Going through a heavy reading phase at the moment. Whipped through books 1 and 2 of Julian May's "Boreal Moon" series. May wrote a series called "The Saga of Pliocene Exile" back in the late 70s or early 80s that I liked quite a bit, but she has never matched it again. The first book in the Boreal Moon series was fairly promising, but the second one was a let down.

One of the problems was too much deus ex machina dude. This is when an author has some powerful benevolent entity in the background who performs miracles at times, but still allows horrible things to happen at others, basically so the author can keep the plot moving. I'm like "Ok. You rescued the princess here, but with your power if you wanted to you could have just prevented the king and his children from being eaten by horrible fen monsters. You knew about it, you had your agent standing right there, but you let it happen anyway."

This has prompted me to come up with my top five annoying things in fantasy novels.

1. Deus ex machina dude. Also known as Fizban syndrome, after the annoying character who kept showing up in the couple of Dragonlance books I bothered to read.

2. Prophetic dream sequences. Please. These things are usually impossible to interpet, and I usually don't give a damn.

3. Two dimensional villains. This was originally "one dimensional villains" but actually pure evil with no rational behind it can work if done right. It's those annoying asshole stupid emporers who bore me. Who would follow these people, and how do they manage to stay in power, when despite slaying countless sad villages, they are so dumb they leave our hero in the dungeon so he can escape?

4. Too many plot lines going at once. Yes, having multiple characters to follow at the same time gives an increased sense of breadth to a world, but when you have more than three threads going at once it is just too freckin annoying. Robert Jordon's "Wheel of Time" series has crawled to a standstill because of this junk.

5. Stories within the stories. When our author interrupts the main plot to have some storyteller tell a totally unrelated legend. I end up having to read these things because there might be something useful for the main plot, but it really turns out our author just wanted to write about something different to flesh out their world. Save it for an appendix.