Author - Nathan

I’ve seen this guy’s books promoted all over the place, but it wasn’t until reader Ever pointed it out to me that I saw this “open letter” in his Amazon “about” page:

An open letter to my fellow scifi/fantasy writers.

Dear, dear friends:

You are awful. All of you. (Yes, ALL OF YOU!)

Please do not take it personally. But someone has to tell you this, and it might as well be me.

You suffer from three key deficits: LACK OF IMAGINATION, LACK OF EMPATHY, and LACK OF SELF-AWARENESS.

First, your lack of IMAGINATION.

99% of scifi/fantasy novels can be categorized as follows:

a) “Hip”, “Modern Day” Fantasy: “diverse” teenagers with magical powers fighting vampires in urban settings.

b) Teenagers suffering deprivation in a post-nuclear wasteland;

c) The so-called “epic” fantasy novel, with “world building” expecting you to learn the history of hundreds of characters, castles, cities and taverns like a History of Art exam.

d) Everyone fighting World War II again, in outer space; and

e) “Hard” scifi, with 500 pages of hand wringing and mental _asturbation about a transmission from an alien sphere (or… if you’re feeling imaginative… an alien cube!).

Not only are these topics very, very trite, but your rendition of them is even worse. You’re like a bad photocopy machine making worse and worse copies which themselves are bad copies of other copies.

…

Go ahead and read the rest of it. (It continues for another thousand words.)

This, I should point out, is a writer whose illustrious books look like this:

So, you know, “consider the source” and all that.