Fellow forumbeings, I don’t know I feel about this.
The first in a planned trilogy following Dr. Brandt Savage, the great-grandson of…Doc Savage. By an author I am not that fond of (though I know the ghostwriter’s doing the heavy lifting). I didn’t even know this existed.
But I had some Amazon bucks and I am a Doc Savage completist, so….
…oh boy.
I just finished reading the Station Eleven novel and I agree with just about every story change they made for the HBO series. That basically never happens for me
Best of luck?
So I have decided to finally tackle Remembrance of Things Past. After two evenings of reading, I am (according to my Kindle) roughly 3% of the way through.
So far… eh? I wouldn’t call it boring, exactly, but if you’re suffering from insomnia I highly recommend it for its soporific effect. I know it’s mostly famous for being super long, but I cannot help but feel that a really savage editing would have done this book a world of good. Like… you like the church, I GET IT ALREADY.
But I suppose it’s unfair to judge a book after 3% even if that 3% is hundreds of pages.
I don’t think my copy is very good though. It seems someone took a hard copy and OCR’d it, so it has weird typos like “°f” in place of “of” and referring to Françoise as Franchise at one point. Well, I did pay a dollar for it 
Tore through it in one sitting:
It’s a great story and the writer, Kirk Wallace Johnson, reminds me a lot of Jon Krakauer (which is high praise from me).
I confess I’d never heard of Doc Savage, so I looked him up:
Doc Savage is a fictional character of the competent man hero type
Competency is a super-power? Doesn’t that lower the bar just a little?
I do love how the “competent man” article links to Mary Sue. Some editor has opinions. Granted, one of the other names for this apparent genre is “peak-human” so…
Trying to remember the name of the wit who said, “An alternate term for ‘Mary Sue’ is hero.” lol
I think what makes a Mary Sue is when their position in the story is unearned, like the example of a fan-fiction writer inserting themself into the story and being universally loved without the reader seeing why this should be the case.
In a well-told story we’re made to understand why the hero is the hero, so I don’t think they’re the same.
Eh. There are SO MANY male heroes who are blatant self-inserts for their creators. Lots of times, the creator even says that out loud and nobody bats an eye. I’ve lost track of how many times a hero in even an acclaimed movie got the perfect mate or got away from the consequences of poor or unthinking behavior for no good reason, but just because that’s what the creators wanted and what the audience expects.
And like I grumbled about in the Soultaker thread, the term got so stretched out over time that it basically became meaningless. Like whoever complained that Nathalie in that movie is one, when the whole plot relies on the fact that she’s absolutely not. Unless we’re going with the latter definition that any girl who tries to do stuff at all = “Mary Sue.” Feh.
And yet the term is almost exclusively applied to female characters. Male characters with the exact same traits are very rarely referred to so derisively.
I was going by the idea that a Mary Sue can be male or female.
If there’s a trend to call any female hero a Mary Sue or to avoid calling males a Mary Sue, I was unaware of that and of course it’s wrong.
Actually, there is a term for these characters: Gary Stu.
Wesley Crusher is a perfect example of a Gary Stu character.
Lol. And yet, I still find Riker much more irritating.
that may be, but Roddenberry pretty much admitted Wesley was a self-insert character of himself.
I do too, far and away. But still, Wesley is the prototypical Mary Sue/Gary Stu. Not only is he Roddenberry, but his heroics strain credulity.
This might be one of the few times fans called a guy out for this. Of course, it didn’t help. G.R. just doubled down. 
I mean, that’s because the term is something to apply to things you don’t like. I’ve found that once such a term gets popular, any actual meaning that may have once applied inevitably gets lost.
Eyes of the Dragon is another great fantasy book by King. I rarely hear it mentioned, but it’s one of my favorites. I think the poison mentioned in the story was a metaphor for the drug & alcohol addiction King was struggling with at the time.
