“’If I wanted you dead, you would be dead’?” He sucked
some blood from between his teeth, then spat it onto the cobbles. “What is
that? A line from some mid-century melodrama? You heard that onstage a few
nights ago?”
In “Skullsworn” by Brian
Staveley
Reasons to avoid
some Fantasy:
1. Trilogies - a
story seldom needs 3 volumes, nobody wants to read the 'excluded middle' of
tosh, let alone wait for the third volume when they have forgotten the contents
of the first - strike George R.R. Martin;
2. Sequel proliferation.
Ditto objection 1 squared - strike Eddings et al;
3. Formulaic -
It's often better to re-read Tolkien, skipping some of his embarrassing
attempts at females than read the whole thing again with different silly names
- strike all sorts of piffle;
4. Silly names -
countries; cities; people. How about concepts; recipes; politics - invent
something - move to include Iain M. Banks 'Culture' - or does invention have to
belong to THE science fiction part of SF?
5. Written by
die cast. Surely much is the product of hashish and D&D - this you can make
up for yourself;
6. Poor writing
- to wit the obviously much beloved Staveley - whilst his books were
entertaining they are limited by his repetitive vocabulary; why can't his
educated characters master the conditional subjunctive…?
One of the
common failing of most fantasy fiction is that the morality and emotional
conflict of the antagonists is never explored or it feels gimmicky. We get a
lot of stuff wherein the good guys become less good, and the bad guys stay
smart-alecky. Characters tend to be stupid. It’s how an author can impart
information to the reader that the character themselves haven’t picked up on
yet. It’s also an engagement tactic: did you guess, right? May as well read the
next chapter and find out, you stupid reader. What else? Ah yes. Strong
romance...check, Romance the focus...check, World Without Plenty of
magic...check, some clichés...check, Some semi-explicit stuff...check. All
genres of books have many poor and average writers and some great ones -
fantasy writing is just as good as any other kind of writing and the best
fantasy provides some excellent analysis and criticism of reality as well as
imagining coherent alternative realities and managing to be both funny at some points
and gripping at others. I despair of so
much fantasy fiction. There is a lot of landfill quality stuff out there; but
also, too many multi-volume epics with formulaic plots. How many more times
will that downtrodden turn out to be the heir to the
kingdom? (feel free to substitute “ploughboy orphan” by “Assassin that has ten
days to kill ten people enumerated in an ancient song, including ‘the one you love
/ who will not come again.’” or by any other input placeholder you wish).
I don't know why I bother reading crap like this. Staveley no more...
SF = Speculative
Fiction.
