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Why realism does not equate to adult (or even good) fantasy

Why realism does not equate to adult (or even good) fantasy

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the-steel-remainsThat foul smell in the air? There’s something rotten in the realm of fantasy fiction, and its name is realism.

Two of the blogs I frequent and another one I’ve recently stumbled across have all recently commented on (and lamented about) a new trend gripping fantasy these days: Realism, and the corresponding claim that it somehow makes fantasy more adult and serious.

Lagomorph Rex of Dweomera Lagomorpha says that the new trend leaves him cold: It’s no secret that I dislike the current trend in Fantasy. It’s almost as if every author has decided they will up the misery and muck quotient and see who can make the nastiest world in which to force their characters to try and survive in.

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A Critical Appreciation of James Enge

A Critical Appreciation of James Enge

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thewolfageNo sooner does our man James Enge — World Fantasy Award-nominated author, Black Gate blogger, and international man of mystery — appear on the scene with his third novel The Wolf Age, than Western Civilization finally begins to acknowledge his genius. The latest accolades are courtesy of John H. Stevens at SF Signal:

Enge has described in his Black Gate interview how he “took a big hammer” and smashed away at Morlock to transform him from a “mopey Byronic wish-fulfillment self-image” into a more flawed character. He did this to a large extent to get away from what he saw as the “wish-fulfillment” in much of fantasy fiction. But after reading Enge’s work it is clear that he has continued hammering away at fantasy to bend it into spooky and unconventional shapes…

His third novel has a richer texture to its plot, and this makes it the most enjoyable, and in some ways the most profound, of his major works to date… There is a surer hand at work here, and a smoother progress in the story than in the first two novels.

Stevens links to much of the recent coverage of James, and includes what is already my favorite quote of the year, from an interview with James at Civilian Reader:

I like Zelazny’s description of his masterwork, the original Amber series: ‘a philosophical romance shot through with elements of horror and morbidity.’ That’s what I try to write: philorohorrmorbmance.

Sample chapters from The Wolf Age are available here.

The complete Critical Appreciation of James Enge is available here.

Robert E. Howard Birthday Celebration

Robert E. Howard Birthday Celebration

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solomon-kane3Here’s to Robert E. Howard, creator of my favorite genre, sword-and-sorcery, on the anniversary of his birth. Raise high your goblets and drink deep.

What is best about Robert E. Howard’s writing? The driving headlong pace, the seemingly inexhaustible imagination, the splendid cinematic prose poetry, the never-say-die protagonists? It is hard to pick one thing, so it may be simpler to state that Robert E. Howard possessed profound and often astonishing storytelling gifts. Without drowning his readers in adjectives (he had the knack of using just enough adjectives or adverbs, and knew to let the verbs do the heavy lifting) or slowing pace, he brought his scenes to life. Vividly.

Writer Eric Knight may have most succinctly described this particular aspect of Howard’s power in an article on Solomon Kane:

“’Wings of the Night’ features a marathon running fight through ruin, countryside, and even air that only a team of computer animators with a sixty-million dollar budget and the latest rendering technology (or a single Texan from Cross Plains hammering the story out with worn typewriter ribbon) could bring properly to life.”

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Robert E. Howard: The Day That I Was Born

Robert E. Howard: The Day That I Was Born

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reh1

Robert E. Howard, author and poet, was born on January 22, 1906. In an undated letter to his friend Clyde Smith (“Salaam/Again glancing…), Howard wrote of this day in the poem, “I Praise My Nativity.”

“Oh, evil the day that I was born, like a tale that a witch has told;
I came to birth on a bitter morn, when the sky was dim and cold.
The god that girds the loins of Fate and sends the nighttime rain,
He diced my game on an iron plate with dice carved out of pain.
“This for the shadow of hope,” laughed he, as the numbers glinted up,
“This for a spell and this for Hell, and this for the bitter cup.”
A Shadow came out of the gloom of night and covered me with his cowl
That carried the curse of The Truer Sight and the blindness of the owl.
Oh, evil the day that I was born, triply I curse that day,
And I would to God I had died that morn and passed like the ocean spray.”

While he may have wished to God that he had died that morn, as one of his legions of fans, I’m grateful that he didn’t. And I have about twelve hundred reasons for my gratitude: the over four hundred short stories and more than seven hundred poems that he wrote.

Unlike many of the Black Gate readers, I’m relatively new to the writings of Robert E. Howard. I became interested in him when I saw the movie The Whole Wide World in 2006. I started with the Del Reys: The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane and Kull Exile of Atlantis. I also read my way enthusiastically through all the Conan stories and then everything else of Howard’s I could get my hands on. I haunted the REH eBay offerings looking for the books and stories I didn’t have.

My efforts were rewarded. I was *there* when Dark Agnes, Valeria and Howard’s strong women flashed their swords and fought beside men as equals. I laughed out loud at Meet Cap’n Kidd and the other Breckenridge Elkins tales, relished Lord of Samarcand and chewed my nails during Pigeons in Hell.

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Tolkien and Howard still The Two Towers of fantasy

Tolkien and Howard still The Two Towers of fantasy

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jrr_tolkienNot to beat the subject, like Fingon, to death, but neither writer is trod into the mire by a comparison to the other. The shortest distance between these two towers is the straight line they draw and defend against the dulling of our sense of wonder, the deadening of our sense of loss, and the slow death of imagination denied.

–Steve Tompkins, “The Shortest Distance Between Two Towers”

With my first Black Gate post of 2011 I thought I’d kick off the New Year with one of those big, bold, declarative, prediction type posts. So here it is: J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard are firmly ensconced as the two towers of fantasy, and as the years pass they will not only remain such, but perhaps will never be dethroned.

Although they arguably did not blaze the trail, Tolkien and Howard set the standard for two sub-genres of fantasy — high fantasy and swords and sorcery, respectively — and no one has done either better before or since.

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2011: Wikileaks and Cyberpunks

2011: Wikileaks and Cyberpunks

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NeuromancerThe first days of a year always have a feel, to me, of science fiction; of a piece of the future made real. You’re looking at a new date everywhere you turn. The name of the year is not the old name. You find yourself living inside something whose coming you have been awaiting, a future now present. But typically this strangeness doesn’t last long; sooner or later the human tendency to adapt makes a new normal, and life as it has been reasserts itself.

Only for me the strangeness came early this year, and I’m not sure when it’ll go away. I’ve been following the ongoing Wikileaks story, or set of stories, and increasingly I have come to feel as though I’m watching a cyberpunk novel unfolding in real time. The release by the Wikileaks site of confidential diplomatic cables, following on the heels of similar releases of confidential documents to do with American military activity in Iraq and Afghanistan, has spiralled into an array of interlocked narratives and events that seem to me to suggest something about the shape of the world in the year 2011.

Specifically, it suggests that cyberpunk has turned out to be the wave of the future after all.

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Vexed Hierarchies

Vexed Hierarchies

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Heroes in the WindAnother year’s drawing to a close, and with it the first full decade of the twenty-first century. It’s a time for looking back, for thinking over what’s happened and what’s going on, in fantasy fiction and elsewhere. I don’t pretend to be in a position to make any worthwhile assessment of fantasy as a whole; but I do want to write about a change that seems to be in process right now. I think it’s a positive change, and potentially a radical one. And I can remember the moment I realised it was happening.

It was when I saw a collection of Robert E. Howard short stories published by Penguin Books.

Let me firstly explain why this was a shock. When I was a kid, Penguin seemed to be a publisher of self-consciously literary books; orange-spined paperbacks featuring mostly English people doing resolutely ordinary everyday things. This wasn’t accurate, as Penguin published sf writers, from Fred Hoyle to Keith Laumer to Fred Saberhagen, as well as mysteries, and writers like Ian Fleming and P.G. Wodehouse; but the perception was that the orange-spined books were realist fiction, and ambitious on a level above the rest. They didn’t interest me at the time, but I gathered from the adults around me that these books represented, in some way that was never clearly articulated, a literary quality beyond the sf and fantasy that I was reading.

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H.P. Lovecraft: The Style Adjectival

H.P. Lovecraft: The Style Adjectival

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Howard Phillips LovecraftEveryone has their heresies. Things they believe, or things they perceive to be true, with which many if not most authorities would disagree. That’s especially so, I think, with readers. Everybody who reads is going to have a list of writers who they feel are unjustly praised or unjustly criticised. Or, in some cases, writers whose work is wrongly praised or criticised; writers accepted as great, for example, but who you think are great for some other reason than is held by most people.

I’ve got a bunch of these heresies. I want to talk here about one such: I believe that H.P. Lovecraft is not only a major writer, but a major stylist. I think his use of language is powerful and original. I think he’s often misread as failing to do things he has no interest in, and I think what he is interested in doing is not often discussed on its own terms.

Before going on to explain what I mean, I should probably make a couple of points clear. Firstly, I have no particular interest in discussing Lovecraft`s life and personality except to note that the desire of many critics to focus on Lovecraft as an individual may suggest a need to evade dealing with the horrors of his fiction. In any event, Lovecraft was not a static thinker; his perspectives and opinions on many things changed over the course of his life. In writing this post, therefore, I’m going to try to talk about “Lovecraft” as a back-formation from the texts of his stories; I mean simply that I’m going to write about what I see in the fiction, treated as a whole, and not worry much over the details of his biography.

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Stages of Gamer Development

Stages of Gamer Development

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diceI am currently in a master’s program for Counseling Studies, and part of that is the study of psychological theories. Something I have learned is that many theories have been presented over the years about psychological development. What stages are involved, what the normal “process” of psychological development is, and so on.

This got me to thinking. Do gamers go through a development process? (And by that I mean tabletop role-players. Video-gamers may go through a similar process, but that’s not my focus.) Perhaps someday, when I have to write a research paper, I will base it on this idea. Because I’m a geek like that.

Anyway, here’s my initial theory on The Stages of Gamer Development, from a psychological point of view. This theory assumes an average gamer, introduced to the hobby during adolescence (ages 11-13 or so), who continues playing through adulthood. Obviously there will be many who do not fall within these parameters. But, given it’s a psychological theory, it is a broad generalization at best, and open for individual interpretation of course.

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Novel Writing: A Summation in Praise of Long Books

Novel Writing: A Summation in Praise of Long Books

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Nanop BadgeAnother NaNoWriMo has come and gone, with mixed results for me. I won, in that I wrote more than 50,000 words. But I didn’t come close to the target of twice that, which is what I was aiming for. In the past, my pace tended to pick up as the month ended; this time around a bad cold hampered my progress, and I didn’t even crack 60,000.

Still, there’s a sense in which I think I accomplished what I was after this month. I took an idea, or a collection of ideas, and started giving it form as an actual story. I wrote enough to gain a sense of the thing; how it’d be shaped, what sort of themes would be prominent, what kind of voice I’d use to tell the tale.

Perhaps the main point is that I learned what the scale of it would be. I started with the notion that I’d be writing two books, totalling maybe a bit more than 100,000 words; I know now that I’m working on a four-volume story, probably with a word count of between 300,000 and 400,000 words.

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