Creatures of light and darkness
Two gods, two houses, one quest & the eternal war between life & death: To save his kingdom, Anubis, Lord of the Dead, sends forth his servant on a mission of vengeance. At the same time, from The House of Life, Osiris sends forth his son, Horus, on the same mission to destroy utterly & forever The Prince Who Was a Thousand. But neither of these superhuman warriors is prepared for the strange & harrowing world of mortal life. The Thing That Cries in the Night may well destroy not only their worlds, but all humankind. As Zelazny did with the Hindu pantheon in the legendary, groundbreaking classic Lord of Light, the master storyteller here breathes new life into the Egyptian gods with another dazzling tale of mythology & imagination.
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4mentions
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2012–2022years
50% recommend50% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- No love for Creatures of Light and Darkness?
- I'm actually looking forward to that.
I read a lot of golden and silver age science fiction. One of the things I love about the oldies isn't that they're necessarily better than modern science fiction, it's that they're short. Creatures of Light and Darkness, a fantastic book, is 192 pages. It's a stand-alone story which spans thousands of years, the better part of the universe, and builds such wonderful characters. And the author gets you from here to there in 192 pages.
Nowadays, you can't introduce a plot and two characters in 200 pages. 400, 500, 600 pages are the norm. Some of it is style. Sometimes you need 600 pages to tell a story. But a portion of it is that authors are told, by their publishing companies, they need to target a certain size to get their books published, because a book needs to have a certain heft or it will never leave the shelf. And it's a damn shame, because some of these 600 page monstrosities could have been a fantastic 200 page book.
Broadcast television also imposes certain constraints upon the show. Some shows work well with this format, for instance, if the show is episodic in nature. If the show is trying to tell a particular story, it works less well.
One thing that can go wrong is that not all stories that get turned into a TV show require 18 hours of video to tell. A lot of filler is added, episodic episodes which get dropped into the middle of the story arc to drag things out. If the show's producers and writers are good, they can use these filler episodes to flesh out the characters and the world. But they aren't always good enough.
A second thing that can go wrong is that you don't always know when to end your story. A show may get renewed for two or three or four seasons, and if you finished telling the story in the first season, you now have to come up with a completely new story for season two, or reveal that by a fiendish twist your story wasn't actually finished in the season finale like you thought it was. This isn't always as ... satisfying as it could be. Other times, you have to keep putting off finishing the story at the end of each season, which turns entire seasons into filler. This carries the additional risk that you may get canceled in season three and never finish the story you started in season one.
I'm generally looking forward to the death of big media producers, because I think the quality of entertainment will go up once people are freed from the constraint of telling all of their stories in twenty to twenty-four 22 or 44 minute episodes.
- I found an advertisement for cigarettes in the middle of Creatures of Light and Darkness.
- Oh wait crap actually I am thinking about Zelazny's Creatures of Light and Darkness. Those two titles occupy the same hash bucket in my brain.
