Tag: books

Books you must not read

The Telegraph provides fifty to avoid:

41 Courage by Gordon Brown: A tantalising prequel to the former PM’s future publications: “How to Get a Good Price for Your Gold”, “Debt Management for Dummies” and “Workplace Harmony”.

42 Jordan: Pushed to the Limit by Katie Price: Disappointingly thin on insights into the Hashemite Kingdom east of Israel.

43 Saturday by Ian McEwan: What the author learnt after spending two years getting in the way of a neurosurgeon. Not as good as Enduring Love, which is not as good as Amsterdam, which is not as good as Atonement.

44 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières: Loved for its description of wartime Cephalonia, but now ruined by the constant appearance during civil partnership ceremonies of the passage about tree roots.

45 The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown: Useful only as a shorthand to know whom to avoid on the Tube.

46 Twilight by Stephenie Meyer: See above, especially if they’re grown-ups, who really should not be fixating on vampires.

47 Harry Potter… by JK Rowling: See above, especially if they’re grown-ups reading a version with an adult cover.

48 One Day by David Nicholls: A wonderful book that follows a relationship over 20 years, spoilt only by people telling you how wonderful it is, while trying not to give away the ending (hint: very, very sad).

49 Scouting for Boys by Robert Baden-Powell: Awkward to ask for in a book shop.

50 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov: Scouting for girls.

This list inspired me to come up with a list of six SF/F books you must not read.

Abercrombie’s inquisition

So, I finished reading Abercrombie’s The First Law series. I quite liked it despite the various criticisms I’ve mentioned in the past, but I wanted to mention something that struck me about the book’s most interesting character, the torturer of the Royal Inquisition, Sand dan Glotka. Abercrombie devotes a great deal of time and attention to Glotka and it shows. His backstory is involved and interesting, his descent from superficial hero to deeply introspective anti-hero is compelling, and he manages to come off in a sympathetic manner despite the many awful deeds he consciously elects to perform. There is only one significant problem with the character of Glotka.

The greater part of the Inquisition as portrayed in The First Law is a load of historical bollocks.

Read the rest at the Black Gate.

Book review: The Heroes

The Heroes, by Joe Abercrombie
Orbit (560 pages, $24.99, February 2011)

After the lively discussion of two weeks ago regarding the decline and fall of modern fantasy fiction begun by Leo Grin, I find a certain ironic pleasure in being able to unequivocally declare that Joe Abercrombie is, without question, the best writer of fantasy military fiction being published today. Were it not for the fictitious medievalesque setting, The Heroes would barely qualify as fantasy at all, but even so, as pure military fiction, Abercrombie compares favorably with David Drake, Ralph Peters, David Weber, and even Tom Clancy post-Red Storm Rising. I quite enjoyed the book and very much look forward to reading more of Abercrombie’s dark and bloody work in the future.

The Heroes is a stand-alone novel that utilizes many characters from Abercrombie’s popular epic nihilism series, The First Law. It is a small-scale tale of a three-day battle between the Union and the newly crowned King of the North, and is somewhat reminiscent of historical tales of Gettysburg and other epic battles in the way the action tends to revolve around the physical environment, such as the prehistoric monuments on the large hill that provide the novel with its title. The title is more than a little tongue-in-cheek, as it happens, given that the theme of the book, smashed home as ferociously as one of Abercrombie’s anti-hero’s heavy swords hammers into the skull of a defeated enemy, is that there are no heroes and victorious battles and heroic deeds alike go ultimately for naught.

Read the rest of the review of The Heroes at the Black Gate

A long-awaited dance

I can’t pretend that I’m anywhere nearly as excited as a lot of epic fantasy fans are, but I will probably re-read the series in order to refresh my memory before reading the next book in the series:

Great news for fans of epic fantasy today: The great George R. R. Martin has announced on his web page that the long, long-awaited 5th book in his SONG OF ICE AND FIRE series is almost done. No kidding this time. A DANCE WITH DRAGONS will be hitting stories on July 12, 2011. Although previous dates have been set and then cancelled, Martin says this one is “for real.”

I generally enjoy the Fire and Ice series, but I thought the last book, divided into two, bordered on the tedious and didn’t advance the story much. Like pitchers, writers tend to lose their fastball abruptly, and often without any warning. I suspect Martin’s inability to finish the book in a reasonable time frame after turning in a relatively mediocre, (in comparison with the standard he’d previously set, you understand) prior novel doesn’t bode well for A Dance with Dragons, but I will be pleased to be proved wrong in July.

Defining epic

Matthew David Surridge attempts to define it:

[W]e decided to take a stab at coming up with a definition for epic fantasy ourselves. We decided to first list a number of texts that seemed clearly ‘epic fantasies,’ and try to work out what they had in common. In the process, we also thought of texts that seemed close but which we felt not to be epics, and texts that really seem to be on the margins of the epic; any genre definition is a fuzzy set, and some things will seem in the genre and some out of it depending on how you look at them. At any rate, while it seemed likely that the defintion we’d arrive at would be somewhat conservative — at best describing what epic fantasy has been so far, not necessarily what it is or could be — it seemed worth doing, just to try to establish what people think of when they talk about epic fantasy. If you have any counter-suggestions, or texts that you’d like to put forward as possible epics, we’d love to hear about it in the comments.

The core texts that we came up with, by a fairly quick process of word-association, were: Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara, David Eddings’ Belgariad, Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s The Wheel of Time, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Deathgate Cycle, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, Robin Hobb’s Liveship Traders Trilogy, Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Legacy series, R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Nothing series, and Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series. In many cases only one of us had read the books in question; in a couple of cases, notably Erikson and Bakker, it has to be said neither of us had read all the books of the series. In some cases neither of us liked the books much, but this was not an evaluative process, simply definitional.

As we discussed what we thought was and wasn’t epic fantasy, the marginal cases we found were Ursula Le Guin’s original Earthsea trilogy, Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, and Glen Cook’s Black Company series. Things that looked like epic fantasy, but which one or another of us felt strongly were not, were Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books, Roger Zelazny’s Amber series, and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books.

Attempting to justify what we felt was and wasn’t epic fantasy, we came up with the following characteristics of the fantasy epic: Firstly, it has to have a certain length. Ideally, at least three thick books. I’ve seen The Lord of the Rings estimated at 400,000 words, which seems about right; The Sword of Shannara I’ve seen estimated as 265,000 words, so let’s set 250,000 words as an absolute minimum, with a reasonable expectation of much more.

Epic fantasy is one of those things that I suspect is easier to recognize than define. Tolkien is clearly epic. Eddings is clearly epic. I don’t think Carey feels epic in any way, shape or form; even though one could make a rational case for it, I think the argument for Zelazny’s Amber is stronger than for Carey’s Kushiel. I also think that both the original Dragonlance trilogy and the Twins trilogy are far more epic than Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry, even though the latter is clearly higher quality literature. But certainly Surridge’s approach is the correct one, the challenge is to reasonably draw the line between that which is epic and that which is not epic. The primary omission thus far, in my opinion, is is Steven Erikson’s prodigiously epic Malazan Book of the Fallen, even if it isn’t always what I would tend to consider particularly readable or even necessarily plotted.

UPDATE – Erikson wasn’t omitted at all. Let this serve as an object lesson in why one should read carefully before opining.

Surviving the test of time

Bestselling Novels
#TitleAuthor
1.The Broad HighwayJeffrey Farnol
2.The Prodigal JudgeVaughan Kester
3.The Winning of Barbara WorthHarold Bell Wright
4.QueedHenry Sydnor Harrison
5.The HarvesterGene Stratton Porter
6.The Iron WomanMargaret Deland
7.The Long RollMary Johnston
8.Molly Make-BelieveEleanor Abbott
9.The RosaryFlorence L. Barclay
10.The Common LawRobert W. Chambers

How many of these writers or novels do you recognize? They are the 10 best-selling authors of exactly 100 years ago. I am a reasonably well-read individual, and I have to admit that I have never heard of any of these books or any of these authors except for Robert W. Chambers, who also wrote the ur-Lovecraftian collection of short stories entitled The King in Yellow. One of the things that became clear in last week’s discussion about the literary decline of the fantasy genre, (or, as I would argue, the literary decline of the SF/F genre), is that very few of those involved in the discussion appeared to fully realize just how unusual it is for literary works to survive 70 years, as the works of Robert E. Howard and J.R.R. Tolkien have, let alone 100. Nor, as should be readily apparent from the names and titles on this bestseller’s list from 1911, should one be inclined to confuse book sales with literary longevity, let alone immortality.

Read the entire post at the Black Gate. Then comment here, or there, as you prefer.

At the Black Gate

Last week, I read with great interest the discussion that began with Leo Grin’s comparison of the heroic fantasy fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard with the anti-heroic fantasy fiction of Joe Abercrombie. As this is a topic that has interested me for years, I certainly have a number of thoughts regarding it. However, since I am a political commentator who is correctly said to be well outside the ideological mainstream of the SF/F community, I think it is best to begin by pointing out to those on both sides of the spectrum who may be eager to turn this into a political debate that this is not a political subject, but rather a historical, literary, and philosophical one. And as such, there is no need to argue over whether the trajectory over time that Grin observes is desirable or not, since that is a matter of perspective and personal opinion.

Regardless of one’s ideological self-identification or opinion on the specifics of Grin’s observations, it should be eminently clear to all and sundry that something material and significant has changed within the field of fantasy fiction in the 71 years that separate Howard’s final publication from Abercrombie’s first one and the 52 years that separate the publication of The Return of the King from The Blade Itself. I should also point out that I offer no personal criticism of Joe Abercrombie here, as he merely happens to serve as a representative of modern fantasy fiction and one of its more accomplished representatives at that….

Read the rest of what is a rather lengthy post on the link between literary decline and societal decline over at Black Gate.

So close

I have to admit, I enjoy it every time I happen to see who keeps RGD in #2 on Kindle, as was the case again today.

The decline of fantasy

I found this back-and-forth on the decline of modern fantasy into nihilism to be quite interesting. I’ll probably weigh in with my own thoughts on the matter when my turn comes around again on Sunday, so check out the discussion between Leo Grin, Joe Abercrombie and others at the Black Gate:

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. They and their fans are welcome to that opinion. For my part — and I think Tolkien and Howard would have heartily agreed — I think they’ve done little more than become cheap purveyors of civilizational graffiti.

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 a well-worn road: 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.

Longtime Ilk may recall that I touched on a few of these themes in an essay entitled CS Lewis and the problem of religion in science fiction and fantasy, which was published in the 2005 anthology Revisiting Narnia by BenBella Books.