Richard Morgan on gratuitous sex and violence

[Lord Patrek]

Richard Morgan wrote an interesting piece on gratuitous sex and violence in SFF books/series. While I may not agree with everything he says, it is food for thought.

You can find the essay, titled "Gratuities at your discretion", here.

Cheers,

Patrick

[Starkess]

Thanks for the link. It's certainly an interesting response, but I don't think he really seems to get the complaints that people make. He says gratuitous is meaningless, assumes we all play video games for the same purpose, and declares that the prudes just object to the content. Well, yeah. That is the general complaint. That the rest of the content is good, but the sex and violence is not to those people's liking--hence it is gratuitous to their enjoyment of the story.

He's welcome to tell everyone to fuck off and write what he pleases to write. And people can continue to read or not. But it is not wrong or insane of them to offer an opinion about the prevalence of sex and violence in his work.

I dunno. Just rubs me the wrong way, like he's yelling at readers for liking what they like and not liking what they don't like. Responding to criticism of one's writing is always a delicate task, lest one come off as whiny or petulant. Plus it's not a very well-written essay to me, I had to kind of struggle to get through it.

[Humble AK]

1 minute ago, Starkess said:

I dunno. Just rubs me the wrong way, like he's yelling at readers for liking what they like and not liking what they don't like. Responding to criticism of one's writing is always a delicate task, lest one come off as whiny or petulant. Plus it's not a very well-written essay to me, I had to kind of struggle to get through it.

I think it's not so much that an audience can't have their tastes and be critical of material that opposes those tastes, but rather the observation that the criticism is founded upon disingenuous thinking. There generally is a skewed scale of what your typical audience will find acceptable as far as sex is concerned compared to pretty much anything else. Society still isn't entirely comfortable with the topic of sex, even those who generally view themselves as progressive in this area. I like to think I'm extremely progressive, but even I have double standards. I would happily watch horribly violent movies with my parents (or anyone, really) and laugh as they squirm and announce that it's in poor taste, but I would feel very uncomfortable to watch equivalently graphic sex with them.

There's yet a long way to go before society has a healthy attitude regarding sex, whatever that may be.

[C.T. Phipps]

Richard has a fine point. "If you don't like it, don't buy it."

[Darth Richard II]

So...he wants to be remembered for his porn?

[Astromech]

I've only read his Altered Carbon and found it more graphic than some novels, but not necessarily gratuitous. Even the scene with  . . .

Spoiler

Miriam Bancroft and her sex-drug-oozing body

,which would be the closest to what I would possibly consider gratuitous, isn't necessarily, since it does add a dynamic/tension with that character later in the novel. Graphic? Yes. Gratuitous? Not necessarily. He's hardcore where others are softcore.

[HexMachina]

Well I disagree completely with his point that nobody cares about the story anyway. I think assuming that is coming at this from a faulty premise. To me, and I can't imagine I am alone in this, the narrative/story is (in most cases) the most important part. To take my favourite fantasy for example, I read the Fitz books to discover where the story is going, first and foremost. The rest of it - the emotional manipulation in relation to the characters and so on - is secondary. And not only that, it makes narrative sense, arising naturally from the progression of the plot. It's not just about "I'll put in X because it's what my readers thrill to." The story does and should come first, with the readers' "thrill" being secondary to that. 

I'm not a fan of the essay at all actually. I think he comes across as petulant, whiny and condescending to his critics.

[Andorion]

6 minutes ago, HelenaExMachina said:

Well I disagree completely with his point that nobody cares about the story anyway. I think assuming that is coming at this from a faulty premise. To me, and I can't imagine I am alone in this, the narrative/story is (in most cases) the most important part. To take my favourite fantasy for example, I read the Fitz books to discover where the story is going, first and foremost. The rest of it - the emotional manipulation in relation to the characters and so on - is secondary. And not only that, it makes narrative sense, arising naturally from the progression of the plot. It's not just about "I'll put in X because it's what my readers thrill to." The story does and should come first, with the readers' "thrill" being secondary to that. 

I'm not a fan of the essay at all actually. I think he comes across as petulant, whiny and condescending to his critics.

This is also my main point of disagreement. It simply does not chime at all in any way whatsoever with how I read, and how I remember what I read. Story is very very important. 

Gratuitous sex is a bit of a more problematic topic. I know Morgan is notorious for his explicit sex, but to me that did not detract from the story. It helped in character creation. But I have read far more problematic sex - I don't remember the book - it was PNR I think - Vampire, half vampire couple, having relationships problems, hiding in a house preparing for an attack, work out their issues by having super explicit sex every two chapters. That is honestly what I remember about that book, and that really did not help the story at all.

[Humble AK]

9 minutes ago, HelenaExMachina said:

Well I disagree completely with his point that nobody cares about the story anyway. I think assuming that is coming at this from a faulty premise. To me, and I can't imagine I am alone in this, the narrative/story is (in most cases) the most important part. To take my favourite fantasy for example, I read the Fitz books to discover where the story is going, first and foremost. The rest of it - the emotional manipulation in relation to the characters and so on - is secondary. And not only that, it makes narrative sense, arising naturally from the progression of the plot. It's not just about "I'll put in X because it's what my readers thrill to." The story does and should come first, with the readers' "thrill" being secondary to that. 

I think that most people have the initial emotional response to material, and then later analyze why they had that response. You can be conscious of why certain things are appealing to you in real time, but I think liking material comes first, and the analysis is a retroactive operator based on that initial emotional response. No one is going to objectively analyze anything, and so there will always be some inconsistency of logic applied in why one likes this content, versus why one likes other content. I do think that emotional response, which isn't logical, is the most important aspect in judging material...for most people. Perhaps there are outliers, though I doubt it.

[C.T. Phipps]

I confess, he didn't have me sold on my his point until he started randomly talking about Max Payne.

[David Selig]

Morgan's problem is that his sex scenes are really boring. He is just not good at them but he insists on writing a lot of them and quite long ones. I don't care that they don't add to the story, the problem is that they don't add to anything and you can find way better wank material at the numerous sites for free erotic fiction on the Internet.

[The Marquis de Leech]

A while back I wrote a blog post about the sex/gore/swearing quotient in fantasy:

--

Put those pitchforks down. I’m not about to go into a massive moralistic spiel about how evil modern fantasy is corrupting our children, and that everyone ought to go back to only reading good wholesome fare like C.S. Lewis. Rather, this is a complaint about what people consider “adult” within the genre – which is why I’ve been using the inverted commas, since I personally don’t consider it particularly adult at all.

For a couple of decades now, the genre has been beefing up its swearing content (I’m struggling to remember a fantasy book featuring copious usages of fuck before A Song of Ice and Fire appeared on the scene). Alongside that has come an increase in sexual content, both consensual and non-consensual, and in-your-face violence. Some of these changes have been undeniably positive – the genre has become a more diverse place than it once was – but I honestly think you lose points if you include a gay character only to promptly have him arse-raped. In any case, the problem isn’t the grimdark trend per se, but rather that too many people out there think a fantasy book containing high levels of sex, gore, and swearing is more mature than one without.

My position? There’s nothing inherently mature or adult about sex, gore, and swearing in books. There’s nothing inherently wrong with them either – everything depends on context and execution – but reading about such things where the author is simply trying to be edgy gets tiresome. It gets even worse if that sort of content becomes the major point of the exercise, as though simply chucking in wall-to-wall violence, rape, and fucks is sufficient to sustain a story by itself. Just as the post-1977 Tolkien imitations ended up becoming formulaic self-parodies, so it is with the school of thought that you can earn critical brownie points if your main character swears while he murders.

Where has this notion of adult themes come from? I’d suggest in part that it’s thumbing your nose at Tolkien, or more accurately, what they think Tolkien is. You know, the idea that the whole good/evil thing is so childish, and that Tolkien was a wimp who wouldn’t go near “realistic” things like sex and gore – never mind that The Lord of the Rings features catapulted heads and an on-screen suicide, or that The Silmarillion has both incest and mass character death. Tolkien (who you’ll remember was a veteran of the Battle of the Somme, and thus quite familiar with the more horrific things people do to each other) just didn’t do swearing either, so surely including fucks and cunts and what-not in your text must be an iconoclastic break with convention, right? Ditto with copious gore – Tolkien never killed off Frodo, and simply portrayed him as a shell-shocked veteran who could never enjoy life again. The wuss!

I’d also suggest that there’s a follow-the-leader element too, in this case with Martin readers. After Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, people were hunting around for something else fantastical, to the point where A Song of Ice and Fire became one of the landmarks in the genre. Unfortunately, rather than focussing on Martin’s strengths (e.g. characterisation), too many ended up lingering on the narrative wrapping paper – the swearing, and so forth, which was held up as “realistic”, as though that was inherently a good thing.  In some cases, this evolved into a “my tastes are superior to yours” situation, whereby those who appreciated what they thought of as realistic fantasy (not that Martin is realistic in the true sense) looked down on their fellows as interested only in childish escapism. And from there it became a race to see who could out-do who in terms of out-squicking others. One wonders how much further the race has left to go.

Speaking of squick, a while ago I watched the 1970s film adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom (you know, the one moved to fascist Italy, and is so over the top that it was banned in many countries, including my one, until the twenty-first century). One of the points the film made? You’ve got a bunch of sick fascist fucks watching horrible tortures on people for their own sick entertainment. You know, just like the audience themselves. There’s a strong point about audience complicity here, and I think it’s relevant to the present discussion. Why do so many fantasy readers enjoy reading about this sort of thing? To demonstrate that they too are adults (C.S. Lewis had something to say about that)? Because it’s a way of fulfilling one’s darker needs in a socially harmless way (which might be a matter for psychologists)? Because they like seeing the characters go through hell and out the other side (a valid point, were it not for the fact that there are a host of other ways to torment your characters)? I don’t know. I really don’t.

[sologdin]

sex without pornography and war without violence are irresponsible defaults of authorial duty; we should accordingly be concerned about the gratuitous absence of sex & violence, deployed for the sake of gratifying a retrograde anti-prurient interest, on the one hand, and with the purpose of sanitizing belligerence, on the other.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

8 hours ago, Starkess said:

Thanks for the link. It's certainly an interesting response, but I don't think he really seems to get the complaints that people make. He says gratuitous is meaningless, assumes we all play video games for the same purpose, and declares that the prudes just object to the content. Well, yeah. That is the general complaint. That the rest of the content is good, but the sex and violence is not to those people's liking--hence it is gratuitous to their enjoyment of the story.

He's welcome to tell everyone to fuck off and write what he pleases to write. And people can continue to read or not. But it is not wrong or insane of them to offer an opinion about the prevalence of sex and violence in his work.

I dunno. Just rubs me the wrong way, like he's yelling at readers for liking what they like and not liking what they don't like. Responding to criticism of one's writing is always a delicate task, lest one come off as whiny or petulant. Plus it's not a very well-written essay to me, I had to kind of struggle to get through it.

Agreed.  It seems like a flaying attempt to disarm any attempt to suggest problems with his writting style.  

[SeanF]

6 hours ago, sologdin said:

 

I'm not familiar with Richard Morgan's books, but I'm not convinced by the parallel he draws with video games.  The experience you get from a good book is quite different. 

Personally, I think that when it comes to violence, less is very often better than more.  I agree with George Martin's comment that a good horror story doesn't require a detailed description of "the rats gnawing off Billy's genitalia".  What makes the Reek chapters in A Dance with Dragons so good is the psychological impact that being tortured has had on Theon;  a detailed description of his fingers and toes and penis being flayed would be far less interesting.  If I want to read pages of torture porn, or just porn, I can go to fanfiction.net.  I expect more from a good author.

WRT Roose Bolton's quote above, I honestly don't think that LOTR would have been a better book if only Tolkien had written page after page of graphic murder, torture and rape.  We get a sufficiently good idea of the terrible things that happen in Middle Earth (Gollum snatching infants from cradles, cannibalism, undead spirits, severed heads being catapulted into a besieged city, Denethor's growing madness, Frodo's despair, Shelob, wood men being hunted for fun) without needing more graphic accounts.  Would it be a more enjoyable read, if we'd got detailed descriptions of the Orcs torturing Frodo in Cirith Ungol, or Elrond's wife being gang-raped by Orcs?  I doubt it.

[SeanF]

11 hours ago, HelenaExMachina said:

Well I disagree completely with his point that nobody cares about the story anyway. I think assuming that is coming at this from a faulty premise. To me, and I can't imagine I am alone in this, the narrative/story is (in most cases) the most important part. To take my favourite fantasy for example, I read the Fitz books to discover where the story is going, first and foremost. The rest of it - the emotional manipulation in relation to the characters and so on - is secondary. And not only that, it makes narrative sense, arising naturally from the progression of the plot. It's not just about "I'll put in X because it's what my readers thrill to." The story does and should come first, with the readers' "thrill" being secondary to that. 

I'm not a fan of the essay at all actually. I think he comes across as petulant, whiny and condescending to his critics.

The Liveship Traders has three protagonists being raped, two during the course of the story, and one before the events of the story began.  But, the focus is on the impact that being raped had on each of those characters, not graphic accounts of the rapes themselves.  And that's what matters from a story-telling point of view, in my opinion.

[sologdin]

1 hour ago, SeanF said:

I'm not familiar with Richard Morgan's books, but I'm not convinced by the parallel he draws with video games.  The experience you get from a good book is quite different. 

Personally, I think that when it comes to violence, less is very often better than more.  I agree with George Martin's comment that a good horror story doesn't require a detailed description of "the rats gnawing off Billy's genitalia".  What makes the Reek chapters in A Dance with Dragons so good is the psychological impact that being tortured has had on Theon;  a detailed description of his fingers and toes and penis being flayed would be far less interesting.  If I want to read pages of torture porn, or just porn, I can go to fanfiction.net.  I expect more from a good author.

WRT Roose Bolton's quote above, I honestly don't think that LOTR would have been a better book if only Tolkien had written page after page of graphic murder, torture and rape.  We get a sufficiently good idea of the terrible things that happen in Middle Earth (Gollum snatching infants from cradles, cannibalism, undead spirits, severed heads being catapulted into a besieged city, Denethor's growing madness, Frodo's despair, Shelob, wood men being hunted for fun) without needing more graphic accounts.  Would it be a more enjoyable read, if we'd got detailed descriptions of the Orcs torturing Frodo in Cirith Ungol, or Elrond's wife being gang-raped by Orcs?  I doubt it.

agreed.  but my point was rather that it's some sort of ethical breach for an author sacrifice the political objective to an aesthetic one.  

[maarsen]

As far as gratuitous sex goes, Richard Morgan isn't even in the running for being out there. James Ellroy on a bad day certainly tosses in much more. As for violence, again Ellroy certainly  outdoes Morgan.

[Richard Writhen]

16 hours ago, Starkess said:

He's welcome to tell everyone to fuck off and write what he pleases to write. And people can continue to read or not. But it is not wrong or insane of them to offer an opinion about the prevalence of sex and violence in his work.

 

[Astromech]

1 hour ago, maarsen said:

As far as gratuitous sex goes, Richard Morgan isn't even in the running for being out there. James Ellroy on a bad day certainly tosses in much more. As for violence, again Ellroy certainly  outdoes Morgan.

Thanks for reminding me to start Ellroy's Underworld USA trilogy