Tag Archives: reading

Fantasy of Excess

Posted by on February 4, 2013 No comments
Pictured: A Shardbearer bearing his Shardblade

Pictured: A Shardbearer bearing his Shardblade

I mentioned in my last post that I’ve been reading Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings, a doorstopper of a first entry in a series whose express purpose is to be a very long succession of doorstoppers. I’ll admit up front that I wasn’t sure if I’d finish it. Epic fantasy really isn’t my genre, and I only decided to try it in the first place because I was curious about what fantasy fans are into these days. Still, everything was going surprisingly well when I wrote that post. Sanderson’s writing has improved markedly since last time I tried one of his books (Elantris, if I remember correctly) and he seems to be actively avoiding many of the pitfalls so many fantasy authors blunder into on a regular basis.

That was around 50 pages ago. I’ve now set The Way of Kings aside, and I seriously doubt I’ll ever pick it up again.

What happened?

Some Background

First of all, I should explain the problems I’ve had with epic fantasy in the past.

I read The Hobbit way back in the day and liked it quite a bit. I read The Lord of the Rings shortly after that and didn’t entirely understand what all the fuss was about. (I will freely admit that I only finished the third one because I wanted to be able to tell people that I Had Read The Lord Of The Rings.) Then someone recommended the Wheel of Time books to me, and I, in my naiveté, decided to read four of them in a row.

I started to suspect that I had made a grave mistake around the point in the second book (or maybe the third, I forget) where two of the female protagonists are captured by insidious foreign types and forced into slavery via magic collars that enable the slavers to perfectly simulate the feeling of being spanked. There are long descriptions of how humiliating the characters find all of this. There is one particularly baffling scene where a character isn’t allowed to wash herself for an entire week and her dishevelled state is lingered upon for several uncomfortable paragraphs.

But wait, I thought, I must be misinterpreting this. There’s no way a respectable publisher of mature fantasy novels would ever agree to print millions of copies of someone’s thinly-veiled wank material.

Long story short, much of the Wheel of Time franchise is indeed thinly-veiled wank material. It features a seemingly infinite number of scenes where female characters are degraded or humiliated in an uncomfortably prurient fashion. All of the women wear dresses with ‘plunging necklines’. There’s one particularly hilarious moment where the hero’s love interest (one of three) is trapped in a dream dimension where her thoughts control reality. When she thinks about Hero Guy, her dress alters itself to show more cleavage. It is every bit as ridiculous and misogynistic as it sounds.

So there’s that. My other big problem with epic fantasy is the ‘epic’ part. The world or universe must always be in grave danger from some nebulously-defined ancient evil. The heros are destined to rise up and defeat this evil – not because they’re the right people to do it, but because there must be an epic hero to strike down epic evil in an epic Final Battle. In the Wheel of Time series, this is an ontological fact – the fabric of creation itself is structured in such a way that this needs to happen or the whole thing will unravel.

I find all of this incredibly tedious. A livejournaler named limyaael refers to this as ‘fantasy of excess‘, a label she applies to both Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkind. Everything is cranked up to 11. Nothing is ever subtle. The bad guy in Wheel of Time is The Dark One, and he is The Most Evil. He lives inside a scary mountain and his minions make cursed swords using the blood of pregnant women. (Or something like that; it’s been a while.) His apostles are either evil, sadistic schemers if they’re women or evil, slightly-less-sadistic schemers if they’re men, sadism being a largely feminine trait in Jordan’s books for whatever reason.

In short, most epic fantasy novels tend not to take place in anything even approaching a realistic world. Well duh! you might say, but I’m not referring to magic or dragons when I use the word ‘realistic’. The last time I checked, reality does not order itself into neatly-partitioned categories labelled Good and Evil unless you’re some sort of ideological fanatic. The worlds of epic fantasy are teleological to such an absurd degree that they can only ever come across as flimsy caricatures of reality.

Or at least, that used to be the case. In recent times, fantasy authors have been throwing themselves gleefully in the opposite direction, creating worlds and characters that are intentionally devoid of inherent meaning or objective reality. They tend to do this with all the subtlety of a thirteen-year-old Nietzche fan: tons of violence, alarming amounts of rape and a general sense that heroism is pointless in the face of a bleak and meaningless reality. (One hopes their parents are appropriately shocked, or else fantasy’s gritty turn will have been a complete waste.)

The phrase ‘fantasy of excess’ still applies in all cases. It’s just a different kind of excess, that’s all.

And with that out of the way, we move on to The Way of Kings…

Three Prologues is Three Too Many

Prologues are a staple of the fantasy genre. I have no idea why.

The Way of Kings starts off with what is referred to as a ‘Prelude to The Stormlight Archive’. A prelude, then, is distinct from a prologue, and is presumably meant to act as the starting point for the entire series as opposed to just this book. (‘The Stormlight Archive’, remember, is the name of the epic ten-book cycle of which The Way of Kings is merely the first volume.)

I’m not buying it. Call it what you want, this is a prologue, and it serves the same function as most fantasy prologues: pointless window dressing. We are introduced to an ancient cyclical ritual in which powerful beings come into existence, fight in a battle, die, and wait for it all to happen again. There is no context for any of it; we don’t know who these people are, what they’re trying to accomplish or how their odd struggle is going to tie into the main plotline.

The real prologue comes next. Worryingly, it is set 4,500 years after the events of the Prelude.

It starts with this:

The love of men is a frigid thing, a mountain stream only three steps from the ice. We are his. Oh Stormfather…we are his. It is but a thousand days, and the Everstorm comes.”

–Collected on the first day of the week of Palah of the month Shash of the year 1171, thirty-one seconds before death. Subject was a darkeyed pregnant woman of middle years. The child did not survive.

Every chapter begins with one of these. They form a kind of miniature plotline in their own right, recounting the dying words of various people who speak a lot of prophetic nonsense just before they bite it. I started to skip them after the fourth chapter, mostly because I figured out what they’re doing but also because they can be a bit cringe-inducing. (‘WE ARE HIS. THE EVERSTORM COMES!’)

We’re then introduced to Szeth-son-son-Vallano, who is basically a cross between Altair of Assassin’s Creed fame and the guy from Dishonored. I didn’t choose videogame references randomly, by the way. The book invites them: Szeth is a superpowered assassin who wields magic that seems purpose-built to translate well into a gameplay mechanic.

Here’s a good example:

This was a Basic Lashing, first of his three kinds of Lashings. It gave him the ability to manipulate whatever force, spren or god it was that held men to the ground. With this Lashing, he could bind people or objects to different surfaces or in different directions.

[...]

A Full Lashing bound objects together, holding them fast until the Stormlight ran out. It took longer to create – and drained Stormlight far more quickly – than a Basic Lashing.

You can almost hear the mana bar depleting.

This is a particular quirk of Sanderson’s, one that he is alternatly praised and criticised for. For what it’s worth, I don’t have a problem with highly mechanistic magic systems, but I think we can all agree that the opening chapters of your book are not the best point at which to rob your setting of a lot of its mystery. The chapters immediately after this will treat magic as something wondrous and awe-inspiring, which doesn’t entirely work if you’re picturing ‘Shardbearers’ spending talent points to earn a 3% reduction in Stormlight drain every time they use a Full Lashing.

Szeth goes on to assassinate a king, which kicks off the main plot. At the point where I stopped reading, there was still no reason why all of this had to be described to the reader in such detail. ‘They killed our king, now we’re at war’ would have worked just fine.

Immediately after the prologue comes a page saying ‘Part One – Above Silence’, along with two names: Kaladin and Shallan. They must be our main characters, right?

But wait, the first chapter – set six years after the Prologue – stars a generic fantasy Callow Youth named Cenn. He’s in the army and is afraid of dying. Kaladin shows up (ah, there he is) and assures him that he will not die, because Kaladin is one of the good guys and never sends his men to certain death.

Then another magic-wielding Shardbearer shows up and Cenn dies anyway. Wonderful.

So there you have it: three prologues, only one of which calls itself a prologue. I have trouble justifying any of them. I guess you could argue that the first chapter/third prologue gets across Kaladin’s habit of trying to right the wrongs of the world, but I’m not sure it’s necessary given that he spends the next few chapters angsting about it.

I’ve just spent the last thousand words nitpicking The Way of Kings to death, so here are a few things I quite liked about the first five or six (real) chapters.

Passing the Bechdel Test

So there’s Kaladin, who goes from being shrouded in a protective cloak of good luck to being weighed down by doom and ill fortune after a nasty betrayal. He’s interesting enough, I guess, although I was disappointed when it turned out that he isn’t gay despite the book going out of its way to make it seem like he is. (In short: he obsesses over the death of a boy he knew when he was a teenager. It’s written exactly the way most people would write someone grieving over the murder of their first love, but we find out around page 130 or so that it was his brother. I have no idea why Sanderson holds off on revealing this for so long.)

(Also yes, I am aware that Sanderson has not been great about homosexuality in the past – see for example that infamous Dumbledore blog post of his. However, I’ve always gotten the impression that he’s a bit more open-minded than you might think at first glance and would probably be a lot more progressive if he could just untangle himself from whatever belief system it is that made him say homophobic things even though his heart clearly wasn’t in it. But that’s getting into the territory of psychoanalysing authors, so let’s move on.)

Kaladin gets sold into slavery and eventually ends up on a Bridge Crew, which is a lot more unpleasant than it sounds. He comes close to throwing himself off a cliff in a fit of despair, but pulls himself back from the edge both figuratively and literally so that he can be a hero again.

Shallan is much, much more interesting than Kaladin – so much so that I would have happily read an entire book about her and nobody else. Her first viewpoint chapter opens with her tracking down Jasnah Kholin, the princess of some nation or another (I lost track of the various countries and empires fairly quickly) and also the world’s most respected scholar. Shallan wants to be this woman’s ‘ward’, which basically entails becoming her apprentice and benefiting from her vast knowledge and experience.

This would have been interesting enough on its own (I will happily accept more fantasy novels about academics), but it becomes even more compelling when we learn that Shallan has an ulterior motive. She genuinely respects and admires Jasnah, and is obviously torn over the fact that her true reason for wanting to become her ward involves screwing her over royally. Er, no pun intended.

If you’ve been watching the genre for any length of time, you’ll probably have noticed a resurgence in critiques of how fantasy authors handle female characters in their books. As I said in the beginning of this post, a disturbing number of authors choose to join the Cult of Grit by writing lurid rape scenes. “But it’s realistic!‘ they will cry, even as their teenage killing-machine protagonists become cyclones of flashing steel and dismembered limbs five times per chapter. Sanderson appears to be making a conscious effort to avoid that with Shallan. She isn’t motivated by some past trauma, sexual or otherwise (at least not in the part I read), and is given a huge amount of agency by the text. Her conversations with Jasnah also pass the Bechdel Test with flying colours, which is nice.

The prose in these chapters is also much better than what I’ve come to expect from Sanderson. I remember reading on his blog once that he works on two or three books at a time, and boy does it show. There are still some rough spots here and there, paragraphs or scenes that read like unpolished first draft material, but in general I didn’t have a problem with the writing.

Let’s go back to where I was in my previous blog post: 100 pages in and quite enjoying myself. I had every hope of actually finishing this thing and leaving open the possibility that I might check out the sequel when it comes out. Then I finished Part One and moved on to Part Two, and promptly lost all interest.

This Fantasy Cycle is Spinning Its Wheels

Here is a chronological summary of everything that happens to Kaladin, starting from his first POV chapter and ending with the final chapter of Part One of the book:

Betrayed and Enslaved –> Sits in a wagon and angsts about his departed optimism –> Sits in a wagon –> Sits in a wagon –> Arrives in hellish military camp –> Angsts about his departed optimism in a hellish military camp –> Decides to commit suicide –> Regains sense of optimism

His character arc for Part One isn’t difficult to spot: he is betrayed, becomes bitter and nihilistic, hits rock bottom and then rises from the ashes of his despair intent on saving himself and the other slaves at the military camp. The first part happens between chapters: we do not see the betrayal. Nor do we see his faith in the inherent goodness of the world slowly fall apart. What we’re left with, then, is an awful lot of the middle stuff: angsting, despair, more angsting, and some frankly silly ‘I AM CURSED WOE BETIDE ME’ inner monologues. By the time he finally rallies himself and decides to fight back, I had mostly stopped caring, because it was always obvious that that was going to happen. I don’t usually like to tell authors exactly how they should write their books, but Kaladin’s entire arc could have been handled with far fewer pages than it actually gets.

But that’s nothing compared to the amount of padding in Shallan’s initial chapters. Here’s a summary of what happens:

Arrives in Fantasy City –> Finds Jasnah and is rebuffed –> Decides to petition Jasnah again –> Petitions Jasnah again and is once again rebuffed –> Goes off to brood –> Is inspired to petition Jasnah a third time–> Puts in motion a plan to convince Jasnah to accept her –> Plan goes nowhere, but Jasnah accepts her anyway

Most of those sentences summarise an entire chapter. The first time Jasnah tells Shallan to take a hike, I assumed she’d probably try again. The second time, I looked forward to seeing how Shallan would achieve her goals without becoming Jasnah’s ward. When she decided to take a third stab at convincing Jasnah, I wondered why the hell she couldn’t have just become her ward the first time around.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s lots of description and worldbuilding and all the rest of it happening between those action summaries, but it doesn’t make up for the fact that Sanderson has Shallan take such an incredibly circuitous route to the conclusion of her initial arc. Nothing in the story would have changed if Jasnah had simply accepted her the first time – or, I guess, the second time, since I can at least see the value in delaying the acceptance once so we get to see more of Fantasy City.

Even feeling like the book had led me around in circles for no good reason, I was willing to push on to Part Two. I wanted to see more of Shallan, and I was interested in reading about Kaladin freeing himself from slavery and (I’m guessing) gaining magical Stormlight powers.

Part Two opens with a completely new viewpoint character, in a completely new location, talking to people who have no discernible connection to anything that happened in Part One. Well, all right, that’s not too bad. It’s probably just a single chapter.

Part Two, Chapter One stars Shallan’s brother, who is far less interesting than her. He probably has his own plotlines and motivations and character arc. It doesn’t matter; I was done.

This right here is why ‘scope’ is not an inherent virtue. Fantasy authors and fans have this tendency to behave as though making a book massive in every sense of the word is in itself an achievement. ‘Look at this book,’ they will say. ‘Look at how many characters it has! Look at how many nations and cultures and generations its plot encompasses. This is a towering achievement, a monumental work. How can you be anything but impressed?’

Very easily, as it turns out. Part One of The Way of Kings is perfectly readable and entertaining, but that’s all. The writing is just okay. The characters are interesting enough, but they’re not likely to stay with you once you close the book. The worldbuilding, while intriguing, consists largely of a succession of stereotypes: men from this country are identifiable by their coats (they all wear the same style, I guess), women from this country are taught these particular ‘feminine arts’, these guys all have weird eyebrows, and so on. It is massively broad but shallow as a puddle.

There is nothing challenging in the first 150 pages of The Way of Kings. It is bog standard fantasy writing, notable only for the fact that it goes on for quite some time and promises to continue going on for an even longer time. To belabour the point slightly, a mediocre song does not become an achievement just because it happens to be an hour long; it may be notable, certainly, because hour-long songs are quite rare and must take a while to make, but that doesn’t mean that they have the same inherent worth as a four-minute song that completely rewrites the rules of its genre.

Or, to use a real example: this might be worth discussing and even putting in a museum, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a great work of art.

Epiphany

So I’ve given up on The Way of Kings, mostly because I really don’t want to read 900 pages of it. If it was a third of its current length I’d probably have kept going, but another three book’s worth of content is too much if it’s all going to be decompressed to the same point as the first 150 pages.

I did have something of an epiphany while writing this blog post, though. (And I’d like to point out now that this post is, somewhat ironically, far longer than it needs to be. Whoops.) I’d always wondered why people were drawn to massive fantasy novels, and now I feel like I know: it’s because they represent an absurdly good return on investment if you like them. Had I been completely enamoured of The Way of Kings (and I sort of was, at least in the beginning) I would now be looking forward to hundreds more pages of it and then a new book of equal length every few years. For Sanderson’s fans, The Stormlight Archive is a safe bet – potentially for decades, assuming it doen’t go off the rails and that he doesn’t stop writing it for whatever reason.

I’m certainly not immune to the appeal of being given lots and lots of what I like. It’s the reason why I marathoned my way through several seasons of Mad Men and Breaking Bad when I first discovered them. (And, uh, True Blood, but let’s not talk about that.) It’s the reason why I read the first Wheel of Time book and then immediately got three more rather than playing it safe and just getting the second volume – because there was so much of it, and I had every reason to expect that I’d enjoy it all.

In the end, reading a small fraction of The Way of Kings gave me more respect for its genre. It’s still very much Not For Me, but I can now see the appeal where I couldn’t before. Maybe that’s enough to say that I’ve given the genre a fair chance.

…or maybe I should go to the opposite end of the grittiness spectrum by reading this. Let’s see how I feel next time I turn on my e-reader.

Reading List – 29/01/2013

Posted by on January 29, 2013 No comments

Some more books I’ve been reading, in no particular order:

Adaptation by Malinda Lo – This one came recommended by Phoebe. That alone is usually enough to get me to read something, but in this case I also felt as if I was making up for the fact that I skipped over Lo’s other books.

Adaptation takes old-school SF plot points (Area 51, aliens, X-Files shenanigans) and drags them into the modern day. The opening chapter starts off incredibly strong: the main character is waiting for a flight home to San Francisco when a news report comes on informing the entire airport that planes are falling out of the sky for unknown reasons.

Nothing else that happens after that quite lives up to the promise of those first few pages. The ending in particular feels rushed and insubstantial. It leaves things on an interesting note, though, and I like Lo’s writing, so I’ll probably check out the sequel.

The Doll Who Hate His Mother by Ramsay Campbell - The Grin of the Dark, also by Campbell, is one of the few genuinely scary horror novels I’ve read in the past year. This one isn’t quite as good (it’s his first novel, and it shows), but it’s still miles better than most of what’s clogging up the Horror shelves right now. Campbell knows when to lay it on thick (the book opens with somebody stealing the arm from the corpse of the main characters’ brother) and when to rein things in, a balancing act that surprisingly few horror authors are capable of. Campbell has got a huge back catalogue that I’m looking forward to mining, so expect him to show up on these lists if I keep doing them.

The Night Bookmobile by Audrey Niffenegger – I read The Time Traveler’s Wife back when I was a teenager and thus had horrible taste in everything. Now I can see that the book has a lot of problems, although I still think it’s a good early example of that literary SF thing everyone is so big on these days. But Niffenegger doesn’t just do boring word-only books! No, she also does comics (sorry, ‘graphic novels’). The Night Bookmobile is one of them.

I decided to buy this on a whim after seeing her name on it. The artwork is very attractive, and it’s got that ‘meditations on what it means to read’ thing going, which is always a plus, but I’m not entirely sure it’s worth the £17 I paid for it in a London bookshop. See if you can pick it up somewhere a bit less expensive, maybe.

Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi – This is a peculiar book, part magical realist allegory and part short-story collection. The titular ‘Mr. Fox’ is one of those casually misogynistic authors so beloved of the western literary establishment. He doesn’t hate women (good heavens, no), it’s just that all of his female character have to die in ironic or ‘poetic’ ways. I imagine he and Cormac McCarthy would get along like a house on fire.

Mr. Fox’s muse is Mary Foxe, an imaginary-but-maybe-not woman who pulls him (and by extension, the reader) through a series of stories in which she and he constantly switch roles. Sometimes it’s easy to tell who is supposed to be who, as in the brief vignette in the book’s opening pages, and sometimes it’s a lot more difficult. Overall I enjoyed the book a lot, but it could have done with a bit more cohesion. Some of the stories feel as if they need more room to breathe, and would perhaps have been better served in a more conventional collection.

Currently Reading:

Shades of Earth by Beth Revis – According to my Kindle, I’m 15% of the way through this. I’m not entirely sure if I’ll keep going.

It’s not that the book is offensively bad or anything, but I suspect that I know exactly what’s going to happen from here on out. The main characters have crash-landed on an alien planet and the cryogenically frozen Earth settlers are awake – cue inevitable conflict. This stuff was boring when it came up in the increasingly ill-advised Rama sequels, and I’m not sure it’s going to be any more interesting here.

Actually, I’ve grown a bit weary of YA trilogies overall. People often complain (rightly, in many cases) that some popular YA authors can barely fill one book with engaging material, let alone three. Across the Universe was a perfectly good YA SF yarn in its own right. Did it really need to be stretched out into three volumes?

The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson – Wait! Let me explain myself.

I’m writing something fantasy-ish at the moment, so I thought I’d see what the genre has been up to since I stopped forcing myself through the Wheel of Time books. I initially ruled out Brandon Sanderson as a re-entry vector, mostly because I wasn’t overly fond of Elantris and because he was the one who finished the aforementioned Wheel of Time books after Robert Jordan’s death. That left a few options: Gritty gritfest fantasy from the likes of Joe Abercombie (no thanks), fringe stuff courtesy of someone like Catherine Valente (disqualified because I wanted to try mainstream fantasy) or going into the Fantasy section of Chapters and buying whatever had the silliest/least silly (depending on my mood) cover. That last strategy sounded like a recipe for disaster, so I defaulted to the most juvenile/masculine form of arbitration available: size.

And thus we return to Sanderson. See, The Way of Kings is big. I don’t just mean it contains a lot of pages, although it’s got that going for it as well. I mean that it’s big in every sense imaginable: it’s stuffed with characters; has not one, not two, but three prologues (one is called an ‘Introduction’ or something and the other is technically the first chapter, but they’re both prologues in disguise), and I’m 10% of the way through and have already identifies around eight different plotlines. The book’s world is huge, at least in the sense that it contains a lot of stuff.

Oh, and Sanderson has said that this is the first volume in the Stormlight Archive ‘cycle’, which is intended to be 10 books long. Given the usual rate of fantasy-series inflation, that means he’ll finish sometime around 2050 on volume thirty-six, the last of which will be split into fifteen separate novels.

Having said all that, The Way of Kings is perfectly readable and entertaining. There is so far not a hint of the dreaded Grit, although it may well be hiding somewhere in the remaining 900 pages (oh god). We’ll see how it goes.

Up Next:

Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín – This is called ‘Brooklyn’ and is written by an Irish author, so I’m guessing it’s about an Irish person emigrating to New York during the period between 1950 and 1970. Oh look, I was right!

(For real though, Tóibín is pretty great.)

Some Books I’ve Been Reading

Posted by on September 30, 2012 3 comments

Some books I’ve been reading that weren’t for review over at the Academy, in no particular order:

Darkmans by Nicola Barker – My brother has an irrational hatred for three kinds of literary novels: anything about Nazis, anything about someone returning to their hometown after a mid-life divorce, and anything about a large cast of diverse characters connect by Thematic Elements.

Darkmans is the latter, although it thankfully doesn’t stray too far into ‘character as irony-delivery vector’ territory. I thought I had a fairly good idea of what to expect going in, but the book pulls out a few surprises in the first chapter and then never quite goes in the direction you’d expect from then on. It also manages to be creepier in places than most horror novels I’ve read lately, so that’s nice. I’ll be checking out Barker’s latest, The Yips, as soon as it’s available in any format other than hideously-expensive-hardback or ebook-priced-as-hideously-expensive-hardback.

The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman – Below are three things that annoyed me in the first 40 pages of this book:

  1. The two main characters act like caricatures of B-list Hollywood celebrities. This is ironic because they’re involved in the theatre business in Berlin in 1931.
  2. A character talks about how strictly historical historical fiction is a waste of time. This is ironic because the book is set in an intentionally historically-inaccurate Berlin in 1931. 
  3. A character asks ‘what is to be done’ with ‘six million unwanted people’. This is ironic because the book is set in Berlin in 1931.

The cumulative effect is akin to having Beauman nudge you in the ribs going ‘Eh? Eh? Get it?’ every few minutes.

The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt – My first Leavitt, and one I enjoyed a lot for the first two-thirds or so. I think it’s safe to say that I’ve read my fair share of novels about gay men in Oxbridge at the turn of the century, but this one stands out a bit by virtue of having a few decent female characters (yes, that is worth mentioning when dealing with a book like this) and by never degenerating into a huge angst fest.

It’s ostensibly about the relationship between G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, both famous mathematicians  but it ends up being more about G.H. Hardy and a cardboard cutout with ‘Ramanujan’ scrawled across it. Even by the end of the book, I never felt as though I knew who Ramanujan was or what achievements he made. We’re only told about him publishing a few papers before he takes ill and proceeds to spend the next eighty pages going in and out of various hospitals.

Still, the writing is good, and it made me want to read more Leavitt.

Sweeth Tooth by Ian McEwan – Also about Cambridge (sort of), also not entirely what you’d expect. The ‘young woman recruited into MI5′ thing is really a backdrop for a story about the Cold War-era literary scene, which is…interesting, I guess?

McEwan is one of the those odd writers who seems to be a lot more famous than he should be given how many people seem to hate him. I don’t hate him, exactly, but after trying this and Atonement I’m not sure I’ll be queueing up for whatever he writes next. (Although I still want to read Solar, for some reason…)

Hounded by Kevin Hearne – My latest, possibly last attempt at finding a mainstream urban fantasy series that I enjoy. It’s better than I expected (it helps that Kevin Hearne can actually write), but not by a wide enough margin to make me go running out for the rest.

Oh, but there is one particularly ludicrous scene that I feel the need to bring up. Atticus, the main character Druid guy (who lives in some generic part of America, because God forbid an urban fantasy novel be set elsewhere), is friends with this old Irish woman. He gets attacked by some god or another in front of her house, and defends himself by cutting the god’s head off with his Sword of +15 Power Fantasy. The old lady is understandably shaken by this, since she doesn’t know there’s anything supernatural going on, so Atticus explains that the guy he just killed was British and kind of an asshole or something. The old Irish lady who is Irish then gets over the fact that Atticus decapitated someone on her driveway and happily becomes an accessory to murder by helping him deal with the body.

Hounded is not a very good book, is what I’m saying.

‘Catching Fire’ and First Person: Some Thoughts

Posted by on July 1, 2011 No comments

As you may or may not be aware, I’m one of the few reviewers on the internet who didn’t like The Hunger Games…by which I mean the first book in the series, not the series as a whole. (Incidentally: authors, please stop naming your trilogies after their first constituent volumes. It makes it difficult to write about them.) Before now I didn’t have much of an opinion on the rest of the books because I hadn’t read them. The first volume was enough to kill any interest I might have had, and I felt no compelling reason to revise my opinion of them even as they became ‘The Next [x]‘, where [x] may be Harry Potter, Twilight or some other series that isn’t even remotely like The Hunger Games.

Well, that was before the YA industry started pumping out one depressingly mediocre ‘dystopian’ novel after another. These days The Hunger Games is not just a bestselling series – by some sort of book-reviewer alchemy whose mechanisms I’ll probably never understand, it has become the gold standard by which all other dystopian YA is measured. Given that I like to complain about bad YA fiction here (as you may have noticed), and given that bad YA dystopian (which is to say YA dystopian) is sort of my pet peeve du jour, I thought I’d better check out the rest of the series so as to have an opinion on hand should somebody desperately come seeking it. Which happens exactly…never, but still. There was always a chance I just didn’t ‘get it’ the first time around.

Now I’m coming up to the halfway mark on Catching Fire, and I can safely say that I’ve been missing very little. I actually prefer this one to the first, possibly because there’s less time devoted to descriptions of outlandish clothing this time around, but it’s still a struggle to maintain any sort of interest. When you find yourself skimming heavily at the twenty page mark, you know you’re in for a rough time. Part of my boredom comes from the poor worldbuilding, which I’ll get to in a future post (insert sound of sharpening knives here), but most of it is down to the writing.

Like its predecessor, Catching Fire is narrated in first-person present tense by series protagonist Katniss Everdeen. Her voice is crushingly, unrelentingly bland. What kind of person is she, exactly? I still haven’t the foggiest idea. I get the feeling she’s supposed to come across as a reluctant heroine, the kind who doubts her own ability even while others treat her a paragon of courage, but every decision she makes is buried under so much mental throat-clearing that it’s difficult to tell one way or the other. I’ve read a book and a half from her perspective, and I still have no idea how she differs (or doesn’t differ) from the people around her. Her descriptions of the world in which the series takes place are delivered to the reader as if they were air-dropped into her head by an omniscient narrator; there is never any real sense that we’re being shown her world as opposed to the world.

But how could that be? Isn’t first-person supposed to bring the reader closer to the narrator? Well yes, but it doesn’t automatically do that. It is surprisingly easy to write first person as though it was third person, which is exactly what Collins does here. Take any random paragraph or even a whole chapter, and replace every instance of ‘I’ with ‘she’. In almost all cases, that paragraph or chapter will still make perfect sense. It probably won’t even read all that differently. This is not how you should use first person. If you’re going to write like this, use third person and give yourself the opportunity to switch perspectives (I’d kill for a few chapters from Gale’s point of view) or to disengage the narrative from a single character altogether and show the reader what’s happening on a wider scale. Imagine ‘Salem’s Lot if it was told in first person – all of those brilliantly-written scenes of a town slowly succumbing to a vampire infestation would be gone, replaced with endless filler of the viewpoint character sitting around in his underwear and struggling with writer’s block. The Hunger Games is not the story of Katniss Everdeen’s personal struggle to piece her life together after the Games. It’s an adventure story about a rebellion, and it would be infinitely better if it was written as such.

(Oh, and speaking of Stephen King, he’s brilliant at doing the opposite of what I’m talking about: writing third person as though it was first. The difference is that he uses this to open up narrative opportunities rather than letting it them off.)

Another common myth about first person is that it lets the reader more easily relate to your narrator. Not true, alas! It can do that, but your narrator needs to be fleshed-out and compelling to begin with. If they aren’t, using first person will only make those weaknesses all the more obvious. The longer I spend in Katniss’ head, the more I’m convinced that there isn’t a whole lot in there. Which isn’t to say that she’s stupid, just that Collins doesn’t seem to have any more idea what she’s like as a person than I do. Which would be fine, because this is an adventure story about a group of people fighting for their freedom and not the Testament of Katniss (see above), except that every single moment of the entire trilogy is told from her point of view. Even the most brilliantly-conceived characters have trouble carrying a story for that long, and Katniss certainly can’t be counted among their ranks.

Of course, I’m not saying that the series would automatically be better if it had been written in third person, – only that doing so would, at the least, not have detracted anything from it. So writers, take heed: don’t just treat first person as the default narration. Really think about whether your story is best suited for it, because if it’s not, you probably won’t be able to change your mind two third of the way through a trilogy. And it will show.

REVIEW: The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht

Posted by on June 11, 2011 No comments

The Tiger's WifeThe Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It took a while for The Tiger’s Wife to grow on me. Any book that comes with the amount of hype surrounding this one (not to mention the hype around its author) is going to have a lot to live up to, and for the first 100 pages or so I was convinced that The Tiger’s Wife would end up being a huge disappointment. Thankfully it wasn’t – not by a long shot – but it still never entirely lived up to my hype-inflated expectations.

The novel’s structure treads familiar ground for literary fiction: in the present, our ostensible protagonist Natalia is on her way to deliver a batch of vaccines to an orphanage when she learns that her grandfather has died. More importantly, he died on a mysterious trip to a remote village that his family was entirely unaware of. Cue flashbacks to Natalia’s childhood and adolescence.

The opening chapters set up a compelling mystery – what was Natalia’s grandfather doing in that village? – but it’s one that never really goes anywhere. This central narrative quickly becomes subordinate to a series of admittedly fascinating diversions. Lapsing into an almost omniscient voice, Natalia relates several key events of her grandfather’s life. The most important of these are his meetings with the seemingly-immortal ‘deathless man’, who comes to define his later years, and the titular ‘tiger’s wife’, who does the same for his early childhood.

The novel’s structure manages to keep itself together up until this point, but begins to fall apart as soon as Natalia starts describing the early lives of people her grandfather knew when he was a young boy – people who are, in most cases, long dead by the time she gets around to telling their stories. There’s a flimsy justification for this, with Natalia occasionally dropping back to the present (after the main vaccine-delivery plotline) to describe how she interviewed the people of her grandfather’s village, but I suspect this was probably a late addition to the story. In fact, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if The Tiger’s Wife started out as a series of interconnected short stories, with Natalia as an ever-present narrator being hastily-added conceit intended to bring it all together.

Thankfully, most of the stories (chapters?) are interesting enough that you won’t care. Obreht plays with the reader’s sympathies like a pro, in one case introducing a character as a brutish thug who savagely beats his wife (the same woman who later becomes ‘the tiger’s wife’) before moving back in time to paint a far more endearing picture of his adolescence. It helps that Obreht’s prose is incredibly self-assured but never overwrought; it manages to effortlessly carry the story through three generations of characters, a fairly incredible feat in itself.

Ultimately, however, The Tiger’s Wife ends up being slightly less than the sum of its parts. It should be thought-provoking, with its subtle ruminations on illness and warfare and its hints of the supernatural, but a few days after finishing it I’d be hard pressed to say what impression it left on me. It’s certainly an enjoyable read, even if only for the quality of the writing, but I’m not sure it’s quite as brilliant a debut as everybody is claiming.



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A Contrarian Response to the WSJ Controversy

Posted by on June 8, 2011 5 comments

So, the YA world has weathered its latest controversy: an article in the Wall Street Journal suggesting that young adult literature is too violent, too bleak and too dark overall. This isn’t a particularly new claim, nor is it aimed solely at YA. Video games, Japanese animation and comic books are all routinely accused of the same crime, even when (whoops) the examples under discussion aren’t actually intended for children. I think this particular article has riled people up so much because of the clear lack of research that went into it (which seems to have amounted to ‘asking a parent at B&N what she thought and running with that’) and because of the sheer ridiculousness of its claims. After laughably suggesting that children’s fiction is darker now than it’s ever been, which would come as a surprise to Rohald Dahl if he was still with us, the writer of the piece goes on to say this:

If books show us the world, teen fiction can be like a hall of fun-house mirrors, constantly reflecting back hideously distorted portrayals of what life is. There are of course exceptions, but a careless young reader—or one who seeks out depravity—will find himself surrounded by images not of joy or beauty but of damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds.

I know, right? Excuse me while I retire to my fainting couch.

Now, I’m not going to waste time debunking the idea that reading ‘dark’ books will somehow scar a child. It’s such an obviously stupid idea that it doesn’t really deserve the effort. What I would like to debunk, however, is the most common response in the YA community to the whole controversy. That response has boiled down to ‘Yes, YA these days is dark, but so is life!‘…which would be all well and good, except that YA these days isn’t dark. In fact, I’d say it’s becoming less and less dark by the month, much to its detriment.

I’m going to focus on genre YA here, because it’s what I know best, but I will point out that contemporary YA can be pretty dark. That doesn’t mean the WSJ article is right, however, it just means that it severely underestimates what kids are sophisticated enough to handle and what they experience in their everyday lives. The fact that a book talks about self-harm or suicide does not make it ‘depraved’, and I’m amazed that an apparently-respected reviewer of children’s books could be inane enough to think otherwise.

With that out of the way…

Let’s repeat Meghan Cox Gurdon’s thought experiment. Imagine you’re walking into the YA section of a Barnes & Nobles (or a Waterstone’s, if you live in the UK, or whatever your local equivalent to those might be). What’s the predominant color on the shelves? I’m guessing black. What’s the most predominant image? Without a doubt, it’s going to be long-haired girls in floaty dresses. You can take all those books, put them in a pile, and burn them safely conclude that there won’t be anything very dark in any of them. I can say this after struggling through many, many examples of paranormal stories in which the creatures du jour – vampires, werewolves, ‘fae’ – are about as threatening as a sleepy housecat. Violence will be at an absolute minimum, physical injury will be described in the blandest terms possible, and the fated true lovers will invariably end up fatedly true loving each other for the rest of their lives. With frightening regularity, the main characters are wealthy, upper-middle-class children with, at best, some unrealistically-mild psychological trauma following the convenient death of one or both of their parents. The most disturbing thing about these books tends to be the warped obsession that those fated lovebirds show for each other – and that, judging by author comments, is intended to be romantic rather than unsettling. Let The Right One In, they are not.

So paranormal romance books aren’t, in the vast majority of cases, even approaching being ‘dark’ – not unless you’re the kind of person who thinks Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a bit too edgy for its own good. But what about dystopian fiction? That must be dark, right?

Here’s Beth Revis, talking about Across the Universe:

Well, while my novel has nothing to do with vampires, I can assume, judging from a few specific scenes, that it is in the “dark, dark stuff” category. Pushing aside those specific scenes (because I don’t want to spoil the novel for anyone), the genre itself would imply dark stuff: it’s dystopian, a science fiction that takes place in a world that isn’t ideal.

But—and I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating—the point of my novel specifically and dystopian novels in general—is not about the dark, dark stuff. They are all, at their heart,hopeful. Create a dark setting, but populate it with characters that are willing—are fighting—to rise above it.

You could read my book and focus on Eldest, and the mindlessness of the people on the ship, and the drugs and the murder and the dark.

Or you could read her book and focus on the fact that it manages to feel entirely tame despite featuring a suicide, several murders, attempted rape and what should be a nightmarish method of keeping a large population under control. The fact that a book contains scenes where people are killed does not in itself make it ‘dark’, just as depicting an oppressive future society does not in itself make your book as visceral a social critique as 1984.

The WSJ article singles out The Hunger Games as an example of ‘dark’ dystopian fiction, calling it ‘hyper-violent’. Which I suppose it is, if you ignore the fact that it contains surprisingly few examples of actual, you know, violence. When it does finally occur, it is almost always carried out by characters who have already been set up as evil; there is never a scene where the sympathetic main characters are forced to do reprehensible things to survive. (I’m talking about the first book here, by the way. According to what I’ve read, the third tries to compensate for this by going too far in the other direction.) Time after time, dystopian authors shy away from making their characters face up to the supposedly bleak conditions they’ve put them in. I can only assume this is because doing so would get in the way of the all-important cheesy romance.

It hasn’t always been this way. When I was about twelve or so, I went to my local library and borrowed a book called Z For Zachariah, by Robert C. O’Brien. It was shelved in the children’s section, yet turned out to be easily the darkest novel I’d ever encountered. (It was also one of my earliest exposures to science fiction.) It describes the aftermath of a nuclear war, which leaves a sixteen-year old girl living alone on her miraculously radiation-free farm. Her family and friends are all dead, as is the entire population of the nearby town; for all she knows, the entire world might be dead. Eventually she is joined by a man wearing an advanced radiation suit, which let him walk from a distant military base to her farm. They work together until he becomes increasingly antagonistic and eventually tries to rape her, at which point she takes the radiation suit and leaves. She walks off into an extremely uncertain future, leaving the man (who she now justifiably hates) behind even as he begs her to stay with him.

The book ends there.

Can you imagine most dystopian authors today writing something like that? Of course not, and yet we’re still told that modern offerings are on par with the (usually disturbing) classics of the genre.

The online YA community, which is composed largely of adult readers, seems to have completely lost the ability to evaluate or analyse YA books. It’s the only explanation I can think of for how anybody could honestly call Across the Universe or The Hunger Games ‘dark’. (Which isn’t to say that dark genre YA doesn’t exist, of course – look at the Chaos Walking books, or Lauren deStefano’s Wither, or Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels - it just isn’t talked about nearly as often as the fluffier, lighter stuff.) When did this happen? I suspect it started as soon as it became common for people to read only YA and nothing else. Yes, Across the Universe might be dark by the standards of its genre, but it sure as hell isn’t dark compared with a lot of adult fiction. To be truly bleak, even if only as a prelude to a hopeful ending, you need to be willing to really twist the knife: two lovers coming to hate each other over a mistimed phone call can appear more tragic to the reader than all the mass murders you can throw at them.

Honestly, I wish the WSJ was right. YA should be provocative, and challenging, and able to show prudish adults that young people are for more capable than society gives them credit for. Meghan Cox Gurdon isn’t insulting YA when she says that it’s too dark. If anything, she’s giving it a lot more credit than it deserves.

What I Listen To When I’m Writing, Part Two

Posted by on February 27, 2011 1 comment

I did one of these ages ago, so I guess I might as well do another one!

Lots of people listen to music while writing. It’s a good way of drowning out other sounds, although I know for some people it’s a much deeper connection than that. They’ll listen to music that fits well with whatever book they’re writing, or even with individual scenes, and are conversely unable to listen to music that clashes too heavily the mood of whatever they’re working on.

Interestingly, I said this during my last music post:

I wouldn’t say either of those are particularly evocative of the mood of what I’m writing, but that’s never really bothered me. I can write depressing scenes while listening to cheerful music or vice-versa.

That’s actually no longer the case. I can listen to pretty much anything that I like while writing, but I’m now much more inclined to go for something that I think is evocative of the scene or series of scenes I’m working on. I wonder when the change started?

Anyway, here’s a brief list of the songs I’m listening to at the moment. Thanks to the vast piracy machine that is YouTube, you can listen to them as well!

First up, we’ve got ‘Ný Batterí’ by Sigur Rós, because I apparently like Icelandic music (and more specifically what the internet tells me is called ‘post-rock’):

I tend to find lyrics distracting, which is why my writing playlists are full of instrumental pieces. This does have some lyrics, but they’re fairly unobtrusive (and I don’t understand them, which helps).

The slow build on this reminds me of the kind of mood I’d like to go for with Castor, which starts out fairly innocuous before turning into something much more intense.

Next up: ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ by Radiohead.

This is just really easy for me to listen to while writing; the musical equivalent of white noise. I actually don’t enjoy this song unless I’m writing, which is a first.

I’ve always really liked stuff from soundtracks. One of my favourites is ‘HGW XX/7′ from the film ‘The Lives of Others’, which you should really see if you haven’t.

This isn’t depressing, exactly (or at least I don’t think so), but it is very melancholy and bittersweet, which I like.

Next up we have ‘Happy’ by The Frames, which really is depressing! Or at least the first half is:

This is more or less how I imagine James, the main character of Castor. Except, you know, in musical form.

(Shut up, it makes sense if you’re a writer.)

And finally, another one from The Frames – ‘Falling Slowly’:

I’m a bit of a sucker for bombastic songs like this. If I was going to match this up to any part of Castor, it would be the romantic subplot (it’s YA, of course there’s a romantic subplot). It’s not mushy, exactly, but it is very sincere.

Anyway, that’s a rough playlist of sorts! If you’ve got one of your own, post it in the comments.

Sean’s Thoughts On YA Romance, Part XIV

Posted by on February 14, 2011 6 comments

This guy has a lot to answer for.

It’s Valentine’s Day, which means that love is in the air and I have an excuse to complain about my favourite pet peeve! Of course, I refer to the many-headed beast that is YA romance. Almost everybody agrees that romance in teenage fiction is kind of…well, ‘stupid’ seems like too strong a word, so let’s go with ‘bad’. (Or ‘stupibad’, to employ a neologism of my own design.) Yet the same tropes keep coming up again and again – it’s as if the entire YA community is staring at an unsightly pile of cat poo in the middle of its collective living room, tut-tutting and complaining about what an awful smell it’s making and doing exactly nothing to clean it up.

If you follow me.

So, below I’ve summarised a few of the things I’d love to see less of in YA romance, along with a few of the things I’d love to see a whole lot more of. Keep in mind that I’m primarily talking about ‘genre’ YA fiction here – paranormal romance, urban fantasy, fantasy, even those new-fangled dystopians that are all the rage right now. Contemporary YA is much better about handling realistic and thorny teenage romances, although there’s one trope in particular that it could really do without.

Let’s begin!

1) Instant True Love, AKA Twu Luv.

You saw that one coming, right? I think I’ve written on this topic three times now.

There seem to be a certain number of YA authors who are under the impression that two people can and should fall in love instantly upon seeing each other. I understand it has even become popular in recent years for characters to have had some sort of epic past-love romance, just to bolster the idea that they can take one look into each other’s eyes and know on the spot that this is their Soulmate (I could do without ever seeing that word again).

Do I really need to explain what’s wrong with this? No? Well too bad, I’m doing it anyway.

Here’s how these scenes usually play out: the main character sees her love interest for the first time (it’s almost always a ‘her’), and the reader is treated to a long, loving description of his male-model looks and perfect hair and high cheekbones (why the high cheekbones?!). After the reader has finished digesting a big chunk of Beefcake Exposition, the main character will add a perfunctory note explaining that oh, she also felt immediately drawn to him in a mysterious, one might say supernatural way – if we’re lucky, that is. Sometimes it’s just the physical description and little else.

That’s not love, that’s lust. Go to any major urban area and walk around for a few hours. There’s a very good change that you’ll you spot somebody you consider to be extremely attractive. Would you say no to having sex with them? Probably not. Are you head-over-heels in love with them based on that one glimpse, and are you going to spend the rest of the day thinking obsessively about meeting them again? I certainly hope not.

Please, give the reader some other reason to think that these people are in love.

2) Stalking spelled backwards is ‘love’.

Yes, people are still doing this. No, I have no idea why.

AUTHORS: If your love interest is an insufferable asshole/a stalker/psychotic, nobody with half a functioning brain is going to want your main character to end up with him.

3) The inevitable love triangle.

Before inserting a love triangle into your story, ask yourself whether it really needs to be there. If the answer is ‘no’, do not put a love triangle into your story.

Oh, and you bonus un-points if the poor sap shoved into the Loser Corner is charming, loving and stable, while the designated love interest is creepy and potentially dangerous. See: every YA love triangle ever.

Closely related to this is the slutty best friend who exists solely to be a huge bitch and make the main character look better by comparison. I have talked about this elsewhere.

4) Normativity ‘R Us.

Picture your average genre-YA couple. If you didn’t immediately think of two white, able-bodied, straight and stupidly attractive people, you have far more eclectic reading tastes than I.

This is another Cat Poo Issue (feel free to use that one), since agents and editors keep saying that YA could do with more diversity, and I know for a fact that many people are writing books that try to take readers a bit further from their comfort zone than is normal. And yet, the shelves are still packed with covers showing white 25-year old models pretending to be 16-year olds. Yes, things are starting to change, but it’s happening sloooowly. (This is another area where contemporary YA is a lot better than genre.)

Take note, however: if you are going to buck the trend, please don’t treat your non-white-/gay/whatever characters as mere window dressing. Readers will notice if you treat their personalities like an attribute sheet that has ‘bisexual’ or ‘black’ tacked on to the end. Oh, and avoid stereotyping. You’d think I wouldn’t have to say that in this day and age, wouldn’t you?

5) The tragic death of Mr. Minority.

This one is probably more common in contemporary, to be honest. You know the story: main character is safely within the bounds of the majority, but falls in love with somebody who isn’t. Poignancy and coming-of-age ensues.

Then one of them dies. And when I say ‘one of them’, I mean the minority character.

This can cross over with what’s known as ‘Death by Newbery Medal‘. I suspect it’s a trope being kept alive by people who don’t realise that a better title for Romeo and Juliet would be Idiocy in Five Acts, by William Shakespeare. Killing off one of half (or even both halves) of a couple does not necessarily make their romance more meaningful. Mixed-race romance? The non-white character (who will often be poor, for extra Liberal Points) will almost certainly die. One character has a possibly-fatal-but-maybe-they’ll-make-it-through disease? They’re gonna die, usually in the most maudlin way possible. The characters are gay? If they manage to end up in a relationship at all (an iffy proposition in itself), they will almost certainly die, although it’s more likely they’ll stand on the sidelines until the author needs something tragic to happen so all the straight characters can learn an important lesson. That lesson is usually…uh…don’t be gay? You know, sometimes it’s difficult to give writers the benefit of the doubt…

This has the effect of suggesting there are two distinct kinds of love: there is ‘good love’, by which I mean ‘normal love’, where you get to ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after. Then there is ‘bad love’, which kills you. Somehow, the publishing world has decided that this kind of story deserves to be showered with literary awards. Protip: your chances of scoring a major award increase if the minority character is killed in a hilariously out-of-the-blue fashion, like an off-page car crash or a sudden, random murder by a phantom mugger who the author conjures out of thin air in the last thirty pages. The last time I came across this was in Colum McCann’s Let The Great World Spin (not YA), in which a young black prostitute is killed in a completely pointless, yet meticulously described car crash. I was laughing so hard throughout that other people in the cafe I was in started giving me funny looks.

Really, there’s no need for this. This kind of ‘us against the world’ relationship comes with a certain amount of emotional potential built-in by its very nature; you do not need to kill off one of the characters just to up the ante.

And finally…

6) Let’s be more speculative.

This is aimed squarely at the SF/Dystopian writers out there. Why are all of your romances vanilla one-boy-one-girl affairs? Your story is set in the future, land of limitless opportunities! Where are all the clone families and polyamorous three-way romances and matriarchal harems? Are you telling me you can come up with a dystopian society with all sorts of unusual social mores, but you can’t come up with anything more interesting for your characters to do than engage in a boring old high-school romance?

Let’s be more speculative about these things.

That’s all for now! I swear my next post will consist of something other than me complaining. Probably.

Oh, and Happy Valentine’s Day!

YA Writers: Steal From Everybody

Posted by on January 28, 2011 2 comments

 

 

All writers steal.

Well, no, all writers borrow. Although, what’s the difference between borrowing something and stealing it when you can’t give it back?

All writers take inspiration, then. We’re like sponges for ideas.

Now I’m comparing writers to sponges.

But you know what I mean. If you write, I don’t have to explain what I’m talking about. You know how it feels to be reading a book or watching  a movie or talking to friends and be suddenly hit over the head with an idea. Very often, you can tell exactly where that idea came from. Maybe the main character in a movie is eerily reminiscent of your own main character, but with different emphasis placed on certain aspects of his personality. Before that moment, you never realised that your story could be vastly improved by stressing a character’s faithfulness; now you see that it couldn’t work any other way. This is not plagiarism. Writers give far less thought to the fine line between inspiration and outright theft than most people think. We simply ‘know’, on some intuitive level, when we’ve gone too far. (And who would want to go too far? Writing plagiarised stories must be the most soul-crushing endeavor possible.)

You would think that a YA writer would draw inspiration primarily from YA novels, but that isn’t the case for me. For example, ast night I went to see an excellent stage adaptation of Jane Eyre. There’s a scene where Jane is sitting alone in a corner of the drawing room while Mr. Rochester entertains a band of upper-class twits (the best kind). Nothing like this happens in my WIP, yet while watching the scene unfold I was struck by a sudden idea for the opening chapters of the book: He can say this….then he’ll say that…which will give the reader a much better appreciation for…haha, yes!

And then I sort of zoned out and missed ten minutes of the play because I was too busy mentally rewriting my first chapter.

My point is that writers do this kind of thing constantly. We do not sit down and think ‘I’m going to read this YA novel so I can take ideas from it’. It just happens, and it happens at the least likely of times. I think you’ll agree that something like Jane Eyre isn’t the best template in the world for YA. (Although I will admit that the more unbalanced aspects of the Jane/Rochester relationship now remind me of Edward Cullen. Yes, really.)

I think it’s a good thing for writers to take inspiration from ‘outside’ sources. YA as a category has become something a closed ecosystem lately, with the same tropes and ideas being endlessly recycled. So YA writers: steal from everybody, not just each other.

REVIEW: The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan

Posted by on January 7, 2011 No comments

The Steel Remains (A Land Fit for Heroes, #1)The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Richard K. Morgan is apparently best known for writing very gritty, fast-paced science fiction, and does it ever show. Although it’s fantasy through and through, The Steel Remains subtly breaks enough genre conventions that I can see why some people refer to it as a SF/Fantasy hybrid (I might not agree with those people, but I can see where they’re coming from): the planet that the story takes place on has a ring system, ‘the Band’, which features in various myths and religions throughout its cultures; the characters, rather than being heroes full of untapped Destiny, are approaching middle age and ostensibly have their glory days far behind them; almost every death is described with a sort of gleeful brutality, even when it’s the good guys butchering their way through the bad guys; there is quite a bit of unromanticised sex.

If you read all of that and thought ‘Sweet, a fantasy novel for people who are bored by most fantasy novels’…well, don’t get your hopes up that high. Morgan’s SF sensibilities are undeniably refreshing, but they can just as often become grating. This becomes most problematic in the dialogue: every single character uses the word ‘fuck’ as if they’re trying to reach a quota, even if they’re a priest, an emperor, or a god, and the diction is consistently ‘modern’ in few other ways. It wasn’t strange enough to detract from the story, exactly, but it was sometimes distracting.

The plot moves along quickly, which might help to hide the fact that it remains incredibly unfocused for the novel’s first two-thirds or so. Ringil, the faded war-hero, is brought back from a life of exile in order to save his cousin from slave traders. Needless to say, there’s a lot more to it than that, but it takes a long time for the rest of the plot to show up. The most intriguing character in the novel (who is notably not any of the three main characters) shows up just in time to save things from descending into an unfocused mess, but still late enough that some people will probably have lost interest before then. Thankfully, the mythology surrounding him is compelling and unique enough to make up for virtually all of the book’s other flaws. Morgan has hit on something great here, and I sincerely hope he’ll expand on it in future volumes.

I suspect, however, that sales for the second book in the series will be smaller than for the first, at least if some of the negative reviews on Amazon are any indication. There are apparently a worrying number of people who can’t handle the idea of a stereotypically masculine fantasy hero being gay (or, indeed, a fantasy heroine being a lesbian), and Morgan’s frank handling of gay themes has upset more than a handful of critics. Bizarrely, several Amazon reviewers seem to be offended that Ringil isn’t stereotypical enough, apparently feeling that Morgan was engaging in some form of deception by not having him instantly adhere to their idea of what gay men are like.

I’ve even come across such squeamishness in positive reviews like this one, where the book is described as featuring ‘an incessant bombardment of hardcore, gay pornography’ and as pushing an ‘agenda’ (might that be the homosexual agenda, by any chance?) As a rebuttal, I’ll simply point out that there is a scene in which the reader is told precisely how many thrusts a minor character can engage in during sex before he ejaculates. Needless to say, this has been described by nobody as constituting ‘hardcore, straight pornography’.

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