Realism is rapidly moving into the realm of fantasy. What a sentence
!
Now, I all for diversifying, I have no problem with that. I love new ideas as well as new interpretations of old ones and the current trend of bringing the gritty realism to the Old High fantasy surroundings is just fine and dandy.
There is nothing that "new" about it of course, but the current popularity and even perhaps the raise of literary standard is a very Good thing indeed. (I hope fervently that GRRM finishes his serie soon or else... I'm not gonna read it when it matters.)
All this is - even more hopefully - leading to better writing and therefore, better books. Lot of the stuff written and published is OK-fun-to-read entertainment, but still marginally literate. A pitifully small amount of different and truly great writers are around, but it's still just a fraction of the field.
Now, to sex.
Sex is a part of the big equation of life and can be an important piece in a story. Some writers can handle it well, some don't. Some are worse than bad. Good books have tepid and plain bad sex-scenes and then there's something like Goodkind's Wizard's First Rule, where the rest of the book is equivalent of 12-year-old wanna-be purple-fantasy of dull cliché after another (my opinion), but with a surprisingly well-written S/M-scene in the end part of it.
Kearney was a good example, but I was thinking of Mary Gentle and her ASH. Now there is some truly great scenes of arousing and well-written sex. From very different points of views. Some of them are truly horrifying and some just plain steaming with #"%/&%½!
Jacqueline Carey and Kushiel's Dart anyone? One of the biggest theme's (maybe the most important one) is domination and masochism. But even though the various sexual encounters are very graphic and explicit, they are also very beautiful. Very well done and the writing in general is also very good.
Another one with a lot of S/M in SF/F is John Norman with his Gor-books. Here's the complete opposite. Those are pure hack-writing, horribly bad writing with atrociously lame dialogue. Now there's very little explicit sex, but a friend of mine, who's openly admitted masocist, told me that Norman's S/M is VERY arousing and well-done.
I can't argue with that. To me it looks and sounds boring as hell, but apparently it's very much like a real thing to some practicioners of S/M.
Another point that came to my mind, is something that bothers me often. People mistake "telling all" to be better than "leaving some things unsaid". Imagination plays the biggest part to me. It's my part of the Fantasy we "create" with the author of a book. What I see on those pages and how does that translates in my mind. There are numerous fantasy writers, who leave nothing to the care of your own imagination, who painstakingly write down every little detail, as if that would somehow make it all better. It certainly makes them thicker.
It's same with sex. On occasion, the graphic version serves a certain purpose. Sometimes it's all better off when left to your active imagination, where all of the fun really takes place in the end.
