6 ms·

The second chapter of Anne McCaffrey's 'Dragonflight', written in 1968, opens with: "F'lar, on bronze Mnementh's great neck, appeared first in the skies above t

The second chapter of Anne McCaffrey's 'Dragonflight', written in 1968, opens with: "F'lar, on bronze Mnementh's great neck, appeared first in the skies above the chief Hold of Fax, so-called Lord of the High Reaches."

ryangs 2y ago
I think proper nouns get a bit more of a pass in terms of purple prose.
- setgree 2y ago
  I also enjoy the non-standard punctuation, e.g. F'lax -- how would you pronounce that?
  - PhasmaFelis 2y ago
    IIRC, dragonriders always elide part of their name, and indicate the gap with an apostrophe. It's consistent and explained in the text at some point.
  - FactolSarin 2y ago
    The apostrophe here most likely represents a glottal stop (as in Hawai'i).
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      Unlikely, since no English speaker would be able to pronounce that cluster. The odds are overwhelming that it represents nothing at all, just like the apostrophe in "don't".
  - pavlov 2y ago
    In Finnish, the apostrophe marks a syllable break between instances of the same vowel, and sounds like a very short pause. Maybe they use Finnish spelling rules on this planet. Example word: vaa'an — genetive of "vaaka" = "scale"
  - mock-possum 2y ago
    Ooh this is fun trivia - originally dragons had a hard time with human names, so it became a tradition for dragon riders (particularly males) to adopt the dragon’s pronunciation as an honorific. So “Simon” becomes “S’mon.” You say it with a bit of a slur - suhMON or fuhLAX - where the first syllable is not only unemphasized but uttered as quickly as possible then slurred into the next. F’lar really is just “fuhLAR”
tialaramex 2y ago
McCaffrey is on that TV Tropes list, I have only read a few of her novels and she does jump out for obvious examples of this trope. It's tricky to write an opening sentence though. We all recognise "Call me Ishmael" and probably "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" is obvious to lots of people but for example, "I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighbourhoods" doesn't exactly promise Breakfast at Tiffany's does it? By the second chapter I think you've earned a lot of leeway, either the reader is engaged and will soldier on despite your six new nouns and what might be a new word or possibly a new meaning for a word they know already - or they have probably set the book down some time ago and will never see this sentence anyway.
Suppafly 2y ago
Maybe because I read a lot of scifi and fantasy, despite not having read any Anne McCaffrey, but that doesn't seem particularly hard to parse or understand.
- permo-w 2y ago
  it has four, going on five, esoteric proper nouns in one sentence. it's not hard to parse, but it isn't something I love reading either. I'm reminded of the Illuminatus Trilogy, which at times is barely more than proper nouns arranged into sentences at random. like Finnegan's Wake but with more flower power
  - aredox 2y ago
    It reminds me of opening the bible - especially the books in the old testament- or any old compendium of legends from ancient civilisations.
  - PhasmaFelis 2y ago
    > it has four, going on five, esoteric proper nouns in one sentence. it's not hard to parse, but it isn't something I love reading either. Even so. If the sentence was something like "Kowalski's Mosquito soared high above the Führerbunker, Hitler's final redoubt in Berlin," no one would find that problematic. McCaffrey's sentence is only troubling if you've already assumed that made-up names are inherently bad writing.
    - bmacho 2y ago
      Made-up names are bad to read for me too. I don't like too many things in my head with unfamiliar names. I can't think of things with unfamiliar names, and it bothers me.
      - PhasmaFelis 2y ago
        That sounds very unpleasant. I'm sorry. With all respect, though, I think we can agree that that's an issue with the reader, not the writer? If I read a novel with a lot of Vietnamese characters and locations, say, I might well have some difficulty telling them apart, but that doesn't mean that Vietnamese names are bad writing.
aaroninsf 2y ago
What's funny is that this register and conceit is one that I dearly love among science fiction and fantasy writers, provided they fulfill the implicit promise, that on a second reading all such things will be clear. It's an intentional device. Andre Norton is particularly adept at this: when accounting for my deep love of her many thin "pulp" novels, many of which exist in the same universe, something I regularly praise is the way she almost as a signature drops you without exposition into drama. The conceit of a chatty expositional conversational narrator who can in effect be imaged to be turning to their friend-from-out-of-town to helpfully explain what this thing is or what the significance of that is—often with a presumed familiarity with the frame of reference their audience might hanve—is by contrast a crutch and now most characteristic of what we call Young Adult fiction. Trust in the reader, and trust in their sufficient interest to file such things away, is, I think, characteristic of a different era—one that demanded more of readers. I don't think it's a coincidence that our own era finds this off-putting. We're lazy now, and we have small token windows. EDIT: and I could probably have reproduced, or at least completed, that line of McCaffery's, from memory—though that particular book shows its age and its history in being the first short story she wrote about her world Pern. She got a lot softer and more sentimental as she went along, and less prone to patriarchal stereotypes she brought along from her work as a romance writer.

ryangs 2y ago

I think proper nouns get a bit more of a pass in terms of purple prose.

setgree 2y ago
I also enjoy the non-standard punctuation, e.g. F'lax -- how would you pronounce that?
- PhasmaFelis 2y ago
  IIRC, dragonriders always elide part of their name, and indicate the gap with an apostrophe. It's consistent and explained in the text at some point.
- FactolSarin 2y ago
  The apostrophe here most likely represents a glottal stop (as in Hawai'i).
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    Unlikely, since no English speaker would be able to pronounce that cluster. The odds are overwhelming that it represents nothing at all, just like the apostrophe in "don't".
- pavlov 2y ago
  In Finnish, the apostrophe marks a syllable break between instances of the same vowel, and sounds like a very short pause. Maybe they use Finnish spelling rules on this planet. Example word: vaa'an — genetive of "vaaka" = "scale"
- mock-possum 2y ago
  Ooh this is fun trivia - originally dragons had a hard time with human names, so it became a tradition for dragon riders (particularly males) to adopt the dragon’s pronunciation as an honorific. So “Simon” becomes “S’mon.” You say it with a bit of a slur - suhMON or fuhLAX - where the first syllable is not only unemphasized but uttered as quickly as possible then slurred into the next. F’lar really is just “fuhLAR”

tialaramex 2y ago

McCaffrey is on that TV Tropes list, I have only read a few of her novels and she does jump out for obvious examples of this trope. It's tricky to write an opening sentence though. We all recognise "Call me Ishmael" and probably "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" is obvious to lots of people but for example, "I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighbourhoods" doesn't exactly promise Breakfast at Tiffany's does it? By the second chapter I think you've earned a lot of leeway, either the reader is engaged and will soldier on despite your six new nouns and what might be a new word or possibly a new meaning for a word they know already - or they have probably set the book down some time ago and will never see this sentence anyway.

Suppafly 2y ago

Maybe because I read a lot of scifi and fantasy, despite not having read any Anne McCaffrey, but that doesn't seem particularly hard to parse or understand.

permo-w 2y ago
it has four, going on five, esoteric proper nouns in one sentence. it's not hard to parse, but it isn't something I love reading either. I'm reminded of the Illuminatus Trilogy, which at times is barely more than proper nouns arranged into sentences at random. like Finnegan's Wake but with more flower power
- aredox 2y ago
  It reminds me of opening the bible - especially the books in the old testament- or any old compendium of legends from ancient civilisations.
- PhasmaFelis 2y ago
  > it has four, going on five, esoteric proper nouns in one sentence. it's not hard to parse, but it isn't something I love reading either. Even so. If the sentence was something like "Kowalski's Mosquito soared high above the Führerbunker, Hitler's final redoubt in Berlin," no one would find that problematic. McCaffrey's sentence is only troubling if you've already assumed that made-up names are inherently bad writing.
  - bmacho 2y ago
    Made-up names are bad to read for me too. I don't like too many things in my head with unfamiliar names. I can't think of things with unfamiliar names, and it bothers me.
    - PhasmaFelis 2y ago
      That sounds very unpleasant. I'm sorry. With all respect, though, I think we can agree that that's an issue with the reader, not the writer? If I read a novel with a lot of Vietnamese characters and locations, say, I might well have some difficulty telling them apart, but that doesn't mean that Vietnamese names are bad writing.

aaroninsf 2y ago

What's funny is that this register and conceit is one that I dearly love among science fiction and fantasy writers, provided they fulfill the implicit promise, that on a second reading all such things will be clear. It's an intentional device. Andre Norton is particularly adept at this: when accounting for my deep love of her many thin "pulp" novels, many of which exist in the same universe, something I regularly praise is the way she almost as a signature drops you without exposition into drama. The conceit of a chatty expositional conversational narrator who can in effect be imaged to be turning to their friend-from-out-of-town to helpfully explain what this thing is or what the significance of that is—often with a presumed familiarity with the frame of reference their audience might hanve—is by contrast a crutch and now most characteristic of what we call Young Adult fiction. Trust in the reader, and trust in their sufficient interest to file such things away, is, I think, characteristic of a different era—one that demanded more of readers. I don't think it's a coincidence that our own era finds this off-putting. We're lazy now, and we have small token windows. EDIT: and I could probably have reproduced, or at least completed, that line of McCaffery's, from memory—though that particular book shows its age and its history in being the first short story she wrote about her world Pern. She got a lot softer and more sentimental as she went along, and less prone to patriarchal stereotypes she brought along from her work as a romance writer.