July 6, 2005
7:22 PM, Wednesday, July 6, 2005
You wouldn’t think that something as straightforward as swords-&-sorcery could be made to sound as involuted and self-referential as hard SF, but the New Edge will prove you wrong. (Via Jonathan Strahan.)
Don’t get me wrong — I like a good swordfight, I dare say, better than the next guy (unless the next guy is Greg’s Aunt Helen). I even think they’re right about the difference between swords-&-sorcery and heroic fantasy — albeit in the sense, and with about as much relevance, as a Renaissance philologist would have been right about the difference between Norman French and Anglo-Saxon.
But oy.
Those who come to the New Edge looking for parody or mocking irony must look elsewhere. Sword and sorcery has been down and out for so long that it has often survived in a bastardized form by parodying itself . . . “One of the main problems with High Fantasy is that it has become a sort of post-Tolkien monocrop where a good deal reads and looks the same.” . . . “Modern s.f. fans mock fans of Golden Age s.f. for seeking Sense of Wonder as if it were some phantom grail for fools. . . . [A]ll sense of wonder has been sucked out of the books because there is no experience of Exploration, of the discovery and unveiling of new and mysterious places and circumstances. Couple this anemic deficiency with an absence of headlong, driven, vital storytelling, and you have a prescription for a moribund genre.”
It may sound strange when read from a space as snarky as this one’s become over the last few weeks, but I’m coming to realize that the one thing that really pisses me off is contempt.
These writers . . . were working writers. . . . They were trying to please the same sort of audience who gathered at the foot of ancient storytellers, not the young poet who lurked on the edges of the campfire, sneering at the story.
O-kay. Well, all I know is that tegeus-Cromis, who “imagined himself a better poet than swordsman,” could take Conan any day of the week.
Update: Nathan Meyer has made some comments that I think are worth addressing. I’m going to cheat, and address them up here. (Of course Dave and Nick have chimed in since then, but I’ll just have to deal with that.
So, Nathan:
I appreciate your not wanting to start a brawl. I don’t want to start one either. If I sound didactic it’s because I’ve heard all this half a dozen times over the last few years. (Read Alan’s generic version for the standard form.) Usually it’s somebody with a different axe to grind — hard SF, say. But it’s the same straw-man arguments every time. Sweeping denunciations of whole swaths of the genre. Blame, cast wholesale on MFA programs and lit-fic imitators. Vague accusations aimed at an unexamined “political correctness.” The assumption that this is all the fault of bad editing and bad reviewing and what the readers really want is what I want — which is what I used to read when I was a kid. (Or they would, if only they were in possession of all the facts.) I get tired of hearing it, and that makes me testy.
The Edgies complain that there’s not much 30s-to-50s style swords-&-sorcery being published these days. Fair enough. They complain that they don’t like most of the fantasy that is published. Fair enough to that, too — it doesn’t do much for me, either.
But when they stop talking about what they want to see more of and start talking about what they want to see less of, I want them to show their work. When they say that what the brick-thick fantasy novel reader needs is a “high-octane” dose of old-fashioned s-&-s, I want to know what makes them think so many other people want the same thing they want. When they say that what survives of swords-&-sorcery is mostly self-parody, I want them to name names. (Steven Brust? I sure wouldn’t say it to his face.) When they say that what’s “shackled” fantasy is the attempt to please some shadowy “literary set,” I want them to make a case. (Who? What kind of shackles? Which literary set?) When they talk about high fantasy having become a “post-Tolkien monocrop,” I want them to explain why the differences between Cherryh, Jordan, Martin, Walton and Wolfe aren’t worth taking notice of. When they say that modern SF fans have nothing but contempt for a sense of wonder, I again want to know who they’re talking about, because I don’t know anybody in the SF world who professes contempt for it, and the people who (for whatever reason) use the silly spelling are some of the most old-school I know.
High fantasy is its own animal. God knows it’s not without flaws — I haven’t read it regularly myself for at least ten years, and I don’t think I’ve read a series that I was really happy with since I was too young to know better. But modern high fantasy isn’t Tolkien clones, any more than Banana Republic sells clones of Jermyn Street and Savile Row. It started out that way, maybe (Iron Crown trilogy, anybody?). But it’s been around for thirty years now, give or take, and can trace its pedigree through Moorcock and Leiber to Howard to Burroughs to Kipling as surely as through Feist and Eddings to Brooks to Tolkien. (If you could cut all the teenage dramedy and gratuitous travel out of Jordan, you might actually have a pretty good swords-&-sorcery novel, with all the exploration and unveiling of mysteries that the Edgies could ask for.) Not to mention all kinds of other influences, from Heyer to Fraser to Clavell.
And whatever high fantasy’s faults — no question that there are many — the one thing they can’t be laid on is trying to impress the literati.
As an SF writer, I surely went through this phase where I worried about what They thought of me — the literary They, the academic They, the art-snob They. (You’ll find plenty of evidence of that right here on this weblog, if you slog through the “Art” archives.) And you know what I found out? I found out they were totally cool with it. Good writing is good writing, and good writers recognize good writing. The SF world is full of MFAs and the “mainstream” literary world is full of genre fans. Yeah, the “sneering poet” is probably still out there somewhere, but I haven’t met him. What you’re a lot more likely to get is the poet who listens appreciatively to the storyteller and then goes home to incorporate the old-school riffs into his avant-garde improv. The sneering poet just isn’t a player.
The sneering barbarian, unfortunately, seems to be alive and well.
