Okay, so, everybody's saying great things about this "Symphony of the Sword", and now I'm tempted to read it. Except there are about four hundred volumes of UF material I haven't read because I can't get through the first chunk of Core material. (I don't mind injokes if I can get the common cultural background by watching more anime, or at least searching the Web, but in "Undocumented Features" (as opposed to Undocumented Features) there are a lot of references to people, places, and things from Team Eyrie's college background.) I'd just skip the first story, but it pretty much sets up everything after that; I read a few pieces of some other story, Twilight of the Gods, I think, and had almost zero clue who was what when and where.

So... hm. I'm not sure exactly what I'm asking for here. Is there a sort of Cliff Notes version of Core 1 that would give me the info I need to follow the future stories? Does one of the later Core stories recap the important points? Or would I have to read through a great amount of dross (I apologise if I'm hurting your feelings, guys, but Core 1 is olllllld; your writing skills have improved immensely since you wrote it. Not to mention there's the whole injoke angle still.) to have any clue about the good stuff?

>I'd just skip the first story, but it pretty much sets up
>everything after that; I read a few pieces of some other story,
>Twilight of the Gods, I think, and had almost zero clue who was what
>when and where.

I'm not sure, but I suspected if you started with The Long Road (Core 2), you wouldn't be all that lost. I mean, the Wedge Defense Force doesn't even get founded until midway through that one.

OTOH, it's not much better than Core 1, so I'm not sure how much that would help.

>Or would I have to read through a great
>amount of dross (I apologise if I'm hurting your feelings, guys, but
>Core 1 is olllllld; your writing skills have improved immensely
>since you wrote it. Not to mention there's the whole injoke angle
>still.) to have any clue about the good stuff?

If you read UF, you have to read through a great amount of dross anyway. If you're dross-averse, stay out of the Exile directory entirely. And don't read any of my FI material except Twilight and the Symphony. Or my Golden Age stuff, except Rite of Passage.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor in Chief, Netadmin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

>If you read UF, you have to read through a great amount of
>dross anyway. If you're dross-averse, stay out of the Exile directory
>entirely. And don't read any of my FI material except Twilight
>and the Symphony. Or my Golden Age stuff, except Rite of
>Passage.
>

Think of it not as dross ,
think of it as climate building .

-Griever
be it as it may I still think
that UF isn't the same without
the complete Exile and Golden Age .
There's a lot of good stuff in there
that's a shame to miss (like
Gryph in StarTrek - or at least
I 'think' that story's in 'Exile').

Gryphon wrote:

If you read UF, you have to read through a great amount of dross anyway. If you're dross-averse, stay out of the Exile directory entirely. And don't read any of my FI material except Twilight and the Symphony. Or my Golden Age stuff, except Rite of Passage.

Let me just say how glad I am to have come back to this response to my question, which I realized (when I woke up the next morning) might not be taken so well. ("This stuff stinks! Where's the good stuff?") It's like an anti-flame. It soothes dry and chapped skin. It treats sunburn. I'm saving some for the next time I drink hot cocoa before it cools.

--Zenigame, slightly silly at 0245

>Let me just say how glad I am to have come back to this
>response to my question, which I realized (when I woke up the next
>morning) might not be taken so well. ("This stuff stinks! Where's
>the good stuff?")

Bah. I think "This stuff stinks! Where's the good stuff?" all the time when I'm poking around in the older archives for continuity research...

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor in Chief, Netadmin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Read it while either slightly drunk or three hours after your bedtime. That's how I got through a certain person's bad Tenchi fic... (late, not drunk)

-Craig

Whether you get all the injokes or not, how can you argue with slaughtering Knights of the STRAIGHT and Narrow Path with a 20mm cannon?
Or molecularly unstable green Jell-O?
And, heaven help us all, a wave motion -RIFLE-. <DROOL>

TRB

"I wish I was reaper, culling lost souls. I wish I could cast them into deep and lonely holes."

LAST EDITED ON Jul-29-01 AT 11:38 AM (EDT)

>Whether you get all the injokes or not, how can you argue with
>slaughtering Knights of the STRAIGHT and Narrow Path with a 20mm
>cannon?
>Or molecularly unstable green Jell-O?
>And, heaven help us all, a wave motion -RIFLE-. <DROOL>

Oh, I never claimed it was bad (also, knowing the area helps quite a bit) - just saying what I do when I need to read bad stuff. It doesn't, by the way, work for textbooks.

And that rifle was one thing I never understood, unless Android started cooler than god: he was just playing laser tag with a rifle that destroys buildings...

-Craig

Edited to include --> I don't think I made my opinion clear: the Core isn't an awesome piece of literature. In fact, the general consensus is that it's no good. But it's helluva fun, despite (or because of) all that.

>Edited to include --> I don't think I made my opinion clear: the Core
>isn't an awesome piece of literature. In fact, the general consensus
>is that it's no good. But it's helluva fun, despite (or because of)
>all that.

I wouldn't say that the Core is *no* good. It's quite fun, and it had to have some merits in order to establish the kind of following it has. And Core 04 is still a great read, even after all this time.

However, it's also true that the Core has been vastly outshined by Twilight and SotS.

-- Sean --

http://www.thebrokenlink.org The Broken Link 4.0 is live!
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." -- Albert Einstein
"It's not easy being green." -- Kermit the Frog

Call me shallow and self centered, but my only great and overwhelming prerequisite for something to be classified as good is "Did I enjoy it?". B-)

TRB

"I wish I was reaper, culling lost souls. I wish I could cast them into deep and lonely holes."

LAST EDITED ON Jul-29-01 AT 10:01 PM (EDT)

>Call me shallow and self centered, but my only great and overwhelming
>prerequisite for something to be classified as good is "Did I enjoy
>it?". B-)

I'll second that. Had to be something there that all it took was a friend of mine emailing me Core1 about... 4-5 months ago to get me started reading pretty much everything in UF, HL, and NXE <yup, I did lose a goodly chunk of my time for a while, but hey, it was my last semester in college, I needed something to cut the combined boredom/sense of impending doom>

-={(Astynax)}=-
"Authors are always too hard on themselves anyway. It's akin to looking back at your first 'hello world' and thinking 'gods I sucked at coding'. Chances are you didn't truly suck, you just didn't know how yet."

hmm, for a catchy tagline, that got kinda big didn't it?

<DCForums goof #34235: square brackets are taken as html markup... angled brackets in subjects just get chucked violently. This notice posted in the interests of public safety>

You know, I find even the old stuff to be better than a good 90% of the stuff out there... In fact I darn near needed to have a tank of o2 with me while reading it because of all the laughing I did while reading it.

Yes, the overall writing abilities of the Eyrie crew have improved with all the practice they've gotten in being so prolific. That doesn't mean the old stuff is dross, or not worth reading... just that later material has the benifit of much practice.

Shoot, you can see that sort of improvement in any writer who does a lot of work!

___________________

Vaughn doesn't know I exist. I guess this explains why the rest of reality keeps ignoring me as well. >_<

>I'll second that. Had to be something there that all it took was a
>friend of mine emailing me Core1 about... 4-5 months ago to get me
>started reading pretty much everything in UF, HL, and NXE <yup, I did
>lose a goodly chunk of my time for a while, but hey, it was my last
>semester in college, I needed something to cut the combined
>boredom/sense of impending doom>

Heh. Glad to be of service. But then again, what're friends for? ^_^

--Michael, who next year will be *at* Brewfest instead of working Brewfest.