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?

My writing buddy Pantsless Justin posed a neat question recently:

The speculative aspect (in SF/F Fiction) — can it be entirely in the period and the setting, the moral code, and the language with which the tale is told?

I certainly think so. But then again, I’ve written a lot of “fake historical” F (a term coined for Guy Gavriel Kay’s work), and it had very little obvious magic. I also love historical fiction. So I don’t care how much overt speculative-ness is in a story, or if there is any at all, so long as the setting is neat and the characters are captivating.

Many other writers and editors disagree. I had a lot of trouble with critiquers who weren’t sure whether my “fake historical” F was supposed to be speculative or not. A bigger issue may be readers — most F readers want obvious speculative elements, for awe and wonder, and they’ll be looking for them as they read.

I think the most important thing is to write the story you want to write, and worry later about how speculative it is and where you should submit it. This approach of course can lead to a stable of stories that don’t quite fit any market out there (ask me how I know! :) ), but I do think it’s the best way for a writer to hone their natural voice and produce the best possible work.

If what Ann VanderMeer told me last spring still holds, my short story “Excision” will be in Weird Tales #347, her first issue, which is supposed to be out this week. But the Table of Contents hasn’t been released yet, and the Weird Tales blog says #346 is coming out this week. I’m not sure if that’s a mistake or if something has changed — Google tells me nothing. If I had gotten off my ass Saturday and driven up to Capclave, I could have asked someone from Wildside Press. Ah well–all will be revealed in due time.

“It’s the job that’s never started that takes longest to finish.”

J.R.R. Tolkien