Category Archive for ‘opinion’

My post on the value of grit surely did sweep the intertubes, provoking many and varied(ish) responses.  Some of the pick:

A lengthy, wide-ranging and frequently interesting discussion ensued at Chronicles Network.

Fellow purveyor of grit both fantastic and science-fictional Richard Morgan is amused and bemused.

Foz Meadows has some great points to make about what some will consider the elephant in the room – the treatment of race and gender in gritty fantasy.

Sophia McDougall runs that ball into the endzone of male rape.

Liz Bourke will make you wince in that endzone.

Marie Brennan says “I don’t have a problem with stories where everything is grim and dark and horrible,” and proceeds to lay out her problems with such stories.

Finally Elizabeth Bear brings things full circle by agreeing that endlessly serving up utterly unleavened blackness and cynicism (and rape) would indeed be childish, but points out that most worthwhile gritty fantasy doesn’t actually appear to do that.

Many good and interesting points to think about, a lot of which I’d agree with.  Doubtless gritty fantasy (and I’d include my own) has not always covered itself in glory in its treatment of race and gender.  Though I don’t see any reason why grit can’t be a powerful tool to investigate those issues, if wielded with skill, thought and responsibility (not by me, in other words).

My main problem remains with the definitions, and their apparently endless mutability to suit whatever argument is being made.  I thought, for instance, I celebrated the value of grit, but Foz Meadows begins by saying I wrote a piece defending grimdark.  She then defines grimdark as having a whole set of characteristics I would never dream of defending.  There seems to be a tendency toward massive generalisation, and a defining of a large and amorphous (and generally never identified) group of books by the most extreme and egregious examples (though even those often remain unidentified).  To fashion an argument that is incontestable, but doesn’t seem to actually apply to much.  And all this after I specifically asked people not to make a straw man out of me!  You just can’t trust the internet to do what it’s told these days.  I’ll move along for now, and give the last word to Bear:

“The least self-reflective of the grimdark seems to me to be a little too busy wallowing in splatter and gratuitousness—violence, betrayal, rapine, raping, pillaging, cannibalism, torture… pick three… or four… as if those things were an end to themselves … That nihilistic view of the world is essentially a juvenile, sociopathic, self-justifying fetish, and most of us eventually grow out of it … But what some critics ignore is that the best of the current wave of gritty fantasy does not buy into this fallacy … Instead, it embraces a balance closer to reality: that the world is arbitrary and unfair, and that sometimes even well-meaning people do awful things: desperate, vicious things. But also, that complete jerks, sociopathic monsters, can and do accomplish good—sometimes purposefully, sometimes not. People are not good or bad, but people.  The best gritty fantasy reflects this, considers it, attempts not to spin a morality play but describe a complicated and ambiguous arc of people doing what they feel they have to do.”

It’s been way too long since I have driven up my page hits with some self-important splurge of ill-considered waffle, which leaves me wondering why the hell I even have a blog.  Let us end this lamentable situation right now.

I have been observing for some time a certain tendency for people to complain about the level of grit in fantasy books.  The dirt physical and moral.  The attention to unpleasant detail.  The greyness of the characters.  The cynicism of the outlook.  I’m going to be vague about who I mean that I may properly remove all nuance from their arguments and construct a total straw man, of course.  This is the internet, after all, I wouldn’t want facts or charitable interpretations to get in the way of my pontificating.  But  I think we can accept that some people think things have got too gritty.  Or maybe gritty in the wrong way.  Grimdark is a phrase I’m hearing quite a lot, which seems by definition to be pejorative – excessively and unnecessarily dark, cynical, violent, brutal without purpose and beyond the point of ridiculousness.  There’s often what seems to me a slightly weird double standard applied of, ‘I find this thoroughly horrible and disgusting therefore the author must have intended me to be titillated and entertained!’

Of course there have always been those who’d rather not have explicit sex, violence, or swearing in their books, and express that as an entirely reasonable matter of taste.  But there are others who go well beyond taste, and identify grit as something objectively dangerous, wrong, or reprehensible.  My observation of this tendency goes right back to that classic Leo Grin article a couple of years ago.  Leo wanted the mythic wellspring of his fantasy kept pure, simple, and heroic.  Fantasy morality tales, you might say.  Others are less evangelical, but there’s a tendency to see grit as skeevy.  As by default an appeal to the lowest common denominator.  As wallowing in low-grade moral slime like a pig in filth for no better reason that the amusement of neanderthal idiots.  We idiots, of course, need and deserve amusement as much as anyone else, if not more, and I’m happy to fill that need, but such criticisms ignore what grit has to offer to all kinds of other readers and, I would argue, entirely miss why it has become so popular of late.

Now before anyone makes a straw man out of me, let me say that this is not intended as some kind of manifesto.  I don’t think everything has to be gritty by any means, in fact there’s a degree to which grit loses its power the more of it there is.  Every writer has to find their own style, their own way to be truthful.  And with great grit comes great responsibility.  It’s easy in an earnest desire to be truthful, or perhaps a less earnest desire to bludgeon the reader with the amazing dirty grim gritty grim depths of which you are capable, to ride roughshod on your spiky horse over rightly sensitive issues.  To cause offence through crap writing.  Maybe to a degree that’s inevitable.  Removing all crap writing from a given book is a herculean challenge.  But I believe the role of a writer is not to avoid offence.  Just to think carefully afterwards and reflect on how you might do better next time.  To be assessing criticism and constantly striving to become that little bit less crap.  But you’ve also sometimes got to laugh in the face of criticism.  Because the role of the writer is also to throw caution to the wind and write the most honest and heartfelt books you can.  Better to have a book that many readers love and some find revolting than a book that no one reads at all.  Far, far better.  Gritty is one tool in the writer’s arsenal, and it’s one I personally like to use.  In discussing gritty, I’m going to be a little gritty.  Possibly even grimdark.  But if you really don’t like that shit, why are you even here?

Realism, people.  Lots of those who praise gritty writing talk about its realism.  Lots of people who criticise it assert there’s nothing realistic about splatter and crushing cynicism.  You’re both right!  Realism is an interesting concept in fantasy.  If we were aiming at the uncompromisingly real we probably wouldn’t be writing in made up worlds with forces that don’t actually exist.  So things are often exaggerated for effect, twisted, larger than life.  But we can still aim at something that approximates real life in all kinds of different ways.  Where the people and their behaviour and the outcomes of their actions are believable.  Real life is surprising, and unpredictable.  Traditional fantasy is often the reverse.  You know how to spot a certain type of character, and when you spot him/her you’ve a pretty good notion where their story is going to go.  Grit attempts to shake up that relationship, to throw curveballs.  Critics might say that grit is so prevalent we now can be sure our hero will be eating babies by the end of the prologue, but I actually don’t believe that.  I think the palette of epic fantasy has grown broader over the last few years as a result of the movement to gritty.  And I do think there is a correlation between dirt both moral and physical and realism.  Cities before the coming of modern sanitation were pretty ripe and unhealthy places.  People who walk hundreds of miles ill equipped can get suppurating chafe-sores in their arse-cracks.  Glittering heroes often do have filthy skeletons in their closets.  Grit can give the reader the sense that they are dealing with something true.  Something honest.  Is it the only route to verisimilitude?  No.  But it’s an entirely valid one.

And grit isn’t just about realism.  It bleeds into, and is associated with, all kinds of other features of writing that I think can be desirable when properly deployed.  Let me count the ways…

1. Tight focus on character.  There was a time when epic fantasy seemed to spend a whole lot of time on setting.  It was about the maps, monsters and magic systems.  The authorial voice hovered above the characters at some remove in a third person omniscient kind of way, occasionally dipping into their thoughts for a heroic aside.  These days a lot of writers choose to get closer, to write in tight point of view, to give the reader a sense of what it’s like to be those people and how they see the world.  And extreme people in extreme situations may well think, feel, and observe some pretty extreme stuff.  I’d argue it’s very hard to write a convincing, immersive combat scene in tight point of view without including those details of blood, pain, fear, and horror that by definition take it into the arena of gritty.  You don’t have to be an actual mass murderer yourself to realise that real violence is painful, dirty and deeply unpleasant, with sudden and explosive lasting physical and psychological damage stripped of all romance.  Violence, related truthfully in tight point of view, is gritty.  Of course you could find your drama elsewhere.  In commerce, in conversation, in romance.  But epic fantasy is about war, is about battle, is about violence and people who inflict and suffer it.  These are live and pressing topics which people want to read about.  And if you’re going to cover those topics, gritty is a totally valid choice.  I will stop short of saying the only valid choice.  But it’s a good one, especially in a world with…

2. Moral ambiguity.  Perhaps in the aftermath of Word War II and the midst of the Cold War, good sides and bad sides seemed to make better instinctive sense.  The modern world, with its 24 hour coverage of every point of view, seems like a much murkier place, at least to me.  Perhaps we no longer accept the idea that people can be totally good or totally evil.  At least we begin to suspect that they’re often not.  That sometimes we’re dealing more with the greater good and the necessary evil.  That the exercise of power requires compromises with the dark side, and high motives rarely entirely survive contact with reality.  That everyone thinks they’re good, and that good people in bad corners might have to do bad things.  Some of us want to read about such characters.  We may not want every character in every book to be a morally grey irredeemable torturing tortured fuckwad.  But some shades of grey, or even black, in some parts of a genre is a healthy thing.  The bad things our good people have to do?  They’re gritty.  The good motives the bad people have in order to make them at all believable?  You know what, they’re gritty too.  When the whole thing becomes such a moral jumble that it’s really difficult any longer to tell which are the bad or good guys?  That’s really gritty.  I also believe it to be truthful, in its way.  In real life you don’t have orcs that you can conveniently tell are going to be evil by looking at their spiky armour and can therefore in good conscience slaughter without mercy.  You have differing groups of people with their infinitely complex individual needs and conflicting desires.  Portraying your fantasy world in a way that’s like our world?  That’s only…

3. Honesty.  People crap.  People swear.  People get ill.  People die in a way that serves no narrative.  People get drunk and take drugs.  People do and think and say vile things.  People are horrible to each other.  Really horrible.  These things have ever been true.  Do we need to read about all that?  Not necessarily.  But in a book that tries to get inside the heads of characters facing their dooms and present them as cogent and coherent people, I don’t see why these things shouldn’t be looked at.  They’re part of life and hence fair game for investigation and reproduction by a writer.  The fact is, though we fight hard to live well and enjoy ourselves…

4. Sometimes life really is that shit.  Forget historical accuracy.  The truth is fantasy is rarely about the world as it was.  That’s what historical fiction is for.  It’s a reaction to the fantasy that’s come before.  Gritty fantasy is a reaction to and a counterbalancing of a style of fantasy in which life is clean, meaningful, and straightforward, and the coming of the promised king really does solve all social problems, and there are often magical solutions to the horrors – like death, illness, and crippling wounds – that plague us in the real world.  Good fantasy does not have to gaze wistfully over its shoulder at an imagined past, it can cast its uncompromising eye on the now…

5. Modernity.  Verily mine leige-lord but twas a time in ages of olde when a fearsome tranche of ye genre did aim upon an moste horrible approximationne of faux cod-medievalism in both language and dialogue.  Hey nonny nonny!  Let me state right now that unless you do it amazingly well I really hate that shit.  It may very well be that you’re aiming at creating a sort of medieval analogue, but we’re not writing in middle english, and even if our characters are from then, our readers are from now.  Every writer is going to find their own route to verisimilitude as I keep saying in order to unconvincingly cover my ass, but for me the only language that’s entirely truthful from an author of today is the language of today.  In a book about action and adventure I want to feel that pace and drive and edge that you get from unashamedly modern prose, I want to feel that…

6. Shock Value.  A quick kick in the nuts.  A splash of cold water.  The unexpected, the gob-smacking, the cringe-inducing.  The reader is snatched from their complacent stupor like a fish from the pond, perhaps while they gasp on the bank made to consider their own expectations and preferences.  Some readers want to be swaddled in the fluffy blanket of the familiar, good for them, but they can find something else to read.  Now, clearly things are much more shocking when you’re not used to them.  The death of a certain main character in Game of Thrones blew my mind when I first read it.  Now central character death is de rigeur.  Moral ambiguity, gore and filth are common coin in fantasy to a degree, certainly they’re not nearly as surprising as they were.  But a well executed scene can still have mighty punch.  And hey, as expectations change, you can change it up.  The vile mercenary … saves a bunch of school kids.  Grit allows you more shock value because…

7. Range.  In the end, ‘teh gritty’ is another tool in the toolbox.  Grit is an inclusion.  Not grit is an absence.  Nothing to prevent gritty books including the ennobling, the clean, the beautiful.  Indeed, I’d argue that the extremes of darkness only allow the glimpses of light to twinkle all the more brightly, if that’s the effect you’re after.  Clean books deny themselves a chunk of the physical and emotional spectrum.  Not to mention the wonderful, versatile and expressive word, ‘fuck’.  And yeah, a lot of gritty dwells more in the dark half, perhaps, but often less than people tiringly bemoan, and no book exists in a vacuum, all books grow out of what has come before.  A lot of gritty writing is about counterbalancing the heaps of clean, shiny, good guys win type stuff which dominated commercial fantasy throughout the 80s and 90s and is still, as far as I’m aware, being written very successfully and in large quantities.

‘But grit and depth are not the same!’ comes the bleat.  ’Cynicism isn’t grown up!  There’s nothing clever about fart gags!’  It goes almost without saying that gritty writing at its worst is silly and superficial, just as tediously heroic and mannered writing at its worst is silly and superficial.  Guess what?  A lot of writing is silly and superficial, though obviously not mine.  At all.  But the dividing line between what is righteous and worthwhile, and what is wrongful and gratuitous, is so fuzzy as to be a blur, and will be in a totally different place, or indeed set of places, for every author and every reader.  Often people have limitless capacity for savage ultraviolence but find a consensual sex scene, or indeed someone having a wee, just a bit too edgy for their sensibilities.  One person’s disgracefully titillating torture porn can be another’s searing examination of how far one might go to get the truth.  One person’s foul profanity is another’s hilarious and realistic dialogue.  One person’s perverse and unnecessary sex scene is another’s honest and necessary investigation of the full range of the characters and their relationships.  One person’s disheartening pessimism that threatens the heart of western civilisation is another’s thought provoking deconstruction of conventions.  No doubt there were, and probably are, enthusiasts for the western that found Fistful of Dollars a purposeless and disgusting debasement of their genre.  To me it’s a necessary, valid, and entirely natural development and investigation of it, a step in pushing things forward to new and interesting places.  If a movement is worthless, it will quickly dry up.  If a movement is valuable, it will influence what comes after.  This is why I always raise an urbane eyebrow when people go beyond declaring something bad, and into the arena of proclaiming it wrong.

And the fact is, for those who don’t like it, one has to smile, shrug and say – Tough Grit.  There have always been rich seams of darkness, cynicism, savagery and moral ambiguity in fantasy, but this stuff is in the commercial heart of the genre now, and at the core of many of those examples that are spilling out into the mainstream.  There are an awful lot of readers who love it, who find it has reinvigorated their interest in a tired genre, and the genie won’t go back in the bottle.  I would say sorry, but I’m not.  George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, surely the gold standard of gritty epic fantasy, is also rapidly becoming the most successful epic fantasy of this era, and he its definitive living writer.  There are still plenty of writers and publishers very successfully putting out more traditional stuff if you really need another righteous hero endlessly prevailing against the odds.  In due course I don’t doubt the pendulum will swing back at least some of the way towards romantic and heroic.  It’ll just take one great, interesting, exciting book to do it and I look forward to reading it.  Who knows, I might even try to write it.  But for the moment most of the debuts, most of the things that are really generating excitement, are more or less gritty.  In this, fantasy is simply starting to catch up with what’s been going on in TV for some time now, and where written westerns and thrillers have been for years.

So, yeah, shitty gritty books are no better than shitty shiny books.  But I proudly and unapologetically assert that there’s a great deal more to grit than a capacity to shock and titillate.  Although I must equally proudly and unapologetically assert that I do sometimes quite enjoy being shocked and titillated.

Whatever could be wrong with that, vicar?

Occasionally ideas come to me.  Diamond-edged insights into the nature of fantasy and the role of my own work within it.  Often in response to negative reviews about my work, as it happens…

But not very often.  Which is why it becomes necessary for me to link to other people’s.  In this case, BC Woods has an interesting essay up about Authority, Moral Absolutism and Heroism in Fantasy, with particular focus on the works of Goodkind, Sanderson, Pratchett, Martin, and some Abercrombie guy:

“The moral problems in Abercrombie’s and Martin’s work are the same as before: What is right? And who decides what is right?  Only in these works, no obvious answer presents itself at the end of the narrative and no signs or portents appear to hint one way or another.  This leaves us only with human authority … There is a lesson here, but it is not one of trust but of skepticism. These works (I would say indirectly) promote a worldview in which it is necessary to challenge and question those in power … rulership in Abercrombie and Martin’s work, as in our own world, in no way implies a divine mandate. Not only is supreme Authority absent, but all human authority is suspect.”

A fair assessment, I’d say.  I guess all literature (if I may be so bold as to place my sword-based rantings under that umbrella) reflects the times in which it’s written.  Probably that’s even more true of SF and Fantasy than of books set in our own world and time.  Nothing more dated than past visions of the future, after all.  For me, that skeptical vision of power is a reaction against the moral simplicity I’d seen in the epic fantasy I’d read as a kid, written in the aftermath of the world wars and during the cold war, in which the goodly wizard has everyone’s best interests at heart and the lost heir to the throne always ushers in a new age of monarchist glory once the big bad has been shuffled off and he’s regained his rightful throne.  Few doubts about which is the right side there, or what is the proper order of things.  Perhaps it was ever thus, really, but these days motives seem always murkier, right and wrong much harder to pin down.  Doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as right and wrong – that would be nihilism, after all, and we know how we all feel about that...

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.