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Writing that Alters Reality
Oct. 6th, 2020 11:50 pmApr 2020
Foundryside - Robert Jackson Bennett - Jo Fletcher Books, 2018 (ebook edition)
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Maybe it's just my particular sampling, but an awful lot of recent fantasy works seem to have had female thieves, rogues or assassins as lead characters. Some examples: Brandon Sanderson's Vin in the Mistborn novels, S.A. Chakraborty's Nahri, P. Djeli Clark's Creeper, V.E. Schwab's Lila in A Darker Shade of Magic, A.K. Larkwood's Csorwe (review forthcoming!) and Lila Bellaqua from His Dark Materials. I find this a bit depressing. I get that in a traditionally male-dominated mediaeval fantasy environment, making a female protagonist a small-time crook is one of the few ways to give her both freedom and agency whilst allowing for the inevitable "special destiny" plot development, but shouldn't we be starting to tell different stories by now? It says something for the small numbers of roles that women are permitted in big commercial fantasies that the only female equivalents of Gandalf that I can think of in terms of power and accorded respect are Galadriel, Granny Weatherwax and David Eddings' Polgara, for goodness' sake. And stories with female knightly or amazonian protagonists aren't exactly two-a-penny either. Making your female protagonist small and weak might be a way of encouraging reader sympathy, but it's a subtle form of misogyny.
Well, tough luck, because here's yet another one - Robert Jackson Bennett's Sancia in his new "Founders" trilogy. Fortunately, Bennett's talent for hitting on good fantasy ideas has struck again, and makes this book an enjoyable and compelling read.
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The Lure of the Trilogy
Jun. 17th, 2019 11:06 pmJul 2018
City of Blades / City of Miracles - Robert Jackson Bennett – Jo Fletcher Books, 2017
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One of the odder quirks of the fantasy genre is the weird prevalence of the trilogy as a literary format. Yes, Lord of the Rings started the trend, but it is clearly a single story that had to be divided into three for publishing reasons. And Tolkien's tale was based on some thirty years of world-building, so it earned its length (indeed, one of the most impressive features of LOTR as a narrative is just how lightly the lore is worn - it's there and it's important, but for the most part does not get in the way of the action).
Later fantasy writers have much less excuse for inflicting trilogies on their readers. Given the pressure on authors to produce, I would guess that the world-building for the average fantasy trilogy takes a year or two at most, which is not enough to sustain, say, 1500 pages of narrative without some longueurs. Hence the phenomenon of the mid-trilogy volume blues, in which authors struggle to pad out their stories to meet the requirements of their publishers and their readers. While it is always interesting to see the tactics that they employ, often one cannot help wondering whether the story would have been better told if the author had stopped after one volume.
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Don't Mention the Gods
May. 14th, 2018 10:15 pmMay 2017
City of Stairs - Robert Jackson Bennett - Jo Fletcher Books, 2014
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This book was in the running for the 2015 World Fantasy, Locus and British Fantasy Awards, but won none of them. This is perhaps not surprising, for it breaks a number of the cardinal rules of fantasy. For a start, it is not set in a mediaeval world, but in something closer to our own; there are guns and trains. The obvious cultural influences of its two main nations are unusual - "the continent" and its great city of Bulikov are clearly Russian-influenced, while the island state of Saypur, which has conquered the continent, is a small-scale India. So we have white-skinned Continentals being ruled over by brown-skinned Saypuris. But the most striking feature is the treatment of religion. Most fantasy worlds have at least some sort of pantheon (perhaps as a necessary psychological prop when arbitrary magical powers render rational explanations impossible), but in this world, Richard Dawkins has won. Saypur is an atheist nation whose culture is based on science and technology and its Worldly Regulations ban the people of Bulikov from worshipping their six gods. There is a good reason for this - until 70 years ago, the gods actually existed and terrorised the world until they were killed off with a mysterious weapon invented by a legendary Saypuri hero called the Kaj.
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