Tag: Black Gate

After much discussion of NPR’s 100 greatest science fiction and fantasy works, I was moved to construct my own list of what I consider to be the top 50. As with all such lists this is somewhat arbitrary, nevertheless it should be taken as the complete, definitive, and conclusive final word on the matter. I see no purpose in honoring innovation for innovation’s sake when others have subsequently done it better, for example, John Polidori’s The Vampyre and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein have both been long surpassed as examples of their type, whereas the same is not true for Tolkien’s oft-imitated The Lord of the Rings or Orwell’s Animal Farm. In some cases, I have chosen to highlight a single book, Dune, for example, whereas in others I have chosen to judge a series as a whole. Night Watch is easily the best of Terry Pratchett’s books, but it cannot be judged fairly in isolation as one has to have a fuller understanding of Ankh-Morpork to fully appreciate the novel. I have paid zero attention to book sales or authorial reputation, I have read all of the books on the list, and I have tended to rate genuinely amusing books more highly than others might due to the additional degree of difficulty involved.

I further note that if you happen to disagree with the reverence shown to Mr. Ray Bradbury, you are clearly inhuman, possess no soul, and should consider returning to your home planet. If you have not read or heard of Tanith Lee, people should throw rocks at you on the street until you rectify the error. On the other hand, if you have not read Hesse, that is understandable since he’s not traditionally considered a genre author. But do yourself a favor and read the book anyhow. And yes, Edgar Allen Poe should by rights be on here somewhere near the top, but the metric is books and/or series, not authors and/or short stories.

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Dune, Frank Herbert
3. Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
4. The Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis
5. The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse
6. Watership Down, Richard Adams
7. The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
8. The Secret Books of Paradys, Tanith Lee
9. The Sprawl Trilogy, William Gibson
10. The Cthulhu Mythos, HP Lovecraft

Read the rest of the list at the Black Gate.

That title isn’t even remotely fair. But who can be expected to resist such a perfect conjunction of rhetoric and alliteration? R. Scott Bakker’s The Prince of Nothing is not an erotic trilogy, it is an interesting, original, large-scale fantasy series that happens to incorporate, to its detriment, some pornographic elements and an amount of inept philosophizing. But since my review sparked a relatively lively debate over whether this is a fair and accurate characterization of the three novels concerned, I thought it would be sensible to appeal to the judgment of an esteemed intellectual who has provided us with a fail-proof method of determining whether a movie is pornographic or not.

I speak, of course, of Umberto Eco and his famous essay “How to Recognize a Porn Movie”:

Pornographic movies are full of people who climb into cars and drive for miles and miles, couples who waste incredible amounts of time signing in at hotel desks, gentlemen who spend many minutes in elevators before reaching their rooms, girls who sip various drinks and who fiddle interminably with laces and blouses before confessing to each other that they prefer Sappho to Don Juan. To put it simply, crudely, in porn movies, before you can see a healthy screw you have to put up with a documentary that could be sponsored by the Traffic Bureau.

There are obvious reasons. A movie in which Gilbert did nothing but rape Gilbertina, front, back, and sideways, would be intolerable. Physically, for the actors, and economically, for the producer. And it would also be, psychologically, intolerable for the spectator: for the transgression to work, it must be played out against a background of normality. To depict normality is one of the most difficult things for any artist – whereas portraying deviation, crime, rape, torture, is very easy.

Therefore the pornographic movie must present normality – essential if the transgression is to have interest – in the way that every spectator conceives it. Therefore, if Gilbert has to take the bus and go from A to B, we will see Gilbert taking the bus and then the bus proceeding from A to B.

This often irritates the spectators, because they think they would like the unspeakable scenes to be continuous. But this is an illusion on their part. They couldn’t bear a full hour and a half of unspeakable scenes. So the passages of the wasted time are essential.

I repeat. Go into a movie theater. If, to go from A to B, the characters take longer than you would like, then the film you are seeing is pornographic.

Since both the excruciating crusade to Shimeh and Prince Kellhus’s journey to find his father bordered on the interminable, with the only relief being the occasional battle, philosophical pontification, penetration of the prostitute Esmenet by various parties, or the torture of a Tleilaxu Face Dancer(1), the matter can clearly be regarded as settled. It is also worth noting that in his essay, Eco points out how “portraying deviation, crime, rape, torture, is very easy”. Ergo, reliance upon them in a literary work is not evidence of a work’s brilliance or greatness or realism, but rather testifies to the author’s incapacity, laziness, deviancy, or limited moral palette.

We know that Bakker is neither incapable nor lazy. Aside from his fictional meanderings, we have no reason to believe Bakker is any more deviant than anyone else. He’s Canadian, not Japanese, after all.(2) So, we can safely conclude on the basis of last February’s discourse on uncertainty and amorality that it is his limited moral palette, which stems from the affectation(3) that uncertainty is the highest moral good, that is responsible for Bakker’s frequent resort to pornographic elements in The Prince of Nothing.(4) There is, after all, little room to appeal to the reader’s emotions or moral sensibilities on the basis of a character’s insufficient uncertainty, indeed, the limitations of this peculiar moral palette is such that it is difficult to even justify any action at all on the part of any character intended to be presented as heroic or ideal.

(1) Consult skin-spy, whatever.
(2) True fact: 95% of all the world’s weirdness comes from Japan. You’ll see more deviance on a public bus in Tokyo than in a Toronto S&M dungeon.
(3) And it is an affectation, nothing more. It’s always amusing to see how rapidly a post-moralist devolves into vulgar morality when forced to choose between his steadfast disapproval of a traditional moral judgment and his professed uncertainty.
(4) Note that I wrote the following months BEFORE reading any of Bakker’s fiction: “Let a hundred nihilistic anti-heroes blossom into the murderous child rapists of their creators’ moralblind fantasies.” That’s how perfectly predictable his “creatively transgressive” attempts to shock the reader into perceiving black amid a thousand shades of grey were.

About twenty years ago, I was at a used bookstore and I picked up what looked like an interesting medieval spin on James Bond.  It was set during the period of the Crusades, but appeared to be conceived as an action-thriller series rather like The Executioner, Mack Bolan.  I started reading it, but around page 30, when the slave girl sent by Saladin to spy on the Crusaders was in full throat enjoying her third rape at the hands of her captors, I suddenly realized that the book was not a historical novel but rather one of those strange 70’s porn novels with a thin veneer of historical fiction.  A little research indicates that the book was probably the fifth book in the Crusader series, Saladin’s Spy (1986), written by an author very familiar to Black Gate readers, although he published it under the pen name “John Cleve” rather than Andrew J. Offutt.  I hadn’t thought about that book for years, until I was casting about for a way to explain the epic fantasy of R. Scott Bakker’s series entitled The Prince of Nothing.

Read the rest at the Black Gate.

It was interesting to read George R.R. Martin’s latest so soon after seeing HBO’s A Game of Thrones and reading two fantasy series that some have attempted to compare to Martin’s epic, The First Law by Joe Abercrombie and The Prince of Nothing by R. Scott Bakker. My first thought upon simply viewing the size of the tome was that Martin is clearly suffering from the same disease that inflicted Stephen King and JK Rowling before him. It would appear that some time in between A Storm of Swords and A Feast For Crows, Martin came down with a bad case of morbus nemendatorus. This is the illness which strikes an author after he has become so prodigiously successful that he no longer sees any need to pay heed to an editor. It can be diagnosed on sight by the simple measurement of the thickness of the first book in the series and comparing it with that of the last book in the series. After reading A Dance with Dragons, it is abundantly clear that Mr. Martin has not yet recovered from it.

Read the rest at the Black Gate.

UPDATE – Matthew David Surridge, who is one of the best critics in the SF/F genre, offers a substantially different take on the novel.

After some back-and-forth discussions pursuant to my opining on the New Nihilism of George R.R. Martin, Joe Abercrombie and others in a post entitled The Decline and Fall of the Fantasy Novel, I found myself interested in the works of my interlocutor, who happened to be the author of The Prince of Nothing series as well as a second series entitled The Aspect Emperor. It’s too soon to write a review, as I have only finished the first book in the series, The Darkness That Comes Before. However, there are already five things that are readily apparent about Mr. Bakker’s fiction:

Read the rest at The Blâck Gátë

Over at the Black Gate, I comment upon what may be the ultimate tribute to an accomplishment in both filmmaking and literary characterization.

I was a fan of Joel Rosenberg’s work long before I ever met him, but I eventually came to admire him more as a man than as an author. I wasn’t a close friend of his, more the friend of a friend, but I did have the good fortune to get to know him over the last 15 years. It was a privilege for an SF/F fan, but more than that, it was a genuine pleasure. Growing up in Minnesota, which at the time felt rather like the cold side of the back of beyond, I had no idea that there were Real Live Writers living there, never being much inclined to read the author bios at the back. Like many a teenage boy in the Eighties, I had dabbled in role-playing games such as AD&D, Gamma World, and Traveller in the Time Before Girls, and so The Guardians of the Flame were a real revelation to me. Rosenberg’s novels were gritty long before grit became fashionable; he made a distinct impression on a young reader by killing off a major character practically at the beginning of the first novel, then went himself one better by killing off the lead character in only the fourth book in the series. I can’t recall being more shocked while reading fiction any time before or since. Karl Cullinane is dead? But… but what about the series?

Continued at The Black Gate