Valiant and the Tolkien-bashers
As part of my ongoing campaign to read all of next year's Locus Recommended Books before they release the list, I finished reading Holly Black's Valiant today.
I really enjoyed it - it's as dark and gritty as YA can possibly get before being banned in schools, I think (although I reckon this would be banned in a few - homeless kids shooting up faery glamour with shared needles is pretty damned gritty) but it's such a narratively pleasing book.
The heroine, Val, is given a pretty strong reason to run away from home and into a dark, deadly world. The plot is clever and precise, with few (f any) wasted scenes and characters. The romance is unconventional. The story is complete (hallelujah!) - it may well have sequels, but doesn't need them. It's a satisfying read, and I love that the main character is believably gutsy and valiant.
It belongs to the same "school" of fantasy as Scott Westerfeld's Midnighters (and probably his other YA fantasies such as Peeps which I haven't read yet) and Justine Larbalestier's Magic or Madness, a lot of Kelly Link's short stories and just about anything by Nina Kiriki Hoffman - which reveal a magical layer to our modern world. Nothing new, I know, but there's been a spate of excellent fantasy fiction along these lines lately.
I was thinking about this as I read an interview with Neil Gaiman and Susanna Clarke. They're both witty and interesting as they try to isolate what their books have in common, and whether this has anything to do with an innate Englishness in their fantasy (more on this later). But what really struck me was the overal tone of the interviewer, who is so busy telling Neil and Susanna how brilliant they are (which, let's face it, they are) that she stomps all over the fantasy genre to do so.
Questions/comments like:
"Both of you have very distinctive approaches to writing fiction with fantastic elements, so much so that I almost hesitate to call it fantasy, because by now the term is one many people associate with faux-medieval epics."
"What about all the association with all those Tolkien imitators?"
"Still, you wind up being lumped with it because of the genre label."
This annoys the hell out of me. Yes, there's some crap fantasy out there (okay, a lot) which rips off Tolkien or, as Neil Gaiman phrased it, "somebody's impression of what they liked about Tolkien, combined with what they enjoyed about playing Dungeons and Dragons as a high schooler." And yes, there's some excellent fantasy fiction out there right now that is a) set in a version of our world in which magic exists and b) is not at all Tolkieny.
BUT
Not all otherworld fantasy is a) inspired by D&D or b) a Tolkien rip off. And I'm sick to the back teeth of people both saying and implying that this is so.
There's some great our-world fantasy out at the moment. But there's also books by Patricia McKillip, Lois McMaster Bujold, Terry Pratchett, Tamora Pierce, Jacqueline Carey, Anne Bishop and a whole lot of others who use otherworlds to great effect.
Comments like:
"Gaiman and Clarke write in an imaginative tradition that, as they see it, goes back centuries, although the "fantasy" label now affixed to it is a recent development. It's not always a comfortable fit when so many readers associate the genre with pallid Tolkien derivatives."
just perpetuate this idea of otherworld fantasy being a trashy elf-fest. This is common when people not familiar with fantasy or SF as readers put together journalism on famous SF/fantasy writers. Like JK Rowling in a recent (maybe not so recent?) article where she said (apparently mis-quoted) that she barely even thought of her novel as being fantasy. (Pratchett gave a great rejoinder to this) And then there's the classic Margaret Atwood's - "Science fiction is that crappy genre with spaceships and robots. What I write is good solid extrapolation of the future, therefore it's speculative fiction)
The interviewer in this case, Laura Miller, is not part of the speculative fiction community - but the ideas she is parroting are often repeated by speculative writers who try to make their work seem more worthy by distinguishing themselves from "that fantasy rubbish with dragons and hobbits". Trilogy-bashing is particularly prevalent, almost as common as Tolkien-bashing.
I'm not saying that if you write fantasy you have to love anything written in the genre. Some of it is, after all, pretty stupid. But that doesn't mean that whole sub-genres (like otherworld fantasy!) should be dismissed as rubbish. Some of it is brilliant. And clever. And non-deriviative. And some of it was even written long before Lord of the Rings!
That's it. Rant over. Normal service will be resumed shortly (whines about slow progress on thesis, complains about lack of sleep, points out new cute thing baby is doing, whinges about novel I am not writing).
I really enjoyed it - it's as dark and gritty as YA can possibly get before being banned in schools, I think (although I reckon this would be banned in a few - homeless kids shooting up faery glamour with shared needles is pretty damned gritty) but it's such a narratively pleasing book.
The heroine, Val, is given a pretty strong reason to run away from home and into a dark, deadly world. The plot is clever and precise, with few (f any) wasted scenes and characters. The romance is unconventional. The story is complete (hallelujah!) - it may well have sequels, but doesn't need them. It's a satisfying read, and I love that the main character is believably gutsy and valiant.
It belongs to the same "school" of fantasy as Scott Westerfeld's Midnighters (and probably his other YA fantasies such as Peeps which I haven't read yet) and Justine Larbalestier's Magic or Madness, a lot of Kelly Link's short stories and just about anything by Nina Kiriki Hoffman - which reveal a magical layer to our modern world. Nothing new, I know, but there's been a spate of excellent fantasy fiction along these lines lately.
I was thinking about this as I read an interview with Neil Gaiman and Susanna Clarke. They're both witty and interesting as they try to isolate what their books have in common, and whether this has anything to do with an innate Englishness in their fantasy (more on this later). But what really struck me was the overal tone of the interviewer, who is so busy telling Neil and Susanna how brilliant they are (which, let's face it, they are) that she stomps all over the fantasy genre to do so.
Questions/comments like:
"Both of you have very distinctive approaches to writing fiction with fantastic elements, so much so that I almost hesitate to call it fantasy, because by now the term is one many people associate with faux-medieval epics."
"What about all the association with all those Tolkien imitators?"
"Still, you wind up being lumped with it because of the genre label."
This annoys the hell out of me. Yes, there's some crap fantasy out there (okay, a lot) which rips off Tolkien or, as Neil Gaiman phrased it, "somebody's impression of what they liked about Tolkien, combined with what they enjoyed about playing Dungeons and Dragons as a high schooler." And yes, there's some excellent fantasy fiction out there right now that is a) set in a version of our world in which magic exists and b) is not at all Tolkieny.
BUT
Not all otherworld fantasy is a) inspired by D&D or b) a Tolkien rip off. And I'm sick to the back teeth of people both saying and implying that this is so.
There's some great our-world fantasy out at the moment. But there's also books by Patricia McKillip, Lois McMaster Bujold, Terry Pratchett, Tamora Pierce, Jacqueline Carey, Anne Bishop and a whole lot of others who use otherworlds to great effect.
Comments like:
"Gaiman and Clarke write in an imaginative tradition that, as they see it, goes back centuries, although the "fantasy" label now affixed to it is a recent development. It's not always a comfortable fit when so many readers associate the genre with pallid Tolkien derivatives."
just perpetuate this idea of otherworld fantasy being a trashy elf-fest. This is common when people not familiar with fantasy or SF as readers put together journalism on famous SF/fantasy writers. Like JK Rowling in a recent (maybe not so recent?) article where she said (apparently mis-quoted) that she barely even thought of her novel as being fantasy. (Pratchett gave a great rejoinder to this) And then there's the classic Margaret Atwood's - "Science fiction is that crappy genre with spaceships and robots. What I write is good solid extrapolation of the future, therefore it's speculative fiction)
The interviewer in this case, Laura Miller, is not part of the speculative fiction community - but the ideas she is parroting are often repeated by speculative writers who try to make their work seem more worthy by distinguishing themselves from "that fantasy rubbish with dragons and hobbits". Trilogy-bashing is particularly prevalent, almost as common as Tolkien-bashing.
I'm not saying that if you write fantasy you have to love anything written in the genre. Some of it is, after all, pretty stupid. But that doesn't mean that whole sub-genres (like otherworld fantasy!) should be dismissed as rubbish. Some of it is brilliant. And clever. And non-deriviative. And some of it was even written long before Lord of the Rings!
That's it. Rant over. Normal service will be resumed shortly (whines about slow progress on thesis, complains about lack of sleep, points out new cute thing baby is doing, whinges about novel I am not writing).