Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2267178" data-attributes="member: 4937">"It doesn't make much sense for low fantasy though - REH (Conan) or Leiber (Fafhrd/Mouser) though. Or Vance (Dying Earth), or even Gene Wolfe (Book of the New Sun)."Conan and Fafhrd simply offer different definitions of what is heroic than the Judeo-Christian tradition, but that doesn't mean that Conan and Fafhrd aren't heroic examples.  In fact, Conan and Fafhrd are the same sort of characters as Theseus and Oddyseus - both of whom are explicitly within the story moral models despite the fact that we (from our moral perspectives) might find thier treachery less than virtuous.  There are several different ways that one can define 'virtue'.  One of the classic ways to do it is through a narrative.  Conan, Fafhrd, and (for example) The Count du Monte Cristo and John Carter are all classic boy heroes designed to enstill in boys a certain admiration for thier courage, perserverance, cunning, and other classic 'warrior virtues'.  Sometimes this is explicitly the goal (it certainly is with ERB's John Carter and Tarzan), and sometimes this is merely a side effect of writing a story which appeals to those 'boyish virtues'.  In fact, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser in particular are interesting because there are points in the stories where Fafhrd seems to be on the verge of moral revelation but never quite completes the thoughts that reader reading the story can make.  I've only read one Vance story and I don't remember much of it, but I wouldn't be surprised to find the same true about Vance.And Gene Wolfe only appears to be a work of low fantasy, and is only fantasy in part (at the least).  I generally classify Book of the New Sun as science fiction.  Book of the New Sun is an extremely complex work, and its hard to summerize it.  Once you begin carving away the settings trappings, he is in fact explicitly science fiction, and one the questions he's most concerned with in Book of the New Sun is what is the nature of identity.  Another question he is interested in is how myth shapes the human experience, how stories become myths, and the relationship of telling stories to being human.  These are very much the concerns of alot of science fiction stories, and not the primary concerns of a fantasy story.  You are not generally going to see a fantasy in which the storyteller weaves the greek myth of Theseus, with the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac, and with a short story by Ray Bradbury for the purpose of talking about how stories shape culture, nor does the typical fantasy retale the Appollo moon landing in mythic terms with a robot who remembers the actually history commenting on how the stories differ from the truth.</blockquote>

Verification