Nar not Sim!
May. 9th, 2006 09:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvessel25 Apr 06
Fool’s Fate - Robin Hobb - Voyager, 2003
* *
There is a website called The Forge that hosts a learned discussion on the theory of role-playing games. It defines three styles of play - gamist, where the aim is to “level up” or achieve some other metric of character development by overcoming in-game challenges; sim, where players attempt to simulate a working fantasy world; and narrativism or dramatism, where the purpose is to tell a satisfying story. The same analytical framework can, I think, be applied to books, and doing so provides an interesting explanation of the phenomenon of big-name fantasy author’s bloat that has afflicted the likes of J.K. Rowling, Gene Wolfe and now, I am sorry to say, Robin Hobb.
The usual brief synopsis before we continue - Fool’s Fate concerns itself with Dutiful’s journey (with Fitz and most of the other major characters in tow) to the ice-locked island of Aslevjal to slay the dragon Icefyre so that he can marry the Narcheska and thereby bind the Six Duchies and their old enemies the Out Islands into a European Union-style peace. It takes almost half the book for the party to get there, the interim being taken up chiefly with politicking in the Out Island clans and Fitz’s increasingly strained relationships with the dim-witted but magically powerful servant Thick, who really hates sea travel, and, through dreams, his daughter Nettle (well, they were about the only people he hadn’t pissed off in the previous book, so I suppose it was inevitable). On the island Fitz encounters a couple of old friends and an old enemy and there is a denoument followed by a loooong coda where Fitz basically does a lap of honour of all the still-living people he’s ever met and resolves his issues with them.
So, back to the gamist/sim/narrativist analysis. What would these terms correspond to in a fantasy series? Gamism would, I suppose, be the quest plot - the setting of challenges that must be overcome for the main character to progress in the storyline. This could be as crude as collecting the n parts of the Maguffin That Will Save The World, but it could also be a systematic addition of magical powers, or the plot-therapy model where the hero must overcome some personality flaw and grow emotionally or spiritually. In this book, the obvious plot (Dutiful’s quest to kill the dragon) is a disguise for the real challenge that Hobb set herself in writing this second trilogy, which is to make Fitz live happily ever after. Unfortunately she can only do this by ruthlessly stripping away the things that make him interesting. After all, one of the features that makes the original Assassin trilogy unusual and interesting is that Fitz does not live happily ever after; his experiences have damaged him, he thinks and we think, forever. There are some things that magic can’t fix. Except that in this trilogy, it turns out that it can. The way in which Hobb brings about Fitz’s recovery is ingenious and fits logically with a concept from the previous trilogy, but the effect is to undermine Fitz’s heroism and the events of the first trilogy since he no longer has to pay the personal costs of his actions.
Sim and narrativism are relatively straightforward to map. Sim, as its name suggests, can describe the extent to which the writer tries to simulate a working fantasy world that the readers can immerse themselves in. However, it can also include other aspects of realism in writing such as the depth, detail and plausibility of the description of the characters’ emotional and intellectual responses to the situations they encounter. This latter aspect is something that Hobb is supremely good at, perhaps better than anyone else in the fantasy genre, and is the main reason why her books stand out from other superficially similar series. Her world-building is competent too - the Six Duchies and the Out Islands, despite the usual lack of historical depth and complexity, feel like real places.
Unfortunately sim can, as in role-playing games, be the enemy of narrativism. The latter is essentially about the creation of solid narrative structures, which I shall interpret here as the arrangement of the dramatic climaxes so as to form a good story, that is one with a beginning, middle and end. Now call me old-fashioned, but the dramatic highspot of a story, whether it be emotion- or action-based, really ought to come just before the end. Having it in the middle of the book simply doesn’t work, particularly if it is the only dramatic action in the entire six hundred pages. The broken-backed dramatic structure was bad enough in the previous book, but at least there it could be explained away as mid-trilogy volume blues. There can be no excuse for doing the same thing again in the final volume of a six book series.
Sadly, with her emphasis on emotional minutiae Hobb has - literally - lost the plot. She occasionally finds it again, but her attempts to force it into the simulations of her characters’ lives ends up damaging their plausibility. A few of the more egregious examples: Dutiful spends most of this book acting at least ten years older than his actual age. The way in which he and the Narcheska fall in love is utterly implausible - there is no obvious match in personalities that might explain it, and the sexual desire seems oddly muted given that they are supposed to be adolescents. Fitz’s encounter with an old adversary is precipitated by Chade and Dutiful sending him on a relatively trivial mission which surely should have been given to someone other than him. Thick’s irritating prevalence in the first half of the book suggests that he will be central to the story’s denouement, which turns out not to be the case. His antipathy to Fitz appears to derive mostly from the requirement to maintain the emotional tension during the uneventful voyage to the Out Islands.
This retreat from nar to sim is, I think, the explanation for many cases of fantasy author’s bloat. It’s one of the coping strategies when the author is short on plot ideas - most readers will hardly object to spending more time in a world that they have come to like. In Hobb’s case, however, it appears to be entirely deliberate. She seems to have decided deliberately to shift to a more “realistic” form of writing where detailed description of the characters’ thoughts and feelings trumps the overall dramatic structure of the novel. I can only presume that she now finds planning the climaxes of her novels too much like hard work. According to reports, her latest book, Shaman’s Crossing, though set in a fresh new fantasy world, is similarly lacking in action. Sadly it seems unlikely that she will ever repeat the glories of her Liveship Traders series where the elements of gamism, narrativism and sim were in perfect balance.
Fool’s Fate - Robin Hobb - Voyager, 2003
* *
There is a website called The Forge that hosts a learned discussion on the theory of role-playing games. It defines three styles of play - gamist, where the aim is to “level up” or achieve some other metric of character development by overcoming in-game challenges; sim, where players attempt to simulate a working fantasy world; and narrativism or dramatism, where the purpose is to tell a satisfying story. The same analytical framework can, I think, be applied to books, and doing so provides an interesting explanation of the phenomenon of big-name fantasy author’s bloat that has afflicted the likes of J.K. Rowling, Gene Wolfe and now, I am sorry to say, Robin Hobb.
The usual brief synopsis before we continue - Fool’s Fate concerns itself with Dutiful’s journey (with Fitz and most of the other major characters in tow) to the ice-locked island of Aslevjal to slay the dragon Icefyre so that he can marry the Narcheska and thereby bind the Six Duchies and their old enemies the Out Islands into a European Union-style peace. It takes almost half the book for the party to get there, the interim being taken up chiefly with politicking in the Out Island clans and Fitz’s increasingly strained relationships with the dim-witted but magically powerful servant Thick, who really hates sea travel, and, through dreams, his daughter Nettle (well, they were about the only people he hadn’t pissed off in the previous book, so I suppose it was inevitable). On the island Fitz encounters a couple of old friends and an old enemy and there is a denoument followed by a loooong coda where Fitz basically does a lap of honour of all the still-living people he’s ever met and resolves his issues with them.
So, back to the gamist/sim/narrativist analysis. What would these terms correspond to in a fantasy series? Gamism would, I suppose, be the quest plot - the setting of challenges that must be overcome for the main character to progress in the storyline. This could be as crude as collecting the n parts of the Maguffin That Will Save The World, but it could also be a systematic addition of magical powers, or the plot-therapy model where the hero must overcome some personality flaw and grow emotionally or spiritually. In this book, the obvious plot (Dutiful’s quest to kill the dragon) is a disguise for the real challenge that Hobb set herself in writing this second trilogy, which is to make Fitz live happily ever after. Unfortunately she can only do this by ruthlessly stripping away the things that make him interesting. After all, one of the features that makes the original Assassin trilogy unusual and interesting is that Fitz does not live happily ever after; his experiences have damaged him, he thinks and we think, forever. There are some things that magic can’t fix. Except that in this trilogy, it turns out that it can. The way in which Hobb brings about Fitz’s recovery is ingenious and fits logically with a concept from the previous trilogy, but the effect is to undermine Fitz’s heroism and the events of the first trilogy since he no longer has to pay the personal costs of his actions.
Sim and narrativism are relatively straightforward to map. Sim, as its name suggests, can describe the extent to which the writer tries to simulate a working fantasy world that the readers can immerse themselves in. However, it can also include other aspects of realism in writing such as the depth, detail and plausibility of the description of the characters’ emotional and intellectual responses to the situations they encounter. This latter aspect is something that Hobb is supremely good at, perhaps better than anyone else in the fantasy genre, and is the main reason why her books stand out from other superficially similar series. Her world-building is competent too - the Six Duchies and the Out Islands, despite the usual lack of historical depth and complexity, feel like real places.
Unfortunately sim can, as in role-playing games, be the enemy of narrativism. The latter is essentially about the creation of solid narrative structures, which I shall interpret here as the arrangement of the dramatic climaxes so as to form a good story, that is one with a beginning, middle and end. Now call me old-fashioned, but the dramatic highspot of a story, whether it be emotion- or action-based, really ought to come just before the end. Having it in the middle of the book simply doesn’t work, particularly if it is the only dramatic action in the entire six hundred pages. The broken-backed dramatic structure was bad enough in the previous book, but at least there it could be explained away as mid-trilogy volume blues. There can be no excuse for doing the same thing again in the final volume of a six book series.
Sadly, with her emphasis on emotional minutiae Hobb has - literally - lost the plot. She occasionally finds it again, but her attempts to force it into the simulations of her characters’ lives ends up damaging their plausibility. A few of the more egregious examples: Dutiful spends most of this book acting at least ten years older than his actual age. The way in which he and the Narcheska fall in love is utterly implausible - there is no obvious match in personalities that might explain it, and the sexual desire seems oddly muted given that they are supposed to be adolescents. Fitz’s encounter with an old adversary is precipitated by Chade and Dutiful sending him on a relatively trivial mission which surely should have been given to someone other than him. Thick’s irritating prevalence in the first half of the book suggests that he will be central to the story’s denouement, which turns out not to be the case. His antipathy to Fitz appears to derive mostly from the requirement to maintain the emotional tension during the uneventful voyage to the Out Islands.
This retreat from nar to sim is, I think, the explanation for many cases of fantasy author’s bloat. It’s one of the coping strategies when the author is short on plot ideas - most readers will hardly object to spending more time in a world that they have come to like. In Hobb’s case, however, it appears to be entirely deliberate. She seems to have decided deliberately to shift to a more “realistic” form of writing where detailed description of the characters’ thoughts and feelings trumps the overall dramatic structure of the novel. I can only presume that she now finds planning the climaxes of her novels too much like hard work. According to reports, her latest book, Shaman’s Crossing, though set in a fresh new fantasy world, is similarly lacking in action. Sadly it seems unlikely that she will ever repeat the glories of her Liveship Traders series where the elements of gamism, narrativism and sim were in perfect balance.