[Gary Wassner]

It's such an immense waste of time, and it belies their ulterior motives. I generally dismiss the criticism and look to the criticizer in order to understand the motivation.

[Sammie]

What do you say to those wo don't even try to disguise their storyline as something unique nor any of the characters in it?

In this case I'm referring to Rowlings who flatly admits everything in her books is taken from other books out there. Nothing is original. And to argue the point further, she's not even that good, at least in her early writing. Yet she now sits on top of the heap of Fantasy writers for creating something 'original'.

I remember at a parents evening when I was about ten, my teacher told my parents that is was obvious from my 'original' writing that I read quite widely. At the time I thought that was a really stupid thing to say....surely the more people you rip off in your writing, the less original the result is?! But I think JK Rowling proves quite nicely that the opposite is of course true. She derives inspirations from numerous different sources, but there is undoubtably something fresh and original about the result.

(The moral of this story, boys and girls, is 'sometimes your teacher is actually right' ;) :D)

[Gary Wassner]

Great teachers are like diamonds in the rough. We should each be blessed with at least one in our lifetimes. My youngest son has disgraphia. He cannot write at all. He is as fast on the keyboard as I am, and extremely astute and intelligent, but he could never write. His teachers when he was in grade school used to badger him and insult him and tell him he was lazy. They often made him rewrite his papers over and over and over, all to no avail. He failed tests because they couldn't read his writing. It undermined his self esteem and almost ruined his life. Finally, an incredible woman, his guidance counsellor in the middle school, took him under her wing and helped us all to diagnose his disability. She never abandoned him again. She saved him, literally. Now he's a sophomore at Fordham College at Lincoln Center in NYC and he is a staff member here, writing reviews for the gaming forum.

I think of her as an angel of fate, a truly incredible woman. We are in contact still, all the time. In fact, I just sent her a set of my books.

[ironchef texmex]

I'm reading Mieville's The Scar at the moment. It's good. I like it. World building is a major benchmark of good sci-fi and I appreciate it whenever I see it done well in any genre. This is good world building. Whether or not it can be called original, who cares? It's ambitious and there is something to be said for that.

Still, it's not like I want everything I read to be The Scar. First off, Elves and Dwarves don't make fantasy books derivitive -- and therefore invalid without ever having been read -- any more than the presence of cowboys invalidates a western.

Second, I kind of like books that contain "EEEEEvil". Sure, it can be done haphazardly, but too many books without any bad guys and I start to get bored. We have to explain (read: rationalize) everyone's actions? Why? Did the medieval villagers try and 'understand' the motivation of the travelling bands of mercenaries that so often lived by rape and pillage? Whether or not the devil was making them do it, or merely cheering from the sidelines seems like a question of semantics at that point. I get tired of reading books where things happen that no one is really responsible for. I don't want every book I read to be like that.

As for dark forces, that sort of comes with the territory when you have a story that posits gods as real. Virtually all religions include malevolent entities. Why wouldn't fantasy novels?

New Weird has some interesting stuff, but take away the notions of good and evil and the fantasy characters become less fantastic, the heroes have less to become indignant about and therefore become less heroic, and the whole genre looses a measure of what made it popular in the first place.

[Gary Wassner]

New Weird has some interesting stuff, but take away the notions of good and evil and the fantasy characters become less fantastic, the heroes have less to become indignant about and therefore become less heroic, and the whole genre looses a measure of what made it popular in the first place.

I wish I had said that. You make such an important point. The grand scope of Epic Fantasy enhances all of its attributes.

[KatG]

What is coming to be called New Weird is a mix of dark fantasy and the grittier urban/contemporary fantasy titles. It's sort of a rebirth of the "cyberpunk" style fantasy that was popular in the 1980's when cyberpunk sf was hot. I have an old paperback that was edited by Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold -- four novellas by Stephen R. Boyett, Bellamy Bach, Charles de Lint, and Ellen Kushner -- called "Borderlands," which can be summed up by saying elves with motorcycles, electronics and guitars. :) And which was emblematic of the sort of fantasy that was being put out a good deal during that time, and which was why non-epic fantasy titles got stuck with the sub-genre label "urban" fantasy. That sort of stuff continued to be published, but at a smaller trickle of titles through the 1990's because epic fantasy got so big. It's really nice to see those types of stories increasing in popularity as we get the next wave of fantasy fans. And since "rebellion" is part of that trend, maybe it's not surprising that we're getting a lot of "your father's fantasy stinks" sort of attitude. And to be fair, it isn't usually levelled at all of epic fantasy, just those writers they don't like. :)

This sort of thing does happen in a genre. In the beginning, the new fantasy genre owed a huge debt to the gaming industry, which started with the RPG and hit pay dirt with computer and video games. They figured out early that franchising the games with written fiction was a good combination, because the fantasy fans were interested in both games and books. TSR probably doubled the amount of genre fantasy titles being put out, especially epic fantasy, and ensured that the genre would be profitable for all. But TSR was resented for its market share by the non-gaming publishers, and its epic fantasy writers, like Bob Salvatore, Weis & Hickman, etc., were looked down upon by other writers and some fans. They weren't considered for awards or things of that sort, and often found themselves ostracized in the community.

I'd hate to see that sort of split occurring again. But I'd also hate to see noirish fantasy recede again, so maybe we can put up with a little grumbling now and then. It will be interesting to see if they embrace the older contemporary fantasy writers like Charles de Lint in New Weird or ignore them as not dour and horrific enough.

[Gary Wassner]

I am so in favor of whatever people choose to write. If it's good, then it's good, right? If it's bad, then don't read it. But I cannot understand the point in denigrating a genre or sub-genre or whatever you choose to call it, because of the format of it. Separate and apart from any one individual work, how does it even make sense? It seems so reactionary to me. It's like stereotyping, and it verges on bigotry, which is so antithetical to what the New Wierd claims to be all about.

[Dawnstorm]

Separate and apart from any one individual work, how does it even make sense?

They're saying classifyability is a bad thing, I suppose. (It detracts from the individual merits of the work in favour of the repetitive; it makes you "run the groove" instead of "working out the text"...)

There is something to that line of argument; but it gets absurd at some point. There simply is no New Weird, if there's no Old Faithful. You can't be cross-genre, without there being genres. You can't defy expectations, if there are no expectations.

It's a symbiosis (either that, or they're parasites ;) ).

[JRMurdock]

I am so in favor of whatever people choose to write. If it's good, then it's good, right? If it's bad, then don't read it.

I agree with you 100% on this point. If you have the notion to write, by God do it. Even if no one ever reads what you write, it's a form of expression. Those who excel at it can get paid, but it's a great way to work out issues in your head.

[KatG]

I don't think the main objection of such critics is to there being epic fantasy, the Old Faithful. I think the objection is to what they see as trash cluttering up the Old Faithful. But the problem is always who decides what is trash.

In the very beginning, there were fans who were also into sf, or gaming or comics and there wasn't a lot of fantasy fiction available for them, outside of children's. And the sf publishers, knowing they had a lot of these fans already on board, said: we'll bring in writers, we'll give you fantasy titles. And that's how the genre was born. And a lot of the books were perhaps not written with great artistry, not the highest literary quality or most creative, but it went from practically none to dozens. And the fans didn't care if it was perfect or not, they were just glad to have it, to have their own community and market. And they were considered outcasts, freaks, just as sf fans had been considered freaks, though the interest in sf from the 1950-1970's had upped sf's respectibility a bit. (Some sf writers resented fantasy dragging them back down actually.) Women fans were welcome, but were considered even weirder freaks than the male fans by the outside world.

But now genre fantasy is established, sf is venerable, and even though we're still considered freaks, we're considered a lot more interesting freaks. So we've got a lot of, I'd guess I'd call it gentrification movements going on. Sort of a we've been a slum, a ghetto, but there are some really nice buildings here of merit, so we just have to get rid of all the trash that makes people think we're weird, and reward the more literary and adventurous writers and the literary elite will maybe want to hang here and buy renovated condos. And while I applaud the idea of encouraging literary style writing, experimentation and variety in the genre, which it definitely could use, and for excellent writers to get the respect and money they deserve, the accompanying lets get rid of the ones that embarass us even if fans like them idea does bug me. Because trash is not necessarily trash, not worthless. And I don't trust the eye of the ones who are chosing which buildings to knock down.

But I think a lot of the time, writers are just saying -- this is what I'm doing and it's different from this more familiar thing and that should be okay -- which is fine, but it tends to come out as or they get pushed into the stance of us and them, and then you get the gentrification rhetoric.

I think Matt was talking not so much about the idea that no one could write about a great evil without it being bad, but that so many epic fantasy writers used that idea because that's all they could think of and that's what they were used to. And as I said, I'm not sure that's the reasoning behind it -- I think it's more interest in the subject than lack of vision.