Yes, no, “interesting”
12 o'clock, April 20, 2005
Seán Harnett is wrong in absolving Tolkien of all blame (influentially-speaking, historically-speaking) for the modern Brick-Thick Fantasy Novel. He’s certainly wrong in describing classic heroic fantasy as “more truly a reflection of the times in which we lived” than “stories of divorcees and martinis and quiet, stately dysfunction,” unless perhaps he spent the glory years of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser running guns in Indochina, or hunting Mau-Mau for bounty in British Kenya. He doesn’t seem to understand that there is a market for slow immersive worldbuilding as well as for the “short, sharp shocks” of pulp and the shallow secondary creations that he says he prefers. And anyone who complains that China Miéville is being “squeezed off the shelves” by David Eddings is not writing from, como se dicen, the reality-based community.
But he may not be wrong in shifting some of the blame for the Brick-Thick Fantasy Novel to the Anti-Inkling himself, Michael Moorcock.
China Mieville is being squeezed out of the bookstores? What a weird world this man lives in; Perdido Street Station stared at me from the shelves of Bookshop Santa Cruz, every time I went there, for close to a year before I bought it.
I must admit to having little patience for this debate in general; while a lot of so-called "epic fantasy" comes across as boring drivel, the genre as a whole appeals to me, and it always has. Nor is it clear to me what his gripe with epic fantasy is, aside from length - and by that definition, Mieville's works are closer to the epic fantasies than to the shorter pulp fiction that he seems to be drooling over.
His rant makes me wonder how long it will be before someone publishes a lengthy rant denouncing modern science-fiction and calling for a return to the glory days of the 1950s, when exciting stories about mercenaries selling slave girls to the venusian overlords could still be found in the bookstores.