While I haven't read enough of the major Eternal Champion books for the repeated plotline to grate, I did enjoy Elric a whole lot. And The War Hound and the World's Pain, while having much in common with, say, Weird of the White Wolf, is in no real danger of being mistaken for it.
And Dancers at the End of Time (a delight and a favorite of mine) is in no real danger of being mistaken for anything else.
(In Moorcock's defense, I'd suggest that the formulaic nature of his repeated plot is very much the point he's trying to make. Still, de gustibus.)
Moorcock's sort of the Brancusi of skiffy; he's got a small handful of themes that obsess him, which the great body of his work is involved in ringing small changes and variations on. This isn't a bad thing, but it does require a willingness to look at the same heads and torsos over and over again.
Though perhaps appropo for a Richard Thompson reference, we'll find our own antidepressants, thanks.
Rowling's world is well-crafted, but it's no Middle-Earth, no Bas-Lag or Ambergris.
Does it have to be? My Martin Backpacker's not a thousand-dollar Taylor, but I can play you a tune on it that you'll hum all day.
The trouble with plots is that summarizing them inevitably makes the work sound stupider than it is. Boy finds out he's got magic powers, must defeat evil sorcerer, goes to magic school. Scientist accidentally breeds giant brain-sucking bugs. Tiny people with hairy feet cross half the world to dispose of cursed jewelry.
Plot is not story; plot's just what happens. Stories are the core of things, the place where you can look in and see what (various things) the tale is "about."
Harry Potter is about (for another value of "about") power, and responsibility, and the difference between training and education; about growing up in a world beseiged by darkness; about what it means to be gifted, and what it does not. Note that for "Harry Potter" one can replace Buffy, or Star Wars, or Wheel of Time, or Riddle-Master, or any of a long list of other things. This is a feature, not a bug. That collection of themes is one of the the deep and resonant chords of fantasy, that thrums in accord with something deep in the breast of thousands of fans. Play it right, and you've already got something worth listening to; play it on an instrument made of memorable characters in a compelling setting and you'll do a lot of encores.
...aaaand of course Patrick came in while I was typing all that and said the same thing with less verbiage. #%&!*$!%#$% editors.
Abigail, if I may:
I wonder if you're putting too much emphasis on the Harry Potter plot as the driving force of the books. (Of course you can transpose the plot to other sorts of stories. There ain't but so many of the things.)
You contend upthread that the appeal of Harry Potter is in the non-genre elements. I really don't think that's true - indeed, the point I was trying to make a couple of posts back is that it's the genre stuff people fall in love with and keep coming back for. If I had to make an unsubstantiated claim about Harry Potter's appeal, it would be that it gives its fans an opportunity to explore a world that can't be visited otherwise - and that places it firmly in the camp of fantasy. The plot is secondary, at best. And maybe hippogriffs and Mirrors of Erised are ordinary to the characters (though I don't really buy that), but they're not to us, at all. The recognizable setting may put us at ease, but it's wonder that makes us addicts.
And Harry's desire for ordinariness doesn't make it so. Indeed, I'd argue that one of the important points of the story is that, even among wizards, Harry is unavoidably special (in ways, it should be added, that don't graft well to settings without the elements of fantasy). Like Buffy, he has seven volumes of trouble to deal with before all the implications of what that means settle in. The line "You think you know - what you are, what's to come" could be delivered just as easily to Harry in the context of his story, and we'd get the same frisson of anticipation out of it. And though Harry's world is full of elements you can find across the genres, facing up to myffic destiny is, I think, unique to the realm of the fantastic.
(And of course Buffy isn't fantasy. It's just a soap opera with monsters. Jeez.)
Don't for a moment think that the contemplation of sin is the same as the committing of it. That's the way They think, rememember - the self-righteous fundamentalists, the ones with God on their side, who want the government so small it fits in your bedroom. (And then only if it's You Not Them doing the contemplating.)
In Marat/Sade, Peter Weiss has the Marquis say, "I am capable of anything, and everything fills me with horror." I've been thinking of that line a lot lately, both in light of the nasty wastes of oxygen who turned Abu Ghraib into their own little private Silling (and their loathsome masters back home), and my own feelings about what I'd like to do to people like them.
(Lynndie goat-f*cking England has brought shame on me twice, both for my country and for the state I want to be proud to have grown up in, and she did it with a gleeful smirk - the worst trash of both places. Given half an hour, a locked room, and no consequences, I can't vouch for what I wouldn't do. I'm not proud of that, but there you go.)
Of course, the real Citizen Sade got himself in trouble during the Terror for refusing to carry out the death penalty. Or own ancien regime just looks worse and worse by comparison. Congratulations, George, Dick, Rummy: the Divine Marquis, by fuck, was a better man than the lot of you.
hypochris:
Ophelia.Well, God 'ild you! They say the owl was a baker's daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.
- Hamlet, IV:v
I know at least one gypsy. Assuming the President isn't warded from curses, it's worth a shot.
Rick Heller, I think you may be misinterpreting that dream.
Quoth Jimcat:
I thought I knew something about progressive rock. Silly me.
Yeah, that was pretty much my reaction when I saw that page. Somehow owning three different versions of "Larks' Tongues in Aspic Part 2" doesn't seem so impressive anymore.
Tim, I didn't really think you were one-upping me. I'm so used to people's eyes glazing over when I talk about my taste in music that I'm delighted for the reminder that there are places even farther afield. (I'll most definitely have to give your stuff a listen next time I'm on a computer with sound.)
Xopher - Canterbury and Symphonic are subgenres of progressive rock.
I think Tim gave me a more-marginal-than-thou bitchslap, though. Well done, sir!
Acoustic, at least until I figure out how to make proper noise on an electric. One of nature's strummers, me. (Electric for violins, though. I want to be Carla Kihlstedt when I grow up.)
The answer to all questions of breakfast is "bagel," of course. And many of lunch and dinner.
Homoiusion. More syllables = more better theology.
I'm not allowed opinions on jazz, what with my tastes falling solidly in the Keith Jarrett camp and all.
Chaucer, but only by a pretty narrow margin. On account of the fart jokes.
Mouse. Trackball is the work of the Adversary.
Sherman, if only because he pisses off Confederate sympathizers worse.
Stirred, out of sympathy; I'd much rather be stirred than shaken, myself.
(Extra credit: Tolkien over Lewis. Dark over milk. Canterbury over symphonic. Skill-based over class-based. Stratfordian over Oxfordian. Am I missing any?)
If it's not gauche coming from some feller who doesn't know you - Happy Anniversary, Nielsen Haydens. Here's to many more.
I can imagine, though I've never read, a story entirely about a conflict between two AIs (and not a shoot-'em-up either).
The first thing I thought of was Terry Bisson's "They're Made Out Of Meat," though that might not quite be what you had in mind...
Patrick -
Sorry; didn't mean to ruffle any feathers there. My point was only that SF was more inclusive than it's sometimes given credit for. Discussing a genre in terms of words like "hard" and "soft" is useful for exactly as long as those words broaden the field (and I don't much like the coloring those particular words bring to it either, partly because of the attitudinizing you mention). Spending a lot of time and energy deciding which neatly-labeled box literature should go in is ultimately pretty silly.
The Carla McNeil interview I was thinking of when I posted is here, incidentally.
Xopher -
Carla Speed McNeil makes an interesting distinction between hard SF (dealing with technological science) and social SF (dealing with "soft" sciences like sociology, anthropology and psychology), placing her work in Finder in the latter. Which is also where the science fiction of Atwood goes, along with the work of Sherri Tepper, Joan Vinge, and Frank Herbert, just for starters.
I thought it was a nice reminder that the "science" in SF didn't have to be about machines, but could address theories of society, history, politics and the human mind with the same sense of speculation.
I empathize with Slacktivist's struggle to reclaim "evangelical" as a non-dirty word. I really had no idea there was a distiction between "evangelical" and "fundamentalist"; they were always the same thing in the small town I grew up in, so my instinctive reaction to the word is a case of the wiggins. One more term that's been perverted by its worst examples - kudos to Fred Clark for everything he's doing to publicly clean up evangelicalism's image.
Some off-the-cuff ideas for liberal Christian bumper-sticker phrases:
Jesus Loves All Marriages
Real Christians Support Diversity
Liberal Like Jesus
Christ Is In My Heart, Not My Fundament
At the risk of derailing the thread, I'm hoping that "Don't mourn, organize" is also being taken to heart by the folks who got turned down at the NYC courthouse this mourning, among whom I number some friends.
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