Is it Grimdark or is it not?

[Werthead]

KatG writes a gazillion word detailed analysis of Grimdark, and all we come away with is.."You think Sanderson is Grimdark???"

Until I read a previous topic in witch KatG mentioned Grimdark I was always under the assumption the term was just a way people were describing authors that had a similar grim and dark tone as George R R Martin's(GRRM) A Song of Ice and Fire (GRRMDARK). Was/Am I the only one?

GRRM's place in the pantheon of grimdark is disputed. In fact, even Abercrombie is. One of the alleged features of grimdark is the notion that the world itself inherently sucks, which isn't the case all of the time with Martin's world (or Abercrombie's). Oddly, Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy, set on a planet choking in ash, would fit that definition. Others dispute this dispute and claim that grimdark is more about lots of swearing and sex and entrails, in which case GRRM and Abercrombie may count but Sanderson doesn't. And then people point out that the term comes from Warhammer and 40K, both of which are aimed at relative youngsters (certainly teens and up), so although the worlds and settings suck (and the Warhammer world was recently utterly destroyed in the fiction, the most nihilistic and grimdark thing possible to happen) the actual fiction steers clear of elements like sex and swearing and graphic ultraviolence.

What makes a book not Grimdark? The Sword of Truth series has seriously dark stuff all throughout it. The main characters get raped, tortured, enslaved etc and from memory Goodkind doesn't shy away from showing it. So it's full of all the cool stuff the grimdark crowd like, so what's stopping it from being described as Grimdark?

As a movement, grimdark is really seen as being a more recent thing whilst Goodkind published his first book over 20 years ago. However, those who'd put Donaldson and Cook into the pantheon with even older series would probably put Goodkind in there as well.

One important distinction I think is that grimdark settings are often held to be awful and depressing places in the books in which they are discussed, violence has a corrosive effect on the soul and the good guys find themselves morally compromised by the hard choices they make. In Goodkind, the good guys are always good (even when massacring thousands of unarmed civilians and burning their cities), there is never a single moment of moral doubt or metacommentary, and no-one is ever really psychologically affected by the horrors they see. Goodkind may use the wallpaper of grimdark, but he never really engages with the issues of the subgenre and therefore isn't really part of it.

 

[KatG]

Nonsense. We've already established the opposite is fluffycrystalfairyunicornwings.

I agree that My Little Pony is probably pretty opposite of grimdark fantasy. But, again, you're trying to disappear a lot of authors. There was a ton of graphic stuff in the 1800's because they had things like public hangings and slavery. Their relationship with violence was a lot more clearcut than our modern age -- they didn't see graphic material as necessarily a problem, depending on the type of publication. And that continued well into the World War II era. Conan was not a nice person when Howard invented him for magazine publication in 1932:

The fifties were filled with pulp stories that were incredibly graphic, including plenty of rape, rape presented as sex, icky monsters, brutal murders, torture including by the good guys, and actually a fair amount of anti-heroes and successful villains. The 1970's were all about sex, including rape, S&M, and the 1980's were all about bare breasts, bloody horror and violent action, including the dismemberment of women and a lot of splattergore and slasher films. There were graphic novels, underground publishing, commando bloodfests, etc. There is a whole line of authors who wrote graphic, edgy, gritty, noir nihilistic, bloody, amoral, horror, military, etc. stuff stretching over decades. While it may feel a little icky to think that our grandparents and parents read that stuff, and while it seems to make us feel supercool to say that we're the ones making the really gritty, edgy, dark violent stuff way beyond what has gone before, we're not.

What makes grimdark separate is because a group of authors around the same time were going for a very similar look, sound, themes and types of settings and characters in secondary world. And then that word, having stuck, becomes a useful way to refer to other books in the same neighborhood as a reference point. It will pop up periodically. There may be a new "grimdark" generation down the road that is seen as another movement. And certainly some of the stuff that the authors of their time tackle is of their time and of conflicts and mores in that time. It's specific.

But when you compare grimdark's graphic levels to say Leisure Books horror novels of the 1980's, it's actually on the lighter side of a lot of it. Grimdark, in fact, uses bursts of violence as punctuation between longer spells of moody, entertaining posturing. That's what sort of makes it dark fantasy, as opposed to horror. And in terms of sexual content, grimdark is very light on that, especially compared to the 1960's-1980's period. They like battle scenes more than sex ones, even rape ones. And most of the content of Martin's Song is straight out regular political epic fantasy and contains not that graphic battle action. (The t.v. show goes for a more lurid take on the story.)

Alchemist, I'm sorry that I confused you -- I was responding to everybody posting in aggregate, not saying that you said all those different things. The only time I was responding directly to you was at the top of the post, when I quoted you. But let's tackle some of what you brought up:

But I do think that he probably thought something like, "Wow, those guys are making a killing on writing big fat fantasy - I should give it a shot, but I'm going to do something different, something edgier."

No, that wasn't his goal. Bear in mind that big fat fantasy was a staple starting in the 1970's, long before Song. And lots of big fat fantasy didn't sell or sold mid-list. What made a series a hit was not it being big and fat, but word of mouth that led lots of people to hear of it, try it, like it, and spread more word of mouth. (Fiction has been doing viral for a very long time.)

Martin was a successful film and t.v. writer and producer, which made him a ton load more money than doing written fiction. He in fact had written very little fiction for awhile because of his Hollywood career. But he got tired of being paid for scripts which so seldom got developed into actual productions (because that happens to everybody in Hollywood,) and so he decided to take a break and try something totally different -- a big epic fantasy trilogy based on historical wars and stuffed with fantastic elements and a gigantic cast and scope -- a series that would be deliberately impossible to ever film but which you could do to your heart's content in written fiction. And because he did have the big Hollywood career, as well as a respected SFF writing career from way back, his publisher was eager to take it on. It did get a fair amount of publicity from the publisher from that, and Games was a category bestseller, but it did take a little while to build the word of mouth into a bigger bestsellerdom with a rabid cult following as well.

And while Martin was bearing in mind that he wanted to go the Moorcock route rather than the Tolkien, with being more towards historical fiction than mythic poetry like Tolkien, edgier was already in epic fantasy. Donaldson, Kay, Cook, Gemmell and countless other writers were doing graphically violent and edgy. Dark fantasy has been a sub-category of fantasy since the 1800's. Martin was great with the shock plot twists, but most of what he was doing was no edgier than a lot of the 1980's and 1990's sec world fantasy being put out. You have to remember, epic fantasy has been huge and churning out thousands of titles for nearly fifty years. The two things that really drew people to Martin weren't especially the dark material. It was A) the gigantic scope of the attempt (much like with Jordan,) and its relationship to historical and military fiction (some tried to call it historical fiction; ) and B) his deep submersion into each pov character, giving each full chapters when they were on deck within the context of such a large epic, (some people only read the storylines of the pov characters they like.) The Martin is the author of all darkness stuff didn't start coming up until into the oughts, when people kept trying to declare oughts authors somehow breaking with the writers in the 1980's and 1990's and being way more supercool dark and edgy. Since a lot of the writers from then are still around and publishing, that sort of irked a lot of them. Basically, Martin has very good word of mouth voluntary spin doctors (not that I don't love his work.) And so does grimdark.

Now what I find worrying is that grimdark has dominated epic fantasy for a decade or more, it seems. I do think this has a lot to do with the popularity of Martin, his influence, and in the last five years, the HBO show. Grimdark is in. I do hope that it will fade, though, or at least we will see a new wave of less grimdark-focused epic fantasy.

It really hasn't dominated secondary world fantasy. Grimdark is actually a fairly small group of fantasy authors. They just happen to be beloved here in this forum, so it just seems like they run the world. Remember, secondary world fantasy is a huge general category and not everything in it is a giant war novel, and certainly not a nihilistic, Gothic barbarian novel. Jacqueline Carey is a much bigger author than Mark Lawrence (though Mark is working on it.) I can come up with a list of ought and teens fantasy authors that will run for days who aren't grimdark and who are big in the field and big sellers. We don't have to wait for a "new wave" -- we have fifteen years of countless titles already. Likewise, grimdark is nowhere near all of dark fantasy. It's just a sub-group of dark fantasy.

Kay isn't grimdark, as he's a much older author. He's just an ancestor of it, who uses dark and graphic material. As for whether he fetishes it, I would say that varies depending on the book. I certainly felt that he did so in his first trilogy and badly. His writing for me improved in his later works. Grimdark isn't that interested in making a fetish of violence, sex or even moodiness. It's more interested in philosophical themes of desperation, frustrated attempts at redemption, how people are turned monstrous, western themes of expansion and appropriation, ruthlessness in politics and war, etc. In many ways, it condemns violence and war, with characters trying to move away from those things to varying degrees of success.

The Sword of Truth series has seriously dark stuff all throughout it. The main characters get raped, tortured, enslaved etc and from memory Goodkind doesn't shy away from showing it. So it's full of all the cool stuff the grimdark crowd like, so what's stopping it from being described as Grimdark?

1) Time period. Goodkind started writing his series in the 1990's. He's not part of the nucleus of authors in the last ten years. He might be an influence to some of the grimdark writers, but stylistically, he has little in common with them.

2) Style and themes, which make up the movement and tone of the sub-sub-category. Grimdark isn't about the graphic violence. Lots of fantasy stories have graphic violence and dark elements. It's about the consequences of graphic violence. About living a life, having to live a life, of graphic violence. Grimdark employs tragedy -- its characters are broken, despairing, attempting redemption or revenge, sacrificial, turned amorally ruthless and savage in varying degrees. It uses a setting and atmosphere of dystopian chaos -- horrific, war-torn, mysterious, nihilistic and fatalistic, in which characters are tossed like a ship on rocks in a storm.

To borrow Lord Grimdark's characters, Logen is a magically cursed beserker who keeps trying to escape violence and leading men into battle, who causes the death of those he loves and hates alike. Glotka was a promising but feckless military officer taken prisoner and broken in body and spirit, to in turn break others and scheme from the shadows while at the same time often trying to save the world from worse horrors. Jezel is also a promising but feckless military officer, who is slowly broken down by his dreams of glory and the manipulation of others into a puppet king. And so on and so forth. If you want to put it in its simplest terms, grimdark fantasy is thematically about the Fall from Heaven.

In contrast, Goodkind's themes involve righteous leadership, the demands of duty, objectivist libertarianism values about inherent merit, heroic defiance and victory, etc. While some of his characters are broken and make hard, questionable choices morally, those aren't the main themes of the series. It's called The Sword of Truth, not The Sword of Despair. So it's not grimdark even retroactively. It's doing a different sort of story.

 

[Mark Lawrence]

It's worth noting that when words like 'movement' or 'group' are used they carry an implication that there is some kind of aspirational or deliberate element at play - some effort made to belong.

As someone cited a couple of times in this thread as having written some 'grimdark' books I should point out that when I had finished writing the Broken Empire trilogy I hadn't read any work by Abercrombie, Morgan, Bakker, Cook, Rothfuss, Lynch, Brett, Sanderson, Goodkind, or ... I believe ... any author mentioned in this thread with a grimdark connected with the exceptions of Donaldson, Martin, and Moorcock.

When I wrote Prince of Thorns the only book I had in mind was A Clockwork Orange (1962, Burgess).

I still haven't read any Abercrombie, Morgan, Cook, Goodkind, or Sanderson...

It's very easy to trick oneself into believing you understand the heritage and influences of an author. People are given to stating them as fact with no more evidence than a hunch. I recently saw this posted about me on a forum:

>The author also must be a fan of the sci-fi series Firefly, as the sarcasm and linguistic patterns of the main character seem to mirror that used in the show.

But I’ve never seen an episode of Firefly.

 

[Contrarius]

I still haven't read any Abercrombie, Morgan, Cook, Goodkind, or Sanderson...
[.....]
But I’ve never seen an episode of Firefly.

Mark, Mark, Mark. You make me so sad for you.

You MUST get busy and read Abercrombie and Morgan -- and then watch all of Firefly. They are essential to your continued happiness. ;-)

 

[Mark Lawrence]

Mark, Mark, Mark. You make me so sad for you.

You MUST get busy and read Abercrombie and Morgan -- and then watch all of Firefly. They are essential to your continued happiness. ;-)

It's being busy that gets in the way!

I have all of the ARCs of Abercrombie's YA trilogy. I'm the only one in the house not to have read them yet.

 

[Alchemist]

It's worth noting that when words like 'movement' or 'group' are used they carry an implication that there is some kind of aspirational or deliberate element at play - some effort made to belong.

I hear what you are saying, but bear in mind that many "movements" aren't deliberate or part of some kind of aligned intention to produce something specific, but more of a "congealing" works and artists/authors around specific themes and tonalities. It isn't like Da Vinci and others were saying, "Hey, we're in the Renaissance - let's do Renaissance stuff." Actually, I read somewhere that what we call the Renaissance was actually only participated in by about 1,000 people. It is only after the fact that it was labeled as such, and that its cultural and historical influence was realized as the "axis" between the Medieval and Modern Ages.

I see it as a zeitgeist thing - art is always contextual, always produced within a time and place. This is why John Clute said something to the effect that science fiction post-911 is forever changed, that all sf after 9/11/2001 is influenced by 9/11 to various degrees, even if subconsciously. It could be that the "grimdark movement" arises at least partially as a collective response to the Age of Terror (or at least the Age of perceived Terror!).

 

[Alchemist]

What makes grimdark separate is because a group of authors around the same time were going for a very similar look, sound, themes and types of settings and characters in secondary world.

So you're saying that "grimdark" is simply a modern iteration of dark fantasy, with some degree of intentionality behind. This seems to go against what Mark Lawrence is saying, at least about his own work.

Alchemist, I'm sorry that I confused you -- I was responding to everybody posting in aggregate, not saying that you said all those different things. The only time I was responding directly to you was at the top of the post, when I quoted you. But let's tackle some of what you brought up:

No problem!

No, that wasn't his goal. Bear in mind that big fat fantasy was a staple starting in the 1970's, long before Song. And lots of big fat fantasy didn't sell or sold mid-list. What made a series a hit was not it being big and fat, but word of mouth that led lots of people to hear of it, try it, like it, and spread more word of mouth. (Fiction has been doing viral for a very long time.)

I don't think it was his literal, or only, goal - but no author is working in a vacuum, so I'm sure he was aware of Jordan's and Goodkind's success.

And while Martin was bearing in mind that he wanted to go the Moorcock route rather than the Tolkien, with being more towards historical fiction than mythic poetry like Tolkien, edgier was already in epic fantasy.

I realize that, but I think he brought a new popularity to it, especially in terms of "big fat fantasy."

Donaldson, Kay, Cook, Gemmell and countless other writers were doing graphically violent and edgy.

I don't know why you keep including Kay - I really don't see him in the same light. Sure, he writes for an adult audience and doesn't shy away from serious, even dark, themes, but he really doesn't seem to qualify as "dark fantasy."

Dark fantasy has been a sub-category of fantasy since the 1800's. Martin was great with the shock plot twists, but most of what he was doing was no edgier than a lot of the 1980's and 1990's sec world fantasy being put out.

I hear that. It may simply be a matter of (lack of) historical memory. At the least we could say that Martin's work was darker and edgier than the vast majority of the epic fantasy of the 80s and 90s.

It really hasn't dominated secondary world fantasy. Grimdark is actually a fairly small group of fantasy authors. They just happen to be beloved here in this forum, so it just seems like they run the world. Remember, secondary world fantasy is a huge general category and not everything in it is a giant war novel, and certainly not a nihilistic, Gothic barbarian novel. Jacqueline Carey is a much bigger author than Mark Lawrence (though Mark is working on it.) I can come up with a list of ought and teens fantasy authors that will run for days who aren't grimdark and who are big in the field and big sellers. We don't have to wait for a "new wave" -- we have fifteen years of countless titles already. Likewise, grimdark is nowhere near all of dark fantasy. It's just a sub-group of dark fantasy.

This may be a matter of semantics. I don't see "dominate" as meaning "everything," as you seem to imply. I do think it has a much larger role and influence than it did, say, 20 years ago. In a similar sense that dynastic/political epic fantasy seems more popular now relative to quest fantasy than 20+ years (I blame Jordan and Martin for this, although clearly they aren't the only ones).

Kay isn't grimdark, as he's a much older author. He's just an ancestor of it, who uses dark and graphic material. As for whether he fetishes it, I would say that varies depending on the book. I certainly felt that he did so in his first trilogy and badly. His writing for me improved in his later works. Grimdark isn't that interested in making a fetish of violence, sex or even moodiness. It's more interested in philosophical themes of desperation, frustrated attempts at redemption, how people are turned monstrous, western themes of expansion and appropriation, ruthlessness in politics and war, etc. In many ways, it condemns violence and war, with characters trying to move away from those things to varying degrees of success.

OK, thanks for clarifying this - I should have read your entire post before replying to it, but your posts are just so long (and my daughters want to go to the beach . I agree with you about Fionavar, which is my least favorite of Kay's work (although I haven't read his last three).

And so on and so forth. If you want to put it in its simplest terms, grimdark fantasy is thematically about the Fall from Heaven.

This is interesting because in a way this is what Tolkien's work is about, and no one would accuse JRR of being grimdark. How would you differentiate Tolkien's approach to the "fall from heaven" from grimdark's? I personally think it has something to do with Tolkien's Romanticism, that the longing for the "golden age" is palpable and the focus of the protagonists is about preserving and/or revitalizing the "light." Maybe grimdark has more to do with the living in the Fallen World without hope of redemption - thus the nihilism that you mention.

In contrast, Goodkind's themes involve righteous leadership, the demands of duty, objectivist libertarianism values about inherent merit, heroic defiance and victory, etc. While some of his characters are broken and make hard, questionable choices morally, those aren't the main themes of the series. It's called The Sword of Truth, not The Sword of Despair. So it's not grimdark even retroactively. It's doing a different sort of story.

Thanks for reminding me why I've never read Goodkind

 

[Jo Zebedee]

As someone cited a couple of times in this thread as having written some 'grimdark' books I should point out that when I had finished writing the Broken Empire trilogy I hadn't read any work by Abercrombie, Morgan, Bakker, Cook, Rothfuss, Lynch, Brett, Sanderson, Goodkind, or ... I believe ... any author mentioned in this thread with a grimdark connected with the exceptions of Donaldson, Martin, and Moorcock.

.

It took me aback because I didn't see it in any way as grimdark (which I've read a few books of, but no more than many other sff genres - probably less). In fact, after I'd finished it I was pointed in the direction of Lois McMaster Bujold and relaxed that someone else somewhere seemed to write a similar level of sf.

I have an uncanny knack of being totally unable to set out to write any definable genre. Next I'll come out with one of those fluffy unicorn thingmajigs...

 

[Eldanuumea]

Mark, your life cannot be complete until you've seen Firefly. And you have to try Mistborn, book one. The allomancy is so fascinating and fully developed.

 

[KatG]

It's worth noting that when words like 'movement' or 'group' are used they carry an implication that there is some kind of aspirational or deliberate element at play - some effort made to belong.

Well no, they don't carry that implication at all. As I said previously several times here, sometimes a genre movement is deliberate in which a group of authors who are pals say we want to explore this and try these stylistic and thematic ideas because we like them, such as New Wave SF, and start writing it and getting it published, and sometimes, it's accidental. A group of authors who don't even necessarily know each other, sometimes living in different countries, just happen to be hitting the same sort of themes, stylistic tones and common elements (which is quite easy to have happen in fantasy,) publishers grok it and publish it, some of them do really well, some of them do pretty well, and people -- fans, media, editors, etc. -- start to group them together, seeing the commonalities and talking about them, and bequeathing various descriptive labels, one of which may stick, such as with cyberpunk SF.

Bruce Bethke titled a short story "Cyberpunk." Then editor Gardner Dezois started calling various writer's works cyberpunk, other people do it, and William Gibson finds himself called the king of cyberpunk because of the success of Neuromancer. Writers like Tim Powers, Emma Bull, James Blaylock, and K.W. Jeter were doing contemporary and historical fiction that was very successful but quite different from epic sec world fantasy, which was usually pre-industrial or portal/multiverse. So Jeter used the terms urban fantasy to describe, retroactively, for the contemporary stuff (not a movement as it was not theme related but a sub-category by setting,) and steampunk for the Victorian-ish historical stuff, both SF and fantasy, riffing off of cyberpunk, (both a movement and a sub-category,) in the 1980's. The terms stuck and people used those terms to refer to works that had the contemporary setting for contemporary fantasy and common elements including setting, style/tone and themes for steampunk, which also grew into a wider cultural movement. After becoming moribund in use in the 1990's, urban fantasy re-emerged as a term for contemporary fantasy in the early oughts, beating out supernatural fantasy and modern fantasy as terms.

So basically, authors don't have a lot of control over these terms, although they may make some of them up or spread their use as part of fandom. They're descriptors that people end up using, not definers. They are meant to be a reference point -- if someone likes Abercrombie, they may (or may not) like your work because you are exploring similar ideas in your own way. And then they end up as panel subjects at conventions. The influence of A Clockwork Orange is pretty obvious on your work, as well as some other works maybe. But did you read those? Maybe, maybe not. There are clear lines of descent in fiction, as we see ideas developed over time, topics revisited, but just because something an author does is related to past works doesn't mean that the past author is a direct influence of that author. It just means that we can look at and study how different authors did similar things at different times.

And bear in mind that movements as distinct movements rather than general categories happen within a time period, usually somewhere in the neighborhood of five to ten years. Authors are all writing works around the same time period that have not been published yet. They're not copying each other because they can't read each other's unpublished works yet, most of the time. They just happen to be digging around in the same neighborhood. Which is not at all unusual because authors browse just like readers. They read stuff and they like it, but instead of writing just like it, they tend to keep ideas in mind and go find another corner for the next thing, as Brisco County Jr. would say. So you get a lot of different views of vampires, just because a bunch of authors thought they'd play with vampires around the same time, and then a bunch of other authors independent of each other start playing with ghosts instead, and so on. So it looks like a massive copy-cat clambake on the outside, but a lot of the time, it's just the coincidence of some of the thousands of writers noodling around in what ends up being a similar corner. And when people then see the published works in that corner? They start coming up with names for it. Humans group things, especially SFF fan humans.

So you are part of grimdark, Mark, whether you like it or not. Your work is perfectly distinct from other grimdark authors, you didn't know that Abercrombie would be a big hit over several years, much less what he was doing across the pond, he didn't know that people would start calling him Lord Grimdark, etc. But you're not going to be able to stop them doing it because the reality is a bunch of you explored nihilstic dark themes of amorality, brokenness, failed redemption, revenge, monsters and extreme violence and war in a secondary world battle epic setting at around the same time and did well. And people wanted a name for it and grimdark stuck.

That doesn't mean that there will be exact agreement on what grimdark is and who beyond a few names was part of it, even so. It's a discussion. China Mieville described his works as New Weird. He wanted to have a movement of horror-tinged SFF that was a cross between Weird Fiction and New Wave SF. And he got one -- a bunch of other authors were doing stuff in the same patch, the publishers took the term up for marketing, anthologies were assembled. New Weird is a genre movement of the late nineties through early oughts and still sort of a sub-sub-category that crosses categories but is mainly horror dark fantasy. It's related to grimdark. It was possibly an influence for some of the authors getting called grimdark or on the edge of it But there was also plenty of argument over what it was as a movement and Mieville junked the term for his own stuff as never really coalescing. Didn't kill it as a term though that was used for other authors like Jeff Vandermeer, K.J. Bishop and Steph Swainston. Some of those authors knew each other and some of them didn't.

I do not totally get the Firefly reference to your work that person had. I think it is probably in the way your protag and his crew speak to each other, and some of the western elements, that they saw a similar tonality to it. But Clockwork is much more there. So is Conan the Barbarian, for that matter, and I doubt you've read Howard's novels. But Conan slips into a lot of stuff. And that's all not unusual. The lines of descent, direct and indirect come from SF, many types of fantasy, myth, horror, thrillers, westerns, romances, Shakespeare, etc. That's why the argument that everything in sec world fantasy was fluffy unicorns until 1996 gets a bit silly. SFFH was NOT a niche in the past. It has never been a niche. It's always been large. It's integral to literature and all forms of culture.

I'll tackle the rest of posts later. I'm supposed to be working now, you awful people. You should watch some Firefly, Mark, as you will be going to SFF and media conventions in your career and might as well know what the reference is.

 

[Alchemist]

I know it is sacrilege, but I'm not crazy about Firefly. Pretty good but I never got what all the fuss was. I suppose I'm not a "Whedonite."

 

[Mark Lawrence]

Well no, they don't carry that implication at all.

I'll respectfully disagree with that whilst acknowledging that you may not have wished the terms to carry those implications.

I do not totally get the Firefly reference to your work that person had. I think it is probably in the way your protag and his crew speak to each other, and some of the western elements, that they saw a similar tonality to it. But Clockwork is much more there. So is Conan the Barbarian, for that matter, and I doubt you've read Howard's novels. But Conan slips into a lot of stuff. And that's all not unusual.

I've read about a dozen Conan books ... not sure if any were by Howard though.

you will be going to SFF and media conventions in your career and might as well know what the reference is.

I've not been able to go to one yet ... all things are possible though

 

[KatG]

This is why John Clute said something to the effect that science fiction post-911 is forever changed, that all sf after 9/11/2001 is influenced by 9/11 to various degrees, even if subconsciously.

I don't get this. Science fiction is not solely American and there have been horrible terrorism attacks in many parts of the world. I think science fiction is currently much more in love with corporate dystopia than it is with 9/11. But it varies.

As for grimdark social impulses, it's important to note that some grimdark authors are also not American and have rather different views of a lot of things. I think the gaming world has had an influence on grimdark a bit, and we certainly have an era of political cynicism. Oddly enough, we are a more peaceful world with far less military conflict than we used to have, but we certainly do have a view of conflict being worse in the world, which I think comes from the fact that the Internet and its need for data provide a lot of info on conflicts that people might not otherwise notice. We also have less crime and less violent crime in the Western parts of the globe, so it's kind of interesting that at a time when there are technically less violent threats, we have writers exploring worlds of chaotic violence. But I don't know if that's really an influence of grimdark because chaotic violence is a staple of fantasy fiction.

So you're saying that "grimdark" is simply a modern iteration of dark fantasy,

It's a type of dark fantasy, not all of dark fantasy. It's less Goth and more noir than a lot of other dark fantasy. It's horror-tinged but the amount of horror varies and tends to be less critical than military action.

I don't think it was his literal, or only, goal - but no author is working in a vacuum, so I'm sure he was aware of Jordan's and Goodkind's success.

Since he knew Jordan, yes, he was aware. Everybody was aware of Jordan's Wheel and Goodkind's first novel was the subject of a heated book auction and ended up with a very big advance because of it. But, Martin wasn't that known for fantasy, had no guarantee that Song would get that kind of reception, made more money in Hollywood, and originally thought it would just be a duology and then trilogy. Bear in mind, there were hundreds, thousands of big fat epic fantasy series going on for the last twenty years when Martin wrong Song. Writing a big fat book is not a plug in formula for success in fantasy. Mostly, he wanted to try something different from what he'd been doing in film/t.v. Everybody was hoping it would do well, but nobody was expecting what happened in its popularity after A Storm of Swords and then the wait for the new book which seemed to drive some people mad. The last five years due to the t.v. series has really been what's propelled Martin to the mega forefront and remember, he never expected anyone to be able to turn it into an adaptation.

Big fat sec world fantasy has been a mainstay of fantasy since around the mid-1970's. Its popularity has never sagged. Martin has though, because of the t.v. show, brought in a lot of new readers to fantasy, all kinds.

I don't know why you keep including Kay - I really don't see him in the same light. Sure, he writes for an adult audience and doesn't shy away from serious, even dark, themes, but he really doesn't seem to qualify as "dark fantasy."

As we worked out, the use of graphic, violent and edgy material is not limited to dark fantasy, which is just a general sub-category. Graphic and edgy material is very common in sec world fantasy -- that was the point. Kay's work was in the 1980's on up. Lots of authors like Kay were doing edgy material long before 1996 and before grimdark authors. They weren't writing a bunch of fluffy unicorn novels. They were writing rape scenes, graphic violence, torture, etc.

At the least we could say that Martin's work was darker and edgier than the vast majority of the epic fantasy of the 80s and 90s.

No, that's the point: Song wasn't darker and edgier than the vast majority of epic fantasy in the 1980's and 1990's. Admittedly, throwing a kid out a tower window made people's ears perk up. But the reality is that Martin is far less graphic and interested in using military violence than a lot of the other major epic fantasy writers of the 1980's and 1990's. He doesn't shy away from big battle scenes or dark scenes, but his main focus is political grappling. (And he's way more hopeful than the grimdark authors' themes.) He wasn't tame in Song, but it did not mark a big change from what had been done the last twenty years on a regular basis. Part of the problem is that the t.v. show adaptation is much more lurid and while it can't afford big battles that often, it's compensated by adding torture, rapes and other edgy violences to the story. So people often think Song is way more dark and edgy than it actually is. But it certainly was not an outlier in 1996.

In a similar sense that dynastic/political epic fantasy seems more popular now relative to quest fantasy than 20+ years (I blame Jordan and Martin for this, although clearly they aren't the only ones).

Well actually, you'd want to blame Tolkien for it. Lord of the Rings has its central quest that takes up the first part of the novel and then a chunk of the last part of the novel, but it's a dynastic/political war novel, not a straight sword and sorcery quest. The heroes are managing a giant battle. And that did affect things. Sword & Sorcery's heyday was actually in the 1960's and 1970's, before Jordan and Martin got started. In the 1980's portal/multiverse epics became very popular. Then many authors started making things more Tolkien-like and dropping the portal and just going to the alternate world under war itself without any Earth connection. The gaming industry's tie-in stuff, most influential in the 1980's and early 1990's, used both quests and massive dynastic/political war epic approaches, and that had its influence too.

You had Stephen Donaldson's gigantic Thomas Covenant series starting in 1979, Gemmell's long running Drenai series, Glen Cook's Black Company and Dread Empire series, Tad Williams' massive bestseller Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, Katherine Kurtz's bestselling Deryni series which started in the 1970's, Moorcock's Eternal Champion series, Katherine Kerr's beloved Deverry series, Raymond Feist's long running Riftwar series started in 1982, and so on. Jordan was not doing something horribly different, nor did he make it impossible for authors doing epic fantasy to do something else, and many have. Stephen Brust's bestselling Vlad Taltos series, for instance, begun in 1983, is a dynastic/political series that is also a straight episodic thriller series. Again, fantasy fiction is broad.

How would you differentiate Tolkien's approach to the "fall from heaven" from grimdark's? I personally think it has something to do with Tolkien's Romanticism, that the longing for the "golden age" is palpable and the focus of the protagonists is about preserving and/or revitalizing the "light." Maybe grimdark has more to do with the living in the Fallen World without hope of redemption - thus the nihilism that you mention.

Most of Tolkien's characters aren't broken, amoral, violent people for one. Tolkien was working on the effects of World War I and II and how it devastated things and destroyed people and the environment. But he also believed that ordinary people could stand against and survive great tragedy and great devastation, that they were the most valuable; he'd seen that in the wars. That's why the ordinary, country hobbits turn the tide. Frodo is an ordinary country squire whose integrity and lack of interest in power is more valuable to destroying the ring than the big leaders. Sam is a servant whose determination and loyalty makes Frodo's efforts possible. Merry and Pippin's passion and resiliency convince major forces to join the war and play a key role in events. Pretty much everything in Lord of the Rings is about stepping up to great danger, but also understanding how easily we can turn into what we fear if we aren't careful -- Sauramen, Boromir, etc. That's what the ring represents. So Tolkien had his bleak side, his distrust of power side, etc., but LOTR is mainly about hope, about the rise from tragedy, not the fall. In that way it's very mythic and Tolkien was building on the mythic ballads on which he was an expert.

It took me aback because I didn't see it in any way as grimdark

Well since you're writing science fiction, really it's not. But I suspect that someone saw the connection because you are writing space opera about an emperess' son with a good dash of political and war machinations and some dark elements and they think it's fantasy like. Have you read C.S. Friedman's SF novel In Conquest Born? You're doing that sort of stuff, and yes, Bujold too. That's a whole other tradition of science fiction. They're not unconnected but they're not in the same group.

 

[DJ94122]

As someone cited a couple of times in this thread as having written some 'grimdark' books I should point out that when I had finished writing the Broken Empire trilogy I hadn't read any work by Abercrombie, Morgan, Bakker, Cook, Rothfuss, Lynch, Brett, Sanderson, Goodkind, or ... I believe ... any author mentioned in this thread with a grimdark connected with the exceptions of Donaldson, Martin, and Moorcock.

When I wrote Prince of Thorns the only book I had in mind was A Clockwork Orange (1962, Burgess).

Hi, Mark. Sometimes books and movies are clearly influenced by societal events, or their popularity can be attributed to stories that resonate with audiences/readers at that time. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is clearly a 19th century commentary on imperialism and the darkness into which the human heart can fall. Apocalypse Now (directed by Francis Ford Coppola) is simply the same tale told in the setting of the Vietnam War, part of the crises of the American spirit in the 1960's and 70's.

You mention A Clockword Orange. Beyond other works of literature, does Jorg have a contemporary influence? Do you feel he is a sign of our times? Before you began writing did you think his story would resonate, for some reason, with 21st century readers?

 

[Alchemist]

I don't get this. Science fiction is not solely American and there have been horrible terrorism attacks in many parts of the world. I think science fiction is currently much more in love with corporate dystopia than it is with 9/11. But it varies.

Well I think 9/11 has a strong symbolic, psychological impact - beyond just the US, but the Western world in general; - the Empire is vulnerable, so to speak. Not to mention the impact in terms of the "War on Terror," the rise of the culture of fear, etc. But I'd have to revisit the Clute essay in question to refresh my memory as to exactly what he meant. I think it was in Scores or Canary Fever. Will check in a few days when I get back home.

As for grimdark social impulses, it's important to note that some grimdark authors are also not American and have rather different views of a lot of things. I think the gaming world has had an influence on grimdark a bit, and we certainly have an era of political cynicism. Oddly enough, we are a more peaceful world with far less military conflict than we used to have, but we certainly do have a view of conflict being worse in the world, which I think comes from the fact that the Internet and its need for data provide a lot of info on conflicts that people might not otherwise notice. We also have less crime and less violent crime in the Western parts of the globe, so it's kind of interesting that at a time when there are technically less violent threats, we have writers exploring worlds of chaotic violence. But I don't know if that's really an influence of grimdark because chaotic violence is a staple of fantasy fiction.

Interesting point. I think our increased awareness through information technology has kindled this "culture of fear." My wife and I were talking about this with my brother and sister in law, specifically the whole consciousness around children playing in the neighborhood. We talked about the greater freedom children had when we were growing up in the 80s, and how there is so much more fear now. My brother in law mentioned a study in which Vermont children in the 70s or 80s were compared to children now in terms of their range from home; back then they would range for literally miles, while now it is a matter of feet.

My point is that we seem to have a greater shared sense of our mortality, even if the world is no more dangerous. On the other hand, I was listening to a program on NPR in which they were talking about how nuclear-related fear is so much less than it was during the Cold War, yet the same dangers exist (e.g. if a terrorist group got a nuke).

Since he knew Jordan, yes, he was aware. Everybody was aware of Jordan's Wheel and Goodkind's first novel was the subject of a heated book auction and ended up with a very big advance because of it. But, Martin wasn't that known for fantasy, had no guarantee that Song would get that kind of reception, made more money in Hollywood, and originally thought it would just be a duology and then trilogy. Bear in mind, there were hundreds, thousands of big fat epic fantasy series going on for the last twenty years when Martin wrong Song. Writing a big fat book is not a plug in formula for success in fantasy. Mostly, he wanted to try something different from what he'd been doing in film/t.v. Everybody was hoping it would do well, but nobody was expecting what happened in its popularity after A Storm of Swords and then the wait for the new book which seemed to drive some people mad. The last five years due to the t.v. series has really been what's propelled Martin to the mega forefront and remember, he never expected anyone to be able to turn it into an adaptation.

Big fat sec world fantasy has been a mainstay of fantasy since around the mid-1970's. Its popularity has never sagged. Martin has though, because of the t.v. show, brought in a lot of new readers to fantasy, all kinds.

Yes, I'm aware of that - although he was very popular in fantasy reading circles before the HBO show came out, even the leading "fat fantasist," If I remember correctly, having edged out Jordan, especially after the latter's demise.

That said, I do think it is important to point out that with Robert Jordan, fat fantasy became "fatter than ever." His books were the length of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, but there was more of them. This was followed by Goodkind, Martin, Erikson, etc. I realize fat fantasy has been around since before Jordan, but it was only with Williams then Jordan that series were frequently being written in which every book was as long or longer than the entire Lord of the Rings.

As we worked out, the use of graphic, violent and edgy material is not limited to dark fantasy, which is just a general sub-category. Graphic and edgy material is very common in sec world fantasy -- that was the point. Kay's work was in the 1980's on up. Lots of authors like Kay were doing edgy material long before 1996 and before grimdark authors. They weren't writing a bunch of fluffy unicorn novels. They were writing rape scenes, graphic violence, torture, etc.

Yeah, I know. I can't get around the sense, though, that epic secondary world fantasy has been overall darker over the last twenty years (mid 90s to present) than it was in twenty years before (mid 70s to mid 90s).

No, that's the point: Song wasn't darker and edgier than the vast majority of epic fantasy in the 1980's and 1990's. Admittedly, throwing a kid out a tower window made people's ears perk up. But the reality is that Martin is far less graphic and interested in using military violence than a lot of the other major epic fantasy writers of the 1980's and 1990's. He doesn't shy away from big battle scenes or dark scenes, but his main focus is political grappling. (And he's way more hopeful than the grimdark authors' themes.) He wasn't tame in Song, but it did not mark a big change from what had been done the last twenty years on a regular basis. Part of the problem is that the t.v. show adaptation is much more lurid and while it can't afford big battles that often, it's compensated by adding torture, rapes and other edgy violences to the story. So people often think Song is way more dark and edgy than it actually is. But it certainly was not an outlier in 1996.

I stopped reading after Game of Thrones, but people have told me that the show is much more of a "tortureporn fest" than the books.

But I hear you that Martin didn't up the ante on edgy. But I think what happens is that different authors hold different degrees of influence, and Martin's is as large as anyone's in secondary world fantasy market these days. Through his influence, many authors are incorporating "Martinesque" themes. Dial back twenty years and Tolkien's pre-eminence was less challenged, and folks like Jordan, Eddings, Brooks, etc, had strong influences.

Well actually, you'd want to blame Tolkien for it. Lord of the Rings has its central quest that takes up the first part of the novel and then a chunk of the last part of the novel, but it's a dynastic/political war novel, not a straight sword and sorcery quest. The heroes are managing a giant battle. And that did affect things. Sword & Sorcery's heyday was actually in the 1960's and 1970's, before Jordan and Martin got started. In the 1980's portal/multiverse epics became very popular. Then many authors started making things more Tolkien-like and dropping the portal and just going to the alternate world under war itself without any Earth connection. The gaming industry's tie-in stuff, most influential in the 1980's and early 1990's, used both quests and massive dynastic/political war epic approaches, and that had its influence too.

But the dynastic/political element was much more subdued than in many recent works. Tolkien focused on quests and war. ASoIF focuses on politics and war.

(I maintain my search for epic fat fantasy that is focused more on quests, with war and politics taking a back seat, or at least secondary role)

You had Stephen Donaldson's gigantic Thomas Covenant series starting in 1979, Gemmell's long running Drenai series, Glen Cook's Black Company and Dread Empire series, Tad Williams' massive bestseller Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, Katherine Kurtz's bestselling Deryni series which started in the 1970's, Moorcock's Eternal Champion series, Katherine Kerr's beloved Deverry series, Raymond Feist's long running Riftwar series started in 1982, and so on. Jordan was not doing something horribly different, nor did he make it impossible for authors doing epic fantasy to do something else, and many have. Stephen Brust's bestselling Vlad Taltos series, for instance, begun in 1983, is a dynastic/political series that is also a straight episodic thriller series. Again, fantasy fiction is broad.

Jordan wasn't doing something horribly different, but I think what differentiated him and set the tone for fat fantasies from that point on was the granularity of the story - especially once he started slowing down around book 5 or 6. Clearly this was market-driven, but I think that depth of detail become more of the norm. Compare the fantasies of the 60s and 70s to the fantasies of the 90s and later.

Most of Tolkien's characters aren't broken, amoral, violent people for one. Tolkien was working on the effects of World War I and II and how it devastated things and destroyed people and the environment. But he also believed that ordinary people could stand against and survive great tragedy and great devastation, that they were the most valuable; he'd seen that in the wars. That's why the ordinary, country hobbits turn the tide. Frodo is an ordinary country squire whose integrity and lack of interest in power is more valuable to destroying the ring than the big leaders. Sam is a servant whose determination and loyalty makes Frodo's efforts possible. Merry and Pippin's passion and resiliency convince major forces to join the war and play a key role in events. Pretty much everything in Lord of the Rings is about stepping up to great danger, but also understanding how easily we can turn into what we fear if we aren't careful -- Sauramen, Boromir, etc. That's what the ring represents. So Tolkien had his bleak side, his distrust of power side, etc., but LOTR is mainly about hope, about the rise from tragedy, not the fall. In that way it's very mythic and Tolkien was building on the mythic ballads on which he was an expert.

Yeah, well said, although I think Tolkien's melancholic romanticism was palpable, and he still followed the idea that "the best was in the past" - this, perhaps, most strongly exemplified in "dwindling of the light" of the Two Trees. His entire arc, from the Silmarillion to LotR is about the "thinning" of the world, to use a Clute term. But as you say, what makes Tolkien not grimdark is the nobility of his characters, his belief in and love of goodness, truth, and beauty, and I would add his non-fetishization of dark elements like rape, torture, etc.

 

[KatG]

Yes, I'm aware of that - although he was very popular in fantasy reading circles before the HBO show came out, even the leading "fat fantasist," If I remember correctly, having edged out Jordan, especially after the latter's demise.

Martin's Song was more than popular in just fantasy circles; he was an international bestseller before the t.v. show. However, he has not edged out Jordan at all. (Jordan's got more books in his main series after all.) Jordan is several tens of millions ahead of Martin in sales. That may one day down the road even out thanks to the t.v. series for Song, but definitely over the oughts and early teens Jordan is still the big seller. They are both impressive.

That said, I do think it is important to point out that with Robert Jordan, fat fantasy became "fatter than ever." His books were the length of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, but there was more of them. This was followed by Goodkind, Martin, Erikson, etc. I realize fat fantasy has been around since before Jordan, but it was only with Williams then Jordan that series were frequently being written in which every book was as long or longer than the entire Lord of the Rings.

Again, there was a fair amount of fat fantasy before 1989. Tolkien basically started it off with the trilogy that is really one big book, and then Terry Brooks' Sword of Shannara cemented it as a viable publication in the late 1970's. Tad Williams' series was a year ahead of Jordan and both did hit very big sizes, certainly an increase from the shorter novels of the 1960's. But after Jordan and Williams' successes, that didn't mean that publishers rushed to put out 800 page novel series of extreme length. In the 1990's, most of the epic fantasy novels were in the 400-550 page range. That's thick but not fatter than 1970's and 1980's epic fantasy, and not as long as the full volume of LOTR. It's just that you had four series -- Williams, Jordan, Goodkind and Martin that did phenomenally well and were large. Other very successful series, like Salvatore's tie-in Drizzit books and Robin Hobb's The Assassin's Apprentice, were not as large in size per volume. Most series were not.

But again, the four horsemen's series weren't large because of the audience -- they were large because of the authors. Williams sold an average planned trilogy that became a super large trilogy or a quartet, depending on the publisher. Jordan expected his series to only run seven books. Goodkind definitely was not planning eleven books when he started. Martin planned a duology, sold it as a trilogy, then thought it would be five books and now the plan is seven. None of these authors decided that they would write big fat books and stretch their series out as long as possible because that was a sure fire plan. In fact, it was harder to sell big books then as it is now. But they did want to experiment with large war stories and in the writing, the books grew and the series lengthened. And that's usually what happens. It's not trying to please the audience; it's the writer going where the story goes. Which is why some authors have worked on the same series for twenty years and others have done dozens of different trilogies or put out books at a much slower pace. They write how they write. The contemporary fantasy folk are actually the ones with the long multi-book series, but nobody ever pays attention to them and complains, except to assume that they are full of sex which most of them are not.

Yeah, I know. I can't get around the sense, though, that epic secondary world fantasy has been overall darker over the last twenty years (mid 90s to present) than it was in twenty years before (mid 70s to mid 90s).

Well they've figured that out in the mind sciences. In the past, we were younger and we read stuff then or stuff that was even older and we didn't see the world as that dark, most of us, we didn't pay as much attention to dark stuff that didn't affect us and we didn't hear as much about the outside world, so we don't remember the past stories as that dark. We remember them imperfectly and much of the darker stuff in the stories didn't bother us much back then. But when we're older and adults, as noted above, the world seems darker and more scary than it statistically is, and so it seems to us that the stories of the current period are darker. We may even seek darker material out, while ignoring the existence of the less dark stuff, even when it's very successful. We self-select in the present and we cover over the past with fuzzy unicorns (nostalgia,) when many of the horrors of the past were a lot worse.

There is more dark fantasy out there because there is more fantasy published altogether. And it gets more media attention now. And when there are some doing darker fantasy and horror that are hits, that tends to be the bright shiny object that convinces that it must have spread throughout everything and taken over. But fantasy fiction is a much greater range.

But I hear you that Martin didn't up the ante on edgy. But I think what happens is that different authors hold different degrees of influence, and Martin's is as large as anyone's in secondary world fantasy market these days. Through his influence, many authors are incorporating "Martinesque" themes. Dial back twenty years and Tolkien's pre-eminence was less challenged, and folks like Jordan, Eddings, Brooks, etc, had strong influences.

Brooks wrote dark material, Jordan has dark material. Again, we tend to tone things down to play up a contrast that's more either/or than reality. If you see interviews with a number of grimdark authors, they didn't read Martin's Song. They're just assumed to be his children, which is the sort of thing that Mark was talking about. Really, they're Glen Cook's children to a degree. Glen Cook married to David Gemmell as descended from Horward's Conan. But they still might not have read those authors. Jordan is actually still a very strong influence on sec world fantasy writers, as is Moorcock, Tolkien, Feist, Salvatore, Mercedes Lackey, Tad Williams, Donaldson, etc. What happens is that Tolkien is the one that lots of folk and media outside of SFF know of, and so authors tend to get compared as to whether they are like Tolkien or not-like Tolkien. Jordan was actually considered to be not-like Tolkien at first and then to be copying Tolkien, etc. Martin got placed in the not-like Tolkien side most of the time, but he doesn't see himself as far from LOTR, which is an inspiration for Song:

"I’ve said before that the tone of the ending that I’m going for is bittersweet. I mean, it’s no secret that Tolkien has been a huge influence on me, and I love the way he ended Lord of the Rings. It ends with victory, but it’s a bittersweet victory. Frodo is never whole again, and he goes away to the Undying Lands, and the other people live their lives. And the scouring of the Shire—brilliant piece of work, which I didn’t understand when I was 13 years old: “Why is this here? The story’s over?” But every time I read it I understand the brilliance of that segment more and more. All I can say is that’s the kind of tone I will be aiming for. Whether I achieve it or not, that will be up to people like you and my readers to judge."

But the dynastic/political element was much more subdued than in many recent works. Tolkien focused on quests and war. ASoIF focuses on politics and war.

Tolkien focused on quests, politics and war. The entire story is about trying to get everybody to fight together to defeat Sauron -- politics. There are quite a few critical political issues in LOTR, not the least whether Aragorn will take up the mantle of kingship and what's going to happen if he does. And Song focuses on politics, quests and war as well. There are oodles of quests in Song -- Bran, Arya, Tyrion, Dany, Brigette looking for the Stark girls, etc. Both LOTR and Song are built around a very large war -- they are epic in scope. Most stories that tell about a whole war (as opposed to just a smaller story within a war,) are going to be big suckers.

(I maintain my search for epic fat fantasy that is focused more on quests, with war and politics taking a back seat, or at least secondary role)

Wouldn't it make more sense to simply look for secondary world fantasy that isn't a fat epic about a war? Because there are lots of them.

Clearly this was market-driven, but I think that depth of detail become more of the norm. Compare the fantasies of the 60s and 70s to the fantasies of the 90s and later.

It really wasn't market driven. It was Jordan driven. His publisher would have much preferred fewer, shorter books that he could get out faster. But he was telling the story he wanted to tell, building a big world with an epic history and an apocalypse, a take off of Jesus and other myths. It just got really long, but it was also, mostly, considered really good and interesting by lots of readers, not because of its length (most fans would agree it could have been shorter,) but because of its detailed world building, characters, mythic themes and well done battle action.

Again, the fantasies of the 1970's and 1980's were not different from the fantasies of the 1990's. The fantasy novels in the 1960's, when the category fantasy market was first officially launched, were mostly a bit shorter because that was still the magazine era. You had big novels before that, like White's The Once and Future King. But in the main category market, authors would try stuff out as short stories and novellas in the magazines, and then lengthen them into novels. While some of these novels had short hardcover runs, the main market was in mass market paperback, which relied on racks in grocery stores and newsstands. Those vendors didn't want thick books necessarily that wouldn't fit in the racks. But as paperbacks expanded in the bookstores, the authors could write larger stories and didn't necessarily go to the magazines first. So it was in the 1970's that the books started getting a lot longer more often.

In the 1990's, the only significant things that happened were that contemporary fantasy was briefly not quite as popular as it had been in the 1980's, and the Great Paperback Depression when the wholesale market collapsed -- the actual deathknell for magazines collapsing. That really hurt fiction, especially genre fiction. Because fantasy was a younger category market than other ones, and because it had strong tie-ins to the gaming market thanks to D&D role playing and card games, it weathered that collapse a lot better than a lot of other types of fiction. Epic fantasy was certainly critical in that, but it wasn't because the epic fantasy was thick booked. It was because they could package trilogies easily. In the late 1990's, contemporary fantasy (which tend to be thrillers and shorter,) bopped up into growth. These days, the e-fiction market has led to a big increase in short fiction -- anthologies and story collections from authors, which harks back to the 1960's and 70's.

Keep in mind also that the grimdark novels are not necessarily huge ones. The Steel Remains is 448 pages, about average for that sort of story. Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself is a little over 500 pages. Mark's Prince of Thorns is only 336 pages. And is a quest novel. These authors are not trying to recreate Song of Ice and Fire.

 

[Werthead]

I agree that My Little Pony is probably pretty opposite of grimdark fantasy.

There is actually a very popular grimdark revisionist take on MLP. I advise exercising extreme caution when Googling this, however. Some of the MLP fanfics are very disturbing.

Yes, I'm aware of that - although he was very popular in fantasy reading circles before the HBO show came out, even the leading "fat fantasist," If I remember correctly, having edged out Jordan, especially after the latter's demise.

That said, I do think it is important to point out that with Robert Jordan, fat fantasy became "fatter than ever." His books were the length of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, but there was more of them. This was followed by Goodkind, Martin, Erikson, etc. I realize fat fantasy has been around since before Jordan, but it was only with Williams then Jordan that series were frequently being written in which every book was as long or longer than the entire Lord of the Rings.

This was true, although not quite literally (only Williams's To Green Angel Tower is longer than LotR in its entirety, although Martin's ASoS and ADWD are only 30,000-odd words behind LotR in size).

Yeah, I know. I can't get around the sense, though, that epic secondary world fantasy has been overall darker over the last twenty years (mid 90s to present) than it was in twenty years before (mid 70s to mid 90s).

It's worth noting that modern epic fantasy is generally held to have begun in May 1977 with the near-simultaneous release of Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane and Brooks's Sword of Shannara (the original Star Wars coming out the same month probably helped as well), and Donaldson was as dark as hell. It wasn't too many years before he was joined by the likes of Glen Cook and David Gemmell, the former of whom was dark and bleak and the latter dark but optimistic.

Jordan is several tens of millions ahead of Martin in sales.

But closing rapidly. By 2011 ASoIaF had sold about 5-6 million copies. Today it has sold almost 65 million. Jordan is still in a strong position at somewhere between 80 and 90 million (roughly the same amount as Terry Pratchett), but ASoIaF is closing rapidly. With far fewer books, Martin already has way more readers-per-book than Jordan (or even Pratchett!), so on that metric is already the most successful epic fantasy writer since Tolkien.

Martin planned a duology

Martin never planned it as a duology. He didn't know what it was when he started writing the first chapter, but he knew before finishing those first 100 pages it was at least a trilogy (A Game of Thrones, A Dance with Dragons, The Winds of Winter), and sold it as such.

These authors are not trying to recreate Song of Ice and Fire.

I'm surprised we haven't had a lot more epic-scale fantasy recently. A lot of the recent big hitters have been much more focused in terms of numbers of characters/locations and depth of worldbuilding (Abercrombie, Lawrence, Rothfuss, Lynch etc). Only really Sanderson has been going for the widescreen, wide-canvas approach in Stormlight Archive and even that is very different to ASoIaF. It's good to see a lot of Martin/Jordan-influenced authors not trying to imitate them, but it seems strange we don't have a modern big fantasy series that marries that depth of worldbuilding to a sense of detail and character.

 

[KatG]

There is actually a very popular grimdark revisionist take on MLP. I advise exercising extreme caution when Googling this, however. Some of the MLP fanfics are very disturbing.

I am aware of the various adult sub-cultures attached to My Little Pony. However the original My Little Pony would be opposite to grimdark.

It's worth noting that modern epic fantasy is generally held to have begun in May 1977 with the near-simultaneous release of Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane and Brooks's Sword of Shannara (the original Star Wars coming out the same month probably helped as well), and Donaldson was as dark as hell. It wasn't too many years before he was joined by the likes of Glen Cook and David Gemmell, the former of whom was dark and bleak and the latter dark but optimistic.

Brooks' Shannara also had a lot of dark stuff. But they made a nice contrast of hero/anti-hero. It becomes very easy for people to set these up as the two poles of sec world fantasy and try to divide everything up between them, but as we know, it's nowhere near that neat. It's so funny that Donaldson is now considered fluffy unicorn writing, but that's what happens. People forget how dark older stuff that they often read when younger actually was and declare it less dark than the stuff they read now.

But closing rapidly. By 2011 ASoIaF had sold about 5-6 million copies. Today it has sold almost 65 million. Jordan is still in a strong position at somewhere between 80 and 90 million (roughly the same amount as Terry Pratchett), but ASoIaF is closing rapidly. With far fewer books, Martin already has way more readers-per-book than Jordan (or even Pratchett!), so on that metric is already the most successful epic fantasy writer since Tolkien.

Well yes, he has a U.S. based, internationally distributed television show for the last four, five years. In 2015 with the Internet. That's going to happen. As I said, because of the show, he'll probably eclipse Jordan down the road (and if he sticks the seven books, his series will be shorter than Jordan's which has a bit of appeal to some readers coming in from the t.v. show.) But in the nineties and the oughts, Jordan helped grow the fantasy field to its present giant size, the same way that Rowling did with YA fiction. His impact is going to be a long one. But in terms of obsessiveness of fanbase, I think Martin at this point wins maybe.

Martin never planned it as a duology. He didn't know what it was when he started writing the first chapter, but he knew before finishing those first 100 pages it was at least a trilogy (A Game of Thrones, A Dance with Dragons, The Winds of Winter), and sold it as such.

A long time ago in some essay that I read, Martin said that he looked at first on the possibility of a duology, one very large book in one time period and the second in a later time period. But when he started developing the story into an outline to sell it, he did it as a trilogy and sold it as such. That certainly would make sense because it was more feasible and publishers did prefer trilogies back then for sec world series. They liked serial trilogies in the same universe. If I can find the essay on the Net, I'll dig it up. I remember it because, given the size of Game of Thrones, I thought a duology didn't make much sense for a story of this scope. So I don't think he entertained it very long or for the market. When he was writing A Clash of Kings, of course, he was going very long and the publisher told him to make it more books. And so on and so on. But the point is, that's not what he planned, the long fat fantasy series. He didn't plan a seven book series with giant books. The books just grew giant to hold all that he was inventing and so there needed to be more of them. And that happened also to Jordan, Tad Williams slightly, and Goodkind, who originally was also planning a trilogy, I believe. It's not a market thing; it's an author thing.

I'm surprised we haven't had a lot more epic-scale fantasy recently. A lot of the recent big hitters have been much more focused in terms of numbers of characters/locations and depth of worldbuilding (Abercrombie, Lawrence, Rothfuss, Lynch etc). Only really Sanderson has been going for the widescreen, wide-canvas approach in Stormlight Archive and even that is very different to ASoIaF. It's good to see a lot of Martin/Jordan-influenced authors not trying to imitate them, but it seems strange we don't have a modern big fantasy series that marries that depth of worldbuilding to a sense of detail and character.

There are usually only a few because it's quite hard and time-consuming to do. And it does tend to involve a writer whose work expands as they write. Tolkien was a linguist and scholar of epic ballads. Jordan was a military historian. Martin was used to doing a lot of research and did a lot of historical research for Song. Erikson and his co-writer made a giant game that just got bigger as it went, and so forth. Williams just seems to like to write long a lot of the time. But again, most secondary world fantasy, even those doing war novels and fairly epic scopes, tend to be in the 400-600 page range in size. The worlds can get very detailed, but the stories are often more contained and episodice, not necessarily trying to do one giant story, or at least not for more than a trilogy. The really big doorstoppers are rare, rather than the norm.

The grimdark authors aren't following Martin, Jordan, or even quite Gemmell or Cook (though Cook is maybe the most influential -- but again a lot of them haven't probably read him.) They are doing noir nihilistic, which actually tends to be on the shorter side as thrillers. In his first trilogy, for instance, Abercrombie wrote one big story, but each part was a slightly different type of story within that. And then the next three books, he played around with form: Best Served Cold is a Count of Monte Cristo revenge thriller, The Heroes is Catch-22 on barbarian steroids, and Red Country is a straight out Magnificent Seven/The Seekers sort of western. I'm quite curious to see what he will do with the next trilogy. There are long plot arcs that go through all the books, but this is more like with a contemporary fantasy suspense series structure.

And Mark is doing A Clockwork Orange with nuclear radiation. (Which is actually a bit of a nod to Brooks' Shannara, though I don't know if Mark has read that.) Morgan, coming from cyberpunk SF, went for a post-traumatic stress Vietnam sort of thing that is reminiscent of Cook's Black Company but I understand it has a fair amount of savagery and more bleak material, etc. Weeks is more in Martin/Jordan territory, but he's also in the assassin/thief tradition of fantasy to start and then does different things with different series. Brett went for more horror elements, etc. So they are doing different things, but that noir nihilism strings through them, broken and possibly unhealable, a common focus, atmospheric style, themes, that people recognized as close together, published around the same time.

 

[Kingsman]

I'll respectfully disagree with that whilst acknowledging that you may not have wished the terms to carry those implications.

I'm with Mark on that one.

If it makes you feel any better Mr Lawrence, I wouldn't classify The Red Queens War as Grimdark. Has a completely different tone than the Jorg books for me.

 

[DJ94122]

As a total aside, I love the epic (really, I mean it - epic) backs and forths between KatG and whoever is taking the opposite opinion. Somebody should compile all those messages and turn them into a college course.