Why some people hate/refuse Fantasy books, movies etc. ?

[tgr]

The most disgusted I have been with a series of books (trilogy, actually) was peter f hamilton's night dawn trilogy. It was pretty damn good, then he got to the final 100-200 pages and it just went total  to wrap it up.

[Bzalthek]

Hamilton does have weak wrap ups.  Fortunately most of his work up to that point is good enough to forgive him for it.

[HaemishM]

If you're a writer with some promise, and you're good enough to know that you've got some real talent are you going to aim for a Booker Prize or an Academy of Arts Award or something or are you going to write fantasy and go for a Bilbo Baggins Beardy Merit Badge or whatever?

Seriously, if you're any good you ain't gonna paddle in the pool that the 3rd graders have peed in.

Unless you happen to like genre fiction and want to write genre fiction, regardless of what some shit-eating award-giving dickhead says?

Just spitballing here. 

[shiznitz]

The Malazan books are well written, if crazy long.  What really makes them work is the dialogue.  There are so many characters but they all remain consistent book to book.  The one fault I have with them is the heavy doses of "I wanna be a god".

[schild]

Yea, I want to see Richard A. Knaak's treatise on The American Dream with a forward by Mary Kirchoff.

People aren't going to turn down money and fame to write genre fiction unless they're fucking bad. Sorry Haemish.

[HaemishM]

Someone wants to offer me tons of money to write pretentious shit, I can be as pretentious as the next dickbag.

I'll still write genre fiction because I like writing and reading genre fiction.

[apocrypha]

Good writing <> pretentious.

The insistence of people in this thread equating the two is making me roll my eyes so hard I think I've pulled a muscle.

[Wasted]

The assertion that genre writing can't be good writing is what is pretentious.

Also the good writers chasing the big money aren't going for Booker prizes, they are trying to be the next Rowling/King/Patterson/Meyer etc.

[HaemishM]

The assertion that genre writing can't be good writing is what is pretentious.

Also the good writers chasing the big money aren't going for Booker prizes, they are trying to be the next Rowling/King/Patterson/Meyer etc.

Both of this.

Genre writing IS total crap for a lot of it... but so it most writing of any kind. But that doesn't mean genre fiction can't still be literate and it's really goddamn arrogant to classify all genre fiction as sub-literate pablam shat out for the masses. Fuck, the reason Dickens is such a long-winded cockgaggle is that he was getting paid BY THE WORD. It doesn't make him literature - in fact, it's the reason I can't stand his work. Most of Melville's works could be considered "adventure" novels that might otherwise be found in a penny dreadful if not for the fact that some pretentious windbag decided to find symbolism in it. I'm quite sure Melville might have actually meant half of the symbolism found in a work like Moby Dick, but I can almost guarantee you when writing it, he wasn't analyzing it for the symbolic nature of soandso and suchandsuch.

[Margalis]

Literary fiction is essentially a genre.

[Tale]

- In other cases, do you think there is an unwillingness to detach yourself from the 'real world' ? A consequence of this, is that you consider everyone else who is willing to do that a weirdo?
- And why do you think some people can't "suspend their disbelief", while other accept to do that?

- Is the "12 yrs old loner daydreaming in a basement" clichè still viable in a post LOTRO trilogy world? An adult that reads fantasy has an impossible Peter Pan sydrome, blocked in his/her childhood?

At high school in the 1980s, I was conditioned to hide my computer gaming magazines and AD&D stuff from bullies. I was a combination of sporty and nerdy, so nobody pushed me around, but I fucking hated being confronted and teased about my nerdy side.

Near the end of our final year, I had a Commodore 64 games mag in my inside coat pocket with an RPG on the cover. A guy who had hung out with the bullies in the past spotted it. He asked to read it. I got defensive and told him to fuck off. He was surprised and shocked, because he was actually interested in the magazine. Games had crossed the threshhold from nerdy to mainstream and I hadn't even noticed.

I still have that instinct to be defensive about fantasy and sci-fi stuff. I can't get used to non-nerds being interested in it. I instinctively look down on most fantasy as trashy, and treat the stuff I'm interested in as a vice I like to discuss secretly with others who are into it. For example, reading the Game of Thrones series. I never thought I'd get into George RR Martin because it was for neckbeardy basement dwellers. I want to apologise for mentioning it, instead of talking about it like I'd talk about a sports match. That all comes from my conditioning at high school.

My ex-girlfriend is my age. We went to different schools, but she was the hot, rebellious queen of the social scene, who most high school nerds would struggle to talk to. When we met 20 years later and had a relationship, we watched Game of Thrones together. And she was still all "what is this, I don't even..." about fantasy worlds.

At first, she asked what period of history it was set in, and couldn't quite comprehend when I said it was a made-up world. Because she was conditioned to look down on that kind of thing. But eventually she got into it.

I imagine there would be less of this gulf to overcome for younger people, as they've grown up through an era where fantasy often entered the mainstream.

[MahrinSkel]

I imagine there would be less of this gulf to overcome for younger people, as they've grown up through an era where fantasy often entered the mainstream.

This.  My stepson isn't mocked for being the best Starcraft 2 player in his high school, instead he's got a place in the heirarchy roughly equivalent to the jocks of the less popular sports (track, wrestling, etc.).  Other kids come to him for pointers on build orders, girls pretend to be into video games to hang around with him.

It's a brave new world, these kids have grown up in a world where things we considered hopelessly geeky are just *there*, part of the atmosphere.

--Dave

[Count Nerfedalot]

Well, I don't know literature from pretentious crap.  I grade fiction on a scale of Good, Bad, Fun/Light, and Guilty Pleasure. I gave up on literary criticism in High School reading the Red Badge of Courage and having my brain dragged through so many layers of bullshit analysis of the symbolism and hidden meanings self-important folks have wasted their lives imagining were scrawled in invisible ink between every single line of the book it made me puke.

That said, probably the most well written fantasy book I've read in ages is The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.  Every significant character is fleshed out, unique, and believable, acts like real people act, and is a unique mishmash of the good bad and ugly that all people have varying portions of.  The dialog is witty and the style is consistent for each character but varies between characters instead of everyone speaking with the same voice.  The world is described in wonderfully evocative narrative which still manages to avoid the perilous pit of purple prose.  And the story is engaging, somewhat familiar, yet surprises you with unexpected twists and turns that fit the world and characters perfectly.  My only complaint is that sometimes the emotional strings he's deliberately tweaking are a little too obvious, but it does make for an engrossing read, even if I'm annoyed at having my emotions toyed with.  And it's got some serious sad parts and I'm struggling with stress and depression right now so I can't take very much of that at a time, so my rereading is going at a ridiculously slow pace, like a chapter or two a week.

[Azazel]

As a general rule, most of the stuff I read is nonfiction. Usually True Crime, History and Military/Military History. (Books about War, as Denis Leary put it) And whatever Charlie Brooker puts out.

Occasionally, I will read a novel, though those tend to be either Warhammer/40k Novels (because I'm a Warhammer geek. Though some are actually good, which surprised me - though I assume most are trash and I've just been lucky with the ones I've read), classic Sci-Fi/Fantasy which includes Tolkien and others (I inherited a huge amount of Asimov/Doc Smith/Moorcock/Harrison from my brother) or trashy "war genre" things, written by people like Andy McNab, Dick Marchinko, Chris Ryan (though much of that is crap). Otherwise it's the occasional random novel or interesting "comedy" book that finds it's way into my lap.

I used to read a lot of Steven King, Koontz, etc, but I guess I got bored of that sort of thing a decade or so ago now. I tried reading a few Drizzt books, and got through the first or second while travelling, then lost interest.

Really though, outside of my narrow and "Which-ones-are-any-good?"-researched Warhammer books and the "classics" of the genre, I agree that most Fantasy is garbage. (Which as I said, includes many of the Warhammer books).

As well as this, the general perception of "real" adults is that they're books for kids and teens, and for people like the geeks in Big Bang Theory. (Which I guess, is us?) Add in a TV diet over the last couple of decades of Hercules, Xena and Legend of the Seeker, and it's not surprising that the genre isn't really taken seriously.

[Azazel]

Yeah.  Exactly.  I remember defending them to someone a while back as not being that bad, then I did a re-read.  It's amazing what seems good when you're a happy child, as opposed to the utter monsters we've all become.

No doubt, that's why I don't understand how any of you fuckers can even tolerate Star Wars or Lord of the Rings.

I have a box of Star Wars books actually. I'd forgotten about them. I bought them cheap off some guy. Read the 2 Republic Commando books in there (Karen Traviss, written like war novels), got halfway through the short story collection about Jabba's Palace or some shit, and , um.. I'm not sure where the box is now. Pretty sure the Jabba book went back into it.

What I realised when the prequels came out was that I like Star Wars not for the story or the characters (*well, we all like Han), but because of the visual and industrial design elements. LOTR in book form has some incredibly tedious sections, and the film has way too much of hobbits staring lovingly into one anothers' eyes, as well as some fucked-up bits, but remains an overall positive experience. And I really like the visual design.

[apocrypha]

Alright I'll rephrase - I've never read any fantasy (which is what this thread was about, I even specifically differentiated from science fiction already) that didn't make me cringe at how piss poor the writing was. I've been recommended tons of stuff by lots of people and it's all been crap.

The fantasy writers that seem to be the most highly regarded all do the exact same thing that Tolkien does - tell good stories in good settings with good characters but tell them really, really badly in uninteresting language. I'm reading Game of Thrones at the moment and it's the same, pretty good story but terrible, tedious, simplistic writing.

I'm not 17 any more, I'm in my 40s and I've been reading books for a long time. I get very bored very quickly when I don't feel I'm being pushed by an author. Yeah I'll occasionally pick up a Pratchett or a Le Carre for a light read for a week but those are the book equivalent of an Iron Man film - fun, entertaining, candy-floss for the head. Not a meal.

There's nothing wrong with lightweight art (or craft, depending on just how lightweight you go) but there's so much more interesting stuff that people do with their various media, and fantasy writing has never yet moved out of that bracket.

[pxib]

If you want fantasy that's got amazing writing, I recommend Patricia McKillip. The plots are all tangly potboilers, but she can turn a hell of a phrase.

[HaemishM]

The fantasy writers that seem to be the most highly regarded all do the exact same thing that Tolkien does - tell good stories in good settings with good characters but tell them really, really badly in uninteresting language. I'm reading Game of Thrones at the moment and it's the same, pretty good story but terrible, tedious, simplistic writing.

I'm reading Clash of Kings right now and I disagree with what you said.

[Count Nerfedalot]

Alright I'll rephrase - I've never read any fantasy (which is what this thread was about, I even specifically differentiated from science fiction already) that didn't make me cringe at how piss poor the writing was. I've been recommended tons of stuff by lots of people and it's all been crap.

That was my point in recommending The Name of the Wind.  It's not like the other stuff.  He doesn't just use words to tell stories, he paints worlds with them. It really is well-crafted prose rather than the typical hackneyed cliche-ridden crap.  The kind that seems like, if he were to apply it to describing paint drying, you half expect it would actually be pretty interesting.  Of course the bulk of the book is not quite up to the standards he set in the opening chapter and at other highlights, but even in the weakest passages the wordcraft is still way above the at-best average drek you'll find in most of what you read no matter what genre you pick.  Because of that inconsistency it may not be "serious literature" yet, but I think the author shows more promise than anyone else still living that I've read recently.

I complained about how slow my progress is with my re-read, but I suspect that may actually be a good thing.  Normally a good story with a minimum of bad writing in it will suck me in and through it so fast and so deep that I don't remember any of it when I'm done.  This one actually has me thinking about passages I read a few days ago, something that pretty much never happens with mass-market fiction anyway.

[Tale]

Australian politician Malcolm Turnbull, 57, speaking a few moments ago about the history of broadband: "...I'll just step back a little bit, and get a bit geeky so I apologise for that."

Geek = bad = requires apology. I noticed this because a 20-something journalist on Twitter queried whether an apology was needed.

[Wasted]

geeky = technical, people have always apologised for getting technical in conversation.

Geeks can be so sensitive 

[Ironwood]

Quite.

[apocrypha]

OK, so another 2 recommendations to add to my list. However after 30 years of trying fantasy writers recommended to me and hating them *all* you can understand my reticence to go and spend £20 on books right away.

And I've kept trying over the years because I like the genre! I played D&D as a kid, I've been a gamer all my life, fantasy has been a part of my culture forever, which is why I am constantly disappointed with the quality of fantasy writing.

And Haemish, if you like George RR Martin's prose that's fine, but it gives you and I zero common ground on which to discuss writing. It's a long, long way away from my taste.

See, I should have just posted "Because the majority of fantasy in any media is utter shit" instead of actually trying to justify my feelings. Would clearly have been a lot easier.  

[Cyrrex]

Apoc - I don't mean this as a diss, but you clearly have a different itch you are trying to scratch when reading.  I think you all but said that you want to be "challenged" by the author.  To each his own, but that is the exact opposite of what I want when reading...I do it for escapism, and I don't want the language trying to get in the way of my enjoyment.  I prefer straight forward, everyday language, to such an extent that I don't even notice it, if you catch my meaning.  The only exception is when the writing is supposed to be humorous, in which case I really enjoy clever wordcrafting and subtlety..

Anyway, I only mention because I think that the kind of writing style you are interested in would be hugely underrepresented in Fantasy.  I don't think that makes it shit by default - there are plenty of other things that make it a shitty genre.

[apocrypha]

Absolutely.

That's pretty much what I've been saying all along, and it's in response to the thread title which is "Why some people hate/refuse Fantasy" etc. I am one of those people, and my posts here have been explaining why that is for me.

[Numtini]

My ex-girlfriend is my age. We went to different schools, but she was the hot, rebellious queen of the social scene, who most high school nerds would struggle to talk to. When we met 20 years later and had a relationship, we watched Game of Thrones together. And she was still all "what is this, I don't even..." about fantasy worlds

In my experience, the mass culture embrace of fantasy and science fiction of the last 20 has been largely limited to men. Women consider it largely children's literature and when adult men read it simply categorize them as man-children. The urban fantasy genre is starting to change that, but it tends to be acceptable in women's circles because it's romance fiction, not because its SF/Fantasy.

If you think high fantasy is poorly written, read urban fantasy.

[Sky]

I put an urban fantasy on an e-reader once for instructive purposes, teaching our Director how to set it up.

Hey, it was the first title that came up in the catalog (new, available).

Wow.

[Chimpy]

My boss had me testing some inter library loan stuff last night and I used a title she said she uses because we only have one paperback copy so it is easy to search. Pretty sure it is an urban fantasy, she said with a chuckle "I can't wait to see your reaction when you finally read it, it is a 'chick book'."

She reads a lot of similar stuff to what I do and the derisive tone in her voice made it clear that the book would probably not be for me.

[Thrawn]

But, but, I really enjoyed the Dresden Files. 

[Ingmar]

Those are "contemporary fantasy". Which I think is a genre term that exists solely because people don't want to put the Dresden Files in a category that is 99% vampire softcore.

[tgr]

I can't help but wonder what's really wrong with f.ex GRRM's prose, because I literally don't remember a single time I went "...what? Why did he write it this way?"

[WayAbvPar]

Vivid descriptions of heavy glistening members springs to mind.

[Tale]

In my experience, the mass culture embrace of fantasy and science fiction of the last 20 has been largely limited to men. Women consider it largely children's literature and when adult men read it simply categorize them as man-children. The urban fantasy genre is starting to change that, but it tends to be acceptable in women's circles because it's romance fiction, not because its SF/Fantasy.

Whether that's the rule or not, I keep meeting exceptions. My friend's wife put me onto post-Snow Crash Neal Stephenson and Jeff Noon's Vurt and Pollen. Separately I know a female medical doctor whose favourite authors are William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. I've dated a girl whose favourite movie is Predator (or any Arnie sci-fi flick!). Maybe not so many women who follow fantasy, but I guess there's Hex and Felicia Day.

[DraconianOne]

Am I going to regret asking what "Urban Fantasy" is? Is it along the lines of "Dark Romance" which I noticed Waterstones now have as a section header. 

However after 30 years of trying fantasy writers recommended to me and hating them *all* you can understand my reticence to go and spend £20 on books right away.

You know there are some good libraries in Leeds right?* 


*Or at least there used to be.

[Johny Cee]

Am I going to regret asking what "Urban Fantasy" is? Is it along the lines of "Dark Romance" which I noticed Waterstones now have as a section header. 

My post on it from the Book Thread, though "Dark Romance" specifically sounds like the "Paranormal Romance" section some US stores have. 

"Urban Fantasy" is a really, really broad category. 

1. The most popular is contemporary setting but with magic, female protagonist who is somehow flawed (or thinks she is), standing up to baddies (or redeeming them through the power of soft-core sex and/or love). (What the Anita Blake novels turned into, the Sookie Stackhouse books, etc.)
2. The typical male UF, which is basically a detective story with monsters that panders more towards the male wishfullfillment side.  (Dresden)
3. The magic realism or surrealist types, which aren't really as popular anymore.  (Charles De Lint)
4. The hard-boiled/noir books.  Similar to 2, but usually darker.
5. Romance novels, but with vampires.
6. Straight up smut.


- The first bunch of Laurel Hamilton's "Anita Blake" novels were pretty entertaining, before she veered off and it became vampire erotica.  Starts as 2, ends up as 6.
- I liked Kelley Armstong's Bitten.  The rest of her output follows the standard modern UF conventions in 1.
- The first three "Nightwatch" books are really good.  Basically contemporary Good vs Evil, but throws a bunch of curve balls.
- The Simon R Green "Nightside" books are pretty entertaining, if you like pulp.  It's basically pulpy over-the-top serial novellas that feel like they could have seen print in the '30s. Basically 2, but cheesy/campy.  It'll work for you, or you'll roll your eyes.
- Charlie Huston's series about Joe Pitt is good.  It's basically hard-boiled noir, but with vampires.  Funny asshole protagonist who gets shit on.  See 4.
- More old school is Charles De Lint's "Newford" books.  More magic realism, with touches of Native American spiritualism.  See 3.
- Neil Gaiman verges in this territory too...  Neverwhere is basically UF, and you could make an argument for American Gods and Anansi Boys.  Lot of 3, but mixing in different kinds of fantasy.

Try Gaiman's Neverwhere and pick up Nightwatch by That_Russian_Guy.