At 07:33 AM 11/30/00, you wrote:
>Lots of bad stuff like this out there. I have a lot of respect for the
>"working people" that are often recipients of contempt from "mighty
>warriors" in fantasy fiction--like the farmers, peasants, and merchants who
>feed, clothe, and provide substance for everybody else, even wandering
>freebooters. Too often, merchants are corpulent and corrupt or degenerate,
>peasants are presented as somewhat less than human, etc. This also falls
>under the subject of Anderson's work, I think. This is one way that Tolkien
>was quite successful, in that he present "ordinary" people--merchants,
>farmers, etc.--forced into circumstances that required heroism. And the
>hobbits of the Shire were never presented in a negative light for their
>down-to-earth and unassuming nature. If anything, it made them more
>likeable.
What disturbs me about the "Thud and Blunder" essay is that it seems to
argue for a grittier kind of fantasy which has become very popular with the
authors. Good fantasy for me works but is still in ways "glossy" (like
Tolkien) or "shadowy" like Howard. That is, you don't watch the hero walk
down the street with prostitutes hanging out of windows, street vendors
offering meat-pies, mud, slop, and slosh covering the hero's shoes, etc.
When people die in these stories they either just DIE or everyone engages
in some ceremonial beard-shredding. You don't get an infodump on a
character who is about to die, telling you he has a wife and children, that
he left his home because there was a famine, blah, blah, blah.
When a guy with a sword is trying to kill the hero, does it matter that he
is called "Left-handed Rafe" by his clansmen, who only shower on Sundays
because, in a pre-technical world, hot showers are hard to come by? I
don't think so.
Does it matter if Kull leads 400 soldiers across the known world that one
of them is a new recruit who just happens to be a bumbling idiot except for
the corporal who is in charge of training him? I don't think so.
Is it important for the reader to know that Kull has a hankering for those
spicy little sausages that Orna the street merchant sells? He's King of
Valusia. He's got brooding to do, blood to let flow. Let's get on with
the brooding and the blood-letting.
Anderson seems to want the reader to be dragged through every brothel and
chamber-pot an author can imagine. Why? How does realism enhance
fantasy? How does making that imaginary world over THERE look like the
real world HERE improve the story?
Like I said: it's not the believability that he asks for which bothers
me. It's the meticulous duplication of details from our world's past (or,
at least, the past as we imagine it to be) that I find dissatisfying. That
makes the fantasy genre more like a pseudo-historical one.
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