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Writing and Insight
I think I have figured out what it is with the newer Mercedes Lackey novels-- and it's something I would not have figured out if I hadn't been struggling with this in my own writing.
Somewhere along the line, she's gotten into the habit of moralizing.
Characters in earlier Valdemar books would spend a lot of time thinking about morals and ethics and societal expectations and their relationships with others-- witness the conversation Skif has with with Wintermoon in Winds of Change about the ethics of vengeance-torture--but it comes very directly from the characters and their situations. Skif going back to torture and kill someone who tortured and killed people he cared about and then having it weigh on him heavily afterwards is believable and builds on everything we've spent several books finding out about him--he cares very deeply, he'll do anything for a friend, and he's never had much in the way of tight bonds so he holds on really strongly to the ones he has. Similarly, Keisha's parents being restrictive in Owlsight makes sense in context; we spend some time getting to her family dynamic and the way her mother would really prefer a ladylike daughter, and Keisha learning to outright say no to her mother is a huge chunk of her story arc for the book without the narration ever coming right out and saying so. And Natoli jumping up on a table in Storm Rising and shouting a rallying cry that's about eighty percent repressed jealousy of the more "important" Trainees gives us a picture of all the tangled emotional problems surrounding the relationship of the Artificer Blues to the rest of the Collegia in one speech and Karal's single-sentence later observation that perhaps Natoli needed to hear it when Elspeth thanked her. (Honestly, Natoli's speech there is one of my favorite bits in all the books.)
The recent ones give us pages of internal monologue ruminating on ethical issues which are only tangentially related to the story, and they get very on the nose about it. We don't actually see the Valdemaran equivalent of the Quiverfull movement; we just get someone ranting about his backstory with them, and it actually name checks Quiverfull. We get introduced to the Valdemaran equivalent of Evangelicals, again in a very on-the-nose look-at-this-point-I-am-making way, with a lot of speeches about their hatefulness.
It's not organic in the story anymore. They're polemics now as much as they're novels, if not more so. It's something I've been actively struggling with in my own writing-- there's a story I'm working on right now that I'm on my third attempt at, and I think it will actually work this time in part because I've been practicing balancing "story" against "let's talk about serious issues" in other work, and getting a sense of trust in the process that if I focus on the characters, the themes will still come through. (Thus why I am really, intensely proud of "Love Letters." It is a deep meditation on love, relationship compatibility, mental illness, and suicide... and it's all carried through character voice and story; it's the first of the currently-published ones where I feel like I hit that balance well.)
But unlike the other recent Valdemar, Beyond at least is enough story past the moralizing that I bought it and sat down and read it for several hours straight before coming up for air and being like "...I should eat food and drink water; it's 11PM." (It helps that unlike the Collegium Chronicles, which didn't pay attention to the actual process of founding the Collegium at all, so far it appears that the Founding actually paying attention to the process of the Founding of Valdemar.) It's still very clearly a Later Valdemar Book-- the characters are not as clearly drawn and the story is not as compelling-- but I am continuing to read it, and will likely buy the next one, so we're doing better than with the Herald-Spy ones.
Somewhere along the line, she's gotten into the habit of moralizing.
Characters in earlier Valdemar books would spend a lot of time thinking about morals and ethics and societal expectations and their relationships with others-- witness the conversation Skif has with with Wintermoon in Winds of Change about the ethics of vengeance-torture--but it comes very directly from the characters and their situations. Skif going back to torture and kill someone who tortured and killed people he cared about and then having it weigh on him heavily afterwards is believable and builds on everything we've spent several books finding out about him--he cares very deeply, he'll do anything for a friend, and he's never had much in the way of tight bonds so he holds on really strongly to the ones he has. Similarly, Keisha's parents being restrictive in Owlsight makes sense in context; we spend some time getting to her family dynamic and the way her mother would really prefer a ladylike daughter, and Keisha learning to outright say no to her mother is a huge chunk of her story arc for the book without the narration ever coming right out and saying so. And Natoli jumping up on a table in Storm Rising and shouting a rallying cry that's about eighty percent repressed jealousy of the more "important" Trainees gives us a picture of all the tangled emotional problems surrounding the relationship of the Artificer Blues to the rest of the Collegia in one speech and Karal's single-sentence later observation that perhaps Natoli needed to hear it when Elspeth thanked her. (Honestly, Natoli's speech there is one of my favorite bits in all the books.)
The recent ones give us pages of internal monologue ruminating on ethical issues which are only tangentially related to the story, and they get very on the nose about it. We don't actually see the Valdemaran equivalent of the Quiverfull movement; we just get someone ranting about his backstory with them, and it actually name checks Quiverfull. We get introduced to the Valdemaran equivalent of Evangelicals, again in a very on-the-nose look-at-this-point-I-am-making way, with a lot of speeches about their hatefulness.
It's not organic in the story anymore. They're polemics now as much as they're novels, if not more so. It's something I've been actively struggling with in my own writing-- there's a story I'm working on right now that I'm on my third attempt at, and I think it will actually work this time in part because I've been practicing balancing "story" against "let's talk about serious issues" in other work, and getting a sense of trust in the process that if I focus on the characters, the themes will still come through. (Thus why I am really, intensely proud of "Love Letters." It is a deep meditation on love, relationship compatibility, mental illness, and suicide... and it's all carried through character voice and story; it's the first of the currently-published ones where I feel like I hit that balance well.)
But unlike the other recent Valdemar, Beyond at least is enough story past the moralizing that I bought it and sat down and read it for several hours straight before coming up for air and being like "...I should eat food and drink water; it's 11PM." (It helps that unlike the Collegium Chronicles, which didn't pay attention to the actual process of founding the Collegium at all, so far it appears that the Founding actually paying attention to the process of the Founding of Valdemar.) It's still very clearly a Later Valdemar Book-- the characters are not as clearly drawn and the story is not as compelling-- but I am continuing to read it, and will likely buy the next one, so we're doing better than with the Herald-Spy ones.