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Fantasyland
Mar. 9th, 2010 10:38 amWhen I was a teenager I read a quite astonishing amount of fantasy: warlocks and mighty-thewed barbarians and all that stuff. The thing was, I was utterly indiscriminate in my reading. Obviously, I read the classics like Tolkein or CS Lewis or TH White or Robert E Howard, but I also read a quite astounding volume of utter crap. I've read Harry Turtledove. I've read ten whole doorstop-sized books from David Eddings. I've read RPG-spinoff books with titles like My character is way cooler than yours: Volume eight of the chronicles of Grunzzor't'kiul the albino assassin ninja-mage with two scimitars and his psychic wolf companion. God help me, I've even read every single one of John Norman's Gor books. So long a there was a chap with a sword battling a demon, or a girl in a chainmail bikini on the cover, I'd read it.
Thankfully, those days are now largely behind me.
These days, if I feel the need to read something featuring walled cities and people riding round hacking each other into interestingly-shaped chunks with swords, I'm more likely to read actual history or the classic myths. The Norse, Roman and Greek stuff is simply crammed with that sort of thing, and the thing about actual history is that it's jam-packed with real people who have their own personalities, characters and motivations which, unless the author is Tolkein and is going to spend their entire life world-building, no author can really replicate.
However, I recently became a member of the Amazon Vinetm programme, in which they send me free books on the proviso that I review them. I'm not sure why I got invited to join - I'm a top 500 reviewer, but that doesn't seem to be a criteria because my brother got invited too and all his reviews say things like "i liked this becos it wos nice an stuf so i gived it five starz".
Anyway, Vine have started sending me fantasy books, and so I've started reading them for the first time in quite some time - and what strikes me about this sampling of modern fantasy is just how depressingly formulaic and generic it all seems to be. I recently got sent a copy of The Left Hand of God
, which is apparently the most anticipated fantasy novel of the year. Penguin books certainly seem confident of it; adverts on the underground, YouTube and even, bizarrely, a iPhone App.
The thing is, it's just incredibly derivitive. I'm halfway through and I haven't encountered an original idea yet - just direct lifts from Pratchett, Mervyn Peake, Philip Pullman, China Mieville and more. It's like someone has managed to fit together the pieces of several different jigsaws but if you look closely you can still see the original pictures.
As a result of this, I'm curious. A lot of you lot read lots more fantasy than I do. Is comtemporary fantasy all like this? Generic, formulaic and derivative? Is anyone doing anything particularly original out there?
Thankfully, those days are now largely behind me.
These days, if I feel the need to read something featuring walled cities and people riding round hacking each other into interestingly-shaped chunks with swords, I'm more likely to read actual history or the classic myths. The Norse, Roman and Greek stuff is simply crammed with that sort of thing, and the thing about actual history is that it's jam-packed with real people who have their own personalities, characters and motivations which, unless the author is Tolkein and is going to spend their entire life world-building, no author can really replicate.
However, I recently became a member of the Amazon Vinetm programme, in which they send me free books on the proviso that I review them. I'm not sure why I got invited to join - I'm a top 500 reviewer, but that doesn't seem to be a criteria because my brother got invited too and all his reviews say things like "i liked this becos it wos nice an stuf so i gived it five starz".
Anyway, Vine have started sending me fantasy books, and so I've started reading them for the first time in quite some time - and what strikes me about this sampling of modern fantasy is just how depressingly formulaic and generic it all seems to be. I recently got sent a copy of The Left Hand of God
, which is apparently the most anticipated fantasy novel of the year. Penguin books certainly seem confident of it; adverts on the underground, YouTube and even, bizarrely, a iPhone App.The thing is, it's just incredibly derivitive. I'm halfway through and I haven't encountered an original idea yet - just direct lifts from Pratchett, Mervyn Peake, Philip Pullman, China Mieville and more. It's like someone has managed to fit together the pieces of several different jigsaws but if you look closely you can still see the original pictures.
As a result of this, I'm curious. A lot of you lot read lots more fantasy than I do. Is comtemporary fantasy all like this? Generic, formulaic and derivative? Is anyone doing anything particularly original out there?
