Tag: writing

Theories of collapse

Three rival theories seek to explain the decline and fall of GRR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire.  If you haven’t read the five books yet and are concerned about spoilers, don’t read this.  The first book has been out for 16 years now, so I think it can safely be discussed in detail.

  1. Martin simply lost the plot and is unable to handle all of his characters and stories.
  2. The seed of Martin’s nihilistic amorality finally blossomed into full flower.
  3. Martin made a foolish decision to change his approach to the story in mid-series and the structural changes that resulted have proven more than he can handle.

There is at least some truth to all three of these statements.  But which is the primary causal factor.  With regards to (1), that is more of an observation than an explanation.  He has lost the plot.  He is unable to successfully juggle all of his characters and stories.  But it doesn’t explain why.  Is it his age?  Is it his health?  Is it simple lack of interest?  Perhaps, but authors in mental decline usually produce work that is simpler and shorter; Agatha Christie’s last book has a vocabulary that contains 20 percent fewer words than her average novel.  NB: Christie cunningly avoided this being her last word on the subject by writing the final Poirot novel, and one of her best, Curtain, years ahead of time.  Since Dragons shows the same meandering bloat that first appeared in Crows, and since there are still flashes of excellence in both novels, I think a decline in Martin’s mental acuity can be ruled out.

What about the idea that Martin’s nihilistic amorality, always apparent, finally overtook the story, as per (2)?  There is some evidence of this.  The nihilism and amorality has certainly continued to increase as Martin kills off well-meaning Starks and replaces them with vicious new characters.  One reader claimed that the theory can’t be true because it was the nihilistic amorality that made the first three books appealing in the first place.  Even if that is what set them apart, (and there is an element of truth to that; no one will forget the scene where Jaime chucks Bran out the window… for love), that appeal can’t possibly explain the decline in the latter two books because Martin has undeniably cranked up the depravity in comparison with the preceding three.

The real problem with this idea is that we know all of this pointless viciousness is just a sideshow, filler for the events of the real story.  While it might explain why the filler is so nasty, it doesn’t explain why it exists in the first place.  And that brings us to theory (3).

As most Martin readers know, the books were originally supposed to be a trilogy.  Then, after the first book turned into three, Martin faced a five-year gap, during which time the dragons would grow and Daenerys would gather the forces necessary to challenge for the throne of Westeros.  (One would think a wedding between Daenerys and Joffrey would have been the obvious solution to the situation inspired by the historical example of Stephen and Maude, but never mind that.)  Instead of simply writing 10 pages of “here’s what happened in the intervening years”, Martin went back to write what was intended as one book, then became two, and has thus created an even more difficult challenge for himself by adding all of the new characters, many of whose stories are of little to no interest to the fans of the first three books.

Instead of proceeding with the 9 living perspective characters from A Storm of Swords, Martin now finds himself saddled with 21.  This is a structural challenge, and if Martin somehow surmounts it to produce books that are on par with the first three, it will be an epic literary feat indeed.  But the very fact that Martin faces it tends to indicate that he is not up to the challenge of defeating it.

Unlike many Martin readers, I very much doubt that Winds and Dream will be as bad as Feast and Dragons.  After all, Martin is now returning to the story that he originally intended to tell, so he probably has a much better idea of what he wants to do.  However, the unnecessary structural challenge created by all the additional characters and their stories likely means the last two – or three – books will not be as good as they would have been had he not given in to the temptation to go back and fill in the blanks of the required five-year gap.  And that is an excellent object lesson for all writers: don’t give in to prequelitis.  Look forward, not backward.  And don’t hesitate to leave some historical blanks unfilled; indulge the reader’s imagination rather than attempt to leave no stone unturned in explaining everything about everyone.

As for the theories of collapse, they may all be true and help explain each other.  The unfortunate decision to go back and fill in the blanks led to a long submersion into the depths of pointless nihilism, which ultimately proved as uninteresting to Martin as it did to his readers.

Mailvox: illumination and shadow

A physicist notes the way in which Tolkien explicated the distinction between the illuminating fairy tale and the dark deceit of the retrophobic modern fantasy:

I was intrigued by the discussion on retrophobia in fantasy literature, and it made me recall a relevant passage from Professor Wood’s The Gospel According to Tolkien:

The essence of fairy-stories is that they satisfy our heart’s deepest desire: to know a world other than our own, a world that has not been flattened and shrunk and emptied of mystery. To enter this other world, the fairy tale resorts to fantasy in the literal sense. It deals with phantasms or representations of things not generally believed to exist in our primary world: elves (the older word for faires), hobbits, wizards, dwarves, Ringwraiths, wargs, orcs, and the like. Far from being unreal or fantastic in the popular sense, these creatures embody the invisible qualities of the eternal world — love and death, courage and cowardice, terror and hope — that always impinge on our own visible universe. Fairy-stories “open as door on Other Time” Tolkien writes, “and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, perhaps.” Hence Tolkien’s insistence that all fantasy-creations must have the mythic character of the supernatural world as well as the historical consistency of the natural world. The question to be posed for fantasy as also for many of the biblical narratives is not, therefore, “Did these things literally happen?” but “Does their happening reveal the truth?”

This ties into your discussion of the modern Wormtongues, as well. Wood and Tolkien are essentially saying what you’re saying: modern fantasy fails, because important elements of the narrative do not reveal the truth, and readers know it.

The reason so much modern fantasy fails so spectacularly is not because it is soulless and derivative, although it is, but because it quite literally hates the heart.  It is written out of hatred, it is based on lies, and it is designed to obscure rather than reveal.  Take R. Scott Bakker’s series, The Prince of Nothing.  The events chronicled within it did not literally happen, but their happening, quite intentionally, obscures the truth, indeed, it claims that there is no such thing as truth.  The ugliness of the disgusting Face Dancers is an apt metaphor for the ugly incoherence at the core of the modernist vision for the series.

This is why GRR Martin will never be the American JRR Tolkien.  What are the truths revealed by A Song of Ice and Fire?  That people of good will are stupid?  That everyone is pointlessly sadistic? That no good deed goes unpunished?  That sex is either rape, incest, or prostitution?  The only truths to be found in Martin are negative; there is nothing beautiful or mythic about Westeros.  There is death, cowardice, and terror, but where is the love, courage, and hope?  When viewed from this perspective, it becomes apparent that decline of the series observed in the two most recent books are merely the flowering of a retrophobic seed that was planted at the start.

My point is not that those who write in the older tradition are better writers.  If anything, it is remarkable that those who handicap their narratives so severely with their moral blindness and ideological retrophobia manage to produce works that are still compelling in some way.  The problem is that, no matter how highly skilled they are, genuine greatness will always elude them and their works, despite their merits, will rapidly fade into the forgotten dust of history because they do not speak to the eternal truths at the heart of Man.

A GoodReads review

D.M. Dutcher reviews A THRONE OF BONES:

It’s hard to sum it up since so much goes on in the book. At 800854 pages,
it’s long, and the first MLP hardcover release. The length doesn’t feel
too tedious though, with only the start of the book dragging a bit. Once
it gets past discussing the upcoming goblin fight, it gets much better,
as each new character has their own story and part to play.

The
world is very interesting too. It’s sort of a fusion of Rome and
medieval Europe-imagine Rome with its legionnaires and patricians with a
church like in Thomist times and Vikings mingling with supernatural
creatures like elves and werewolves. The main focus is on Rome though,
and it adds a lot to the book by setting it apart from the generic
fantasy land it could be. It’s not just the gladiators and phalanxes,
but he gets the ethos of each nation and group right. You get inside
their heads, and it’s well done indeed.

I also found that it
fixed something that I didn’t like about Game of Thrones. One of the
issues I had with the first book in that series was that the
supernatural and fantasy aspects felt tacked in, as opposed to purely
human drama. Vox though always makes the fantasy part noticeable if not
prevalent. This isn’t just “let’s make it fantasy because we really want
to tell a historical fiction story and ignore the parts we don’t like,”
but magic and fantasy have as much a part to play as the intricate
machinations between nobles. If anything, you wish there was a bit more
focus on it. The elves in particular….

All in all, it’s a good, epic fantasy novel. It was better than I
expected. If you like more traditional Christian fantasy fare that is
clean and more aggressively spiritual (if not evangelistic) you may not
like this. But people who like well-written fantasy and Christians who
are okay with more realism and edginess to their books will probably
enjoy it quite a bit.  

I’m pleased to see that readers are understanding that THE ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT series is not traditional Christian fantasy fare.  It was never intended to be, any more than it was intended to be a mindless attempt to do to GRR Martin what Terry Brooks did to JRR Tolkien in his Shannara series.  I’m still amused by the charge that I am simultaneously mimicking Edward Gibbon and R. Scott Bakker(1); while it would still be wrong, one would do significantly better to assert the book is the bastard love-child of J.B. Bury and Joe Abercrombie.  If critics want to claim that I am a derivative writer in the vein of the retrophobes, that is certainly their prerogative, but I would expect they might at least have the perspicacity to get the genuine influences right.

The reviewer is correct.  The ethos of the book is definitely more concerned with the martial values than the Christian ones.  This is the natural result of half the perspective characters either being military officers or what could reasonably be described as military intelligence.  When I write my characters, I always attempt to focus on their current concerns rather using them as a vessel for some larger point.  This is why the Marcus Valerius who is actively engaged with theological matters as part of a Church embassy led by a pair of noted ecclesiastic intellectuals is simply not going to be anywhere nearly as concerned with such elevated matters while commanding a cavalry wing in the middle of a battle involving some 30,000 combatants.

(1) In all seriousness, Bakker would probably be the last of the epic fantasy writers that I would attempt to mimic. Well, no, that would definitely be Jordan.  Then Erikson, simply because I don’t even know how I would go about trying to imitate him. But I can’t mimic the best thing about Bakker, his florid, but absorbing style, and I can’t imagine wanting to imitate any of his plots or his characters.  His worldbuilding is competent and reasonably substantial, but it doesn’t take a form in which I have any interest whatsoever, nor does it have anything in common with mine.  Moreover, a simple look at the publication date of Summa Elvetica should make it obvious that Selenoth(2) is a world I created long before I’d ever heard of R. Scott Bakker.


(2) I will send a free hardcover to the first person who correctly guesses what computer game served as the original inspiration for the name of Selenoth.  This offer will stand for one week.

The modern Wormtongues of SF/F

As one of the readers at Alpha Game suggested, the discussion of retrophobia in the SF/F genre and its observable consequences is better suited for Vox Popoli even though it began at AG due to the intersexual-relations aspect of the matter.  So, I’m going to move it over here, where the majority of the audience interested in the topic is normally found.

As one Amazon reviewer of A Throne of Bones noted, “modern fantasy is a rather ugly place”.  That’s is true, but it’s not the real problem, being merely a logical consequence of the underlying problem of modern fantasy being an incoherent place.  In the first post on the subject, “Sexism” is a literary necessity, I observed how the structural acceptance of sexual inequality and other aspects of historical societies deemed “evil”, (technically inaccurate, but used in the absence of a better word), by the sensibilities presently infesting the literary genre are not only required for historical verisimilitude, but for literary drama as well.

I used the example of a single change to a single character in A Song of Ice and Fire would have totally eviscerate the entire series and eliminated the greater part of its plot.  Consider the consequences of changing Cersei Lannister from an oppressed woman used as a dynastic piece by her father to a strong and independent warrior woman of the sort that is presently ubiquitous in third generation fantasy, science fiction, and paranormal fiction.

  1. Cersei doesn’t marry Robert Baratheon.  She’s strong and independent like her twin, not a royal brood mare!
  2. House Lannister’s ambitions are reduced from establishing a royal line to finding a wife for Tyrion.
  3. Her children are not bastards.  Robert’s heirs have black hair.
  4. Jon Arryn isn’t murdered to keep a nonexistent secret.  Ned Stark isn’t named to replace him.
  5. Robert doesn’t have an accident coordinated by the Lannisters, who don’t dominate the court and will not benefit from his fall.
  6. Robert’s heirs being legitimate, Stannis and Renly Baratheon remain loyal.
  7. The Starks never come south and never revolt against King’s Landing.  Theon Greyjoy goes home to the Ironborn and never returns to Winterfell.  Jon Snow still goes to the Wall, but Arya remains home and learns to become a lady, not an assassin, whether she wants to or not.

So, what was a war of five kings that spans five continents abruptly becomes a minor debate over whether Robert Baratheon’s black-haired son and heir marries Sansa Stark, a princess of Dorne, or Danerys Targaryen.  This doesn’t remove all of the drama from the book; King Robert could spurn Danerys and thus preserve the Baratheon-Targaryen rivalry and the threat of the Others still lurks north of the Wall.  It’s even possible that the novel which now focuses on the warrior woman Cersei, her lesbian lover, Brienne of Tarth, and their brave journey north of the Wall to discover the secret of the Others might not be entirely dreadful.  One could even argue that it would have a shot at being more interesting than A Dance with Dragons.

But would it be better or more interesting than the complex intrigue and drama filling the first three books?  I very much doubt it.

Now let’s turn it around and throw it out to the readers.  Can you think of a modern fantasy novel in which a single change to a single character would have had the potential to improve the story to a similar degree that the change to Cersei Lannister would alter A Song of Fire and Ice?  Alternatively, what popular SF/F works have been hamstrung by the author’s servile adherence to revisionist modern sensibilities?

What we have seen over the last thirty or forty years in the SF/F genre is metaphorically quite similar to what Tolkien portrayed at the end of The Lord of the Rings in the scouring of the Shire.  The modern Wormtongues have done their best to ruin the once beautiful land of fantasy they invaded, by rejecting the past which they hate and failing to grasp the purpose and significance of societal traditions they do not understand.  These Wormtongues are reduced to cobbling together incoherent and derivative works because their very values work against them, cutting them off from the larger part of the sources of historical conflict and drama, reducing them to coloring with crayons where their predecessors were painting with a full palette that ranged the full width and depth of the human experience.

Retrophobia in SF/F

In which I respond to a John C. Wright essay on what he terms retrophobia and how it has crippled the third generation of fantasy writers:

This theory of literary retrophobia explains why so many mediocre
writers like Terry Brooks, JK Rowling, and John Scalzi, and even
genuinely entertaining writers such as Charles Stross, exhibit such a
powerful inclination for rewriting the works of earlier, more original
writers, not only mimicking their styles, but downright strip-mining
their works for ideas, settings, and even basic plots.

For example, I enjoyed The Sword of Shannara when I was in high
school, for example.  Yes, it was a mediocre imitation of Tolkien, but
it had its moments and it was a preferable alternative to re-reading The Silmarillion for the third time.  But after struggling through The Elfstones of Shannara
and only making it about a chapter into the third book in the series, I
gave it up.  I tried again about twenty years later and didn’t even
make it that far.

The reason, I belatedly realized, was that without the benefit of
working from Tolkien’s template, Brooks simply didn’t know how to write a
fantasy tale capable of holding the reader’s interest.  He’s not a bad
writer; his Demon books weren’t bad.  But he simply didn’t have any of
the deep roots in history or myth that the great genre writers of the
past did, and the shallowness crippled the quality of his storytelling.

Read the rest at Alpha Game.  It’s not related to intersexual relations, but that’s where this got started, so that’s why I posted it there.

Help an author this Christmas

The heart, it bleeds.  I saw the sad plea on John Scalzi’s site, a giant green banner that says “Fuck You. Pay Me.”  It’s tragic that after a short, but glorious career of prostituting himself in a literary manner, he’s been forced to turn to literal prostitution in order to buy his family Christmas Holiday presents this year.

Won’t you please buy a copy of one of his Heinlein derivatives, or his Piper derivative, or his Star Trek derivative?  If enough of us join together and help out, perhaps he’ll not only be able to afford Christmas Holiday presents, but an original idea for a novel too!

The need for “sexism” in literature

In which I address a common complaint concerning female roles in fantasy literature at Alpha Game:

The problem with what Wohl advocates is that by putting modern views
on sexual roles and intersexual relations into the minds, mouths, and
worse, structures of an imaginary historical society, it destroys the
very structural foundations that make the society historical and the dramatic storylines credible – in some cases, even possible.  It’s problem similar to the one faced by secular writers,
who wish to simultaneously eliminate religion from their fictional medieval societies,
and yet retain the dramatic conflict created by the divine right of
kings.  However, it is more severe because the sexual aspect touches upon the
most concrete basis of every society: its ability to sustain itself
through the propagation of its members.

The “sexism” of
which Wohl and many of his commenters complain isn’t cultural, it is
simply the logical consequences of biological and martial imperatives.

Mailvox: the ideas, they spread

CG sounds a little offended upon my behalf:

Did you read this article? It’s a pretty blatant TIA rip-off. Sorry you
don’t receive any credit. 

Despite being taken directly from TIA, this may actually be less of a “rip-off” than another article I saw recently in a mainstream news article that read as if had come right out of a recent WND column.  But this doesn’t bother me in the slightest, in fact, I regard it as in some ways being the ultimate compliment.

What such citations mean is that it the ideas rather than the personality are making their way into the mainstream.  We’re seeing this with Roissy and Game, and we’re also seeing this in a lesser way with various concepts that I’ve been banging on for years now.  Since I’m not pursuing a career as a talking head, it doesn’t really matter if I get the ego boost from seeing my name in print or not, and let’s face it, of all the egos in the world, mine must be among the least in need of boosting.

It’s a good thing that the ideas are able to be transmitted in places where their attachment to my identity may handicap them.  The most influential thinkers are not always those whose names are most recognizable; Paris Hilton and Richard Dawkins are both famous, which examples I trust underline the complete lack of intellectual significance of fame.

The missing seven

I sent out 30 review copies on Friday, so by my count, at least seven reviewers have not yet completed either their reading or their review.  Now, I understand more reviews might seem superfluous, especially of such a relatively small book, but believe it or not, the number of reviews has been observed to make a significant amount of difference in the willingness of Amazon customers to give a book a chance. 

Now, if you absolutely hated the novella and are simply being gracious by neglecting to share your opinion with the reading public, it’s perfectly fine with me if you choose not to favor the world with your verdict.  I have been known to be circumspect in similar circumstances myself, so if that’s the case, please feel free to ignore this reminder.  But if you are one of the reviewers who did read it and just haven’t gotten around to writing your review yet, it would be great if you would see about posting it at your earliest convenience.

And for the 23 of you who did read and review the book on such short notice, I really appreciated your time and effort, and I’m very pleased to see that so many of you enjoyed it.  Also, thanks very much to those who purchased A MAGIC BROKEN, and for a brief while, turned it into a top 25 book in the Epic category.  It was rather fun to see my name in between George R.R. Martin and Neal Stephenson instead of Michael Lewis and FA von Hayek.

Requesting reviewers

I will be announcing two new works of fiction on Monday, both set in the world of Summa Elvetica.  I’d like to get some reviews of the first one up on Amazon over the weekend, so I’m giving away 30 electronic review copies of the forthcoming 50-page(1) novella to those who are a) interested in my fiction, b) willing and able to post reviews on Amazon, and, c) not the Anklebiter of Many Names.

I’m not asking for mindless puffery or anything like that, just your honest perspective on the novella.  So, if you’re interested, please fire off an email to me and I’ll send you the same epub that will be available Monday from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.  If you don’t have an eReader, that’s not a problem, you can use Calibre to read it on your computer.

UPDATE: Okay, the thirty review copies are all spoken for.  Thanks very much to everyone who responded so readily.

(1)  Page count isn’t really meaningful for an ebook, but the novella is 20,000 words.  At the standard 400-word page of a trade paperback, that’s about 50 pages.