Hello Everyone:
First off good discussion. I have to agree with the post made by mmmadsen about perhaps feeling old before my time. I'm thirty years old, and I have been reading speculative fiction for a significant portion of my life. I have a degree in creative writing and have studied genre literature however, it was not until the early 90's that I read and became more familiar with the classic authors of fantasy and speculative fiction, in particularly, sword and sorcery literature. I am referring to people such as my favorite author Robert E. Howard (considered the father of the sword and sorcery genre and whom preceded Tolkien), Fritz Leiber (who I believe may have been the first person to coin the term sword and sorcery), A. Merritt, Edgar Rice Burroughs, etc. Since, I read the books of these authors my reading of more modern fantasy has decreased dramatically.
I went from reading say 2-3 fantasy novels a month from authors like David Eddings, the various TSR novels, and others to spending my time in used bookstores searching for works of older writers of speculative fiction, whose works were penned from primarily the 1930's-1970's. I like the writings of Karl Edward Wagner, Charles R. Saunders (I love the Imaro series of books), Gardner F. Fox's Kothar and Kyrik series, Clark Ashton Smith, H. Rider Haggard, Lord Dunsany, Micheal Moorcock, and other old school authors. I even like the works of Lin Carter, even if he is considered by many people just to be a rip off artist of writers like Howard and Burroughs. I thought his Callisto series was great.
There are several reasons why I find modern fantasy writings unappealing to read. First, the initial problem I have with the modern fantasy novel is that they are predominately an exercise in verbosity. If you look at the writings of the older authors their books are very brisk and tight in style without losing their narrative content, or their ability to pull the reader into the fantasy world the author has created. Robert E. Howard's Conan short stories and Micheal Moorcock's Elric novels are great examples of this. Where as modern authors tend to write long passages describing the same things ad infinum. Robert Jordan, whose series I struggled through and gave up on after I read the Path of Daggers, is a good example of this. 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.
I also find the highly moralistic characters in modern fantasy to be somewhat annoying. In the pulp era of sword & sorcery/herioc fantasy the heroes were more amoralistic in nature. They were heroic because they wanted something and someone who was more evil than them stood in their way, and in order for the neutral protagonist to acheive their objective they had to eliminate the more evil antagonist. In some cases the protagonist of older fantasy fiction could even be categorized as blatantly evil. Micheal Moorcock's Elric character, and Karl Edward Wagner's Kane character spring instantly to mind. In short the characters of classical fantasy literature were good by default as opposed to being good because they possessed an inherent sense of goodness. Again, Robert E. Howard's Conan character, as well as Fritz Leiber's two rogues Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser are excellent examples of this. While in modern fantasy if the heroes are not good because they actively seek to save the world or kingdom from some evil threat, they are good because they are good average down home people put into extraordinary situations, who later become do gooders out to save the world once the inner powers they possess have become developed ala Robert Jordan's three main characters in the Wheel of Time series. I'm truly not trying to sound cynical when I state that often when I was trudging through Jordan's Wheel of Time series and read about Perrin, Matt (the least good of the trio though still fairly innocous in his larcenies),and Rand I felt like I was reading the Dukes of Hazard put into a fantasy world. "Just a good ole boys/never meaning no harm...". Give me the larger than life, hyper-masculine, but more morally humanistic heroes of yesteryear who enjoyed whoring, fighting, drinking to fault, thieving, and acquiring personal wealth/power to the do-gooder heroes of modern fantasy anyday .
Secondly, the problem I have with modern fantasy authors is related to setting. I am African American and while I know many critics of literature accuse early fantasy novels of being racist, because of their depictions of Black and African people, such as Robert E. Howard's Conan short story the Vale of Lost Women, and ERB's Tarzan series (the greatest great white hope story of all time) I can say atleast these authors had their characters adventure in many different non-occidental based settings. For example, the majority of the Conan short stories happened in a plethora of non-occidental cultural milieus ranging from African to East Indian to Semitic/Arabic to Far Eastern. While the majority of modern fantasy stays in a traditional qausi-medieval to-qausi-renaissance setting.
The last thing that comes to mind that bothers this reader concerning modern fantasy is actually the lack of sex and sexually, as opposed to (as some people claim) the graitutous amount of sexuality found in modern fantasy. While, there are some exceptions, like the qausi-S&M and bestiality scenes in Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series, I find most modern fantasy to be completely lacking in sexuality or only displaying sexuality in an arguably perverse manner (like the aforementioned scenes found in Mr. Goodkind's work). While, I would not want a return to the sexually themes found in say the Gor series, I like my heroes to be characters who are sexually active even though I don't want sexual escapades to be the main theme of the book. An example of what I'm talking about is the latent sexuality found in the Conan books by Howard, or the sexual escapades which created so much (often hysterical) trouble for characters like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, or even the libido of epic characters from various ethnic legends such as Zeus and Hercules in Greek mythology, or Gilgamesh of Babylonian mythology. Some of you may label me a sexist, chauvinistic pig, but as a healthy heterosexual male I also greatly miss the sensual images by artist like Frank Frazetta or Boris Vallejo that use to grace the cover of myriad fantasy novels. I'll take those covers over the bland drawings of Daryll K. Sweet that graces the covers of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time and L.E. Modest's books anyday of the week.
Thank you for taking time to read this. It ended up being a bit longer than I intended, but this is a subject I'm passionate about. I think that there a good number of people out there who feel like me, and are not enjoying modern fantasy over older authors. One of the reasons I think more traditional sword & sorcery style books is not produced is because of the bias of editors. I think a great many editors, who grew up reading authors like Howard, Burroughs, etc tired of reading it in their youth, called the style of writing cliche and began searching for other styles of fantasy writings like what is present today. What I think these editors fail to realize is is that while the old school sword & sorcery style of writing may have been cliche to many of them, because it was what they grew up with in their youth (and was admittedly overdone at one point as evidenced by the number of Howard and Burroughs clones that existed) I would say this style of writing and even many of the authors I mentioned are totally alien to the average fantasy and speculative fiction reader of today, and can therefore by virtue of obscurity not be cliche. I also think a good number of editors are afraid to publish more traditional fantasy novels, because of political correctness like for example, if they publish a novel with a typical erotic Vallejo cover they are afraid they might be accused of promoting sexism by feminist who read fantasy literature.
A good example of what I'm talking about is present in the field of science-fiction. In his guide to creating a fantasy universe published by Writer's Digest books author Dr. Ben Bova states that a science-fiction audience likes books based on plausible scientific concepts, and that he receives thousands of Star Wars or Aliens type manuscripts, which as an editor he sends to the slush pile everyday. Now, while I am not a big fan of science-fiction, I am a fan of the more fantastical genre of science-fiction known as "space opera" which works like Star Wars, Aliens, the Dorsai books, etcetera falls into and this is what frequently sells in the science-fiction market place at large. Now, if I didn't like a genre of science-fiction, but everytime I looked on a bookshelf or a magazine or on the movie screen the genre I didn't like was selling out, I would re-evaluate my opinion, and be more open about publishing SOME of the materials that I didn't like. It's kind of like if I grew up on chocolate ice cream, and later on in life opened an ice cream shop and said, "Okay, since I grew up on chocolate I'm sick of chocolate so I'm only going to sell strawberry and vanilla ice cream." Yet, Joe Blow opens an ice cream parlor down the street and sells everything I sell plus chocolate and chocolate always seems to sell out. I would say to myself, "Damn! I'm really sick of chocolate, but some people seem to like it because it sells constantly so, maybe I'll keep selling the flavors I like but make chocolate available to them at my store too."
The problem is as I stated earlier the publishing companies are not doing that. They are only publishing one style/genre of fantasy. If they published and promoted more traditional style fantasy books I think the fantasy market would see an even bigger boom in sells than even that, which we have seen in the last decade or so.
Sincerely,
Essafah
P.S. The one more modern author that I found that I do really enjoy is David Gemmell. Mr. Gemmell's work in my opinion combines the brutal, barbaric, amoral, low (but still extremely offensively powerful) magic, and dark world of authors like Robert E. Howard with the epic world building present today. His characters are larger than life, masculine, but still very human and often have the same fatalistic aura as Howard's heroes. Indeed, unlike Howard Mr. Gemmell frequently kills off his heroes, and while his books while they can be read as series are each written as stand alone novels dependent of other novels in their relative series. If anyone has not Mr. Gemmell's work I would highly recommend them to do so. Also, if anyone (who is a fan of old school sword & sorcery/herioc fantasy) knows of any modern authors they have read whose style you think I might like please let me know.
