Best and Worst Character Ranges

[The Big Peat]

Kinda stole the idea for this from a thread Brian did ages ago in the Gemmell forum and Gemmell's fairly tight focus on character archetypes and it made me wonder - which authors have really good ranges in terms of the characters they portray? And which ones have very narrow ones?

I always thought Eddings has an incredibly narrow range in terms of voice and most of his characters are principled rogues with an urbane sense of humour, so I'd nominate him for the latter.

For the former - I think that under the humour Pratchett can convince from a number of different PoVs. And Katherine Kerr shows a big range in the Deverry cycle. But for me - Guy Gavriel Kay doesn't really change tone, but he does seem to get how to depict a lot of very different archetypes and people in a lot of different situations.

 

[Toby Frost]

Difficult one - my instinct was to say Mervyn Peake, as his characters are a very varied bunch, but they're all seen through the same distorting lens, so I don't know if he'd qualify (you could probably say the same thing about Dickens, for that matter). William Gibson portrays three very different people effectively in Count Zero, rather than the more standard hacker/hitman types of cyberpunk, which is one of the reasons that I like it so much. Are we only talking about SFF here?

I think in fantasy in Eddings' time, there was quite a lot of shuffling of a fairly small pack of archetypes.

 

[HareBrain]

I'd nominate David Mitchell for best character range.

 

[Cathbad]

Kinda stole the idea for this from a thread Brian did ages ago in the Gemmell forum and Gemmell's fairly tight focus on character archetypes and it made me wonder - which authors have really good ranges in terms of the characters they portray? And which ones have very narrow ones?

I always thought Eddings has an incredibly narrow range in terms of voice and most of his characters are principled rogues with an urbane sense of humour, so I'd nominate him for the latter.

For the former - I think that under the humour Pratchett can convince from a number of different PoVs. And Katherine Kerr shows a big range in the Deverry cycle. But for me - Guy Gavriel Kay doesn't really change tone, but he does seem to get how to depict a lot of very different archetypes and people in a lot of different situations.

Yeah, that's one thing Eddings did well , and the one thing I fault Brooks for - he had two archetypes, both he did well, but it didn't change from good character to good character and evil character to evil character - until his later work, at least.

 

[The Big Peat]

Difficult one - my instinct was to say Mervyn Peake, as his characters are a very varied bunch, but they're all seen through the same distorting lens, so I don't know if he'd qualify (you could probably say the same thing about Dickens, for that matter). William Gibson portrays three very different people effectively in Count Zero, rather than the more standard hacker/hitman types of cyberpunk, which is one of the reasons that I like it so much. Are we only talking about SFF here?

I think in fantasy in Eddings' time, there was quite a lot of shuffling of a fairly small pack of archetypes.

Predominantly SFF what with this being a SFF forum, but if anything else really stands out to you, might as well throw it out there.

And I wouldn't mind if Eddings had used a small pack of archetypes (although he's got a fair amount of basic ones), it is the fact he sticks more or less the same personality and voice and humour into virtually every single one of them that makes me raise my eyebrows. Most of his then-peers do a great deal better than that (although re @Cathbad's point, from memory Brooks is similar indeed and writes them less interestingly).

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Most of Robert A. Heinlein's characters seem to be self portraits.

Science fiction and fantasy, like other genre fiction, isn't as character-driven as much literary fiction, so picking the best is tough. Maybe Theodore Sturgeon?

 

[Brian G Turner]

My first thought is to suggest GRRM. While some of the secondary characters can blur into one another, most of the main cast are pretty distinctive. Considering how diverse they are I thought this quite an accomplishment.