Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 982234" data-attributes="member: 3887">I'd just like to say there's nothing inherently wrong with wanting "a warm hand rubbing your tummy" every now and then...<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Just as with comfort foods, sometimes you want a comfort book. A completely unchallenging reading experience that conforms to every genre convention the readers expected. And as with comfort foods --say Twinkies, or Haagen Dass Coffee ice cream-- they're fine so long they aren't a staple of your diet. I love Mieville's writing, and I admire his vitriol, but I think he has to come to grips with the fact that fantasy fiction has been labelled escapist fare, and not without reason, and its as much the reading audiences fault as the writers --well, and the publishing people who balk at putting out a book without a clearly defined target market.I've often wondered how much fantasy fiction can shake the image that its the literary equivalent of Hostess products, if at all. To what degree do fans of the genre demand the very same qualities that disqualify fantasy as literature? A number of people on this board --and I'm not criticizing here-- find Martin's Song of Ice and Fire unenjoyable, basically for being an epic fantsay that's closer to real history; ie brutal, graphically violent, morally ambiguous, and populated by folks you wouldn't want to brunch with. Or that dislike Donaldson's Covenant, who is just too far removed from the heroic --or Romantic-- archetype, and isn't clearly redeemed or redeemable throught the course of six long books.SF shook the stigma of being junk literature --mostly, though its still considered to be a literature of Big Ideas, Bad Execution, no matter how many writers of Gibson's caliber it produces. Can fantasy do the same? Or properly, how many want fantasy to do the same?I can't decide myself if Mieville represents a new movement within fantasy fiction, or he's just a cranky exception that proves the rule... And how many genre strechting/breaking/daring fantasy writers are writing today... I just tried to make a list and couldn't get to one...</blockquote>

Verification