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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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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?
Tolkien had a supernatural cosmology he'd put a lot of thought in, sure, but he has very little in-universe religion. As far as we can tell from The Lord of the Rings, there's no clergy in Middle-Earth and the people don't have any particular religious beliefs they could explain or religious practices and traditions they follow. This was intentional, but it makes everyone feel like 20th century WEIRD people who cringe from espousing the actual metaphysical claims of their local traditional religion even when they don't want to outright denounce it as false.
What I think he got perfect is that in a world of very clear magic, immortality, etc religion is ultimately unremarkable. Religious doubt is impossible in a world where everyone acknowledges that Sauron and Gandalf and Sauruman and Elrond are who they are. I guess you could have hobbit skeptics who say they aren't, but within the story it's all obvious.
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