Category: Fantasy Criticism

A Game of Drones

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

We have to go see my sister today–two to three hours on the Road of Doom, the Garden State Parkway–so I don’t have time to be terribly creative. Instead, let me pass you on to the wags at Honest Trailers, who have whipped up for us their take on “A Game of Thrones” (see http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/videos/game-of-thrones-honest-trailer/ ). A new season of “Game of Thrones” is starting up on television, so here are some laughs at the show’s expense.

Let’s see… What is “Game of Thrones” about? Uh, the bad guys always win. That doesn’t really matter because nobody is really all that good, anyhow. Everyone who is able to do anything does evil.

Oh, and lots of bare-breasted women. They could have called this something that rhymes with “Your Hit Parade.”

This is supposed to be a fantasy, but it sounds more like a day’s sample of The Drudge Report. Why would anyone want to invent a world as lousy and befuddled as ours has been lately? They call it “dark fantasy.” I call it news.

Oh, well, the Honest Trailer is funny. A lot funnier than being tailgated on the Parkway, at least.

I’ll let you know if we come back in one piece.

“No, No… Not That! Aaaaagh!”

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I try not to know a lot about our popular culture. But it has a way of jumping up and butting me between the eyes…

Today at the supermarket I discovered Ever After High, a new series of Young Adult fantasy books… based on a web series and a fashion doll franchise. in other words, a money machine. They’re selling the dolls, they’re selling the video games, and now they’re selling books.

It should be a good idea. The premise is, these are the teenage offspring of various fairy tale characters, preparing to follow in their parents’ and grandparents’ footsteps so that the tales can go on for another generation. Only some of the youngsters don’t want to follow in those footsteps–especially the children of fairy tale villains who don’t want to get killed or embarrassed for the umpteenth generation in a row. They want to branch out into their own tales. So there’s a conflict.

That could be cool, right? But there’s a catch.

All these characters currently attend a fairy tale high school.

No… no! High school???

Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t most of the readers for these books already in high school, or middle school, and already know all about it? What kind of fantasy drops you right back in where you already are? Where is the escape?

Do you know anyone who looks back on high school as the very best days of his or her life?

And so we have yet another example of YA fiction mummifying young readers’ imaginations, equipping them with lead wings, binding the feet of the spirit… Is this so they’ll grow up with the ability to believe in Global Warming? Is this to turn them into docile little subjects of the king, perpetual consumers, and conformists?

Probably.

Can’t Anybody Here Write Fantasy?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Yesterday I was invited to review a newly-published fantasy novel. I won’t tell you the title or the author’s name, because I don’t want to hurt his feelings.

I turned to the book’s amazon.com page and started to read the sample chapter. Brand-new book, no customers reviews as yet–nothing to prejudice me one way or another.

I didn’t finish the chapter. I couldn’t. My wife tried, but she was unseated by a line about a wizard who had had it with some other character’s “snarky attitude.” I didn’t make it past the description of another character as “incredibly handsome.”

You don’t find this kind of impoverished prose in other genres of literature, but fantasy delights in it. When I used to teach creative writing at adult night school, it seemed to me that every student who didn’t have the foggiest idea how to put two words together immediately embarked on writing science fiction. I don’t know if that’s still the case; but certainly a lot of these disadvantaged persons are now producing fantasy.

What can we do to make fantasy better, and make it more respectable as a literary genre?

I suggest, first, a total ban of wizards, sorcerers, magicians, etc. When a “wizard” becomes as commonplace a figure as the guy behind the counter at your local dollar store, he has lost all reason for being.

Any writer who drops into his fantasy such words as “snarky” or “incredibly handsome” ought to be fitted with an electric shock collar that would give him a jolt every time he so transgressed.

While we’re at it, we’d do well to ban hulking barbarian sidekicks, clever and personable thieves who never get caught, lusty tavern wenches with enormous knockers, and invincible warrior women. Their presence might well liven up Serious Mainstream Literature, but it kills fantasy. As soon as the reader sees one of these characters, he knows exactly what to expect from him or her for the rest of the book. There are never any surprises.

Fantasy is supposed to ignite the reader’s imagination, not put it out.

So Where Do I Get the Funny Names?

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It took my mother a long time to get comfortable with my books–“because of all those names!” she said.

She didn’t like the names. I suppose you could write fantasy in which the characters had names like Judy Wilson, Floyd Beckenbauer, Josh Smith, etc. (In fact, Frank Belknap Long did write fantasies like that.) But I’m afraid most of us would miss the fun of coming up with funny names.

True, sometimes a fantasy writer will abuse this privilege. That was one of the things that made George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones a real chore for me to read–an unfinished chore, I might add.

Sometimes, on rare occasions, the names upstage the story. This happens in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan and the Ant Men (one of my favorites, by the way). Here, ERB’s supercharged imagination created a whole civilization of tiny people, about the size of squirrels. And then he went himself one better by giving them huge names! For me, the names are a delight in and of themselves. The ant-city of Trohanadalmakis, and ant-people with names like Komodoflorensal, Calfastoban, Zoanthrohago–there’s magic in those names.

I have given the inhabitants of Obann, the chief country in my fantasy world, names that reflect the country’s history. Obann came into being when several disparate peoples came together, under God, as the Tribes of the Law.

So I have characters with Nordic-sounding names (Helki), Welsh-sounding names (Lord Gwyll), sort-of “Euro” names (Roshay Bault), names redolent of the Old Testament (King Ozias), and sort of ordinary names, like Jack.

The Ghols from way out East have Mongol-inspired names (Szugetai, Chagadai), my Abnaks have names which I hope will evoke images of Native Americans, I have given my Wallekki tribes a Middle Eastern spin… and so on. It comes to me just now that in this I have been following the tradition of Robert E. Howard, famous for his Conan the Barbarian stories. I must have been doing it unconsciously–even so, a tip of the hat to “Two-Gun Bob.”

Fantasy is fun to write, and it should be fun to read, too. The funny names are part of the plan to help the reader escape from the stalag of this evil age, if only temporarily.

If you remain in the fantasy world permanently–well, then, that’s another problem.

The Wilderness of ‘Young Adult Fiction’

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I was in Barnes & Noble yesterday, picking up a Valentine’s Day gift for my wife. This freeze-your-butt-off-every-cotton-pickin’-day Global Warming is getting her down. Maybe Hercule Poirot could cheer her up.

Naturally, I paused to look at the offerings in the Young Adults section. As usual, I wish I hadn’t.

For reasons which may be supernatural, for all I know, grown-up authors are frantically churning out books about sexual confusion, social pathologies, self-destructive fads like “cutting” yourself, seasoned with depictions of teens using “magic” to circumvent adult authority and get anything and everything they want. This is what they think youngsters should be reading. Why? All we get is a lot of half-baked twaddle about “you shouldn’t try to hide from kids what the world is like.”

So again we run head-on into the sophomoric credo that whatever is evil, ugly, or painful is “realistic,” and whatever is good, beautiful, or wholesome is just a delusion. This is how stupid people pretend they’re smart.

So what have you got for your children and grandchildren to read? And maybe more to the point, what are their “teachers” and school librarians urging them to read? You’d better look into that–you might get a rather nasty surprise.

There are books out there–and have always been, so far–that offer a positive vision: books that don’t seek to fill the teenage reader’s head with toxic garbage. You ought to be looking for them.

And when you find some, please let me know.

Why I Don’t Use Magic

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I’m always looking for new fantasy novels. Yesterday I was reading lists of “the top fantasies of 2013”–there are any number of them on the Internet–but I gave it up when I found a new series about a boy who goes to wizards’ school. No, the boy isn’t named “Barry Rotter” or anything like that. Couldn’t they have waited until after J.K. Rowling died? To rip her off while she’s still alive and still writing is the height of bad manners.

I was struck by an overall sense of un-originality among these fantasies. It came through the rave reviews like a whiff of mildew.

Dreariest aspect of it all, fantasy writers are still using “magic” to get things done. The real world functions without magic–and look at all the mischief we get into. A sane person believes the laws of nature hold throughout the universe; so where does “magic” fit in?

So I have ruled out “magic” in my Bell Mountain books. If my characters want to get something done, they actually have to do it–instead of just saying “Ooga-balooga-razzmatazz!” I do allow things that look like magic, but aren’t. The creation of such stunning illusions is still very much with us: see Global Warming.

But there is a more important reason why I’ve kept “real magic” out of my books.

The laws of nature are subservient to God, and we are under both God and the physical laws of our world that God created. “Magic” is a way of making the magician superior to those laws–an altogether wicked and impious concept.

Wicked and impious characters–at least in my books–will seek to acquire magic, will pretend to have it, and may even convince themselves that they do. But only God can say, “Let there be light.”

Proud and corrupt minds always seek to usurp God’s function. In case you hadn’t noticed, that’s what the whole “transgender” business is about. “Male and female created He them–oh, yeah? Well, watch us turn the males into females and the females into males! Now who’s the god? Hah!”

There is no way that kind of thinking leads to any end but evil.

Respect the Reader’s Imagination

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

One of the hardest things to learn, if you want to write fiction, is when to shut up and let the reader’s imagination take over. If you can’t learn to shut up, you might as well go into politics.

To me, the art of writing fiction is to cause pictures to be created in the reader’s mind–partly by what you have written, and partly by the reader’s own imagination. I know I’ve succeeded whenever a reader says something to me like this: “I felt like I was there!” That’s when you know you’ve done it right.

You learn how to do this by reading and reading and reading, and by writing and writing and writing. It’s not something that can be taught in 12 easy lessons.

A friend of mine wrote a novel in which he spent a lot of time telling you exactly what each character was wearing–which had no bearing at all on the story, and only served to slow the pace of the action. I mean, we’re not going to imagine the characters as nude, are we? He also spent a whole page getting some characters across a little stream, when he could just have said something like, “And then they crossed the stream.” He might have even gotten away without mentioning the stream at all.

When you set a scene, you want your readers to be able to “see” it. But you also have to remember that each of them will see it in his own way–and that that’s perfectly all right! If you don’t provide enough descriptive detail, no one will imagine much of anything. But if you provide too much, you’re trying to dominate the reader, and it won’t work. He can always close your book and never open it again if he feels you’re trying to boss him around.

This free lesson on the Art of Writing Fiction is brought to you by me, the unacknowledged master of fantasy.

And the Next Narnia Movie Will Be…?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

You could go bats, trying to keep up with this. But as of last month, the next Chronicles of Narnia movie will be The Silver Chair and not The Magician’s Nephew as earlier reported. (See http://www.narnia.com/us/news-extras/ narnia-news .)

It seems that somehow Douglas Grisham, stepson of C.S. Lewis, got out of his contract with Walden Media and has a new deal with someone else, and they’ve hired a screenplay writer, and so on.

Well, who could blame him, after the hash that was made of the last Narnia movie a couple years ago, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader? They totally changed Lewis’ story. And before that, there was the mess billed as Prince Caspian, perpetrated by Walden in cahoots with Disney. It’d be hard to say which was more revolting–and I say that as someone who very much wanted these movies to succeed. Of course, I’ve also said all along that the old BBC productions from the 80s were vastly better than these glitzy new special-effects extravaganzas.

Prince Caspian turned the title character from a boy to a brooding 20-something hunk, so he could have a sort-of romance with Queen Susan, whom they turned into an Invincible Female Warrior; and they turned Reepacheep the Mouse into a furry Bart Simpson. They corrected all these mistakes in Dawn Treader, but piled on enough new ones to make it just as bad.

In general, I’m in favor of anything that gets kids–and adults!–to read the Chronicles of Narnia, not only because of their strongly Christian content, but because they’re terrific good stories. Currently the Young Adult fiction market is dominated by what can only be called garbage, cranked out by adults who think teens need to be even more overacculturated than they already are. Hopefully, readers who develop a taste for Narnia won’t bother with the crap that’s out there.

But to Mr. Grisham and his new movie-making partners, I say… Get it right this time, fellas, or give it up.

(Sorry, the above link doesn’t work. I don’t know why–it’s some computer whatchamacallit.)

Are My Books Biased?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

A dear friend has pointed out to me that my fantasy novels do, indeed, display a certain “Protestant” slant. This is not an unfair observation; but there’s more to it than meets the eye.

The Temple in Obann–that is, the Religious Establishment–is riddled with corruption. Under Lord Reesh’s direction, the Temple has given itself over to worldly concerns and has no real connection to God. Although the Temple is corrupt, the worst thing about it is that it is ossified.

I never meant the Temple to be analogous to the Roman Catholic Church. The First Prester is more like the Archbishop of Canterbury than a Pope, and he has a seat on the High Council of the nation’s oligarchy. What’s really wrong in Obann is that the Temple doesn’t preach and teach the word of God and has led the people into an empty, ritualistic semblance of religion.

In that respect it resembles many churches and denominations in our own world, Catholic and Protestant alike. In that the Obann Temple has substituted man’s words and traditions for God’s laws, it resembles the religious establishment in Jerusalem as characterized by Our Lord Jesus Christ: for instance, “Thus have ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition” (Matthew 15:6). There was no RC Church when Our Lord spoke those words, but there was a religious establishment.

I’m sure that if one reads all the books in the Bell Mountain series, it will be easily seen that the Temple in Obann does not represent any particular church in our world, but rather an established religion in general, an institution whose interests have become an end in themselves.

The difference is that there are probably more good individuals in the Temple than there are in the three branches of the United States government.

My Answer to a Critic

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

A certain influential person, whose name I will not mention, was invited by a mutual friend to read and review my book, Bell Mountain. He read it, but didn’t review it. This morning, at long last, our mutual friend told me why.

It seems this influential person found Bell Mountain rife with secret Calvinistic messages, and somehow “dangerous” to readers. So he didn’t want to give it any added exposure by reviewing it.

All right–I hope I understand that no writer can hope to please everyone, and only a fool would explain to a reader why he should have liked the book. But as hard as it is to make any headway in the market at all, unfair and stupid criticism really rankles.

Folks, believe me–Bell Mountain is not a sneaky, fiendishly clever trick to turn good Catholics into bad Calvinists. It is not Mein Kampf for kiddies. It’s a fantasy, fer cryin’ out loud! There ain’t any Calvinists or Catholics or Republicans or Democrats or Rotarians or Kiwanis Clubs in the fantasy world which it describes.

I admit the book and its sequels are based–firmly, I hope–on a solid Biblical foundation. I pray that they will be serviceable to My Lord Jesus Christ in the advancement of His Kingdom. But I have tried to do that by writing about another world that has absolutely no connection to our own.

Look, Mr. Big Important Critic–a whole passel of judges for the Global E-Book Awards read Bell Mountain this year and didn’t find any crypto-Calvinism: and they gave it a Bronze Medal, in competition with I dunno how many hundreds of other books. Oh, maybe you’re smarter than they were. Maybe you’re smart enough to see things that aren’t there.

Grow up, will ya?