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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 2928495" data-attributes="member: 812">I like Steven Brust's books. And Steven Erikson's, too. Robert E. Howard writes a kickin' story. So does Fritz Leiber. J.R.R.Tolkien is a friggin' genius.But the rest of them... meh. There's a few I've left out, but let's face it, most fantasy is CRAP. It's piss-poor writing, weak ideas inflated beyond their ability to support and a general lack of anything interesting to say. Even the writers I've listed above have at least as many misses as they have hits.It's tempting to blame genre classification. It's tempting to blame raving fanboys who won't allow change (since that's perceived as criticism, and nothing is more insecure than a raving fanboy).But the truth is most fantasy writers SUCK. Most fantasy isn't worth the paper it's printed on. It's simple economics. Fantasy has been immensely popular for a good long while, which has predictably resulted in all sorts of crap flooding the market (since any yahoo with a sword can sell a few thousand copies). All that crap will wear away at the genre's popularity and fewer people will publish it, and fewer people will write it, and the market will self-select and a higher percentage of the material will actually be worth reading.Worrying about genre definitions is a fruitless exercise that only frustrates people. When somebody says "Eberron's not fantasy so I hate it!" just parse that statement as "I hate Eberron!" get to what aspects of the setting they dislike, if you're interested. Trying to convince them that they're wrong to define it as "not-fantasy" is like teaching Mr. Long's pigs to sing -- frustrating for you, annoying for them.Steven Brust writes a great fantasy novel. Even if they're urban detective stories with teleportation, bureaucracy and rapiers.</blockquote>

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