Twilight Watch

[electricland]

I was browsing through a bookstore earlier this week and picked up (in a non-metaphorical sense) a copy of Twilight Watch, which oakeyo is reading. I noticed that some newspaper -- and please forgive me but I don't remember if it was the Independent or the Telegraph or some other British paper altogether -- had called Lukyanenko "the Russian J.K. Rowling."

Say what? Are they high? I mean, they're both... wildly popular, and fantasy, and about the struggle between Good and Evil. Aside from that, I'm really not seeing much in the way of similarity between the settings, characters, or even format.

Comments

[curtana.livejournal.com]

It sounds like a typical case of someone who doesn't really know much about fantasy lumping books together inanely. I remember reading not long ago (I think perhaps in the Guardian, but maybe somewhere else) that Rowling had created a world "as detailed as Tolkien's" or words to that effect. And I thought to myself, "Really. Who knew that Rowling spent her entire adult life working on her setting, making up languages and creation myths and epic poetry (often in said made-up languages), detailing long family trees... And here I thought she was basically writing in England with wizards."

[raithen.livejournal.com]

**snorfle**

indeed ;).

[lietya.livejournal.com]

Heh. I love that.

You're quite right, too. It's not even limited to fantasy - someone apparently sends a memo to reviewers that ALL books must be compared to Book Fad X for a while. (I kept running across books that were described as "Just like The Da Vinci Code" if they so much as had mention of the church, of a mystery, of codes... bleah.)

[electricland.livejournal.com]

God, it's SO TRUE. And if you don't happen to like TDVC, that was actually a bit off-putting!

[lietya.livejournal.com]

Precisely - in fact, that book came very close to not being read by me, since I thought DVC was pallid and silly! They're not doing a book any favors by convincing a swathe of potential readership *not* to try it...

[electricland.livejournal.com]

Amen!

[monkeycommando.livejournal.com]

I can see that being a wildly popular writer of fantasy in a modern setting, with pop-crossover success _and_ multi media success, is the most, if not only, remarkable thing about Rowling. Throw in the parallel society living just out of phase with our own, and you've got a reasonably strong comparison.

Rowlings' characters, settings and format aren't really remarkable, and though I've only seen the Night Watch movie, I had a similar reaction to that as to my first encounters with Potter: good enough stuff, but I'd read it all before in Vertigo comics in the late '80s.

[electricland.livejournal.com]

All good points, but as a selling point, I still say it's not a very useful or intelligent quote either to make or to use.