Joe Abercrombie defends gritty fantasy

Thought this was a good read, even if I don't wholly agree with him. (I do agree with some bits, but not others.)

 

Edited the link to make it correct - will get back to this tomorrow - time for me to clock off early tonight and relax.

 

Oh, whoops...did I link to the wrong thing? Sorry, if I did (and now curious what I did link to).

It's an interesting read, nonetheless.

 

You originally linked to the wp-comments.php file (somehow). I'll give it a read later as it's quite long and I have lots of work on today.

 

Great Link NF (and I Brian) and a great blog by Joe. From a writer's pov this leapt out at me:

If you don't throw caution to the winds when you actually feel the need, then you'll end up writing sterile, stilted work... and if you don't, then you've no chance of doing better next time, because there is no better, if you can't see past that.

Should this be in Joe's Threads?

 

A general an interest post - really good reading.

The only points I'd make are:

1. Realism is one thing, but I think any serious fiction, in any media, needs to avoid outright "blood porn".

2. GRRM based ASoFaI on the War of the Roses - but the characters and violence are highly exaggerated. Read "The Sunne in Splendour" by Sharon Penman and you can see Ned, Robert, and Cersei - but there is no Joffrey, Ser Gregor, or Bolton, or anything remotely like them - nor, do I think, would their actions ever be accepted. We might see one or two in history, but together in the same period - no, that's not realism - but then, they are designed to provoke an emotional reaction from the reader, much in the same way as a meddling gossip might in a soap opera;

3. I think fantasy is becoming a broader genre, not simply in terms of subjects, but especially in terms of reader. Simply put, I think more and more people are turning to fantasy, and more importantly, finding what they want to read. As geek has gone mainstream I think scifi/fantasy has, and readership will contine to grow. It won't do that if fantasy does not develop as well.

 

I think Grimdark is a perfectly valid choice

But I also think that it can, like everything else, be abused -- stuff put in there JUST to be 'edgy' 'OMG I am so dark' or whathaveyou. Dark for dark's sake, not anything else. That feels cheap and nasty, and I put the book down.

I don't, personally, think Joe does that. But I certainly get that vibe elsewhere, you know?


Slight tangent (and personal preference) Also I think that implication and subtlety can work much more wondrous horrors than explicitness. An implication is/can be much more disturbing than one that is given to me in a blow by blow detail that leaves nothing to my imagination. Because left to itself, my imagination will conjure the worst horror to me, which I can almost guarantee is worse than the one on the page.

 

We may not know all of their names, but just in the last century there were plenty of people like this. How else can we explain the piles of the dead, numbered in millions, in the USSR, in Nazi Germany, in Cambodia, in the Congo and Rwanda, and (in lesser numbers) in many more countries? How can we explain the labour camps, gulags and extermination camps? It's highly unlikely that the kind of people who (under the right circumstances) implemented all that in the twentieth century were not around in centuries before, during war, colonisations, slaving, and other varieties of breakdown in society.

This sort of thing may or may not have happened during the Wars of the Roses, but Westeros isn't the England of that time, and GRRM is under no obligation to be faithful to the politics of that time, let alone to the wider society of those days.


(As I've said elsewhere, I think GRRM is showing us that war has terrible consequences and, if I read the man correctly, might feel he was letting us down if he did not show us the horror of these, particularly to readers in the English-speaking world, whose countries have, thankfully, been spared being occupied by the armies of voracious dictatorships in recent centuries.)

 

GRRM has a great deal of experience as a TV writer - of course he knows exactly how to manipulate his readers' emotions.

Also, fiction is by definition not realistic. The author selects which elements to focus on and which to omit, in order to put the story across in the most vivid and coherent way possible. Otherwise it would be a tedious catalogue of people sleeping, eating and going to the toilet!

 

Just to respond to Brian's points above.

1. Probably more or less everyone would agree that we can do without the excessive, the superficial, the gratuitous. The problem comes when you try to define what that means, or to put actual books or scenes into one of those categories. Quite obviously, these are all subjective judgements. Some people might find any kind of depiction of sex totally beyond the pale. Others might feel that there's some intrinsic value to simple shock value and a pushing of the envelope. Anyone read Splatterpunks? Others might just quite like 'blood porn', for the sake of it.

2. Not to say that the middle ages were an endless catalogue of horrors, but I'd strongly agree with Ursa Major that extremes of brutality on a horrifying scale have been common throughout history. The Wars of the Roses may have been relatively restrained, but Towton is still the bloodiest battle on English soil. The crusades were full of extremes of violence including such noble moments as the sack of Constantinople and the massacres at Acre and Maarat, after which the pope had to write a letter imploring the crusaders not to eat any more civilians. The thirty years war depopulated huge swathes of Germany. That's before we go anywhere near the horrors of the 20th century. Clearly people are also capable of heroism, nobility and chivalrous behaviour, but epic fantasy has tended in the past rather to focus on those aspects of warfare. It doesn't seem surprising, or unreasonable, that gritty fantasy tries to redress that balance. No book is about everything, after all, and every book is in conversation with those that have come before.

 

Hey Joe,

I liked the post a lot (and also thanks for linking up to the one I'd written). I do think there's an inherent problem to your argument in #1 here, though. There may not be an "objective line" delineating the meaningful from the gratuitous, but that doesn't mean we can't and shouldn't use logic and reasoning to determine where that line is located for a given work of fiction. And that line doesn't need to be located in the same place for everyone--that's why we discuss and argue it in places like this. Ideally everyone listens to each other and we're all better for the experience

As for #2, I don't think anyone with a sense of history would deny that the Middle Ages were violent. I think, though, that some people have the false sense that violence is all there was to the Middle Ages. As you say, "grit is a tool in the writer's arsenal." And it's a potentially effective one. But if it's the only one, you end up with a one-note symphony that isn't terribly realistic.