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Those of you who’ve followed this blog for a while (I am reasonably confident there are at least two) will be aware that at times in the past I’ve picked up and examined negative criticisms from around the web, but always in a positive and respectful way (ahem), using them as a springboard for a deeper understanding of my own work (ahem), keen, always, to engage with critics in meaningful discourse. I must confess that I’ve become jaded of late, though. The internet brimmeth over with stuff, and after a while it all starts to look the same. I just don’t feel the slings and arrows like I used to. Which is why I am deeply grateful that Leo Grin has jerked me from my self-satisfied stupour with his searing indictment of modern fantasy over at BigHollywood. He sure is unhappy about something…
“The mere trappings of the genre do nothing for me … when placed into the hands of writers clearly bored with the classic mythic undertones of the genre, and who try to shake things up with what can best be described as postmodern blasphemies against our mythic heritage.”
It’s a very simple argument he advances, really. A kind of literary battle of good against evil, you might say. On one side are the towering mythic geniuses of Tolkien and Howard, who wrote “in blood and lighting” according to Leo, although presumably on extremely hardwearing paper. On the other side are, well, me, Steve Erikson, Michael Swanwick, and Matthew Woodring Stover, apparently. I’ve never met those guys, or read any of their work, I must admit. But that doesn’t mean they’re not down here with me in the evil postmodern myth-destruction bunker. It’s a big old bunker we’ve got, and there’s lots of us down here. Though I’m not entirely sure who.
I’m a little suspicious, I must say, of any argument that lumps Tolkien and Howard together as one thing, although Leo has made the photos of them in his piece point towards each other in a very complimentary fashion. I think of them as polar opposites in many ways, and the originators (or at least key practitioners) of, to some extent, opposed traditions within sword-based fantasy. Tolkien, the father of high fantasy, Howard the father of low. Howard’s work, written by a man who died at thirty, tends to the short and pulpy (as you’d expect from stories written for pulp magazines). Tolkien’s work, published on the whole when he was advanced in years, is very long and literary (as you’d expect from a professor of English). Tolkien is more focused on setting, I’d say, Howard on character. Leo’s point is that they both celebrate a moral simplicity, a triumph of heroism, but I see that too as a massive over-simplification. Howard celebrates the individual, is deeply cynical (could one even say nihilistic) about civilisation. Tolkien seems broadly to celebrate order, structure, duty and tradition. And I celebrate, well …
“Think of a Lord of the Rings where, after stringing you along for thousands of pages, all of the hobbits end up dying of cancer contracted by their proximity to the Ring, Aragorn is revealed to be a buffoonish puppet-king of no honor and false might, and Gandalf no sooner celebrates the defeat of Sauron than he executes a long-held plot to become the new Dark Lord of Middle-earth, and you have some idea of what to expect should you descend into Abercrombie’s jaded literary sewer.”
That sounds … kind of interesting to me, actually, but I dimly percieve that Leo doesn’t like it. Your mileage may vary, of course. But why all the fury, Leo? Relax. Pour yourself a drink. Admire your unrivalled collection of Frank Frazetta prints for a while. Wrestle the old blood pressure down. When an old building is demolished to make way for a new, I can see the cause of upset. Hey, depending what’s lost and what’s gained, I might be upset myself. Let’s all take a look at the plans together and see if we can work something out. But books don’t work that way. If I choose to write my own take on fantasy, what gets destroyed? What loss are we bewailing here? If the mere notion of moral ambiguity, explicit violence and some swearing chills your very soul, I daresay you can still find something on the shelves with “the elevated prose poetry, mythopoeic subcreation, and thematic richness that only the best fantasy achieves” as Leo has it. You want Tolkien and Howard? I’ve got a very handsome leather bound Complete Conan and I’m reasonably sure Lord of the Rings is still in print. Something newer? There are still plenty of established authors very succesfully writing very traditional stuff, if that’s your bag, and many more authors of what might be called these days a somewhat more YA-ish bent (absolutely no disrespect intended) writing interesting work without swearing or graphic sex and violence. I wish the best of luck to them and their readers. Many of their readers, after all, will be my readers too. And I think that’s the key point here. This argument is so cartoonishly simplistic. There just aren’t two neatly defined camps in this.
“The other side thinks that their stuff is, at long last, turning the genre into something more original, thoughtful, and ultimately palatable to intelligent, mature audiences.”
We’re on sides, now? No one told me about sides. What are the sides? Of what? And on which side am I? I love Tolkien, after all. I’d like to be on his side. Grew up with The Hobbit. Read Lord of the Rings every year. I’m a great admirer of his. Without Tolkien there’d be no fantasy as we know it, and certainly no First Law. When it comes to an epic tale with moral clarity set in a supremely realised fantasy world, he pretty much knocked it out of the park. But that means there’s not much point in my writing it again, is there? Forgive me for saying so, but it feels as if folk have been writing Lord of the Rings again for a while now, and I think we could probably, you know, stop. Howard’s less of a personal influence for me, except at distant second hand through the film Conan the Barbarian, D&D and so forth, but there’s no doubting his tremendous influence on the genre, and I’m a big fan of some of the guys who picked up the sword & sorcery baton from him, like Fritz Leiber. Hell, I’d like to be on Howard’s side too. Can I be on his … oh. Apparently I’m on the other side:
“bored middle-class creatives (almost all of them college-educated liberals) living lives devoid of any greater purpose inevitably reach out for anything deemed sacred by the conservatives populating any artistic field. They co-opt the language, the plots, the characters, the cliches, the marketing, and proceed to deconstruct it all like a mad doctor performing an autopsy. Then, using cynicism, profanity, scatology, dark humor, and nihilism, they put it back together into a Frankenstein’s monster designed to shock, outrage, offend, and dishearten. In the case of the fantasy genre, the result is a mockery and defilement of the mythopoeic splendor that true artists like Tolkien and Howard willed into being with their life’s blood.”
I’m in the bored middle class, college educated liberal creative camp, apparently. Unlike Tolkien, who would have had no truck with that middle-class educated creative crap. He was the son of a bank manager and the Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Merton college, with a fistful of honorary degrees and fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature, by the way. This adverserial picture of the world just doesn’t seem, to me, to stand up to the most casual scrutiny. In the words of Mr. Pink, “fuck sides, man, what we need is a little solidarity here.” To me, it’s not really about politics, and it’s got nothing to do with sides, just various writers coming at a genre with their own set of unique concerns, influences, interests. Why must it be steak OR chicken? Can I not enjoy both? Can I not think the two compliment and improve one another? Can I not even think that a solid diet of steak, however much I may enjoy it, may become dull and boring, and long for chicken to explode upon my jaded palet? Hell, let’s go mad and add vegetables too! Where’s the harm in a varied diet? If rocket’s worthless, the fad will soon be over, we can all go back to lettuce. Don’t like something? Eat something else. And why be so upset about what other people choose to eat?
“Soiling the building blocks and well-known tropes of our treasured modern myths is no different than other artists taking a crucifix and dipping it in urine, covering it in ants, or smearing it with feces. In the end, it’s just another small, pathetic chapter in the decades-long slide of Western civilization into suicidal self-loathing.”
It’s so shrill. So absurdly over-the-top and apocalyptic. Surely the hallmark of western civilzation is variety, richness, experimentation. If we all settled for repeating the same-old we’d still be stuck in the dark ages, no? We’d certainly have no Tolkien and Howard, who were bold enough to try to do new things with established forms, cook up new combinations of influences with their own stamp. Isn’t that what it’s all about? I don’t honestly see myself as nihilistic, really. Cynical, for sure. Surprising, I’d hope. Occasionally filthy, no doubt. Bankrupt, certainly not, thank you, baths in my literary sewer are in great demand as my new four book deal certifies. But it’s got nothing to do with tearing anything down, and certainly not with suicidal self-loathing. I see myself as working within a form. Experimenting with the same stuff Tolkien and Howard pioneered. Tweaking, commenting, examining, hopefully in the sort of way that Sergio Leone does with John Ford, and Clint Eastwood does with Sergio Leone. That’s how genre works, no? Darkness, despair, and lack of moral clarity in fantasy isn’t even anything radical. Look at Lovecraft. Look at Howard, for that matter. Look at Tolkien’s Silmarillion. Neither is filth and grime a new development. Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, anyone? But shiny and simple had long been in the commercial ascendant. A correction was bound to come. Grit, slime and moral ambiguity seem popular now. Probably the pendulum will swing back (if it ever really swung away). What’s the big deal? Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend, and all that jazz. My favourite quote from Leo, to be found in the comments, on The First Law:
“That’s not realism, it’s nihilism, and it’s poison to both the reader’s mind and culture.”
I can only scratch my head at the insidious power I appear to have amassed. Whether or not my own work is nihilism seems to me very arguable, but poison to the reader’s mind and culture? Really? If you feel your mind and culture might collapse under the weight of a surprising ending involving an unpleasant wizard, a rubbish king and a couple of swear words, it seems to me you really need to dig them some deeper foundations.
Incidentally, Adam Whitehead gives his own take on some of the issues here, and SF writer John C. Wright seizes the overwrought football of Leo’s argument and runs it into the end-zone of strangeness on his blog:
“It is my judgment, shared of many ancients, that there are certain proper emotional reactions and relatins one ought to have, and improper ones one ought not. A child raised to curse and despise his parents, trample the crusifix, burn the flag, abhor kittens and Christmas scenes and motherhood but adore torture porn and satanism and deformity, that child’s tastes are objectively perverse and false-to-facts. He has been trained to spew his mother’s milk and drink venom. Fair to him is foul, and foul is fair. In the same way that to say A is not-A is an offense against logic, to hate the lovely and love the hateful is an offense against aesthetics, a disconnection from reality … the literati (or, to be precise, anti-literati) make inroads into the realm of elfland itself, to erect the smog and graffito of their beloved Mordor.”
Okaaay. I’m stepping away now. I’ve gone on far too long and now I’ve got Stover AND Swanwick on the phone demanding I get back to the bunker to plot the downfall of western civilisation. Load the kitten-powered zepellins with defaced Christmas scenes and set course for elfland! Mwa ha ha haaaaaah, fools! We’re coming for your myths!
Oh, and usual comments about comments apply. Let’s keep this clean and respectful please, people.
EDIT: I have returned to my computer after a day away and see there’s been all kinds of interest in this post. Apologies to those first-timers whose comments have not been moderated until now. I try to keep a light touch on moderation, but some are sailing close to the wind. A couple I’ve had to strike for overstepping the mark, as I see it. Peter Collinson, your comment was fascinating and highly perceptive but, I would say, a touch too inflammatory for this particular forum. I encourage you all to comment in future, though. Some specific fallout:
I may find John C. Wright’s views outlandish but he takes it in good part and shows dignity and a sense of humour in his reply, so kudos for that. Perhaps, to paraphrase his own comment, I am allowed to find the blog insane without necessarily doubting the mental health of the blogger…
Further discussion at Black Gate, at Ominvoracious, from author Scott Bakker (who I daresay might be down here in the bunker somewhere), of the lack of female authors in all this at Floor to Ceiling Books, of … something relating to it … from the inimitable BC Woods, and that’s just scratching the surface…
FURTHER EDIT: A lot of comments dwell on the politics, which is inevitable I guess as Leo made that a centrepiece of his argument. I’ve let pretty much everything stand that isn’t beyond the pale, but for my own part I’d rather this did not descend into a partisan slagging match. As I’ve said above, I don’t see this as a political issue, and I feel that Leo’s assertion that “new” and “old” fantasy are utterly separate camps, and further that one camp is fundamentally of a different politics, or level of education, or class to the other is the most utterly bogus part of a bogus argument. Likewise there’s a fair bit of ad hominem about. It is the internet. But it doesn’t help. Let’s keep it calm going forward, please.
Brett, when I look at my bookshelf I see a row of Star Wars novels and comics. Feel any better?
Man, R. Scott Bakker breaks it DOWN in his response. If you all haven’t read it on the trackbacks link “Jagged Page”, go do so.
“Wait. If everything in this life is subjective, then the statement “everything in this life is subjective” is not a true/false statement, but merely a report on a matter of your personal taste.
There are truths concerning the subjective just as much as there are truths about objective, external reality. Take, for example, the statement “agony is, in and of itself, an undesirable thing”. This is, any reasonable person would agree, a true statement. And it is true precisely because of the subjective content of the experience we name “agony”.
bored middle-class creatives (almost all of them college-educated liberals) living lives devoid of any greater purpose inevitably reach out for anything deemed sacred by the conservatives populating any artistic field
This is the problem right here- the narcissism that makes them think that anything they don’t like is a personal attack. Uh, Leo, you’re not important, nobody would go out of their way just to tweak your beard.
I posted this on R. Scott Bakker’s post on this same topic (http://bit.ly/ea5Xf2). It still applies.
I read Grin’s article and it seemed to boil down to something very simple: using a bunch of flowery, pseudo-intellectual buzzwords to say he doesn’t like Abercrombie et al as much as he did “The Lord of the Rings.” Wow. Brilliant.
I feel a bit weird coming onto a website of an author whose work I haven’t read, but I feel the need to nonetheless.
Some background information on Leo is necessary. For one thing, Leo is undoubtedly very right-wing, and proud of it: however, he should not be mistaken for some sort of totalitarian who does not tolerate dissenting opinion. The most potent example of this is on The Cimmerian, the Robert E. Howard website he created and ran for years, concurrently with the print journal. Among the contributors for that website was the late Steve Tompkins, a staunch liberal. Yet in all the years the two wrote together on the blog, I can think of only a single instance where the two’s different political positions come into play on the public platform, when Tompkins made a dismissive remark regarding Sarah Palin.
Leo was adamant in keeping politics out of The Cimmerian as much as he could, precisely because of the divisive nature of political discussion. However, I note that when he retired from active involvement on the blog, he handed administrative duties to none other than Steve. Leo handed over a site which was his baby, his creation, to a man with vastly different political beliefs, to say nothing of opinions on other matters. When Steve died, Leo passed the reins to Deuce Richardson, a centrist. One would think that if Leo is indeed some sort of fascistic tyrant not open to any views he does not share, that he would rather see The Cimmerian website close down than in the hands of a non-conservative, let alone a “damn-dirty liberal” like Steve.
Leo’s hysterical, shrill tone is hyperbole, and designed to be provocative and confrontational. Because, as he well knows, people react more vigorously to being called The Enemy Of Reason and Western Civilization And Tiny Fluffy Kittens than they do to well-reasoned and polite discourse. Similarly, the best counter-arguments are those which are measured, insightful and polite – like Mr Abercrombie’s response. Look what’s happened: the blogosphere is abuzz with comments seeking to refute his statements, defending their favourite authors with energy, enthusiasm and indignation. In other words, people are thinking about things, reassessing fantasy literature, and debating – which is, no doubt, exactly what Leo wanted.
Make no mistake, Leo’s very well read. In addition to Howard and Tolkien, he’s on record as enjoying Charles R. Saunders, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, and H.P. Lovecraft, as well as appreciating Lloyd Alexander. A lot of people question if he’s even read Howard, which is anathema to me, being as he’s one of the most highly-regarded (if controversial to a certain subset of scholars) of Howard scholars, and is one of the few who considers Howard and Tolkien as equally great and influential.
In the end, I dearly hope people don’t make judgements on Tolkien or Howard, or their fans, based on an individual’s personal politics. As stated, Steve Tompkins and Deuce Richardson, both JRRT/REH fans who are not right-wing. Rusty Burke, one of the most prominent Howard scholars today, is also not right-wing. There are others. I myself have no real political leanings, and so am not a great example. Leo has opened himself up to criticism on that front, but not Howard fandom in general.
Oh, and I fully intend to read Mr Abercrombie’s work, but not because Leo accidentally made his warped version of LotR too cool (though I admit a morbid fascination with the idea). I intend to read his work because Steve Tompkins loved his work – and expressed his appreciation on The Cimmerian, a website made possible by… Leo Grin. Funny how things work out, isn’t it?
I’m a huge Robert E. Howard fan myself and the more I think about it, Robert E. Howard’s awesome stories seem to me to be the seed and the fertile ground where these very stories that Mr. Grin is bashing took root.
What about Bran Mak Morn? You don’t get much darker then the last pure-bred king of people that are sinking back into savagery. Bran Mak Morn knows he and his Picts are doomed, but he fights and kills anyway for the pure spite of it. The violent crucifixion of Mak Morn’s tribesman at the beginning of Worms of Earth and the nightmare that Bran Mak Morn let’s loose against the Romans, not to mention the sex Mak Morn has with the witch as the payment for the monstrosity, is pretty damn gritty. Especially when you consider Howard didn’t have access to the realistic movies and news footage that we have today.
Yep, I think it’s rather presumptions for Mr. Grin to think Robert E. Howard wouldn’t embrace what Mr. Abercrombie is doing. I kinda think Two-Gun Bob would love it.
Another thought for what it’s worth; maybe Mr. Grin should go look at the Frazetta Conan paintings again. You don’t get grittier than Frazetta and his imagery is credited with one of the first big Howard resurgence, and I think Frazetta’s vision would be a perfect match for Abercrombie’s imagination.
“The problem is not that fantasy is “darker”. The problem is that some works made fantasy a “mundane thing.”"
I love stories that evoke a sense of numinous mystery. I’m all for it. But I also sometimes enjoy stories that treat fantasy worlds as real places rather than settings for the shadow plays of Jungian archetypes.
It’s not an either/or matter. Both are worthwhile. Both can be rewarding reading.
I love pie, but not at every meal. Why can there be only one kind of fantasy?
I’m wondering what Leo Grin is reading, because how many variation can there be on a “boy grows up, not knowing his parents to save the world from a terrible evil”
Preach on, Brother Abercombie.. you have the right of it.
The Lord of the Rings was good, in my opinion. But I couldn’t sit through it again.
Most fantasy after that was tedious rehashes of the same thing, The Splurgs of Mogg, the XXX of the YYY, Wielder of the yadiyadiya. In my opinion. I thought it unlikely I would ever read fantasy again.
Then people starting writing more realistic, new, interesting fantasy. In my opinion. With real, interesting characters. In one summer I picked up tomes by Scott Lynch, Alan Campbell, and Joe, and my faith was restored.
The key point here is In My Opinion. There is still plenty of Splurgs of Mog stuff being written for those that enjoy them (..and Star Wars books. A burn! ;o) )
For those of us who wonder exactly why good should always triumph over evil, who think about the shades of grey, who are sick to the back teeth of simplistic moral absolutes and don’t accept they are necessary constituents of heroic fantasy, and who loved the ending of The First Law, we have Joe and his ilk.
Of course, this guy is entitled to his opinion, even if it is unfounded, poorly argued, and politically motivated.
But thankfully, very few will take any notice and people will continue to buy and enjoy authors like Joe. Hence the sales rankings of The Heroes.
Congrats, Joe. And please do bring back Ninefingers and Ferro.
You know what they say Joe, when someone picks on you it’s only because they fancy you!
Take comfort in that
EDITED – The content of this comment most definitely crossed the line.
It’s apparent to me as a fantasy reader that Grin is wildly out of his element. But because he detests Joe’s work so madly, he’s actually made me decide to give it a try. The First Law trilogy has been added to my Amazon wish list. Good job, sir.
Thanks Lucifel, As long as you enjoy them though eh?
I apologise in advance for an analogy that may seem to have nothing to do with this topic but I assure you is most apt. Amongst fans of Heavy Metal Music there are those wizened old figures mostly encountered in spit and saw dust rock pubs, they sit clad in denim and leather hunched over a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale muttering through their grey beards about how Metal aint Metal no more. How you will never get better than Sabbath, Maiden, and Motorhead etc. They then go on to damn the likes of Metallica, Anthrax and Faith No More, saying that such bands have music lost touch with this ephemeral force that is the so called ‘soul of metal’.
To the genre of Fantasy literature the not so smiley Mr Grin is one of these be patched dark ale drinking grognards. The way I see it the works of Tolkien and authors like him (I’m not lumping Howard in with these authors and I find it bizarre that Mr Grin did) are like the songs of Iron Maiden, sprawling bombastic epics that deal with mythological themes and ideas. Whereas the works people like the talented Mr Abercrombie, Scott Lynch and to some extent George RR Martin are more like songs by Metallica, fast paced, brutal and heavily based on issues felt by society. My point is both the fantasy and heavy metal are genres that have evolved over time and have taken inspiration from works that have proceeded them. As Mr Abercrombie says there should be no division, if this was a festival I am more than sure Tolkien and Abercrombie would share the same stage alongside such acts as Howard and Erikson. At the end of the day all works of fantasy fiction are part of a great cycle of creativity, I don’t think any other genre of fiction promotes creativity more than fantasy, you only have to look at the plethora of role playing games, artwork, video games etc that have been inspired by the genre to realise this (we don’t see table top battle games or RPG’s based on Pride and Prejudice or Enduring Love now do we). Fantasy inspires us to contribute to this mythological world and create our own legends. For example I know many people who got into Tolkien through playing Warhammer (myself included), Warhammer was inspired by Lord of the Rings (alongside other books), in turn Warhammer has inspired many fantasy writers as have games like D&D, thus the great Ouroboros of fantasy continues to consume itself, enfolding more and more devoted fans into its coils, who ultimately create their own worlds and adventures in their own unique ways.
So I say to Mr Grin, if you want your fantasy sweetened with a happy ending that’s fine fair play to you, if you want fiction more akin to the Great Myths of Old well fine, why not try the great myths of old. There are quite a few out there, why not look up The Prose Edda, The Havamal or The Iliad hey if you are feeling particularly adventurous why not even try the Enuma Elis, though I warn you it may be a be a little bit too subversive for your tastes. But don’t knock us so called middle class liberals, this is fantasy for our generation and it’s bloody brilliant!
Al Harron:
1) Leo works for Andrew Breitbart, who similarly used to hang out with liberals while calling them traitorous perverts, and wrote the piece for a Breitbart site — Big Hollywood — that specifically exists to attack “liberal” artists and try to destroy their “influence.” (I honestly don’t know Abercrombie’s politics. He may in fact be a staunch Tory.) Whatever his personal life and hobbies, Leo wrote the piece as political propaganda about how liberal commies are using nihilism to destroy fantasy fiction and proper western mores, not to have a nice discussion on the Internet.
2) Saying that a completely false and hyperbolic argument is necessary for impassioned and reasoned Internet debate to occur is ridiculous. If he doesn’t believe they’re murdering fluffy kittens, don’t say it. But in his political world, it is necessary to do this to paint dissenters as vile enemies and people who aren’t actually his dissenters as dissenters. The idea is to vilify random targets, not discuss. That Abercrombie is smart enough not to take the bait doesn’t particularly make Leo look like a genius. That there is wide ranging discussion on the topic is not really because of Leo or the details of what he said, but because this is the sort of topic fantasy fans go over every few months, exercising their collective nostalgic amnesia.
3) Leo arguing that Conan the Destroyer is heroic and not nihilistic does not make a good argument for him being a Howard “scholar.”
4) Swanwick did his novel in 1993. Stover started his Caine series in 1997. Abercrombie started his series in 2006. Lumping them together as an example of current mores or a concerted movement makes almost as little sense as pairing Howard and Tolkein together. It’s the worst sort of confirmation bias cherry-picking.
EDITED – Sorry, some of this crossed the line.
The fact that so many in the fantasy community have responded with thoughtfulness is a testament to the broad-mindedness of most fantasy readers. We don’t have Leo Grin to thank for that. And I do think he misunderstands Howard. He may revere Howard, but he’s imposing his own views on him, leaving the rest of us scratching our heads because there’s not much in Abercrombie that would be shocking to Conan. That’s the difficulty with absolutist dogmas — everything gets viewed through a single, distorted lens.
Hey if I go all Logen Ninefingers on one of the execs at the corporation I work for, do you think I can blame it on Abercrombie’s books causing the downfall of western civilization and I’m just ahead of the curver? No?
Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to read about ass-holes getting the shit kicked-out of them and that be enough.
I read Leo Grin’s blog post and was moved…..to Amazon to buy The Heroes. Suck it, Leo!
just been reading up the responses on the original article – looks like the pinko liberals are fighting back and Leo’s getting a bit of a tonking. Personally I find the alomst homererotic (did you see what I did there) tone risable and woefully simplistic – but hey maybe that’s the point and it really is for nothing more than upping the readership of the site…..hmmm that gives me a cynical thought – you sure this isn’t just a put up job between you two thought up by the publisher to drum up some sales….ohhhh perish the thought
Brilliant! I’ve been off line a few days and this happens!
So basicaly this guy’s saying its blasphemous to try and move away from the tropes of the genre!? That fantasy is generic and conservative is one of the biggest criticisims leveled at it.
Leslie: I enjoyed your heavy metal analogy. Truly, I have met fans of Ozzy and the old school Metallica who give me blank stares or horrified gasps att he mention of modern titans of metal like Lamb of God or Heaven Shall Burn. But I alsso still think this issue goes beyond mere tastes.
EDITED: Sorry, some of this crossed the line.
Funny old world, back in the day playing rpgs and reading fantasy and whatnot was one step away from satanism, burning churches and whatnot… And these days liberals are ruining it?
I guess Elric is oh so new and liberal ruined too…
I just noticed that Joe updated his post recently and asked us to avoid the politics and ad hominem attacks. I’m guilty of both, especially in my last reply — apologies.
Joe, thanks for asking for people to leave the politics out of this discussion. Like you, I never thought this was a political or a religious matter. Unfortunately your request came after 134 posts of an absolute lefty meltdown. Sad that many of you attack someone so personally and viciously when they say something contrary to your beliefs. Someone even attacked him because of how his picture looked. Really? Good thing this crowd is so enlightened and open.
Dan: You say lefty meltdown, we say reasoned argument that old Leo doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to fantasy fiction, which he characterized inaccurately as a political struggle between “new” writers as liberals and “old” writers as conservative myth makers. We’re saying it isn’t a political struggle and that dragging political cant into it is unsupported by the actual fiction. A lot of fans have made arguments about differences between current and past fantasy, and even though those also often ignore large swathes of fiction, they certainly make more sense than Grin’s political argument. It is not an “ad hominem attack” when the person who wrote the piece specifically talks about authors being conservatives and liberals in the article and that this is his main view of their work. And it is this choice by Grin, to characterize authors’ political views, wrongly, by their fiction, that people are pointing out is completely inaccurate.
Dan, I hope I wasn’t vicious. If so, I apologize.
Tim
I believe in giving the greatest latitude but some of these comments are very close to crossing, or have very definitely crossed, the line. I very much dislike being schoolteacher here but I’ve had to prune some comments and cut some others entirely.
No more personal attacks. That should go without saying.
No more stuff that tars whole groups with the same brush either.
Please, everyone, simmer down.
I won’t cross the line here, I promise. The one good thing about this debate (aside from the fun of it) is that I’ve been inspired to start reading the Robert E Howard Conan Omnibus I’ve had on my Kindle for more than a year. Here’s Howard with an intersting thought that seems pertinent:
“Poets alwasy hate those in power. To them, perfection is always just behind the last corner, or beyond the next. they escape the present in dreams of the past and future.”
Well, it looks like it was mainly my comments that crossed the line and were edited, at least for today. To quote the Internet: I ain’t even mad.
As you are an author trying to reach as many readers as possible, Joe, I can understand your actions. Alienating people because of their political positions won’t net you any readers. That’s cool. I’m still planning on buying your books, so no hate here.
Oh, I managed it too, Chris. In fact, moments after I pressed the submit button on my last comment, I was looking for the Delete button. Joe’s been very decent about it. I hope Dan forgives us.
And, dangit, I really wish I’d learn to proofread my posts. Here’s Howard with the inept typing errors:
“Poets always hate those in power. To them, perfection is always just behind the last corner, or beyond the next. They escape the present in dreams of the past and future.”
Tim H: I make no apologies regarding my political stances. I’m sure if Joe and I sat down and had a chat, we’d find most of our opinions in politics falling along the same lines. But as I said, I understand Joe’s position: alienating his conservative readers isn’t going to net him any sales, and people taking it personally can go a long way in damaging one’s sales in any field.
Anyway, I guess I’m not Richard Morgan, so I’m not allowed to make politically-themed comments on Joe’s blog. It’s all good; I just ordered The Blade Itself.
I suggest everyone here jump over to the linked article by Leo Grin for the read and, more importantly, to read the reader comments below. There is actually a lot of very open minded discussion going on about, you know, fantasy!? Not so much politics.
Regarding one of Leo’s points that id like to talk about. Leo says “Abercrombie’s freshman effort, the massive First Law trilogy ….concluded with a resolution worthy of M. Night Shyamalan at his worst, one that did its best to hurt, disappoint, and dishearten any lover of myths and their timeless truths.” He then goes on to give the LoTR parody which is pretty funny and, if we are being honest, not that far off of a comparison of how Joe does things. Now whether or not that is a bad thing comes down to your own likes and dislikes, not if your a liberal or conservative.
I have to agree with Leo about being disappointed at the end of the First Law. I was pissed, as we’re some friends of mine. Yea, I wanted something of a “happy ending” too. But what I think he is also missing, is that the story is not over. Clearly Logen, West and Ferro are not dead. Joe has no trouble telling you when someone is dead. He has not told us these characters are dead even though he has had two more books to do so. I believe this is because their story is not finished. I think these three will be the characters in the upcoming books. There is what, a 8-9 year gap from the end of First Law to the end of Heroes? There is a lot of story to be told in that period about these characters.
Bottom line, I still have hope for a triumph on the part of Logen at the very least and possibly all three. Now, will that change Leo’s opinion of Joe’s story telling? Who knows, who cares, I just wanted to talk about the actual books, story lines and my theories on what’s to come.
Even though I did not care for the end of the First Law, I CARE about these characters. Joe has done that. And so I keep reading no matter who gets killed off. I just might not be happy about it…
Chris, I’m apologizing because I let my personal views bog down Joe’s blog. And it was not my intent to upset people. I do think that politics and religion are very germain to the discussion, just not in this forum. And I’m not even a lefty, just a failed libertarian.
Joe: as a minor (Australian) fantasy writer myself — well, I couldn’t make it through Leo’s diatribe. By the third paragraph, he’d disappeared so far up his own fundament I suspect he has to call his proctologist when he needs his teeth cleaned.
Your piece, on the other hand, expresses quite a few ideas I’ve entertained for myself. Like you, I grew up on Howard and Tolkien. Like you, I see them as near-opposites, each embodying a particular strain of the genre. And much like you (I suspect) I think fantasy is a genre in which one explores the imagination. New thoughts, new ideas, new ways of approaching old tropes — I like these.
Aside from Tolkien and Howard, I have also enjoyed Zelazny and Leiber — and from the moderns, Garth Nix and China Mieville. Why not? New and different outlooks. True ‘fantasy’.
Reheated Tolkienesque leftovers give me diarrhoea.
Joe, I have deeply enjoyed each of your books, and I’m looking forward to the next one. I note that I cannot say anything similar for the works of one “Leo Grin”.
Joe,
I must say I did enjoy your rebuttal. Whilst I can understand the point Leo is making, and even empathise with his position to a certain (albeit very small) degree, he’s committing a fallacy no fan of literature and art should ever make.
Nothing stays the same for ever and it’s a mistake to try and keep it that way. If authors stuck to the ‘pure’ we’d still all be reading Bibles (or whatever religious text might be relevant). Sure, we’d probably be very moral and spiritually enlightened, but I’m picking we’d also be immensely bored.
Change is good. If Tolkien had not chosen to take a new approach to Anglo Saxon folk lore we would never had got his works. If authors such as yourself don’t push norms and test boundaries then the genre will stagnate and die.
Chris, and others,
Politics is one thing – KatG’s comments are political but, borderline though they are in terms of the confrontational, they address the article – this is not the forum for more general soapboxing, especially if it lumps whole swathes of people, “conservatives”, “liberals” or whatever, together as one homogenous thing. It’s not a question of appealing to readers as widely as possible (though that’s no bad thing in my book) so much as that I refuse to be stuffed into Leo’s ridiculous liberal educated middle-class destroyer of society sausage skin for no other reason than that it suits his worldview to stick me there with a set of other authors who fundamentally have little in common.
Richard Morgan is on thin ice in that regard – he likes the thin ice – but I’m giving him some latitude because he’s not anonymous and hence his comments don’t reflect on me in quite the same way. Maybe that’s a fine distinction but I don’t want to edit or cut any comments unless I feel I have to. Fair enough? Obviously I remain delighted if anyone wishes to buy any of my books as a result of this debacle. Burning them, of course, remains an option.
Personal comments are not cool. Leo may have opened that door a crack with his overwrought tone about mouth breathers, self-loathing and literary sewers, but that’s up to him. Maybe this is something that’s become common in American political discourse and I’m not familiar with, so I’m misinterpreting the tone, but I don’t see how it can possibly be helpful. The way I see it, it’s encumbent upon me to act in as even-handed and reasonable a manner as possible, and address the arguments. Probably I’m failing, but what else can you do?
Perhaps the best response is to maintain a sense of humor and decency, and you are doing a good job that. Thanks for the reminder to keep it sane.
Sorry to splinter your pond ice there, Joe – didn’t realise it was that thin.
To clarify, I should point out my post was not ad hominem caricature, but balanced – albeit somewhat tart – psychological profiling. Further to that, have a look here for a quick primer (the relevant areas for Leo Grin in this case are numbers (3) and (5), and probably a little bit from (4) as well:
http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/mft/index.php?t=home
@ Dan
Joe, thanks for asking for people to leave the politics out of this discussion. Like you, I never thought this was a political or a religious matter.
I can’t speak for Joe on this, but I think Leo Grin’s phrasing very clearly made his diatribe a political one. There’s simply no other way to make sense of what he says. His – somewhat amorphous – target is a fantasised political class, and his treatise is the imagined self-abnegation of western political culture. On this, he is fairly coherent. On literature, by contrast, his apparent credentials notwithstanding, he comes across as ill-informed and confused. To lump Howard’s southern racist tendencies, lurid psychosexual palette and atavistic brutalism in with Tolkien’s donnish pan-Catholic middle class wistfulness and longing for nobility and peace is a category error of gob-smacking proportions.
Richard,
My ice is indeed wafer-like, but it is no pond but yet a mighty lake of oblivion that waits for he that rashly plunges therethrough.
I don’t doubt that Leo wants to see the fact that over the last twenty years or so four books have been published that he doesn’t like (though he proudly asserts he hasn’t read one and relies on cherry-picked amazon reviews for his expertise on another) as the latest deadly stealth attack in a holy war of liberals versus conservatives, but I have no interest in reinforcing any such cockeyed notion by making a raft of political points myself, or necessarily seeing them made in comments. I don’t necessarily agree with your dismissive assessments of Tolkien or Howard, but I totally agree with you that the two don’t seem of a piece at all, politically or otherwise, and Leo’s attempt to co-opt them onto one side of a spurious argument – in which Oxford don Tolkien becomes somehow opposed to college education and Howard an enthusiast for western civilisation – is absurd.
Joe, I think your stance is spot on – keeping a dignified distance from the debate. Instead of wasting your time in debate with the terminally stupid, I presume you are just looking at the sales of The Heroes and the chart position and letting that do your talking?!
Fair enough, Joe. I’ll try to keep the political discussion sterile. But suffice to say, this is highly indicative of American political discourse. Some of us really do want to make the world a better place – and that unfortunately entails responding to the lunatic diatribes of the self-righteous as well as feeding the homeless, and resisting the urge to kill kittens, depending on your personal political leanings.
But to get away from politics: usually the first indicator that one should not be taken seriously is the mention of Tolkien outside of an already engaged discussion of Tolkienesque topics. It was trendy there for a bit for fantasy authors to either declare that all modern fantasy was . . . well, nihilistically bankrupt I suppose, and that only Tolkien held the master formula, and that only they (the indignantt authors), having acquired the master formula, were worthy of the title ‘fantasy author’; or better yet, to declare that Tolkien did not write fantasy he wrote MYTH, and the author refused to be bogged down into that category. Because he writes MYTH.
I think it was obvious to all involved that this was nothing more than marketing strategy, or marketing strategy that took advantage of the author’s cartoonish ego. The trend seems to have passed, and now we have returned to that age of comparing autthors to Tolkien via reviews on dust jackets.
I felt much the same way upon simply reading an excerpt of Grin’s article at another blog. I think it has largely backfired, as well; reading the responses to his piece, I see a lot of folks mentioning Ice & Fire, The Name of the Wind, and other great modern works. I think many of them lean in Leo’s political direction, so the conversation isn’t really political for them. Mr. Grin, to me, is definitely out of his league; someone decrying the death of the classic American muscle car which has been replaced by fuel-sipping, corner-cutting, 0-60-time-smashing beasts from Japan and Germany.
Oh, well. It’s sad that someone would want to inject their politics into literary discussion.
I just think it’s a bit silly that of all people, he chooses you to demonize. From reading your stuff and, specifically the way your writing is often quite cynical of power and large societies contra the “free north” I’d always taken your bent as being of a libertarian sort (with whom someone like Leo might find a fair amount of truck). It’s part of what made reading your stuff so enjoyable.
And yes, to lump REH in with Tolkein shows either very poor reading skills or, I don’t know what… maybe an example of a person’s politics crowding out there critical (if not common) sense?
*SIDEBAR: I live in a pretty politically savvy area (Washington, DC) and I’ve universally recommended your books to them (regardless if they read fantasy or otherwise). Of those that did pick up one of your books, the more liberal they were the more they tended to think you were bemoaning what happens to a society without a moral order codified in a strong central government whereas the more conservative they were they tended to think you were championing libertarian virtues and bemoaning what happens to society that kills their god. I can see how either side would come to those conclusions.
If you take the politics and the website location out, the article makes even less sense, is the problem. But I totally understand why you would not want to be stuffed into a sausage, Mr. A., and yes, this is the state of American political discussion, so out they go.
Conan the Destroyer has become one of literature’s icons because he’s a kick-ass antihero. He’s a thief, outlaw and killer who builds his empire ruthlessly, sometimes doing heroic deeds that are mostly for his own power and glory while civilization collapses around him and through him into nihilistic barbarianism. He is smart and talented, but can be manipulated and is in many stories defeated. In Lord of the Rings, Tolkein presented power and glory as corrupting — what the One Ring offers. Galadriel survives temptation and rejects the power and glory. Boromir, desperate for his country and prideful, does not, betrays the cause and dies. The big task falls on someone who doesn’t want power and glory — an ordinary middle class burgher, a village squire and his ordinary servant. In the hobbits, Tolkien eschews epic myth and goes for folklore instead.
What’s Mr. A doing? Well, he’s got Logen, who is basically Hercules, and Jezal, who is basically Oedipus, and Glokta, who is the tortured imp archetype — the malformed, abused, but often clever personage — the Norse god Loki, Shakespeare’s King Richard III, Stephen Donaldson’s bitter leper Thomas Covenant, etc. Mr. A is not wandering from the mythic poetic at all, nor is he dissecting it just because he’s using tragic myths instead of conquering ones. Tolkein used those too.
Is he poetic? Well, Tolkein certainly was in the sense that he wrote like the don he was and affected a mythic, bardic style certainly. Howard had a different, more blood and thunder style that is not without poetry. Mr. A uses repetition, alliteration, symbolic and mirroring imagery and foreshadowing, metaphors, word play, etc. to bind his characters into the narrative that he wields with a less blunt cudgel than Howard.
Mr. Grin’s main objection really isn’t the lack of mythic figures or the poetry of the narrative, though — it’s that Mr. A. is writing a noir tragedy, (which is kind of funny since a lot of noir tragedy writers have been very conservative.) Noir tragedies are mythic, back before we used the term noir, and noir is certainly a romantic, poetic style. The wisecracks and telling truth to power and getting crushed by power of the form (again, see Oedipus,) are certainly not absent from either Conan or Lord of the Rings. Conan deals with collapse again, Lord of the Rings’ ending is bittersweet, with victory but also tremendous harm and loss, magic and elves leaving the land, and shell-shocked, scarred soldiers coming home. Mr. A ends his noir tragedy also with victory, probably temporary, over barbarian Northmen and the cannibal wizards who want to unleash demon Armageddon, and the survival of civilization, unlike the more nihilistic Conan, but also great loss and consequences.
Is this a new, recent thing in fantasy — the cynical political skullduggery, the dark personal corruption, the collapse of the world? Not unless we want to ignore an enormous number of authors, including Edgar Allen Poe, T.H. White, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Michael Moorcock, Fritz Lieber, Ursula LeGuin, Tanith Lee, Robert Zelazny, Stephen King, Stephen Donaldson, Tim Powers, Gene Wolfe, Guy Gavriel Kay, Glen Cook, Stephen Brust and Howard’s pal, H.P. Lovecraft, as well as numerous pulp writers from the 1930′s to the 1960′s. Mr. A. has not reinvented the wheel; he has not even reinvented a cupholder, but he has produced a dark, mythic, poetic, sword and sorcery epic tragedy worth reading, as have other authors before him (Cthulhu and Frodo live!)
Mr. Grin’s article makes…no….sense. And it also raises the obvious question, politics included: why in the world didn’t he go after China Mieville instead?
Blah Blah Blah Blah Why don`t you people just chill and read a book.
@KatG:
“And it also raises the obvious question, politics included: why in the world didn’t he go after China Mieville instead?”
Probably because China could *totally* kick his ass, on pretty much every level.
One does not simply walk into China Mieville.
Hot damn, I’ve been quoted by Richard Morgan! Yea, he thinks I’m a real doucher, but still…
And thanks for staying out of the politics Joe and trying to stay on the literary points of Grin’s article. As Cuba Gooding Jr said in Jerry Maguire…”I love that about you!”
Elspeth Cooper: “Probably because China could *totally* kick his ass, on pretty much every level.”
Oh I don’t know. Didn’t Joe get into it with a bunch of street kids? But seriously, how do you attempt to make the “literary point” that modern fantasy writers are liberal commie nihilists and not lead with China Mieville? And why grab Swanwick’s 17 year old steampunk cross-dimensional fantasy novel that doesn’t even technically belong in the sub-category he’s lambasting? Also, didn’t Brandon Sanderson kind of write the Gandalf dark lord, radioactive cancer hobbits with Mistborn? Not that the concept couldn’t be revisited.
We have numerous authors who are not doing dark tragedies with their fantasy, and often do well with it, but apparently they don’t count either. Strictly on literary terms, Grin has no leg to stand on. He’s just taking random potshots and claiming it’s a theory.
Considering Mr. grin’s ‘literary pedigree,’ Mieville is probably ‘beneath him’ . . . or, more likely, he’s never heard of him. Seriously, where did this guy get his information? The more I think about it, the more astounded I am that he picked Joe as the target of his . . . well, I can think of lots of unseemly words for his diatribe, but we’ll leave it at that. GRRM is a self-admitted hippie, achieved conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War, and it’s apparent in the overwhelming majority of his work that he’s too open minded to be a social conservative. Why Joe?