I seem to remember the same thing about War of the Roses. It’s still warmed-over England.

Drizzt Unbound: Onto the Vasty Plains
(Book Two in the Dark Swords of Black Terror Trilogy)
By Ti’mothy B’urke

Less innocent but still plucky, despite the doom that came to Drazzt, the spritely vampire leaves the teeming warrens of Ha’rare for the nearby Vasty Plains to pursue her destiny. With the Paxil and Elavil both held temporarily at bay by the lords known only by their initials FDA and those lords’ power of Yrotaluger Weiver, Drizzt has time to learn more about her hidden nature and the unsuspected facts about her parentage. In an empty country where they turned back time, Drizzt follows the drumbeat strains of the night’s remains to a series of encounters with the Al’tai, a wise nomadic people of unlikely stature.
(SEE THE HBO MINI-SERIES. WORLDWIDE AUTHOR TOUR OF F’INLAND.)

Even if you’re going to write your fantasy based on some adaptation of medieval or early-modern Europe, there’s lots more on that palette than just the southeast part of Great Britain. (GG Kaye has done this a few times, I think, but they’ve struck me as too close to be really inventive. The Byzantium pair was, iirc, the life of the emperor Justinian tarted up with a little magic. It didn’t do enough for me to read the second book.)

Although I’ve invested probably too much time in the series, I’m still not enthusiastic about George RR Martin’s set, because the setup is too historically transparent. Ok, here’s England, here’s Scotland, here are some vague Vikings, across the sea there’s sorta Mongols, and oh yeah, the first king is a dead ringer for Henry VIII and one of the main point-of-view characters is so close to Richard III as portrayed by a particular Elizabethan playwright that it’s a good thing Shakespeare is public domain. It’s gotten a little better as it’s gotten longer, but my oh my what a collection of cliches for books that have had such good reviews.

Meanwhile, I’ve said numerous times that fantasy publishers are leaving humongous piles of money on the table by not picking up the rights to Henryk Sienkiewicz’s trilogy and giving it the full-press marketing treatment. It’s only one of the best adventures ever written, and it only has a 100-year track record as a bestseller. Really, this should not be hard for a publisher; it’s even a trilogy already.

(ps More dislikes? I need a little more than “wise and nomadic people” to write the blurb for Book Two in the Dark Swords of Black Terror Trilogy.)

as a conlanger, linguistics major, and huge nerd, i’ve given a large amount of thought to orthographies in fantasy and sci-fi novels, and incline towards the “go with a pronunciation/spelling mapping that will be familiar to your readers, because they WILL pronounce it as they see fit, even if you put a convenient guide in an appendix.”

on the other hand, i honestly haven’t read anywhere near broadly enough in the genres to have any idea how good orthography for made up names correlates to quality.

See, I have no problem with someone deciding to use an apostrophe in exotic or alien names if it’s about a consistent understanding of what that punctuation signifies. The romanization of lots of human languages has entailed either use of marks or decisions to represent sounds with letters that make very different sounds in English. In chiShona, for example, “sv” and “zv” as written in roman characters make a very distinctive sound (“s” or “z” with tongue pressed against the top front of the mouth). In Zulu or Xhosa, c q and z all signify click sounds.

It’s just that when I read a blurb and the apostrophes sound instead like a totally derivative, random way to signify the exotic, I think to myself, “oh, dear, this is likely to be total crap”. It might not be so: I have enjoyed some fantasy works whose names are derivative but whose plotting or characterization is not. But the hook doesn’t set if I think I’m about to pick up something that’s sub-Terry Brooks in its originality or readability.

For an acquired taste in pulp SF, I’m rather enjoying Leigh Brackett’s stories right now. I don’t think they would fit everyone’s fancy, but they’re quite good at what they do.

one author whose occasional apostrophes i overlook, because she’s so good, is c. j. cherryh. check out the chanur books. i say this having last read them before highschool, but i suspect that were i to reread them, i’d still find them good.

Hey, there is lots of wankery much worse than the D&D kind.