Full disclosure: Cat Valente's "Space Opera" is one of my favorite things, partly because of its madcap style, and partly because of one of its central theses about life ("You can't sing a dirge to the repear").
Now, I will grant that Valente uses fewer adjectives than Dickens. (And indeed, fewer than I remembered.) Her style tends more towards relentlessly run-on sentences. When she does use adjectives, she tends to pile them on all at once in unexpected combinations:
> There was absolutely nothing unusual about Fenek. It was the avatar of the average, the model of the median, a beautifully boilerplate world. It orbited an even-tempered, comfortably middle-class yellow sun at a respectful distance, boasted a galactic biodiversity rating of exactly _meh_, and kept its gravity to a considerate low roar, except on weekends.
This effect consciously evokes Douglas Adams, but Valente uses it in new ways.
But as for melodrama, Valente heaps it on with great enthusiasm. It's a different flavor of melodrama, less Tiny Tim and more glam. But there's no shortage of pain and tragedy, and no shortage of defiance.
I think the simple prose in Tolkien's poem of Aragorn is also be to put a mirror to the character. Aragorn is not necessarily simple in his backstory or shallow in his feeling, but he is direct and without artifice.
But I think you are more right about the mythopoetic nature of it. Grand events can be grandiloquent, but the greatest are often announced plainly. ("He is Risen!")
And what's more, we don't see the complications in Aragorn's backstory till much later after we've already gotten to know the simple character! I don't know how much Tolkien chose that intentionally (I know he only developed those complications later in the writing process), but it was a good choice.
I used to amuse myself with the idea of a master's thesis: "Hammett, Heinlein, and Hemingway: Studies in mid-twentieth-century masculinity."
If you'll forgive my putting on my copy editing hat, I don't think "again" is an adjective in Tolkien's verse, but an adverb, one that designates the time of an event. In fact I don't think "again" is ever used as an adjective in modern English.
Full disclosure: Cat Valente's "Space Opera" is one of my favorite things, partly because of its madcap style, and partly because of one of its central theses about life ("You can't sing a dirge to the repear").
Now, I will grant that Valente uses fewer adjectives than Dickens. (And indeed, fewer than I remembered.) Her style tends more towards relentlessly run-on sentences. When she does use adjectives, she tends to pile them on all at once in unexpected combinations:
> There was absolutely nothing unusual about Fenek. It was the avatar of the average, the model of the median, a beautifully boilerplate world. It orbited an even-tempered, comfortably middle-class yellow sun at a respectful distance, boasted a galactic biodiversity rating of exactly _meh_, and kept its gravity to a considerate low roar, except on weekends.
This effect consciously evokes Douglas Adams, but Valente uses it in new ways.
But as for melodrama, Valente heaps it on with great enthusiasm. It's a different flavor of melodrama, less Tiny Tim and more glam. But there's no shortage of pain and tragedy, and no shortage of defiance.
Good post.
I think the simple prose in Tolkien's poem of Aragorn is also be to put a mirror to the character. Aragorn is not necessarily simple in his backstory or shallow in his feeling, but he is direct and without artifice.
But I think you are more right about the mythopoetic nature of it. Grand events can be grandiloquent, but the greatest are often announced plainly. ("He is Risen!")
And what's more, we don't see the complications in Aragorn's backstory till much later after we've already gotten to know the simple character! I don't know how much Tolkien chose that intentionally (I know he only developed those complications later in the writing process), but it was a good choice.
I used to amuse myself with the idea of a master's thesis: "Hammett, Heinlein, and Hemingway: Studies in mid-twentieth-century masculinity."
If you'll forgive my putting on my copy editing hat, I don't think "again" is an adjective in Tolkien's verse, but an adverb, one that designates the time of an event. In fact I don't think "again" is ever used as an adjective in modern English.