I recently posted reactions to several of R.A. Salvatore’s Drizzt novels. The resulting discussion touched on the familiar disparagment of tie-in fiction and I wanted to take a moment to discuss that: What’s the appeal of tie-in fiction? Why is it so popular despite the perception of poor quality?
The better D&D tie-in novels deliver on three levels:
(1) They deliver fast-paced plots with easy prose and cool characters.
(2) They take place in a familiar, highly-detailed setting.
(3) In fact, it’s a setting that your characters might be playing in next Saturday! Heck, you might even run into the characters from the novel that you’re reading right now! (That sense of a personal connection really can’t be undervalued.)
The poorer D&D tie-in novels only deliver on levels 2 and 3.
You can contrast D&D tie-in novels with the tie-in novels written for Star Trek or Star Wars, which deliver on three similar levels:
(1) They deliver fast-paced plots with easy prose and cool characters.
(2) They take place in a familiar universe and expand your knowledge of an entertaining milieu.
(3) They feature familiar characters that you’ve grown to love through TV or film.
In other words, if you’re looking for short, undemanding reading material, then tie-in fiction can provide it. Tie-in novels are basically filling the same role for people that the pulps did in the ’30s and ’40s.
That at least partially answers the question of popularity. So let’s talk about the image problem that tie-in fiction has: Why is tie-in fiction almost universally considered mediocre at best?
I think there are a couple of reasons. First, tie-in fiction inevitably concentrates your attention on the 90% crap ratio. (Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap.) If I pick up 10 unrelated books and 9 of them suck, I’ll just forget about them and focus on the one which was good, trying to find other works like it. If I pick up 10 D&D books and 9 of them suck, I’ll reach the conclusion that D&D books suck and look for non-D&D books in the future.
Second, the process for creating tie-in fiction doesn’t lend itself to works of greatness. Basically, the vast majority of tie-in authors are established but not top-of-the-line authors. If you’re Iain Banks or Vernor Vinge or J.K. Rowling you don’t need or want tie-in novels, and the “undiscovered greats” are generally prohibited from even submitting. (There are, of course, exceptions to this: Pocket Books remained open to slush pile Star Trek submissions for years and Isaac Asimov wrote a tie-in novel.)
On top of all that, a tie-in author is robbed of the one thing which tends to define the immensely popular works of speculative fiction: The ability to create and introduce a world which captures the imagination. Dune, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and many other classics have uniquely captivating worlds contributing greatly, in my opinion, to their success. But a tie-in author is, by definition, playing in someone else’s playground.
Many of them are also robbed of the ability to create new and memorable characters, but here the D&D tie-in novels prove to be a potential exception. Salvatore’s Drizzt novels are an obvious example of that: The key distinction of those immensely popular works was Salvatore’s ability to create a memorable protagonist. His ability to do so suggests that a Conan, Elric, or Gray Mouser could emerge in the realm of tie-in fiction (although, in my opinion, Drizzt doesn’t reach that level of greatness).
