It seems you guys never read the stuff I mentioned.
I thought it was clear from context that I have. I should have been clear. I have read all of Borges, Marquez, Allende, Calvino, Murakami, Yoshimoto, I think.
Who else might count? John Fowles? Angela Carter? Kafka? Rushdie? Joanne Harris? Jonathon Carroll? Sherman Alexie? Toni Morrison? Kafka? Eco? John Crowley? Atwood? Le Guin?
So, my anniversary just recently came and went, so I'm rereading the first book my wife ever gave me, "The Sorrows of Young Werther."
At the time she gave it to me it was super depressing because I thought she was saying she'd never return my feelings and I should just go buy a blue jacket and off myself. Turns out her thought process was more along the lines of "hey, he reads German, and this is a great book originally written in German!".
It's excellent to sit down to read something that isn't a technical manual for once.
There was a link to Grossman's 10 best novels 2000 to 2009....and I've read only four of them and not even heard of several. The fuck.;o/
Edit: Good to see that his editorials are better than his novels! :P
It's always funny how guys that can be amazing at explaining why a novel is good are then still terrible at making a good novel.
And vice versa, sometimes listening to authors dissect writing makes them sound like morons, even though you know they're capable of it themselves!
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
I finished The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, and it is a very enjoyable book! Towards the end, Mitchell tends to interlace two activities together, such as a speech taking place while a character thinks about something, and that's a little annoying to read, but otherwise it is very good!
I have also started The Name Of The Rose and Earth Abides. Earth Abides seems a little too much like boy scout glorification, and being a quarter of the way through it, it seems very much a product of its time -- very 1940s, and it seems to have an odd eugenics undertone at this point.
Urban Fantasy: A woman (in pants that show off her butt on the cover) with too many men in her life - one is probably a cop of some sort, a really good guy but with some dark secrets, while the other is an obvious bad boy, totally wrong for her but also incredibly sexy and with a well hidden tender and nurturing side (there may also be other men, but these two are pretty much guaranteed), and also some other vampires and werewolves that keep generating unfortunate misunderstandings between the woman and the men in her life.
One of my friends just recommended Rosemary and Rue (October Daye series) by Seanan McGuire and it turned out to be one of these horrible cliches. I made it 60% through before I had to put the book down because I wanted to vomit at the terrible plot.
"Look I just got shot twice, poisoned, and feel just about dead but I'm totally up for some sex right now with this dreeaaammmmy guy" *huuuuuaaaaggggghhhhhh*
CommunistCow on
No, I am not really communist. Yes, it is weird that I use this name.
I just finished Way of Kings and I rather liked it, but some of the chapters with Shallan and Jasnah dragged quite a bit IMO. So I'm looking for something else. Can someone recommend a high fantasy or urban fantasy book that only follows one or maybe two characters?
As I stated earlier, I rather enjoyed Name of the Wind and Mistborn. Anyone know of anything else somewhat similar to one of those books?
The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams
Across the Face of the World by Russel Kirkpatrick
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
Urban Fantasy: A woman (in pants that show off her butt on the cover) with too many men in her life - one is probably a cop of some sort, a really good guy but with some dark secrets, while the other is an obvious bad boy, totally wrong for her but also incredibly sexy and with a well hidden tender and nurturing side (there may also be other men, but these two are pretty much guaranteed), and also some other vampires and werewolves that keep generating unfortunate misunderstandings between the woman and the men in her life.
One of my friends just recommended Rosemary and Rue (October Daye series) by Seanan McGuire and it turned out to be one of these horrible cliches. I made it 60% through before I had to put the book down because I wanted to vomit at the terrible plot.
"Look I just got shot twice, poisoned, and feel just about dead but I'm totally up for some sex right now with this dreeaaammmmy guy" *huuuuuaaaaggggghhhhhh*
"Turned out to be"? Man, just a glance at that cover should have told you what kind of book it was, not even looking at the blurb.
But yeah, "Urban Fantasy" is often mislabled Paranormal Romance. It's like Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfic for the most part.
It seems you guys never read the stuff I mentioned.
I thought it was clear from context that I have. I should have been clear. I have read all of Borges, Marquez, Allende, Calvino, Murakami, Yoshimoto, I think.
Who else might count? John Fowles? Angela Carter? Kafka? Rushdie? Joanne Harris? Jonathon Carroll? Sherman Alexie? Toni Morrison? Kafka? Eco? John Crowley? Atwood? Le Guin?
Read all or most of their work too.
I just don't want to get all lit-peen about it.
And how are Borges, Marquez, Allende, Calvino, Murakami, Yoshimoto anything like Martin, Sanderson, Tolkien, Hobb, etc, other than "it's not exactly the real world"?
And I'm don't mean anything like "these guys are good and the others are crap". It's just that what Marquez goals and form and the way he strays from realism are not at all like what Martin does.
Of course, if the only relevant factor for a label is "realistic/not realistic" then yeah, they're all the same. But from a "school of thought/execution" PoV, they're nothing alike.
It seems you guys never read the stuff I mentioned.
I thought it was clear from context that I have. I should have been clear. I have read all of Borges, Marquez, Allende, Calvino, Murakami, Yoshimoto, I think.
Who else might count? John Fowles? Angela Carter? Kafka? Rushdie? Joanne Harris? Jonathon Carroll? Sherman Alexie? Toni Morrison? Kafka? Eco? John Crowley? Atwood? Le Guin?
Read all or most of their work too.
I just don't want to get all lit-peen about it.
And how are Borges, Marquez, Allende, Calvino, Murakami, Yoshimoto anything like Martin, Sanderson, Tolkien, Hobb, etc, other than "it's not exactly the real world"?
And I'm don't mean anything like "these guys are good and the others are crap". It's just that what Marquez goals and form and the way he strays from realism are not at all like what Martin does.
Of course, if the only relevant factor for a label is "realistic/not realistic" then yeah, they're all the same. But from a "school of thought/execution" PoV, they're nothing alike.
And neither are a bunch of things within fantasy/sci-fi.
Fantasy, or speculative fiction if you prefer, is a very wide label.
It seems you guys never read the stuff I mentioned.
I thought it was clear from context that I have. I should have been clear. I have read all of Borges, Marquez, Allende, Calvino, Murakami, Yoshimoto, I think.
Who else might count? John Fowles? Angela Carter? Kafka? Rushdie? Joanne Harris? Jonathon Carroll? Sherman Alexie? Toni Morrison? Kafka? Eco? John Crowley? Atwood? Le Guin?
Read all or most of their work too.
I just don't want to get all lit-peen about it.
And how are Borges, Marquez, Allende, Calvino, Murakami, Yoshimoto anything like Martin, Sanderson, Tolkien, Hobb, etc, other than "it's not exactly the real world"?
And I'm don't mean anything like "these guys are good and the others are crap". It's just that what Marquez goals and form and the way he strays from realism are not at all like what Martin does.
Of course, if the only relevant factor for a label is "realistic/not realistic" then yeah, they're all the same. But from a "school of thought/execution" PoV, they're nothing alike.
I think that what Marquez 'does' with his work is very difficult to talk about. And not relevant. You say there is an entire genre there, within which each of his works is only one example. This writer is not like those others. So what?
Of course your examples are different. I mentioned cherry-picking earlier. Though i would argue that Martin's reent work is an assault on genre conventions and the nostalgic politics that characterise the genre, and is actually tremendously deep. I agree that general labels such as 'thoughtful', 'original', 'existentialist', 'deep' and more are all applicable to those called 'magical realism' and not to your examples of fantasy. But those are all positives, shades of intellectuality. Writers such as Hal Duncan, Gene Wolfe, Ursula K Le Guin, China Mieville, Susanna Clarke, Philip K Dick, William Gibson, Kurt Vonnegut and many others take their F&SF thoughtfully, and I think if you are unaware of them you have some reading to do before you claim to have an informed opinion. And if you are, as I believe, aware of their work, you have very good rhetorical reasons for using hacks like Sanderson in your examples instead of someone like Cormac McCarthy or David Mitchell.
The absolute most I could grant you is something like 'magical realism is fantasy set in a reality that seems to be the real world'. I'll buy that. A sub-genre, sure. Of Fantasy. But I guess you wouldn't want to include Charlaine Harris in Magical Realism, because she's not as intellectual as Murakami Haruki.
It's not even a matter of intellectualism. Books and genres and schools and lineages don't exist in a timeless vacuum.
Marquez is a product of a completely different branch of writing and writers, completely different environment, influences, national politics, cultural background and I'm pretty sure he never read any works that I'd call Fantasy.
This doesn't mean he and his books are necessarily superior or more relevant than Wolfe or Martin or Vonnegut or Rothfuss or Bradbury. But his body of work exists in a completely different context, ecosystem, structure, moment, literary movement, political forces at work in his place and time... And he developed that work without sharing a lineage with those other writers. I'd guess the two branches were forked somewhere around Edgar Allan Poe, which had influence on Borges, who, in turn, probably influenced Marquez. But I'm pretty sure Tolkien, the milestone for contemporary anglophone fantasy, is out of that genus. Martin does a kick as job of fighting Tolkienian tropes, and I love his books, but he exists, as his writing, within the context of Tolkien.
The ONE SINGLE connection between all of them is "NOT BEING 100% REALISTIC". And that is an extremely flimsy way to develop a taxonomy, an ontological view of each book. You're stretching genres to a point in which they become useless and meaningless. It's like saying bats and flys and sparrows are the same kind of being because they all have wings. Nevermind every other thing about them.
The label Latin American Magical Realism, as used by literary scholars, critics, journalists, editors and readers (and not without some controversy), has a degree of granularity and context that goes far beyond just "KINDA REAL BUT NOT REALLY". We can debate if the label is limiting or if it has other shortcomings, and even repudiate it completely after such conversation. That's not a problem.
But bunching up every single "NOT REALLY REALISTIC" book on a single basket is not something that helps anyone talk about books. You're free to draw your lines anywhere you like, and make your personal cartography of pages, but that doesn't make every book caught between your boundaries connected in any meaningful way. Sure, I can concede that they're all Fantasy, but that doesn't say much about any of them.
Half of Gene Wolfe's short stories could easily qualify as "magical realism" if he wasn't a genre writer. Some of them are significantly less fantastic than the spectrum that "magical realism" covers. And if anyone says that he's not as good a writer anyone living then I will gladly fight them because he is and I will have Right on my side.
The whole argument is based on snobbery, exclusionary prejudice and wilful ignorance by an increasingly irrelevant, self-regarding, shrinking clique. "Modernist" fiction needs to sit the fuck down and accept that it's just another genre, if we're going to define literature by genres. It's not the most popular, it's not the most representative, it's not the most exciting, and if it once had all the best writers, it sure doesn't any more. The best writers IMO are those who are discretely ignoring the restrictions of the "modernist" genre. Will Self doesn't call himself a "Fantasy/SF" writer, but of course he bloody is. He's a F/SF writer who writes with a Modernist prose style. But because he has the right friends and the right writing style and can get reviewed in the right journals, his books get put into the "real books" section, away from all those dirty "genre" books.
This doesn't mean he and his books are necessarily superior or more relevant than Wolfe or Martin or Vonnegut or Rothfuss or Bradbury.
Just as an aside, this is possibly the weirdest set of five authors to lump together I've ever run into in the wild. If you're going to discuss literary contexts and authorial traditions there's at least 4 in that set of 5 people.
This doesn't mean he and his books are necessarily superior or more relevant than Wolfe or Martin or Vonnegut or Rothfuss or Bradbury.
Just as an aside, this is possibly the weirdest set of five authors to lump together I've ever run into in the wild. If you're going to discuss literary contexts and authorial traditions there's at least 4 in that set of 5 people.
That's kind of the point. A hugely hetrogenous set of authors who are all "genre".
Feast of Crows done, without even realizing until the end that Martin had split it with Dance With Dragons by characters/settings instead of time. I got to the end, read the little note he'd added, and was pleasantly surprised that I'd be getting a whole new book about certain characters that I enjoy. Then I noticed that the note was dated 2005. Yeesh.
Need to pick up Dance with Dragons tonight, though the only copies I've seen so far were hard-cover. I hope that's not the only edition in print.
Urban Fantasy: A woman (in pants that show off her butt on the cover) with too many men in her life - one is probably a cop of some sort, a really good guy but with some dark secrets, while the other is an obvious bad boy, totally wrong for her but also incredibly sexy and with a well hidden tender and nurturing side (there may also be other men, but these two are pretty much guaranteed), and also some other vampires and werewolves that keep generating unfortunate misunderstandings between the woman and the men in her life.
One of my friends just recommended Rosemary and Rue (October Daye series) by Seanan McGuire and it turned out to be one of these horrible cliches. I made it 60% through before I had to put the book down because I wanted to vomit at the terrible plot.
"Look I just got shot twice, poisoned, and feel just about dead but I'm totally up for some sex right now with this dreeaaammmmy guy" *huuuuuaaaaggggghhhhhh*
"Turned out to be"? Man, just a glance at that cover should have told you what kind of book it was, not even looking at the blurb.
But yeah, "Urban Fantasy" is often mislabled Paranormal Romance. It's like Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfic for the most part.
This friend usually recommends great books and this is the first one she has recommended that sucked.
CommunistCow on
No, I am not really communist. Yes, it is weird that I use this name.
Half of Gene Wolfe's short stories could easily qualify as "magical realism" if he wasn't a genre writer. Some of them are significantly less fantastic than the spectrum that "magical realism" covers. And if anyone says that he's not as good a writer anyone living then I will gladly fight them because he is and I will have Right on my side.
The whole argument is based on snobbery, exclusionary prejudice and wilful ignorance by an increasingly irrelevant, self-regarding, shrinking clique. "Modernist" fiction needs to sit the fuck down and accept that it's just another genre, if we're going to define literature by genres. It's not the most popular, it's not the most representative, it's not the most exciting, and if it once had all the best writers, it sure doesn't any more. The best writers IMO are those who are discretely ignoring the restrictions of the "modernist" genre. Will Self doesn't call himself a "Fantasy/SF" writer, but of course he bloody is. He's a F/SF writer who writes with a Modernist prose style. But because he has the right friends and the right writing style and can get reviewed in the right journals, his books get put into the "real books" section, away from all those dirty "genre" books.
Oh, I'm definitely not debating my point within the whole "Genre vs real Literature" thing. I'm approaching this whole dialogue from a taxonomy point of view. I guess we're all clashing on the difference between literary GENRE such as Fantasy, Romance, Memoir, Thriller etc., and "school" or "movement" (I don't know how do you guys call it in english and I'm too tired to look up), such as 19th century Romantism, early 20th Realism, Modernism, etc. Fantasy is a genre, Latin American Magical Realism is a school. So yeah.
Anyways, coming back to the "Genre vs. Literature" thing... I don't know, from my personal point of view, I'd say most genre authors are indeed "just" creating nice stories: they offer us big imagination, nice plots and nice stories, captivating characters, crowning moments of awesome, poor to average to decent prose, an overall focus on the content with the form as a second-level concern. There is nothing wrong with that, and I love many authors that fall squarely within those boundaries. They have provided me with many strong emotional moments. Brian Sanderson, Isaac Asimov, Rothfuss, The Black Company books I so loved to translate, and so many others.
Also, most literary authors (that I have read) have something that, from a literary context, makes some sort of contribution, be it an advancement or a denial of some literary paradigm or another. They have a strong focus on form, prose, symbolism, and often their books are very hard to read, challenging and even torturous. Many of them are just a bad experience. But when something like that clicks with me, like when I read certain passages by Nabokov, or Herman Melville, or Philip Roth or Marquez or Borges or Eco or Llosa... Well, the feeling of meeting something really sublime is overwhelming.
... But there are those who most definitely muddle up the whole thing, and take a big crap on that divide. Gene Wolfe, for sure, China Mieville, I'd also say, some aspects of Martin's work. And a fuckton of others I can't remember right now. They're just threading a different path.
It doesn't mean that any given reader should be obligated to like Literature more than Genre or the other way around. I feel no need to brave Pynchon's tomes, even though I recognize his relevance, and I also have the strongest lazyness when I consider reading Wheel of Time.
This is just how those things have coalesced within my relationship with books and reading. I don't presume to convert anyone to this view, but I definitely will not agree that there is no difference between anything and everything is the same because all books are equally worthy blah blah blah. I just feel that some people make cool stories, others make great writing, and a few do both.
Half of Gene Wolfe's short stories could easily qualify as "magical realism" if he wasn't a genre writer. Some of them are significantly less fantastic than the spectrum that "magical realism" covers. And if anyone says that he's not as good a writer anyone living then I will gladly fight them because he is and I will have Right on my side.
The whole argument is based on snobbery, exclusionary prejudice and wilful ignorance by an increasingly irrelevant, self-regarding, shrinking clique. "Modernist" fiction needs to sit the fuck down and accept that it's just another genre, if we're going to define literature by genres. It's not the most popular, it's not the most representative, it's not the most exciting, and if it once had all the best writers, it sure doesn't any more. The best writers IMO are those who are discretely ignoring the restrictions of the "modernist" genre. Will Self doesn't call himself a "Fantasy/SF" writer, but of course he bloody is. He's a F/SF writer who writes with a Modernist prose style. But because he has the right friends and the right writing style and can get reviewed in the right journals, his books get put into the "real books" section, away from all those dirty "genre" books.
Oh, I'm definitely not debating my point within the whole "Genre vs real Literature" thing. I'm approaching this whole dialogue from a taxonomy point of view. I guess we're all clashing on the difference between literary GENRE such as Fantasy, Romance, Memoir, Thriller etc., and "school" or "movement" (I don't know how do you guys call it in english and I'm too tired to look up), such as 19th century Romantism, early 20th Realism, Modernism, etc. Fantasy is a genre, Latin American Magical Realism is a school. So yeah.
Anyways, coming back to the "Genre vs. Literature" thing... I don't know, from my personal point of view, I'd say most genre authors are indeed "just" creating nice stories: they offer us big imagination, nice plots and nice stories, captivating characters, crowning moments of awesome, poor to average to decent prose, an overall focus on the content with the form as a second-level concern. There is nothing wrong with that, and I love many authors that fall squarely within those boundaries. They have provided me with many strong emotional moments. Brian Sanderson, Isaac Asimov, Rothfuss, The Black Company books I so loved to translate, and so many others.
Also, most literary authors (that I have read) have something that, from a literary context, makes some sort of contribution, be it an advancement or a denial of some literary paradigm or another. They have a strong focus on form, prose, symbolism, and often their books are very hard to read, challenging and even torturous. Many of them are just a bad experience. But when something like that clicks with me, like when I read certain passages by Nabokov, or Herman Melville, or Philip Roth or Marquez or Borges or Eco or Llosa... Well, the feeling of meeting something really sublime is overwhelming.
... But there are those who most definitely muddle up the whole thing, and take a big crap on that divide. Gene Wolfe, for sure, China Mieville, I'd also say, some aspects of Martin's work. And a fuckton of others I can't remember right now. They're just threading a different path.
It doesn't mean that any given reader should be obligated to like Literature more than Genre or the other way around. I feel no need to brave Pynchon's tomes, even though I recognize his relevance, and I also have the strongest lazyness when I consider reading Wheel of Time.
This is just how those things have coalesced within my relationship with books and reading. I don't presume to convert anyone to this view, but I definitely will not agree that there is no difference between anything and everything is the same because all books are equally worthy blah blah blah. I just feel that some people make cool stories, others make great writing, and a few do both.
I think you would really benefit from reading the Lev Grossman piece linked earlier.
If nothing else, because even though you try really hard to be neutral, your bias is still peaking through as you call plotting not a part of the literary paradigm. Which is really pretty ridiculous.
But does reflect mimetic fiction/capital L literature/whatever the hell you wanna call it's obsession with prose over plot.
PS - if you suggest that the scale goes from "poor to average to decent prose", I would suggest you are either under-read or out of your mind.
I always find the literary worlds slagging of "genre fiction" hilarious, as it's akin to the Nebula/Pluto (can't remember which) disallowing comics after Gaiman crushed them with the Sandman series. Art is art, and saying something is "genre fiction" and "trashy" in comparison, especially when half the shit I see people gushing over is the following: Conflicted main character with possible sexuality issues, add in crazy relationship interest and infidelity, swirl with social standards breaking and finish the book with loose ends hanging.
I'd much rather read something by a "hack" like Sanderson that tries to come up with something new. Marquez, Murakami etc. are interesting because they do such focused riffs and aren't circlejerking on classic tropes.
My post was not meant to touch every single possible aspect of the issue, nor to prove anything as fact. Broad strokes an impressions. My personal view. Not scholar or factual.
And, yeah, I forgot to mention that plotting and characterization hundreds of other elements are major factors in many writers' work regardless of the label. That was an important omission. The L thing might be attributed to laziness and tiredness and a strange tendency to go all German on substantives. You can dissect every minor detail as some sort of clue to a flaw I'm trying to hide, but that would be kinda overreading.
And of course, all those people I mentioned in that paragraph were actually authors whose prose I consider exceptional. I was talking about the mythical "average" writer, but then I started digressing.
My post had several flaws in its composition, Mea Culpa. I still believe there are levels of literaryness, which frequently are not proportional to my level of enjoyment, or to how much I like an author.
Sanderson is really cool, BTW, and I'm seriously thinking about publishing him. But I wouldn't mention him as an example of someone who does that many new things, other than systems like Allomancy and Ferruchemy (I only read Mistborn so far). He is more like the very model of the competent fantasy writer. I would use Mieville or Wolfe for that picture. And I cannot publish them, because they're actually "too brainy" and too "hard to read" for the local average reader. A sad fact that tells us more about the average reader than about the authors themselves.
He does, but the info he dumps is usually fairly clever, or at least unusual. Info-dumps on tired, derivative mythologies and pseudo-15th-Century-European lineages and the like are fucking awful to read. Sanderson explaining his apparently well thought out and lovingly crafted but weird univereses and systems of magic is usually tolerable. It would be nice if he could mix it up on occasion, though, or do something more character driven and less as an exploration of the world he's built.
I read an interview with him once where he talked about the process he went through in writing the first Mistborn book. The setting was locked in from the first but he completely changed the plot and swapped out central characters a few times. I think that's fairly indicative of his style: he's there, first and foremost, to tell you about this world he made up. The people moving around in it are kind of secondary. Luckily he has a light and fast enough writing style outside of the infodumps that it doesn't become unreadable.
I thought the major distinction for Magical Realism is that the world is presented as if it were our world, but the fantastical elements are accepted by the characters as simply normal things. Most "Fantasy" calls out fantastical elements in some way, making it rare or having some rules about it. In "...Solitude," Marquez just has people show up on flying carpets, and grandpa's ghost just hangs around with the family.
I personally use the term "magical realism" to denote when the fantastical is used as if it were mundane. In most other fantasy genres, the fantastical is explicitly fantastic. I don't hold far-future sci-fi as magical realism because often authors will write about something fantastic as if it were mundane in order to hint at a deeper literary purpose -- such as Wolfe using the various hints and comments in the Book of the New Sun to indicate that we are far in the future and that there is much more beneath the surface of the story than what is told to us.
Magical Realism just has stuff happen to indicate that it's magical, but not extraordinary. That's all. The audience isn't left guessing because there's nothing to guess. Dude's ghost doesn't hang around because of some reason; it just does. People don't have some flying carpet powers -- they just use them because that's what they have. At least, that's how I've always understood the term.
I thought the major distinction for Magical Realism is that the world is presented as if it were our world, but the fantastical elements are accepted by the characters as simply normal things. Most "Fantasy" calls out fantastical elements in some way, making it rare or having some rules about it. In "...Solitude," Marquez just has people show up on flying carpets, and grandpa's ghost just hangs around with the family.
I personally use the term "magical realism" to denote when the fantastical is used as if it were mundane. In most other fantasy genres, the fantastical is explicitly fantastic. I don't hold far-future sci-fi as magical realism because often authors will write about something fantastic as if it were mundane in order to hint at a deeper literary purpose -- such as Wolfe using the various hints and comments in the Book of the New Sun to indicate that we are far in the future and that there is much more beneath the surface of the story than what is told to us.
Magical Realism just has stuff happen to indicate that it's magical, but not extraordinary. That's all. The audience isn't left guessing because there's nothing to guess. Dude's ghost doesn't hang around because of some reason; it just does. People don't have some flying carpet powers -- they just use them because that's what they have. At least, that's how I've always understood the term.
Well see your line of thought is perfectly fine, and as you said, "I personally use". And it makes sense and it's ok and it works. I was just talking about how there is a coined term that refers to a specific geographic-historical slice of the literary universe, and that coined term has that meaning to me when I read it because it's fairly important over here. You see, we all can describe and refer to all sorts of things as being "impressionist" for all sorts of logical reasons and it's ok, but the "Default" content of impressionist is a specific art style from a specific place. But both are correct and ok and I'm not gonna give you shit for using impressionist in your own way.
Only you cannot go around saying "Shit son, early 20th Century impressionism is just graffitti because they're both things you do with paint and there ain't no difference, and I will call you a snob if you disagree because words" like people who are not you did.
That's my stance on this whole thingamabob.
So, I read this quaint book called Machine Man by Max Barry and it's some sort of internet wrote book and it's kinda cool but nothing really amazing.
Speaking off, I'm about 40 pages into the new Dresden and it reads like Anita Blake. I wish I was making this up.
Look, the first Dresden was the best one. Then it basically became 'fat DnD geek wish fulfillment' in the same way that the first Anita Blake was the best one, then it became 'oh, my God, burn it'-wish fulfillment.
TlDR; the Dresden books are rubbish, so are the Anita Blake books. In each their way, yes, but rubbish.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
He does, but the info he dumps is usually fairly clever, or at least unusual. Info-dumps on tired, derivative mythologies and pseudo-15th-Century-European lineages and the like are fucking awful to read. Sanderson explaining his apparently well thought out and lovingly crafted but weird univereses and systems of magic is usually tolerable. It would be nice if he could mix it up on occasion, though, or do something more character driven and less as an exploration of the world he's built.
I read an interview with him once where he talked about the process he went through in writing the first Mistborn book. The setting was locked in from the first but he completely changed the plot and swapped out central characters a few times. I think that's fairly indicative of his style: he's there, first and foremost, to tell you about this world he made up. The people moving around in it are kind of secondary. Luckily he has a light and fast enough writing style outside of the infodumps that it doesn't become unreadable.
Mistborn wasn't bad, but the infodump first fight scene became terribly predictable after a certain point, even if I know why it was there. Even later in the books, he has a really terrible tendency to always want to tell you exactly why, rather then setting the ground rules and just telling you what happens and you are smart enough to know the how. Kinda fits with his obsession with world building really.
Way of Kings was where it really started to grate though. Every fight scene with what's-his-monk in those interludes was terribly written and infodumping in the worst way. Then again, Way of Kings was really not a very good effort, even for him.
I'll see what comments are on part 2, but Way of Kings seemed to really hammer home that he isn't really venturing far from his rather specific formula.
It wasn't meant so much as a treatise on you, just a take on the literary world in general and it's bass-ackwardness around stuff that doesn't fit it's mold of good writing. Sanderson is not amazing, but he builds great worlds and keeps things moving at a good clip, which I enjoy in my books. As touched on in the article, sci fi and fantasy books do not focus so much on writing carefully wrought scenes but rather focus on overarching plot and fleshing out the world. I think they both have a place, and the ideal book has a balance of both, as "literary" books are often way too lazy about bringing you into their world and helping you to understand the viewpoint of anyone other than the main character. I don't live in NYC, nor do I understand minutiae of life in another era, so BRING ME INTO IT.
He does, but the info he dumps is usually fairly clever, or at least unusual. Info-dumps on tired, derivative mythologies and pseudo-15th-Century-European lineages and the like are fucking awful to read. Sanderson explaining his apparently well thought out and lovingly crafted but weird univereses and systems of magic is usually tolerable. It would be nice if he could mix it up on occasion, though, or do something more character driven and less as an exploration of the world he's built.
I read an interview with him once where he talked about the process he went through in writing the first Mistborn book. The setting was locked in from the first but he completely changed the plot and swapped out central characters a few times. I think that's fairly indicative of his style: he's there, first and foremost, to tell you about this world he made up. The people moving around in it are kind of secondary. Luckily he has a light and fast enough writing style outside of the infodumps that it doesn't become unreadable.
Mistborn wasn't bad, but the infodump first fight scene became terribly predictable after a certain point, even if I know why it was there. Even later in the books, he has a really terrible tendency to always want to tell you exactly why, rather then setting the ground rules and just telling you what happens and you are smart enough to know the how. Kinda fits with his obsession with world building really.
Way of Kings was where it really started to grate though. Every fight scene with what's-his-monk in those interludes was terribly written and infodumping in the worst way. Then again, Way of Kings was really not a very good effort, even for him.
I'll see what comments are on part 2, but Way of Kings seemed to really hammer home that he isn't really venturing far from his rather specific formula.
The whole point of the magic systems by and large is that they are logical constructions with solid rules. As such how they function needs to be explained. Allomancy and Ferulchemy in particular are systems where each power does exactly one thing that is then applied in various ways. It's a feature not a bug.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
why do people even care so much about genre labels? honestly now. it's not like they're terribly important beyond helping the book end up in the right aisle at the bookstore, or on the right recommended books list on amazon. if you want to engage in any kind of evaluation of quality, or assessment of literary genealogy, or critical work within the text, you're obviously going to have to go a lot deeper than whatever genre label is being applied.
Speaking off, I'm about 40 pages into the new Dresden and it reads like Anita Blake. I wish I was making this up.
Look, the first Dresden was the best one. Then it basically became 'fat DnD geek wish fulfillment' in the same way that the first Anita Blake was the best one, then it became 'oh, my God, burn it'-wish fulfillment.
TlDR; the Dresden books are rubbish, so are the Anita Blake books. In each their way, yes, but rubbish.
Having read a few of them, I thought they were like that from the very start! Especially with an emphasis on the wish fulfillment part. Though my memory's a bit hazy on what happened in which book so you might be right.
Though it's kinda my experience with the "urban fantasy" genre as a whole. I don't hate the idea behind the genre but I hate the stuff in it that I've read!
The whole point of the magic systems by and large is that they are logical constructions with solid rules. As such how they function needs to be explained. Allomancy and Ferulchemy in particular are systems where each power does exactly one thing that is then applied in various ways. It's a feature not a bug.
Well, there's two schools of thought about magic systems.
On the one hand, you have systems like Tolkien and Martin have. There might be a system there, but it's hidden from the reader except in fleeting glimpses. For example, with Tolkien we see runes and words of power being used from time to time, items of power being created, etc, but very little overt magic. A similar thing applies with Martin. Blood sacrifice gets results, sometimes, and magic is something that's difficult to scrape up and put to use, with no rules written down anywhere.
On the other hand, you have Sanderson creating a world where magic is strongly defined, with firm rules that anyone can fully understand by just reading the book. Butcher is in a similar boat, though his system in the Dresden Files is really a set of different systems, each operating by different rules, some of which haven't been explained.
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
why do people even care so much about genre labels? honestly now. it's not like they're terribly important beyond helping the book end up in the right aisle at the bookstore, or on the right recommended books list on amazon. if you want to engage in any kind of evaluation of quality, or assessment of literary genealogy, or critical work within the text, you're obviously going to have to go a lot deeper than whatever genre label is being applied.
I'm by no means a literary critic, but I think the discussion is mostly about how the fantasy genre label is used as a derogatory term and the concept that fantasy writing is by its very nature "not good literature."
To me it seems elitist and stupid to say that "because something fits into genre X it is immediately escapist crap and not worth serious consideration."
No, I am not really communist. Yes, it is weird that I use this name.
Posts
I thought it was clear from context that I have. I should have been clear. I have read all of Borges, Marquez, Allende, Calvino, Murakami, Yoshimoto, I think.
Who else might count? John Fowles? Angela Carter? Kafka? Rushdie? Joanne Harris? Jonathon Carroll? Sherman Alexie? Toni Morrison? Kafka? Eco? John Crowley? Atwood? Le Guin?
Read all or most of their work too.
I just don't want to get all lit-peen about it.
There was a link to Grossman's 10 best novels 2000 to 2009....and I've read only four of them and not even heard of several. The fuck.;o/
Edit: Good to see that his editorials are better than his novels! :P
At the time she gave it to me it was super depressing because I thought she was saying she'd never return my feelings and I should just go buy a blue jacket and off myself. Turns out her thought process was more along the lines of "hey, he reads German, and this is a great book originally written in German!".
It's excellent to sit down to read something that isn't a technical manual for once.
It's always funny how guys that can be amazing at explaining why a novel is good are then still terrible at making a good novel.
And vice versa, sometimes listening to authors dissect writing makes them sound like morons, even though you know they're capable of it themselves!
I have also started The Name Of The Rose and Earth Abides. Earth Abides seems a little too much like boy scout glorification, and being a quarter of the way through it, it seems very much a product of its time -- very 1940s, and it seems to have an odd eugenics undertone at this point.
One of my friends just recommended Rosemary and Rue (October Daye series) by Seanan McGuire and it turned out to be one of these horrible cliches. I made it 60% through before I had to put the book down because I wanted to vomit at the terrible plot.
"Look I just got shot twice, poisoned, and feel just about dead but I'm totally up for some sex right now with this dreeaaammmmy guy" *huuuuuaaaaggggghhhhhh*
The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams
Across the Face of the World by Russel Kirkpatrick
Haven't read the followup yet, but The Magicians was very good.
"Turned out to be"? Man, just a glance at that cover should have told you what kind of book it was, not even looking at the blurb.
But yeah, "Urban Fantasy" is often mislabled Paranormal Romance. It's like Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfic for the most part.
And how are Borges, Marquez, Allende, Calvino, Murakami, Yoshimoto anything like Martin, Sanderson, Tolkien, Hobb, etc, other than "it's not exactly the real world"?
And I'm don't mean anything like "these guys are good and the others are crap". It's just that what Marquez goals and form and the way he strays from realism are not at all like what Martin does.
Of course, if the only relevant factor for a label is "realistic/not realistic" then yeah, they're all the same. But from a "school of thought/execution" PoV, they're nothing alike.
And neither are a bunch of things within fantasy/sci-fi.
Fantasy, or speculative fiction if you prefer, is a very wide label.
I think that what Marquez 'does' with his work is very difficult to talk about. And not relevant. You say there is an entire genre there, within which each of his works is only one example. This writer is not like those others. So what?
Of course your examples are different. I mentioned cherry-picking earlier. Though i would argue that Martin's reent work is an assault on genre conventions and the nostalgic politics that characterise the genre, and is actually tremendously deep. I agree that general labels such as 'thoughtful', 'original', 'existentialist', 'deep' and more are all applicable to those called 'magical realism' and not to your examples of fantasy. But those are all positives, shades of intellectuality. Writers such as Hal Duncan, Gene Wolfe, Ursula K Le Guin, China Mieville, Susanna Clarke, Philip K Dick, William Gibson, Kurt Vonnegut and many others take their F&SF thoughtfully, and I think if you are unaware of them you have some reading to do before you claim to have an informed opinion. And if you are, as I believe, aware of their work, you have very good rhetorical reasons for using hacks like Sanderson in your examples instead of someone like Cormac McCarthy or David Mitchell.
The absolute most I could grant you is something like 'magical realism is fantasy set in a reality that seems to be the real world'. I'll buy that. A sub-genre, sure. Of Fantasy. But I guess you wouldn't want to include Charlaine Harris in Magical Realism, because she's not as intellectual as Murakami Haruki.
Marquez is a product of a completely different branch of writing and writers, completely different environment, influences, national politics, cultural background and I'm pretty sure he never read any works that I'd call Fantasy.
This doesn't mean he and his books are necessarily superior or more relevant than Wolfe or Martin or Vonnegut or Rothfuss or Bradbury. But his body of work exists in a completely different context, ecosystem, structure, moment, literary movement, political forces at work in his place and time... And he developed that work without sharing a lineage with those other writers. I'd guess the two branches were forked somewhere around Edgar Allan Poe, which had influence on Borges, who, in turn, probably influenced Marquez. But I'm pretty sure Tolkien, the milestone for contemporary anglophone fantasy, is out of that genus. Martin does a kick as job of fighting Tolkienian tropes, and I love his books, but he exists, as his writing, within the context of Tolkien.
The ONE SINGLE connection between all of them is "NOT BEING 100% REALISTIC". And that is an extremely flimsy way to develop a taxonomy, an ontological view of each book. You're stretching genres to a point in which they become useless and meaningless. It's like saying bats and flys and sparrows are the same kind of being because they all have wings. Nevermind every other thing about them.
The label Latin American Magical Realism, as used by literary scholars, critics, journalists, editors and readers (and not without some controversy), has a degree of granularity and context that goes far beyond just "KINDA REAL BUT NOT REALLY". We can debate if the label is limiting or if it has other shortcomings, and even repudiate it completely after such conversation. That's not a problem.
But bunching up every single "NOT REALLY REALISTIC" book on a single basket is not something that helps anyone talk about books. You're free to draw your lines anywhere you like, and make your personal cartography of pages, but that doesn't make every book caught between your boundaries connected in any meaningful way. Sure, I can concede that they're all Fantasy, but that doesn't say much about any of them.
The whole argument is based on snobbery, exclusionary prejudice and wilful ignorance by an increasingly irrelevant, self-regarding, shrinking clique. "Modernist" fiction needs to sit the fuck down and accept that it's just another genre, if we're going to define literature by genres. It's not the most popular, it's not the most representative, it's not the most exciting, and if it once had all the best writers, it sure doesn't any more. The best writers IMO are those who are discretely ignoring the restrictions of the "modernist" genre. Will Self doesn't call himself a "Fantasy/SF" writer, but of course he bloody is. He's a F/SF writer who writes with a Modernist prose style. But because he has the right friends and the right writing style and can get reviewed in the right journals, his books get put into the "real books" section, away from all those dirty "genre" books.
Just as an aside, this is possibly the weirdest set of five authors to lump together I've ever run into in the wild. If you're going to discuss literary contexts and authorial traditions there's at least 4 in that set of 5 people.
That's kind of the point. A hugely hetrogenous set of authors who are all "genre".
Need to pick up Dance with Dragons tonight, though the only copies I've seen so far were hard-cover. I hope that's not the only edition in print.
This friend usually recommends great books and this is the first one she has recommended that sucked.
Oh, I'm definitely not debating my point within the whole "Genre vs real Literature" thing. I'm approaching this whole dialogue from a taxonomy point of view. I guess we're all clashing on the difference between literary GENRE such as Fantasy, Romance, Memoir, Thriller etc., and "school" or "movement" (I don't know how do you guys call it in english and I'm too tired to look up), such as 19th century Romantism, early 20th Realism, Modernism, etc. Fantasy is a genre, Latin American Magical Realism is a school. So yeah.
Anyways, coming back to the "Genre vs. Literature" thing... I don't know, from my personal point of view, I'd say most genre authors are indeed "just" creating nice stories: they offer us big imagination, nice plots and nice stories, captivating characters, crowning moments of awesome, poor to average to decent prose, an overall focus on the content with the form as a second-level concern. There is nothing wrong with that, and I love many authors that fall squarely within those boundaries. They have provided me with many strong emotional moments. Brian Sanderson, Isaac Asimov, Rothfuss, The Black Company books I so loved to translate, and so many others.
Also, most literary authors (that I have read) have something that, from a literary context, makes some sort of contribution, be it an advancement or a denial of some literary paradigm or another. They have a strong focus on form, prose, symbolism, and often their books are very hard to read, challenging and even torturous. Many of them are just a bad experience. But when something like that clicks with me, like when I read certain passages by Nabokov, or Herman Melville, or Philip Roth or Marquez or Borges or Eco or Llosa... Well, the feeling of meeting something really sublime is overwhelming.
... But there are those who most definitely muddle up the whole thing, and take a big crap on that divide. Gene Wolfe, for sure, China Mieville, I'd also say, some aspects of Martin's work. And a fuckton of others I can't remember right now. They're just threading a different path.
It doesn't mean that any given reader should be obligated to like Literature more than Genre or the other way around. I feel no need to brave Pynchon's tomes, even though I recognize his relevance, and I also have the strongest lazyness when I consider reading Wheel of Time.
This is just how those things have coalesced within my relationship with books and reading. I don't presume to convert anyone to this view, but I definitely will not agree that there is no difference between anything and everything is the same because all books are equally worthy blah blah blah. I just feel that some people make cool stories, others make great writing, and a few do both.
I think you would really benefit from reading the Lev Grossman piece linked earlier.
If nothing else, because even though you try really hard to be neutral, your bias is still peaking through as you call plotting not a part of the literary paradigm. Which is really pretty ridiculous.
But does reflect mimetic fiction/capital L literature/whatever the hell you wanna call it's obsession with prose over plot.
PS - if you suggest that the scale goes from "poor to average to decent prose", I would suggest you are either under-read or out of your mind.
I'd much rather read something by a "hack" like Sanderson that tries to come up with something new. Marquez, Murakami etc. are interesting because they do such focused riffs and aren't circlejerking on classic tropes.
And, yeah, I forgot to mention that plotting and characterization hundreds of other elements are major factors in many writers' work regardless of the label. That was an important omission. The L thing might be attributed to laziness and tiredness and a strange tendency to go all German on substantives. You can dissect every minor detail as some sort of clue to a flaw I'm trying to hide, but that would be kinda overreading.
And of course, all those people I mentioned in that paragraph were actually authors whose prose I consider exceptional. I was talking about the mythical "average" writer, but then I started digressing.
My post had several flaws in its composition, Mea Culpa. I still believe there are levels of literaryness, which frequently are not proportional to my level of enjoyment, or to how much I like an author.
Sanderson is really cool, BTW, and I'm seriously thinking about publishing him. But I wouldn't mention him as an example of someone who does that many new things, other than systems like Allomancy and Ferruchemy (I only read Mistborn so far). He is more like the very model of the competent fantasy writer. I would use Mieville or Wolfe for that picture. And I cannot publish them, because they're actually "too brainy" and too "hard to read" for the local average reader. A sad fact that tells us more about the average reader than about the authors themselves.
He does, but the info he dumps is usually fairly clever, or at least unusual. Info-dumps on tired, derivative mythologies and pseudo-15th-Century-European lineages and the like are fucking awful to read. Sanderson explaining his apparently well thought out and lovingly crafted but weird univereses and systems of magic is usually tolerable. It would be nice if he could mix it up on occasion, though, or do something more character driven and less as an exploration of the world he's built.
I read an interview with him once where he talked about the process he went through in writing the first Mistborn book. The setting was locked in from the first but he completely changed the plot and swapped out central characters a few times. I think that's fairly indicative of his style: he's there, first and foremost, to tell you about this world he made up. The people moving around in it are kind of secondary. Luckily he has a light and fast enough writing style outside of the infodumps that it doesn't become unreadable.
I personally use the term "magical realism" to denote when the fantastical is used as if it were mundane. In most other fantasy genres, the fantastical is explicitly fantastic. I don't hold far-future sci-fi as magical realism because often authors will write about something fantastic as if it were mundane in order to hint at a deeper literary purpose -- such as Wolfe using the various hints and comments in the Book of the New Sun to indicate that we are far in the future and that there is much more beneath the surface of the story than what is told to us.
Magical Realism just has stuff happen to indicate that it's magical, but not extraordinary. That's all. The audience isn't left guessing because there's nothing to guess. Dude's ghost doesn't hang around because of some reason; it just does. People don't have some flying carpet powers -- they just use them because that's what they have. At least, that's how I've always understood the term.
Only you cannot go around saying "Shit son, early 20th Century impressionism is just graffitti because they're both things you do with paint and there ain't no difference, and I will call you a snob if you disagree because words" like people who are not you did.
That's my stance on this whole thingamabob.
So, I read this quaint book called Machine Man by Max Barry and it's some sort of internet wrote book and it's kinda cool but nothing really amazing.
Look, the first Dresden was the best one. Then it basically became 'fat DnD geek wish fulfillment' in the same way that the first Anita Blake was the best one, then it became 'oh, my God, burn it'-wish fulfillment.
TlDR; the Dresden books are rubbish, so are the Anita Blake books. In each their way, yes, but rubbish.
Whaaaaaaaaaat
Mistborn wasn't bad, but the infodump first fight scene became terribly predictable after a certain point, even if I know why it was there. Even later in the books, he has a really terrible tendency to always want to tell you exactly why, rather then setting the ground rules and just telling you what happens and you are smart enough to know the how. Kinda fits with his obsession with world building really.
Way of Kings was where it really started to grate though. Every fight scene with what's-his-monk in those interludes was terribly written and infodumping in the worst way. Then again, Way of Kings was really not a very good effort, even for him.
I'll see what comments are on part 2, but Way of Kings seemed to really hammer home that he isn't really venturing far from his rather specific formula.
The whole point of the magic systems by and large is that they are logical constructions with solid rules. As such how they function needs to be explained. Allomancy and Ferulchemy in particular are systems where each power does exactly one thing that is then applied in various ways. It's a feature not a bug.
Having read a few of them, I thought they were like that from the very start! Especially with an emphasis on the wish fulfillment part. Though my memory's a bit hazy on what happened in which book so you might be right.
Though it's kinda my experience with the "urban fantasy" genre as a whole. I don't hate the idea behind the genre but I hate the stuff in it that I've read!
Well, there's two schools of thought about magic systems.
On the one hand, you have systems like Tolkien and Martin have. There might be a system there, but it's hidden from the reader except in fleeting glimpses. For example, with Tolkien we see runes and words of power being used from time to time, items of power being created, etc, but very little overt magic. A similar thing applies with Martin. Blood sacrifice gets results, sometimes, and magic is something that's difficult to scrape up and put to use, with no rules written down anywhere.
On the other hand, you have Sanderson creating a world where magic is strongly defined, with firm rules that anyone can fully understand by just reading the book. Butcher is in a similar boat, though his system in the Dresden Files is really a set of different systems, each operating by different rules, some of which haven't been explained.
I'm by no means a literary critic, but I think the discussion is mostly about how the fantasy genre label is used as a derogatory term and the concept that fantasy writing is by its very nature "not good literature."
To me it seems elitist and stupid to say that "because something fits into genre X it is immediately escapist crap and not worth serious consideration."