As I noted on my News page, World Fantasy Award-winning author Jeff VanderMeer has temporarily turned over his blog Ecstatic Days to his wife Ann, the new editor of Weird Tales, and she has invited upcoming WT authors to write guest blog posts. My guest post should run on Jeff’s blog sometime late next week, around Dec. 27th. I rambled for a few paragraphs about why, even though I’m a scientist, I prefer writing fantasy. So check it out next week–great for curing or intensifying those holiday hangovers. I will pry myself off the sofa and announce it here when it does run.

To celebrate the premiere issue under new editor Ann VanderMeer, Weird Tales magazine is running a trial subscription offer at half price. It’s three issues for $10–view all the details here. If you act soon, you could get the first issue of Ms. VanderMeer’s editorship, #347, which has my short story “Excision” in it. There is also a brand-new Michael Moorcock Elric novella scheduled for early next year. For my money, Elric is the most interesting sword & sorcery hero because he’s actually an angst-ridden antihero. I’m very curious, given Ms. VanderMeer’s literary background, to see how the magazine evolves under her lead. There are plenty of magazines for literary fantasy, but not many at all for “normal” fantasy written with a literary sensibility.

This trial offer ends Dec. 21, so snatch it up before it’s gone. I did.

I finished The Lies of Locke Lamora last week, but an element in the middle bothered me. Act I of the book (it closely followed a three-act structure) was mostly setup, but Act II introduced a supremely powerful new villain. This villain somehow knew every one of the protagonist’s secrets. He effortlessly out-maneuvered the most clever secondary characters, then the protagonist. The villain’s henchman wielded dominating power that left the protagonist utterly helpless.

Despite this almost comical power imbalance, the seemingly invincible antagonist made Act II a gripping read by wrecking the protagonist’s life. The tension level was off the charts. I kept wondering “how’s the protagonist ever going to defeat this guy.” Then in the climax of Act III, when the stakes were the highest, the protagonist used a simple loophole, a thing that he’d already considered in Act II, to easily neutralize the antagonist’s supreme power and defeat him in less than a page.

So I got to thinking about this paradox. A powerful antagonist will cause lots of conflict, which is good. But the more powerful he is, the harder it will be for the protagonist to defeat him. When the protagonist eventually does triumph, that victory needs to be extremely clever or brave or strong to make it feel justified.

In Locke Lamora, the protagonist’s eventual victory was way too easy, especially given the antagonist’s seemingly limitless power. But by that point in the novel, the gripping read of the middle (largely due to the conflict caused by that antagonist’s power) had already hooked my attention. I still found the climax weak, and partly because of that I’m not planning to read the sequel. But it seems that the dominantly powerful antagonist was a compelling element even though his defeat was unjustified.

I’m over halfway through The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch. I’m always curious in F debut novels to see what element might have caught the notice of the publisher. So far, the world of Lies is incredibly vivid; the story is a ripping yarn in the best classic F thief-tale style. But the shallow POV and the narrative structure are driving me nuts.

The alternating chapters of boyhood-Locke’s coming of age and grownup-Locke’s scheming leave me feeling jerked around. The boyhood stuff is solid, and the chapters are cleverly ordered so the timelines compliment each other. But every time I finish one of the current chapters, I hate to have the plot interrupted by another boyhood interlude.

The shallow omni POV also leaves me feeling distant from the characters. I don’t mind a narrative zoom-in or zoom-out at the start or end of a scene, telling me something outside the character’s view (like an unseen pursuer tailing our heroes). The POV at least head-hops smoothly from one character into another in the same scene, rather than abruptly. But I’m constantly distracted by the huge quantities of arbitrarily withheld information — things that Locke and the other POV characters obviously know but the author is artificially hiding from the reader to maintain suspense.

This all combines to make the narrative feel extremely distant to me. The POV does describe the characters’ simple emotions and physical reactions, but except for that, it feels almost cinematic.

Maybe it’s the back-cover comparison to Ocean’s Eleven that sparked this thought, but I think what Lynch has done is write a prose movie. His shallow POV communicates the characters’ basic inner thoughts, the same things shown in an actor’s gestures and expressions. Information that the protagonists know is withheld, just like in a movie, so the reader is surprised at the later revelations.

As a proponant of the limited third-person POV, I’m not sure how I feel about this. Limited-third evolved as a response to the rise of movies and TV–a way to get inside a character’s head that those visual formats could not achieve. Lynch isn’t so much regressing to the authorial omni POV of Tolkien and Lewis, but presenting his story in a movie-like format that is physically vivid yet shallow in characterization.

But if characters are defined foremost by their actions, is this shallow “movie” third-person all a ripping yarn type of story needs? In this age of F video games and F blockbuster movies, is a shallow “movie” POV good enough to reach most readers?