The current state of fantasy literature

[jester47]

A word about King- he is more (IMO) a suspense writer. I personally think he is at his best when he is not writing about the supernatural. Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption comes to mind.

About the three musketeers- The Count of Monte Cristo is not about them. It is a self contained story. The books of the Three Musketeers are:

The Three Musketeers, Ten Years Later, Twenty Years After. The man in the iron mask is part of Twenty Years After.

I think a stand alone novel is one where a person can pick it up, read it, and not have key story elements in another physical book. Thus you can have several stand alone novels about discworld. Another good example are the Chronicles of Narnia. Each one (with one or two exceptions) works great as a stand alone novel. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is really great. Gemmel is another good example. Also, think of the number of series that have been coming out lately IN ONE VOLUME. Dying Earth, Lots of the TSR/WotC stuff, Eddings, Brooks, LotR etc. Essentially, the idea is resurfacing that one story = one book.

To find out what works best for Fantasy, lets take a look at other types of Genre fiction. Most notably Mystery and Western. Horror too. The statementwas made that Horror works best as a short story. We have Dracula, Lovecrafts 2 novels, and some stuff king wrote as greatexamples of Horror novels. We get the same with Macarthy, McMurtry and L'Amor in Westerns. Westerns are having a hard time right now.

Hold on a sec-

If you read one thing outside the genre of fantasy For Gods Sake Pick Up Louie L'Amor's "The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour : The Frontier Stories: Volume One" These are some of the best short stories I have ever read and the writing is descriptive, effective and very well done. Furthermore, it is susinct.

Ok, back at it-

Mystery, the largest selling genre in the US does not have huge long serials. And yet the genre was hugely developed by Arthur Conan Doyle (another greatly underrated author BTW) with Sherlock holmes. Mystery works as novels, short stories (less so) and among those we have Self contained novels that reuse regular characters (the world being our own). Hillerman, Christie, Braun, all come to mind. Where horror lacks in novels, Mystery makes up and where mystery lacks in short stories, horror makes up. Westerns follow the same pattern. Fantasy is the only one where we see the Jordanology really taking hold. And in truth this is an anaomoly. A more successful model is the one shared by Robert E. Howard, Agatha Christie, Fritz Leiber, Terry Pratchet, David Gemmel, Loius L'Amour and H.P. Lovecraft (did occasionally reuse characters and he had an over riding theme in all his stories).

The model looks like this: There is somthing that runs through all the books. Be that a world, a character, a concept, a combination of two or all three. Each story is contained within one book. Shortstories abound. For Agatha Christie, its Marples. Pratchett its discworld. For Lovecraft its the Cthulu mythos.

Thats all.

Aaron.

 

[nikolai]

I have come to loathe serial (as in series of books) fantasy. I have not read any Jordan, or Martin however I do have plans to try- that way I can dis them all the better. But since I have not read them, I cant really say anything at this juncture.

I also hate big long fantasy novels that are not self contained. I am of the firm belief that the better writer can WRITE LESS and get MORE STORY into the book than the others.

I'm willing to excuse Martin. I think what he's doing is interesting and narratively clever. There's a definite series arc, each book has a clear story arc and each chapter also has a clear progression. I'm not opposed to all serial fantasy, just it's dominance and I think Martin does it better than anyone else.

I agree that serials are just too common. I'm not sure that their dominance is totally due to popular demand; if Pratchett can do stand alone books that also work as a set, why can't others. Part of the reason may be that quests to save the world can only be done once, so you may as well drag it out.

 

[WizarDru]

I'd argue that, actually. I want more standalone fantasy books. I want a lot more good standalone fantasy books. If I could find them, I'd buy them.

But because 90%* of everything I find on the shelf these days is book 12 of 274, I don't buy. I've bought fewer fantasy novels in the past five years then I did during some single years in high school or college, because I refuse to buy a fantasy novel unless it:

A) Stands alone (or at least stands somewhat alone, such as most of Brust's "Taltos" books), or...

B) The series of which it is a part is fully complete and published.

Sometimes, I'm not in the mood for a 2,000 word opus. Sometimes I just want to read a book.

(* This number is an estimate based on my own experience. I don't pretend to have any factual data to back it up.)

Ari, did you mean 2000 PAGE opus, there?

Anyhow, I'm not saying that people don't want standalone books. I do, too. What I'm saying is that they just plain don't sell as well, and really haven't for a long time, in the narrow S&S sub-genre of Fantasy. I think one thing that's occured is the assumption that if a story spans several books, it must be good, since it must be popular. For example, when I picked up the first volume of "Age of Unreason", I knew that it would have several books to it, and that obviously someone had a good deal of faith in it.

I tend to wait until a series has several books out, as well. But what I've seen happen is that a new book in a series will come out, and someone who's interested in it will pick it and it's predecesors up, simulataneously. A standalone book doesn't generate those kind of spontaneous sales with each new release.

But really, what we're discussing here is the emphasis on novels that aren't self-contained. When I picked up one of Saberhagen's Book of Swords, I knew each was self-contained. If I skipped a book, I would have missed some of the movement of the meta-plot, but each book, for the most part, could exist whole unto itself. The beginning of the book might have some quick summaries for new readers, but then we're off. (quick aside: one of my favorite Swords & Sorcery trilogies is Saberhagen's Empire of the East (1968-1973) which is still mostly self-contained, and Saberhagen's terse, succint style is a direct counter to Jordan's verbose prose).

Unfortunately, most new series don't do this. I wasn't joking about needing to review a FAQ file to try and remember what had gone before with Jordan. More importantly, Jordan has so many viewpoint characters (most of whom don't actually contribute to the narrative significantly enough) and so much going on , I think even he's lost track. There are no significant 'jump-on' points for such books, and that acts, as Ari says, as a significant turn-off to picking up the material.

I can count on one hand the number of fantasy novels that I've purchased in the last three years or so.

Let me think: All 3 GRRM "Song of Ice and Fire" Books. Jordan's "Crossroads of Twilight".

....


Well, if you count the Harry Potter books and Keyes' "Empire of Unreason", both of which I would consider fantasy, but not D&D-esque fantasy, then that would increase the number, somewhat.

I tried Gemmel...but I was put off by his prose style, somehow. I may try Legend again (which I got for free at Worldcon a few years back), but it just didn't click with me, somehow.

 

[Desdichado]

Speaking of Harry Potter, that's a good example of standalone, yet also serialized novels. If I were to write fantasy novels (not likely, but it'd be fun, assuming I had the talent and the craft to pull it off) that's how I'd do it.

 

[RiggsWolfe]

I really think alot of this debate boils down to two different types of readers. Readers who do so for some kind of intellectual stimulation and those who do it for enjoyment.

I belong to the second type. I will read any book I enjoy. If I enjoy it enough I will read it more than once. I have my preferences of course. Terry Brooks bores me for instance. I found Thomas Covenant hard to struggle through and depressing. I was frustrated with some of the writing in the Lord of the Rings. I find most "classics" utterly boring and hard to read, though I appreciate the underlying themes of books such as A Tale of Two Cities. Give me a good Runelords or Honor Harrington anyday.

I used to work with this guy who would give me these long lectures about how Hemingway would move him to moments of awe and intellectual bliss. This came about when I asked him if he enjoyed the DaVinci Code by Dan Brown. He sort of curled his lip and told me it was ok for the masses but not good literature. During this entire monologue I was basically feeling sorry for the poor man. Somewhere along the way he lost track of reading for pleasure and turned it into some kind of critical journey.

I'll be honest, the Fifth Sorceress sounds kind of interesting to me. Sounds like the guy decided to take a chance and not write a politically correct fantasy novel. I may pay my $8 and see. I read the reviews on Amazon.com and my big thought was "I bet if it was the Wizards who were evil and the Sorceresses were the pure heroes these people would be raving about this book."

I should say, I read the website that was part of the subject of this post and it made me sick. Nothing but a bunch of judgemental tripe. Just another person who has decided his opinion has more intrinsic value than others.

 

[ShadowDenizen]

have no problem saying that the best book I've ever read was Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hunded Years of Solitude, but also that my favorite book I've ever read was Watership Down. I can distinguish between personal appeal and quality. Can you?

I actually prefer "Love in the Time of Cholera" to "One Hundred Years of Solitude", but that's neither here nor there.
To chime in, though, "Doctor Zhivago" (or perhaps "Death in Venice") is the best book I've ever read, while Janny Wurts' "War of Light and Shadow" are my favorite book(s).

With that said, due to he new "coolness" of JRRT, there's lots of great fantasy currently out there being published, such as Tad Williams, Laura Resnick, etc. (Of course, YMMV.)

Unfortuantely, though many current writers fall into the "Let's Drag it out forever" camp (Jordan, Brooks, Goodkind, et al.)

Personally, I've atually recently returned to the "roots" of fantasy, and re-read "Gormenghast", the "Gray Mouser" series, the "Elric of Melnibone" saga, "The Lord of the Rings", and "the Coming of Conan" (a reprint of the first 13 Conan adventures published.), and found myself pleasantly surprised at how well they stand the test of time: not only that, it also renewed my love of the fantasy genre.

Why? Because it's popular, and people who like the "genre" enough will buy anything, regardless of quality. I bought the ENTIRE New Jedi Order series of Star Wars books over the past few years, despite the fact that I vehemently despised what the series did to what was (for me) a beloved mythology. They fill my bookshelf, but I can only point to the Stackpole and Allston books in the series as ones that I actually enjoyed. I bought them because I love Star Wars, and I felt some NEED to stay abreast of what was happening in the genre-within-a-genre.

That's a blatant generalization. There are plenty of people out there (like me) who are discerning readers, even in the element of their fandom. I am rabid Buffy-phile, but I feel no compunction to go out and but every Buffy novel out there. Indeed some of the novel's I have read (like "The Book of Fours") are complete garbage. And, as an aside, I actually liked the "New Jedi Order" series.

In Jordon's Wheel of Time series every time Rand uses the Source we have to have this long expository clump explaining how he is feeling and what he is doing. While inner exploration of a character is crucial to good fiction a reader does not need to know exactly how a character is feeling everytime he does the same repetitive action.

That actually doesn't bother me as much as his tendency to describe things in excruciatingly boring detail. I don't really need to read three pages on "how green Nynaeve's dress was" (or whatever.)

 

[Desdichado]

I should say, I read the website that was part of the subject of this post and it made me sick. Nothing but a bunch of judgemental tripe. Just another person who has decided his opinion has more intrinsic value than others.

Oh, I dunno. That's one of the good(?) things about the Internet, it gives a potential audience to anyone who wants to spout off about any subject. That doesn't mean he thinks his opinion is better than anyone else's, merely that he has a strong opinion.

I think you've also hit a crucial point. I like some of the "classics" of the genre, but have little interest in pursuing some others. I have a really good friend who considers R.A. Salvatore to be an incredibly talented writer (which, I guess, from a certain point of view I can't argue with), and I read and enjoy plenty of things that don't have the kind of "intrinsic" value that some seem to want to require. I read books that entertain me. It helps that I'm entertained by a lot of history, biography, astrophysics, etc. as well.

In my case, I've somehow found it very difficult to read anymore. I've probably just got too much going on in my life; four kids, will do that to you I suppose. So I've become very picky. Books that don't just reach up, grab me by the throat and demand that I finish them tend to not get read, unfortunately. When I was younger I read mediocre books by the truckload and didn't really think twice about it.

 

[mmadsen]

I really think alot of this debate boils down to two different types of readers. Readers who do so for some kind of intellectual stimulation and those who do it for enjoyment.

I believe you've drawn a false dichotomy.

I find most "classics" utterly boring and hard to read...

If you find pulp swords & sorcery "classics" like Robert E. Howard's Conan stories "utterly boring and hard to read," something's wrong.

 

[buzz]

In my case, I've somehow found it very difficult to read anymore. I've probably just got too much going on in my life; four kids, will do that to you I suppose. So I've become very picky. Books that don't just reach up, grab me by the throat and demand that I finish them tend to not get read, unfortunately. When I was younger I read mediocre books by the truckload and didn't really think twice about it.

I've found myself in this situation as well. My free time is so precious to me now that I have a hard time committing to anything (reading, gaming, music, social activities, movies, TV) that doesn't absolutely knock my socks off. In turn, this has me focused more on exploring classics of various genres than taking chances on new things that haven't been reccomended to me by what I consider extremely reliable sources. Ergo, I haven't browsed for fantasy or SF books in years (or, for that matter, CD stores or movie theaters).

I suppose this could be a bad thing, actually. Still, there's no harm in being discering; given the massive book-o-plexes, cineramas, and 500 channels of satellite TV, it's become a necessary skill.

 

[Mallus]

This all has nothing to do with 'high art' vs. 'low art', 'intellectual' vs. 'popular'. People read for all kinds of reasons, and derive all kinds of different pleasures from the books they read. Its possible to go from Borges and Nabokov one week to King and Clancy [well, not me...] the next. Different kinds of writing, different pleasures.