And an altogether different take on fantasy

[kcf]

Read this by Jonathan McCalmont.

Some interesting discussion should result in this, but my initial reaction - let me count the ways I disagree...

[Ran]

Dear me. Pomposity knows no bounds.

[DanteGabriel]

Does he have some other column where he actually justifies the comment about George RR Martin's "passive and sheep-like" fans, or are we just supposed to accept that as a given?

[Bellis]

I agree with him: he just doesn't get fantasy. Seems to be suffering from a lack of imagination. Very strange article (she says, eying the Scott Lynch and GRRM sitting quite happily next to the Rushdie and Eco on her bookshelf).

[Red Templar]

That's one thing that always amazed me about some people - they don't understand or don't "get" certain things, so therefore those things are irrelevant.

The funny thing is that the guy even admits that he doesn't get it. So why not just leave it at that, and be content to let others that do get it appreciate the intellectual and literary value of the genre?

Just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean that it has no value. Ran is right - the guy is a pompus ass.

[Violanthe]

I've run into this sentiment before, that somehow because fantasy depicts and authoritarian or patriarchal society that it must inherently be espousing authoritarian or patriarchal values. I think that this is not only bull (after all, what fantasy reader, or writer for that matter, would want to live under such a system?), but I think that the opposite is more likely true. Fantasy readers and writers like to enter this world for purposes of escapism and entertainment, but at the end of the day come away with the feeling that life would be much worse in a medieval milieu. It's just more interesting to read about because it's so different from our own. Constrictive, brutal cultures provide lots of opportunity for conflict and tension. That's all.

[Red Templar]

I've run into this sentiment before, that somehow because fantasy depicts and authoritarian or patriarchal society that it must inherently be espousing authoritarian or patriarchal values. I think that this is not only bull (after all, what fantasy reader, or writer for that matter, would want to live under such a system?), but I think that the opposite is more likely true. Fantasy readers and writers like to enter this world for purposes of escapism and entertainment, but at the end of the day come away with the feeling that life would be much worse in a medieval milieu. It's just more interesting to read about because it's so different from our own. Constrictive, brutal cultures provide lots of opportunity for conflict and tension. That's all.

Good point. I also think that a lot of readers like fantasy because it because it is a valid criticism of authoritarian values.

[danro]

Using Ned Starks support for capital punishment as an example of how GRRM and all his fans are closet supporters of political authoritarianism IRL (ok, I may be exaggerating a little bit here) pushed a few of my buttons.

First of all, it's fiction. It's not even didactic fiction.

Second, the fictional setting is feudal. That is, politically authoritarian. And the fictional character in question was raised to be an authority figure in said system. Making him an anarchist activist wouldn't exactly have been believable. (How many slaves was it that George Washington owned.)

Third, the fictional setting is medieval. That makes the case for or against physical/capital punishment rather different than in modern times. Incarceration as punishment on a larger scale is not practical in a pre-industrial society. Leaving few options harsher than fines, except physical punishment. Did any real medieval societies not have capital punishment?

Fourth. GRRM promoting authoritarianism IRL?

I rest my case.

If he wanted an example there are other good and kind authors writing didactic fiction that arguably glorifies facism.

*edit* I concede that Jonathan McCalmont was right in one of his assumptions though. I actually do think that being prepared to kill someone yourself is indicative of greater character than having an underling do it for you. (Not that I support capital punishment in the first place.)

[kcf]

If he wanted an example there are other good and kind authors writing didactic fiction that arguably glorifies facism.

yeah but none of those types write fantasy - they actually write books that mean something.

[Red Templar]

If he wanted an example there are other good and kind authors writing didactic fiction that arguably glorifies facism.

Would you be kind enough to give us some good examples?

[Werthead]

I've run into this guy before. He posts on the SFX Forum (paradoxically, as he hates SFX Magazine) and is not unintelligent in his criticisms (though frequently long-winded). However, he possesses an inability to accept anyone's opinion other than his own, even when it is (frequently) disagreed with or rejected. I think his head once melted when the paradox of his admiration for John Clute met his hatred for The Wheel of Time (which Clute gave a good write-up of in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy). That was vaguely amusing.

[PhelanArcetus]

Because Eddard Stark totally lives in the same world as Gordon Brown.

I think I need to make an effigy and smack it upside the head.

Actually that analogy brings up an interesting dichotomy in my mind. In Westeros, Ned believes that he, as judge and jury, must also be executioner, lest he divorce himself from the sentence he pronounces, and also because he owes it to the man to carry out that sentence himself rather than hand it to someone else to do. In modern society, judge, jury, and executioner are all kept distinct. Judge is a job that requires legal knowledge beyond the pale of the typical citizen, the jury is intended to be a random sampling (though both prosecution and defense will try and weed out people who they suspect will be unsympathetic; I am confident I was kicked off of a jury because I seemed too intelligent to fall for the "the cop planted the drugs on him due to personal hatred" story). And the executioner is neither the judge nor a member of the jury. This, along with a rigid structure, is intended to keep any one person from being directly and solely responsible for the punishment. The judge determines what is acceptable in the court, and provides the rules of what is and is not a crime. The jury decides guilty or innocent on each crime. The judge applies a legally appropriate sentence for each crime the jury selected guilty for. And an executioner carries out the sentences.

[danro]

yeah but none of those types write fantasy - they actually write books that mean something.

You mean Important Human Themes, Celebrating the Human Spirit and the Living of Life as it Should Be Lived. That kind of books?

[naz]

Well, it's clear that he hasn't read beyond GoT, nor has he understood that he essentially read only 1/7th of a story, when commenting about GRRM. If I was someone who didn't "get" fantasy and read only the first book, I might... just might... think the same thing.

In any event, I think Galactus (I think that was him) and Ran did a good enough job of rebutting him in the Comments section.

[kcf]

You mean Important Human Themes, Celebrating the Human Spirit and the Living of Life as it Should Be Lived. That kind of books?

yep those books are kind of good.

[Xray the Enforcer]

you know the old saying about opinions and assholes.

[PhelanArcetus]

Zoiks!

... I just said zoiks. I surprise myself too often.

I just read two of his prior articles as well. It's incredibly clear that he doesn't "get" fantasy.

Unfortunately, it's also clear that he's a pompous git, a high literature snob, and that he feels that talking about fantasy is slumming it, and also that he's giving us immature people who enjoy fantasy an incredibly valuable gift by deigning to spend some of his time on the genre.

The disconnect is incredible. He wants fantasy to deal with real world politics... I suppose that means he wants the fantasy settings to involve political systems where that's possible... so clearly he needs democracies involved. And obviously all fantasy has people who are just Evil, but we should instead be shown that they have evil economic policies and views on stem cell research.

Can't say I'm keen on the mention that there's objective aesthetic principles that underly artistic expression either.

Now I have to go and see the comments to see how he gets destroyed.

[Swordfish]

Does he have some other column where he actually justifies the comment about George RR Martin's "passive and sheep-like" fans, or are we just supposed to accept that as a given?

He goes into it in the comments.

I also disagree about fantasy existing in order to alienate us. The LONG list of Tolkien knock-offs proves that what fantasy audiences want is pretty much the same stuff they bought last time maybe with a few changes here and there. In fact, the more radical and different the fantasy, the less likely it is to sell well, hence the huge popularity of massive series like GRRM's and Jordan's. The fantasy audience is passive, ill-informed, lazy and content to read the same book over and over, hence the huge power of the big fantasy brands. The same is even true of online tribes... it's no accident that the biggest online fantasy discussion sites are those linked to the biggest selling authors.

[lokisnow]

I like Bakker's replies in the comments section, repeatedly smacks this dude down. I loved this comment:

... The question of epic fantasy's SPECIFIC appeal, it seems to me, is primarily a social, historical, and psychological one.

So getting back to your question regarding worlds and laws. Humans are hardwired to anthropomorphize. Among the many specialized inference systems possessed by our brains, we have 'intentionality detection' systems, which we use to track various kinds of agents as opposed to natural events, which have their own inference systems. Our brain literally has modules dedicated to understanding events according to the modalities of intent or according to the modalities of cause. The thing is, our intentional inference systems are (and this is an uncomfortable fact) hyperactive: they regularly impute intent to events which are in fact causal.

Now before the institutionalization of science in the Enlightenment, we really had no way of knowing this, so as a result, we universally understood the world at large in intentional terms. Only as science provided us with its astonishingly reliable and powerful picture of the ways that causal processes monopolize natural events (the so-called 'disenchantment of the world') were we able to recognize the kinds of wholescale anthropomorphizing underwriting our worldviews. In other words, the institutional dominance of science is what allowed us to see these kinds of worlds as FANTASTIC.

Thus the connection of fantasy worlds to the worlds of scripture (myth that is believed) and myth (scripture that is disbelieved). It's no accident that Middle-earth, Homeric Greece, Biblical Israel, and Vedic India all share such similar ontological structures. They all use the same inference systems to interpret the 'world' - the signature difference is that Middle-earth is a classic example of what psychologists call 'decoupled cognition,' which is just a fancy way of referring to the capacity to think 'as if' that underwrites all fiction. Middle-earth is, in a very real sense, 'scripture otherwise.'

The laws of these worlds are quite literally social and psychological as opposed to natural. This is one of the keys to their appeal, I think. Fantasy worlds are intrinsically meaningful worlds - this is what makes them fantastic. They are not worlds of things, but of AGENTS and ARTIFACTS. There's literally not a 'thing' - understood in the strict sense - to be found in fantasy or scriptural worlds.

Since this is our default way of understanding the world (the scientific worldview requires oodles of training), the primordial way, the 'escapism' of fantasy is not so much an escape as a return to worlds that make immediate sense. And this is part of what makes fantasy the antithesis of modernism, if you define the latter as narrative forms involving the struggle of a protagonist trying to find coherent meaning in an apparently meaningless world. (The Prince of Nothing, btw, tries to turn this toothless saw on its head.) The 'great clomping foot of nerdism,' as Harrison puts it (at once evincing and reinforcing the general bias against forms of decoupled cognition without obvious utility), is nothing more than the 'as if denial' of the scientific worldview, a return not to happier times, but to more comprehensible ones. In epic fantasies, we often like our illusions to run deep.

I can go on and on about this - there's many parallel stories to be told here.

In terms of content, the laws of fantasy worlds are CONCEPTUALLY different, which is just to say they engage different inference systems. In terms of composition, where hard SF uses what I call pseudo-cognitive transition rules to build speculative versions of the stochastically mechanistic world we've gained thanks to the Enlightenment, epic fantasy uses 'associative elimination rules' to build alternate versions of the intentional worlds we've lost thanks to the Enlightenment.

- Scott Bakker

[Fanatic-Templar]

Jordan and Martin are Tolkien knock-offs?

I mean, if I'd only read The Eye of the World I could get that about Jordan, but otherwise...

... why aren't Eragon and The Sword of Shannara the highest standards of fantasy litterature then?