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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1952 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 25, 2026

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So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up Pierce's The Life and Legacy of Ja'far al-Sadiq. Still on Archaeology of Babel.

Midway through As I Lay Dying. The prose (for most of the characters) is not quite the "Faulkner" I was expecting, and I see why kids forced to read it in high school might not have liked it: the story requires some active attention to follow. I've always had some trouble with following characters in books, but maybe that's just me.

I was in the mood for cheap fantasy and a lot of people recommended Joe Abercrombie's First Law series as being really good. And it's not that bad, I got midway through the third book so it can't have been that painful, but it's reminding me of the degree of schlock that exists out there in the world, that I haven't really interacted with.

The tone is hopelessly GrimDerp. On the one hand Abercrombie wants to have a brutal world where people are constantly torture-murdered for no reason by mysterious government agencies, a cynical "gritty realism" where characters on a DnD adventure say things like "This wasn't how it went in the stories!" On the other hand, everything is super lightweight, with no effort at realism or serious effort at world building or character creation. Religion is supposed to be a scam, I think, but there's no effort at actually building a religious foundation to the work. The world is weirdly modern, with "bathrooms" and dentists, but no real attention is given to what level of development exists or doesn't exist in the setting.

Characters have no consistent values. Sex is post-Sexual Revolution casual but look out oh no there's the medieval patriarchy, but also characters don't actually do anything interesting when confronted with it they just kind of shrivel. The women are too open and powerful and feminist, but supposedly acknowledged to be exceptional but we don't see any other women so... He wants to create complex characters that do bad things sometimes but also have heroic qualities, but misses the mark, the sins don't have much weight and the struggles feel fake as a result. The best books that use grimdark settings present us with likeable characters that we identify with, that act according to their own internal sense of right and wrong with a consistent moral compass, then deliver a result that is so brutal and discordant that it creates psychic discomfort in the reader and makes you think.

The writing is idiomatic to modern English. The "brutish uncivilized northern barbarians" will use phrases like "That's the point of fucking exercise." There's no real dialect within the text across different regions, other than the fantasy-Africans using the racial slur "pink" for the fantasy-Europeans, as in "I'm stuck here with this group of pinks" or "you don't know what you're talking about, pink;" which might be my favorite racial slur for white people of all time.

The example that finally got me to give up on the third book was this: a character becomes king through a series of completely unforeshadowed unlikely coincidences. He gets an arranged marriage because, you know, of course he does. His wife, on their wedding night, refuses him, knees him in the testicles, and makes clear she will never sleep with him. And it's very confusing to me why he doesn't rape her, or at least consider it and give a reason why he can't. The setting has been persistently grimdark up to this point, and we're dealing with a feudal patriarchy in which this marriage was arranged, the character himself is shown to be of questionable moral fiber at numerous points. But then his wife refuses him on his wedding night and he just...tolerates it? This is what I mean when I say creating a morally grey-dark grey grimdark universe can create an interesting values dissonance, how does one deal with a refusing wife when one's marriage is a political creation to begin with? Is it, in fact, the king's duty to rape his wife and seek to produce an heir? Alternatively, he can deal with the political consequences of an annulment, which could be severe but are necessary if she won't do her wifely duty. What doesn't work is telling me, the reader, that the young king just sits there and stews. That dog don't hunt.

Anyway it's fine enough as a book if you want schlock, but I forgot how much schlock there was in the world. And it's making me think about the recent discourse in themotte about "female characters" and similar, in that so much of complaint about the lack of quality representation of such-and-such is that people read garbage and call it literature. There's great genre fiction, but there's also so much junk, and this isn't even close to the junkiest junk, and I think that the complaints about things like "rounded female characters" are a matter of expecting genre junk to be literature.

"This wasn't how it went in the stories!"

There is a great bit in The Two Towers where Sam and Frodo get to discussing Great Stories, but I think that one works really well because they recognize their part is, maybe reluctantly, to be in one. It can be done well, IMO.

It's a great line, the first time you hear it. Like maybe in 1954 when LOTR came out. By the fifth time it comes up in a book, it's a cliche, this is actually exactly how it goes in the stories, because this is what all the stories do these days. The story was always going to go exactly this way.

Well, it's also somewhat the opposite of your exact quote: that this is how it went in the stories, and how they rather wish they didn't have to be in one.

But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for.

That's sort of my point. In 1954 you have this established idea of the story, and you can play with that in important ways, and then after it's established you can get a big kick out of it, really play with audience expectations.

Once subversion becomes your expectation, it's eye-roll inducing.

I often wonder how Tolkien's readers would have thought about the great Elf-Human romance subplots. Beren and Luthien, Aragorn and Arwen, these were (for Tolkien) Big Deals. Then every fantasy writer afterward did the same thing, to the point where if you have a human and elves, you know they're gonna bone, and if the setting allows cross-breeding any RP ruleset needs to figure that there's going to be halfsies running around in every combination imaginable. But the first time that happens, it's a big deal! It's epic!

Characters have no consistent values. Sex is post-Sexual Revolution casual but look out oh no there's the medieval patriarchy, but also characters don't actually do anything interesting when confronted with it they just kind of shrivel. The women are too open and powerful and feminist, but supposedly acknowledged to be exceptional but we don't see any other women so... He wants to create complex characters that do bad things sometimes but also have heroic qualities, but misses the mark, the sins don't have much weight and the struggles feel fake as a result. The best books that use grimdark settings present us with likeable characters that we identify with, that act according to their own internal sense of right and wrong with a consistent moral compass, then deliver a result that is so brutal and discordant that it creates psychic discomfort in the reader and makes you think.

How do you feel about Scott Bakker's work? Because I think he makes a real effort at this (he explicitly said he refused to make certain characters female because it'd under the patriarchy in the worldbuilding) and has subsequently been vastly more criticized than Abercrombie (the bleakness at best turns people off, at worst annoys them) and vastly less successful.

I did not enjoy The Prince of Nothing. Pretty much every female character in the first half of the first book gets raped and exists to be a sex slave or prostitute. I don't think all men are that shitty. And one of the men is a huge Marty Stu.

I'm unfamiliar with it, would you recommend him? I'm on kind of a fantasy kick, I want literary junk food, but the quality of some of this just drives me off.

I'm not against strong female characters, even in a patriarchal setting, I think that female agency exists and is often underestimated in patriarchal settings! I even think you can do ye olde feminist trope well with the right context created.

What bugs me about Abercrombie is the unevenness: there's casual sex, and casually strong women, but then there's also "oh this can't be you're a commoner and I'm a noble!"

For all GRRM's flaws, and I think the setting gets sweaty after too many pages, I'm looking for more ASOIAF, but maybe with a more contained storyline and less bloat. Given that ASOIAF has to be one of the most bloated fantasy stories ever told, that ought not to be hard to find.

Oh, Bakker is up on Mount Rushmore for me as far as epic fantasy goes. Nothing quite scratches the same itch. If the idea of the First Crusade filtered through Tolkien, Herbert and Nietzsche appeals you'll likely find something in there for you.

And I think he treats religion - and the excruciating choices it puts us to - with far more seriousness than most of the genre can manage.

If anything the criticism is that he is too even and unrelentingly negative when it comes to patriarchy.

For all GRRM's flaws, and I think the setting gets sweaty after too many pages, I'm looking for more ASOIAF, but maybe with a more contained storyline and less bloat. Given that ASOIAF has to be one of the most bloated fantasy stories ever told, that ought not to be hard to find.

The first series - Prince of Nothing - I think is pretty focused for epic fantasy. There is some bloat in the sequel series though (4 more books, one more than expected).

Great! I'll give that a try, might scratch the itch for me.

And I think he treats religion - and the excruciating choices it puts us to - with far more seriousness than most of the genre can manage.

Religion is so touchy. Tolkien got it perfect, everyone else tends to either make religion too immanent and just another magical mechanic, or they go full Reddit atheism like the Eragon series which is just eye-roll inducing for me: you have magic but no supernatural?

which is just eye-roll inducing for me: you have magic but no supernatural?

This was deeply annoying about the Odyssey. "In a time of apparent magic" and then we see people get turned into pigs. Not in any sort of ambiguous way either. Odysseus even says she gets her power from the Gods!

And if you're going to show that in a pseudo-objective fashion, why do we also need to play coy with Athena?

Of course, if you have actual gods instead of just Bronze Age Zatanna , the whole therapeutic journey of self-discovery where the most important thing is how the protagonist feels about things needs to be rejiggered somewhere.

The Causal Structure of Natural Selection. Fascinating read. I’ve been really taken up with several works in the Cambridge Elements series recently. And they’re very quick reads. My mind’s been roiling with thoughts the last couple weeks.

Airships by Barry Hannah. Short stories (some extremely short like 2-3 pages) about the South from the Civil War to modern day (70s). Jeb Stuart shows up a weird amount of times. A lot of the stories take some pretty wild turns. Good read so far, I'm almost done. I've always thought the South had a really tragic quality to it much of the rest of the country lacked and this book nails it tonally

Did you ever read any Wendell Berry? Finished Jayber Crow recently and it was of this genre and had that quality.

I finished Case Closed on Tuesday. Couldn't put it down, fastest I've read a book all year.

I was in a bookshop last month and impulsively bought PG Wodehouse's A Gentleman of Leisure, having heard from everyone and their mum that Wodehouse is hilarious. I read the first couple of chapters during the week. I was disappointed to find that it's not one of the Jeeves and Wooster novels. So far there haven't been any laugh-out-loud moments.

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