Paints
In a recent interview in the Independent (found, I think, via Neil Gaiman’s journal), Terry Pratchett makes a great point about fantasy fiction:
“When you were a kid,” he says, “you’d have a paint box and you’d take it to school. But there was always the rich kid, and he’d got the paint box with the silver and the gold and possibly the turquoise as well. Instead of doing the best you can with the colours you’d got, you really wish you had the colours he’d got. Fantasy gives you the silver and the gold and the turquoise.”
I think that’s true of all the things we’ve talked about here at the Hall, whether it’s fantasy, or SF, or heroes in tights. Sure, it’s possible to get overloaded now and then by the silver and gold and turquoise, but overall you wouldn’t want to make do without it. And that’s why I like the things I like. A story about a wealthy engineer with a drink problem could be brilliant in the right hands. An alcoholic engineer who gets kidnapped by terrorists could make a decent action film. An engineer who then fights back by building powered armour that can fly is, surely, the best option of them all. That’s the gold and the turquoise (or, indeed, the gold and the hot-rod red).
Which isn’t to say Option 1 wouldn’t be fine. Certainly the only option that would ever approach ‘literary merit’, a definition that conceals the metaphorical multitude of sins. Sometimes more grounded work does us some good, and sometimes we need the fantastical.
I can understand completely why someone wouldn’t like any genre stuff. Some people just aren’t set up to have their suspension of disbelief suspended that far. But I don’t really get it when people who have a particular genre thing, but really dislike another branch. Some SF fans dislike fantasy, while there are a lot of fantasy fans who don’t read any SF (just take a look at the balance of books in any given book shop’s SF&F section.) I mean, they’re really not that different. At all. Same goes for the bizarre loathing seen between some comic and manga fans, even taking into account the distorting effects of internet lunatics.
Of course, I would say that. The Journal is something of a broad church, in that if it’s nerdy, I probably like it. I may prefer certain fantasy authors over others, but that’s a writing style thing and I have no objection in principle to the odd elf.
One of the reasons I bring this up is that the fantasy genre’s been on mind. I started re-reading Terry Brooks’ Shannara series again (I think I’ve written about the series before here), and I don’t think I realised before quite how much he gets thing wrong. Thing is, I still like the books, but there doesn’t seem to be a way of describing why without it all sounding like a back-handed compliment.
The Sword of Shannara, the first one, has been taking longer than expected, and part of that is because it is the roughest. And it hits every thing that fantasy authors are criticised for doing; characters lifted wholesale from Tolkien and/or roleplaying tropes, lots and lots and lots of adverbs, odds are good he drew the map before he wrote the first word, and so on. Despite this, I still like it. In fact, it’s exactly the thing I was in the mood to read, because sometimes what you’re in the mood for is an elf belting stuff with a magic sword.
The thing is, if I hadn’t read so much criticism all over the place about adverbs and maps in fantasy novels, I doubt I would have noticed. It underlines how the majority of dos and don’ts when it comes to this kind of thing are purely matters of personal preference at best, and a hoary load of old cobblers at worst.
