Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

TheDukester wrote:Because Kevin J. Anderprick has no imagination.
All he can do is take the contemporary things he sees around him and add a few SF-sounding words around them. Thus, shopping malls in space ... circuses and entertainment that are exactly like their modern versions ... and your example: Guild ships that are pretty much just the Pacific Princess.

D Pope wrote:I'm a little unclear Lundse, are those the things you mean? Like the luggage stickers?

Kojiro wrote:I'm already familiar with TV Tropes, thank you very much.

Alpha Carinae wrote:

Kojiro wrote:I'm already familiar with TV Tropes, thank you very much.

I already lost about an afternoon thanks to this thread... and then completely forgot why I was there in the first place heheh.

DuneFishUK wrote:Luggage stickers = Security Checks = "Bureaucracy is the best form of Dictatorship" - Fine... except for KJA's terrible execution.

merkin muffley wrote:

DuneFishUK wrote:Luggage stickers = Security Checks = "Bureaucracy is the best form of Dictatorship" - Fine... except for KJA's terrible execution.

That would be a very interesting kind of thing to write about, but Kevin J. Anderson and Briant Herbert have proven themselves to be utterly incapable of developing ideas like this. I guarantee you the luggage stickers are not there as a comment on bureaucracy and dictatorships, it's a cheap plot device designed to give them an excuse for Jessica to think about the fact that lots of things have happened to her.

The closest they've come to writing about fascism is having Erasmus put a guy's head in a jar, sow his arms and legs to two lab assistants, and have those lab assistants feed the head "flesh cookies" made out of people. Their approach to subject matter like that is not to discuss Hannah Arendt, it's Brian saying to Kevin, "Let's add a dash of Mengele." Or Kevin watching a History Channel documentary about Julius Caeser and instructing his editor to insert the word "patrician" whenever possible.

They are fucking morons.

Herbert and Anderson share a comfortable writing partnership and they spend many hours brainstorming plot and characters for each book.
"Sometimes we have a story idea and have to create a character to fit the actions," said Anderson. "Other times we have a vivid character who naturally goes in certain directions. We talk out the books in detail and when we divide the chapters, we can usually determine which of us is best suited to write a character or scene. For example, with The Machine Crusade, I fell in love with Selim Wormrider and therefore wrote the first draft of most of those chapters; Brian was particularly fond of Norma Cenva, the scientist, so he took that storyline. But by the time we're done, we've each gone over each other's chapters so many times we own them all jointly."
Herbert continued, "I usually write the first draft of the Erasmus character. Kevin came up with a character -- a Thinking Machine who was researching what it was like to be human -- and I said let's add (the Nazi medical researcher) Dr Mengele to him and make him really dark and strange. Then Kevin laughed and said, 'Boy Brian, I don't know if I can write that, you'd better do it!' He wasn't saying that couldn't write it -- it was just a little dig that only my twisted mind could write that character. So we have a lot of fun. We riff off each other, like a musical performance."

KJA: I think [Erasmus is] probably the best character that we’ve created in all of these books, I just really love Erasmus.

BH: And you know, Erasmus is a concept of Kevin’s, and then he had me ... And then I said, “Well, why don’t we add, like a Joseph Mengele aspect to this character?” - that’s the Nazi doctor of death – and then Kevin said to me, “Well, that sounds really sick, Brian, maybe you better write the first draft on that one.” But he was definitely a composite between Kevin and me.

KJA: Oh, we kind of fight over who got to write those chapters. I think we split them half and half just because they were so much fun.

Hunchback Jack wrote:From the "Sand in my Shoes" Interview:

of KJA BH wrote:and then he had me ...

of KJA BH wrote:

inhuien wrote:

Hunchback Jack wrote:From the "Sand in my Shoes" Interview:

of KJA BH wrote:and then he had me ...

... And then I said, “Well...

Hunchback Jack wrote:

KJA: I think [Erasmus is] probably the best character that we’ve created in all of these books, I just really love Erasmus.

merkin muffley wrote:Thanks, HBJ!

Hunchback Jack wrote:

KJA: I think [Erasmus is] probably the best character that we’ve created in all of these books, I just really love Erasmus.