I’ve developed an aversion to most fantasy and especially sword and sorcery, but I enjoyed reading your thoughts. I feel like the genre lends itself to lazy storytelling and worldbuilding with no internal consistency or coherence. Obviously there’s a lot of bad SF like that, too, but at least the genre in general aims towards coherence with scientific principles.
I find I have to be in a very specific mood to tolerate fantasy. Do you approach the genres differently?
When I read fantasy, I find I’m looking for mood and ability to evoke feelings more than I am anything else. Another way to put it is that I like fantasy’s ability to access the irrational. In the past 12 months I’ve only read to completion two or three fantasy novels, only one of which was a contemporary doorstop set in an elaborate secondary world. I prefer to go in for short stories. My favorite fantasist (and weird science fictionist) at present is Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) who only wrote short stories. He reused some settings a fair bit but none of the stories really constitute a series (or to revisit a previous conversation about Le Guin, even a cycle). This is a protracted way for me to get at that the coherence issue doesn’t really matter to me and the kinds of fantasy I gravitate toward.
Speaking to sword and sorcery in particular, I go in for it probably because of how close it is to weird fiction and horror. The difference between S&S and those genres is that the hero is more likely to triumph. But I agree about the lazy storytelling. I don’t like it when the stories have a stuff-happens or hack-and-slash quality or feel like a D&D campaign.
I also read by mood. Most of my extracurricular reading is contemporary horror and weird fiction short stories right now. I love science fiction’s inveterate commitment to a rational universe. Weird fiction takes the opposite reaction and says it doesn’t make sense and to the extent that it does we’re doomed. It all works together somehow.
Lately I’ve been a heavy reader of urban fantasy, while avoiding like the plague anything that has “epic” or “kingdom” in the description. For example, I just finished a novel whose protagonist is a magically endowed librarian in New York City struggling against proposed legislation that would essentially reduce all magic users to slaves of a dictatorial government. Now that I can relate to, while muscle bound swordsmen battling fish monsters leave me cold.
I’ve developed an aversion to most fantasy and especially sword and sorcery, but I enjoyed reading your thoughts. I feel like the genre lends itself to lazy storytelling and worldbuilding with no internal consistency or coherence. Obviously there’s a lot of bad SF like that, too, but at least the genre in general aims towards coherence with scientific principles.
I find I have to be in a very specific mood to tolerate fantasy. Do you approach the genres differently?
When I read fantasy, I find I’m looking for mood and ability to evoke feelings more than I am anything else. Another way to put it is that I like fantasy’s ability to access the irrational. In the past 12 months I’ve only read to completion two or three fantasy novels, only one of which was a contemporary doorstop set in an elaborate secondary world. I prefer to go in for short stories. My favorite fantasist (and weird science fictionist) at present is Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) who only wrote short stories. He reused some settings a fair bit but none of the stories really constitute a series (or to revisit a previous conversation about Le Guin, even a cycle). This is a protracted way for me to get at that the coherence issue doesn’t really matter to me and the kinds of fantasy I gravitate toward.
Speaking to sword and sorcery in particular, I go in for it probably because of how close it is to weird fiction and horror. The difference between S&S and those genres is that the hero is more likely to triumph. But I agree about the lazy storytelling. I don’t like it when the stories have a stuff-happens or hack-and-slash quality or feel like a D&D campaign.
I also read by mood. Most of my extracurricular reading is contemporary horror and weird fiction short stories right now. I love science fiction’s inveterate commitment to a rational universe. Weird fiction takes the opposite reaction and says it doesn’t make sense and to the extent that it does we’re doomed. It all works together somehow.
Lately I’ve been a heavy reader of urban fantasy, while avoiding like the plague anything that has “epic” or “kingdom” in the description. For example, I just finished a novel whose protagonist is a magically endowed librarian in New York City struggling against proposed legislation that would essentially reduce all magic users to slaves of a dictatorial government. Now that I can relate to, while muscle bound swordsmen battling fish monsters leave me cold.