he borrowed a few ideas from mythology if nothing else. And for a long time, most fantasy was thinly altered Tolkien ripoffs. Nor is it certain from your description that Stirling is even aware of Ariel. All technology dying is an interesting plot, but itâs not something that couldnât be invented independently by more than one person (and even if it wasnât, it can be handled differently by different people). Following that premise:
âThe Changeâ is a fairly obvious way for the people to refer to the event, considering itâs, well, when, things changed. You could call it âThe Alterationâ I guess (although I sense youâd still use that as evidence where ideas were stolen), or âThe Depoweringâ, or âThe Low-Technitudeâ, but⌠âThe Changeâ does nicely.
SCA being better equipped to handle the new circumstances than people who have based their lives on technology is also a fairly obvious conclusion. The story is going to focus on those who survive and weâre going to hear their stories more than those who didnât.
Fortresses become much more important and harder to assault, so villains will tend to use them, and if you want to attack one using modern tactics but no modern technology, a hang-glider is an obvious way to do so.
Even if all of these were directly inspired by the book, I still donât see a problem (except that he probably should acknowledge the influence, if he remembered he was influenced by it⌠a lot of influence happens that way, an idea gets to you and you donât remember exactly where from), but maybe others do, so letâs explore that possibility. Do you have any actual evidence of that, beyond the similarities mentioned? Has S.M. Stirling mentioned reading the novel when he was young, or has somebody snapped a picture of him at home with it on his bookshelf? Is any of the prose or characters lifted from the book? Are there even any other examples, beyond what you mentioned, where there are similar plot elements?
I donât know. I canât say one way or the other. Maybe he does reuse other peopleâs ideas. Generally, I donât see anything wrong with it as long as he also changes plenty and tries to bring something new to the table. And although the merits of his books are debatable, I think itâs safe to say plenty is changed. You say yourself that Ariel is an outright fantasy, and apparently itâs got unicorns and such (btw, magical creatures coming back to the world? Not the most original idea either! Boyett must have totally stole that idea from Bakshiâs movie Wizards, where faeries and other magical creatures came back after nuclear war destroyed humanity, and just changed a few details. Personally, I donât see how you can defend such a blatant thief.).
Iâm sure Arielâs a great book, and itâs great to promote it and say it dealt with similar themes earlier. But accusing an artist of wrongdoing is going to need a little more than a few plot elements that happen to be similar, most of which follow fairly logically from the basic premise (else every war movie where a guy gets shot is a potential ripoff of the first movie where that happened).
Still waiting for some evidence that he actually derived the concept from there, instead of coming up with it on his own, or from some other source. When you think about it (and I read somewhere else pointing this out), itâs pretty much the mirror image of his previous series, Island in the Sea of Time: one has a world suddenly gaining a technological leg up thanks the big magical event, the other has a world suddenly regressing in technology thanks to the big magical event. Itâs easy to imagine him thinking, âI want to do something about what happened to the Earth Nantucket left behind⌠hmmm, maybe theyâre dealing with kind of the opposite situation, and theyâre actually regressing in technology,â and then, once the idea was formed by him, maybe reflecting back on an old story he once enjoyed that also used that premise, and drew some inspiration, while also introducing plenty of elements of his own and a completely different storyline. Hard to say.
Not idiosyncratic at all, as I said, if youâre writing a story where technology fails and people are forced to rely on medieval weaponry, the people who, for a hobby, practice extensively with such weaponry are naturally going to have a leg up on everybody else. If I were writing a story with that premise, itâd be a part of mine, too. Just like itâd be that staying in a huge city immediately after the change would be a deathtrap (apparently, Ariel dispenses with this, by just having most of the population disappear. Fairly significant difference in plots⌠in addition to the fact that, from what I can tell, Ariel starts many years after their Change, and the Dies the Fire universe follows the characters directly through it, and all the growing pains and learning what works and doesnât).
Also following fairly logically. Youâve got a defended fortress. You want to get past their defenses without confronting them directly. Youâve got modern inventions, but no modern technology. Slipping in with a hang glider is about your only option aside from a balloon, and balloons are easier to spot and shoot down. And remember, Stirlingâs story doesnât have this additional element of magical creatures that it can ALSO draw on for other options, Boyettâs does. He could have written the attack on the fortress being facilitated by a pegasus. Stirling didnât have that option.
Canât speak to the similarities in the characters. Being generous (and, again, itâs not that much of a stretch to a character who is into fantasy in a book where the world is thrust back to medieval tech), and, in my not having read Ariel, Iâll allow for the possibility that maybe theyâre pretty much identical in personality and circumstances, including the extensive family ties to many of the other main characters, rather than that they share one particularly notable trait. So, okay, maybe youâve got ONE point. There are going to be plenty of similarities in any two books, particularly any that share a basic premise. Any others?
Another example of âfairly obvious stuffâ is a superior bow (or for that matter, anything) made before the change out of high tech materials, that is now much more valuable because although it still works, it canât be made any more. Does Ariel have that? I donât know. But if it did, I wouldnât be at all surprised. How about a character dying of what is, in the normal world, a fairly easily treatable disease?
How about anything you can point to thatâs nearly identical thatâs NOT related to the premise?
And you think that when he shamelessly stole a bookâs plot without credit, he would attempt to hide it by also using the same subtitle? Ooookay.
None? You donât think he was influenced by any other books but the one you insist he stole from? If so, heâs incredibly inventive, because, reading a plot synopsis of Ariel, it doesnât sound anything like Dies the Fire at ALL. For one thing, the Ariel, in Ariel, refers to a freaking UNICORN the main character encounters and befriends and the plot revolves around. I mean, thatâs a pretty substantive change. Stirlingâs book is mostly how different groups of people survive a changed world build a new society and the politics and conflicts that follow, rather than one manâs coming-of-age adventure with a unicorn through a world thatâs already changed many years ago. Thereâs not even a side character that canât return home until he kills a dragon, or anything else, in Stirlingâs work as far as I read. If Stirling had no other influences, than heâs some idiot-savant font of creativity.
I didnât know before this conversation, but look what I found in just a few searches:
From http://www.sfreviews.net/boyett_ariel.html:
" (To be fair, Stirling acknowledges the debt, as he offers the new edition its most prominent blurb.)"
and from Library Dad: Steven R. Boyett vs. S. M. Stirling (in the comments, itâs anonymous so it could be bull, but it claims to be Stirling):
âSteve Boyettâs work was one of my inspirations and Iâm a great fan of his; thatâs why I did a blurb for âElegy Beachâ.â
So, yep, he has given it some kind of acknowledgement, a fairly significant one.
So weâre left with a basic premise that inspired a completely different work that shares a few elements in common. I see no problem here. This is how art happens.
The situations are not at all analogous, considering the paintings in that example are virtually exactly the same in every way. These books are not. See the absence of a unicorn for Exhibit A. A comparable example would be a person like you complaining that that any picture of a spaceship towing an asteroid with some kind of structure on it stole from Chris Foss, even if the spaceship, asteroid, and structure looked nothing alike (except in that spaceships tend to have certain features in common with other spaceships, asteroids with asteroids, and structures with structures), and there was also an alien space battle and black hole. And no, Iâd have no problem with that situation (the similarity in concepts that is, Iâd think the complainerâs a bit off-kilter). Especially if the artistâs also said, âYeah, I really liked that Chris Foss painting and I wanted to do something with an inhabited asteroid being towed.â
Inconvenient? No, Iâve seen many times people think that because a few elements are the same, itâs been stolen. Sometimes, as here, I decide to address the stupidity, most times, I ignore it. And sometimes itâs done tongue-in-cheek (heck, I think I did it myself earlier in the thread, with respect to the TV series Revolution, I donât literally think it was a ripoff), and itâs hard to tell how itâs meant. Frankly, I donât care. Accusing a writer of theft for using a general idea in a completely different way is a dumb opinion no matter how many people say it, and I didnât quote it because⌠it wasnât relevant. Saying âsomebody agrees with my opinionâ is a logical fallacy when what weâre discussing is the merits of the opinion itself.
Impressive goalpost shifting. You must be tired lifting and moving them by yourselves. You started arguing it was theft, and that he committed some horrible sin. Have we agreed thatâs not the case? So letâs go to âderivativeâ. Again, no big deal, but, again, weâre only got some slim evidence (the ideas were similar and he acknowledges it as an influence) that he specifically derived the idea from there (as opposed to wanting to work with the idea and once it was set in his mind, remembered another book with a similar idea). Very wishy-washy word, though, âderivative,â it doesnât really have a single clear meaning when weâre talking about creative work. So please, define exactly how you mean the word.
Someone working in the general area of a previous artist canât be said to be plagiarizing, just for that fact alone. You have to actually have evidence of plagiarism. Heâs acknowledged the book as an influence, there doesnât seem to be any stolen text that you can point to, nor any ideas that arenât pretty natural consequences, and the books appear to be extremely different in plot, tone, and characters, ergo, no plagiarism.
Again, jumping from âplagiarismâ to âderivative.â Do you feel theyâre the same? Because there are plenty of things that are derivative that arenât plagiarism. By this point, every time travel book is a little derivative (under some definitions of the word). Doesnât mean they canât also be fun, enlightening, even a great work of literature, or that the writerâs done something wrong to somebody else. Boyettâs work itself sounds pretty derivative in plenty of areas (he may also be very good, may even be in fact a better writer than Stirling. Derivative isnât some terrible curse word). Itâs not just SOME elements in one book that arenât in the other⌠most elements particular to each book arenât in the other, as far as Iâve seen. Youâve listed a handful of elements they seem to share (some of which I canât directly dispute due to lack of references), out of two full novels built off a vaguely (but not entirely) similar premise. Those elements that are, are mostly fairly logical consequences of the shared initial conditions and seem to be handled completely differently. Thatâs normal.
If I was writing a time travel novel, thereâs a good chance itâs going to involve somebody deliberately or accidentally changing history (if not, then itâs got something in common with ANOTHER book, and you could accuse it of being derivative of THAT). When that happens, the character is probably going to discover that the time they left is not what they expected. Itâs probably going to be worse, in fact, at least for the main character (otherwise, not much conflict, not much story). And heâs probably going to want to undo his mistake. Many of these possibilities are emergent from the general concept. Derivative? Maybe, depending on your definition. But nobody should call me a thief for it. If I were writing a war book, chances are, thereâs going to be battles. If itâs a Vietnam book, thereâll probably be a chopper, and people who seem to be villagers on the side of and friendly to the US forces but are REALLY working for the other side. In the vast majority of novels, thereâs a love story SOMEWHERE. Your argument is about as ridiculous as saying, âLook, thereâs a romance plot in these two books, one must be copying!â
No, I claim that his actual announcement of the debt is his announcement of the debt. The name? Isnât that original, and that if Stirling had some ill intent, he would have taken efforts to disguise it. Most likely, IMHO? He simply didnât remember it was used. Maybe he read the book once or twice in the 80s, then twenty years after it first came out he had the idea to do this series, then remembered this book he once enjoyed had a similar premise, and a few of the ideas consciously or unconsciously helped influence him.
I donât know if thatâs the case. Maybe he came up with the idea of Dies the Fire immediately after rereading the book. Considering the books seem to be almost nothing alike, I donât really care either way.
Did he? Then what was it? Quotes, please. Again, I havenât read it, and, considering how you seem to think a book about several different large groups of people first surviving and then rebuilding the world after a catastrophe is suffered blatant theft of a coming of age story of a virgin man and a unicorn fighting against a necromancer in a world where magical creatures have returned and 99% of the population has vanished, because of the presence of a hang-glider, I canât really trust your second-hand impression of things.
Off the hook for what? You havenât made a case⌠in fact, youâre not even clear about what youâre accusing him of. You still think itâs âtheftâ? Or is it just âderivativeâ (whatever that means)? Do you still think, as you bizarrely claimed earlier, that Ariel is the ONLY influence Stirling had on the Dies the Fire series? Or that Boyettâs influences somehow are okay but Stirlingâs evil for his?
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