More in the Moorcock vein. It's easy to imagine the reaction of the critic, holding their nose at writing to formula. But you can turn that around, regarding Dent (and, more plausibly, Moorcock) as a student and theoretician of structure. And that's a pretty powerful point of view. Of course, word-by-word Dent is a poor writer, suffering from an insufficiency of revision, and an overuse of cliche. But I rather suspect that with a little more revision, a little less tolerance of cliche, he would have been pretty good. (Cory Doctorow suffers some of the same problems, and would also be excellent if he simply revised more, eliminated weaker material, and had less tolerance of cliche.) - Michael Nielsen