(Alternate Title: “Epic Fantasy Is What We Point to When We Look Down on Epic Fantasy.”)<\/p>\n
I’ve been on a bit of an epic fantasy kick lately, evidently due to the thousand-ish pages of The Crippled God<\/cite><\/a> not being enough. This means that I was in a weirdly appropriate mental space to catch the recent furor over a fairly dumb NYTimes review of A Game of Thrones<\/cite> on HBO<\/a> that said some snide things about the genre, particularly that women don’t read it. Which has led to a lot of discussion of what epic fantasy is, and whether women read or write it.<\/p>\n A lot of what’s been said is dumb in various ways– I particularly liked the person who grandly declared that the only authors doing any worthwhile work in epic fantasy are women, and didn’t give any examples<\/em>— and a lot of it rubs me a little bit the wrong way. This is probably lingering sensitivity from almost 20 years ago (yikes!) when I was one of the people involved in the creation of rec.art.sf.written.robert-jordan because people in regular rec.arts.sf.written objected to the amount of discussion of the Wheel of Time books. I’ve spent an amazing amount of time reading the subgenre, and an amazing amount of time listening to people talk about how it’s beneath them, so little digs at it really grate. Particularly now that I’m reading a bunch of it again.<\/p>\n The non-stupid elements of the discussion have mostly turned into discussions of definitions, which is exemplified by this LiveJournal post<\/a> (which is mirrored at DreamWidth<\/a>, with separate comments). She’s attempting to look at characteristics of the subgenre and writers in it, and writes:<\/p>\n To quickly define terms, by “urban fantasy” I mean “Set in contemporary world much like ours, but in which magic and\/or magical creatures exist. Typically involves romance, fighting evil, and\/or detecting.” By “epic fantasy,” I mean “Set in non-contemporary world which is not just our world plus magic or an alternate history of our world, big sprawling stories, typically a series of fat volumes, typically involves a huge cast of characters, war, battles, monarchies, and politics. Typically set in a vaguely medieval period.”<\/p>\n I have some questions for you all.<\/p>\n 1. Am I correct that the bestselling writers of epic fantasy are typically male or writing under possibly-male names? I’m thinking of Robin Hobb (woman writing under possibly-male name), Patrick Rothfuss, George R. R. Martin, Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson, Tad Williams, Terry Goodkind, Terry Brooks, etc.<\/p>\n I am under the impression that the female authors writing under clearly female names, like Kate Elliott, Katherine Kerr, are midlist or at least not hugely bestselling authors.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I’m actually not terribly concerned with the gender stuff, but the definition seemed a reasonable enough one. Something bugged me about that list, though, and it took me a while to realized that it was due to the fact that I was in the middle of reading Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind<\/cite>. And that book really doesn’t belong in this list.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n While it’s a thick book, not set in our world, and vaguely medieval in setting, The Name of the Wind<\/cite> fails on practically all other counts. The frame story hints at the possibility of wars and battles to come, but the actual story told in the book is a very tight first-person narrative following a single main character through his early life. The total cast, in both the frame story and the story within the story, runs to maybe a dozen significant secondary characters, but the main focus is on one guy.<\/p>\n This book is not remotely doing the same thing that, say, A Game of Thrones<\/cite> is doing, or the Wheel of Time, or Brandon Sanderson’s own giant fantasy novels. And yet, Rothfuss is always one of the authors cited as an exemplar of modern epic fantasy. But, really, if this is epic fantasy, then so is Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series– Rothfuss isn’t a tenth as clever as Brust, but the primary attraction of his book, like Brust’s, is the narrative voice.<\/p>\n So why is that? My initial snide response is a suspicion that most of the people arguing passionately about the gender distribution of epic fantasy readers and writers haven’t actually read most of the books they’re talking about. This would be consistent with the whiff of disapproval for the subgenre in general that I get from most of these discussions. (Another data point in favor of snide: there were 50+ comments on that post before I pointed out that one of the authors’ names was incorrect (it’s been fixed on LiveJournal but not DreamWidth).)<\/p>\n (This echoes the previous stupid argument about modern epic fantasy, which was that all the characters were amoral bastards, which strongly suggests that the people making that claim haven’t read either Martin or Erikson, because while they’re very bloody, they’re also very moral. The Malazans are clearly the Good Guys in Erikson’s books, while the Starks are noble to a fault in Martin’s.)<\/p>\n That doesn’t really work, though, because it took me a while to realize the problem myself. And even once I started thinking about where The Name of the Wind<\/cite> did belong, I was very hesitant to compare it to Brust, even though that’s really the best analogy. Of the other authors on that list, the only one who’s really working the same territory as Rothfuss in the same way is Robin Hobb, whose first series also had a tight focus on a single character with the narrative voice as one of the main attractions. Her second series broadened things somewhat, but nowhere near the scope of George Martin or Robert Jordan. I wouldn’t really want to add Brust to that list, either– the “right” fix, to my mind, would be to take Rothfuss and Hobb off the “epic fantasy” list, and move them into some new category with Brust. (And Scott Lynch, and maybe Bujold’s Chalion series…)<\/p>\n But as I said, this was a slightly hard mental step to make. So, why was I reluctant to put Rothfuss with Brust? I think the answer has nothing to do with the books themselves, and everything to do with the way they’re packaged. That is, people naturally think of Rothfuss as being in the same category as Martin and Jordan because they’re all writing big thick books, and those books are put together and marketed in similar ways. The contents aren’t actually all that similar, but the covers and cover copy is, which is what creates the impression that they’re the same, when they’re not.<\/p>\n Which is something to keep in mind in reading these debates– a lot of the suggestions people make for “epic fantasy” are rejected on the grounds of, basically, not being “epic” enough, but I think that’s more a matter of marketing than any quality of the text. A lot of the books that get lumped into the “epic fantasy” category don’t really belong by most of the text-based criteria people suggest, but end up there because they’re marketed in the same sorts of ways that more “epic” books are marketed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (Alternate Title: “Epic Fantasy Is What We Point to When We Look Down on Epic Fantasy.”) I’ve been on a bit of an epic fantasy kick lately, evidently due to the thousand-ish pages of The Crippled God not being enough. This means that I was in a weirdly appropriate mental space to catch the recent… Continue reading (Sub)Genre Is a Marketing Convention<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,37,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-pop_culture","category-sf","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5522\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n