Dragons have always been cool, Video games have
always been cool, real ale has always been cool. (Union) Rugby has always been
cool, Science Fiction has always been cool, and Fantasy has always been cool. Football
has always been shit, same as radio 4 depressing plays that the controller
seems to think everyone has been to Cambridge/Oxford and therefore they like
this sort of thing as it’s so highbrow. Kill a mockingbird yada yada, the Royal
Shakespeare Taliban society again shit. Give me dragon slaying and space ship
battles any day of the week. There's very little in life that can't be improved
by adding dragons. Anyway, since when was a game of thrones considered to be
fantasy? To me, it is fantasy with the guts ripped out of it. Take away the
undead and the dragons, and you would see no difference to the overall story.
It is a medieval soap drama with fantasy elements tacked on. Fair enough,
Martins wants to move the genre on - he wants to go beyond epic sagas and
doomed heroes, and the romance that underpins all fantasy, but what has he
replaced it with? Sex and misogyny. And death...meaningless death...If you
constantly kill off your characters left right and centre as it also happens in
"Nightflyers", you're admitting a failure to move their development
on. After all, it's the easiest thing in the world to kill a character and
start again with somebody else, it's a lot harder to have him face the
consequences of his or her actions. That takes a skilled author. Fantasy used
to be about something. Even Conan had more intellectual heft than the present
generation of so called 'fantasy' fiction. Granted, it was a thing of mostly
ugly meanings if you looked at it hard, but it least it was carving out a place
to stand on and defend. Instead of a genera where the magic was used to place a
light on man's imagination and philosophy, it's become a canvas of sound and
fury signifying nothing. 90% of the fantasy on the shelf these days is
indistinguishable. "Nightflyers" and some of the stories in this
volume suffer from this same malady as well. There is more complex fantasy
around than Martin, but it tends to not be as commercial. Steven Erikson's
Malazan Book of the Fallen is certainly more complicated and dealing with a
much vaster set of themes (he even has a Conan-like character who actually
channels Howard's philosophical viewpoint instead of just having muscles and a
sword). Scott Bakker's "Prince of Nothing" series deals with philosophy,
existentialism and nihilism. Matt Stover's "Acts of Caine" series
might just melt your brain. That's not to say they are all better than Martin,
and none touch Martin's gift for varied characterisation, but the genre is in a
much healthier state now because of the authors that Martin helped get off the
ground and get on the shelf by simply re-popularising the genre. Elizabeth
Bear's excellent "Eternal Sky Trilogy" can be read as a subtle rebuke
on Martin's overly-simplistic take on the Mongols with the Dothraki, for
example.
SF = Speculative Fiction.
