The current debate about epic fantasy is still raging, fueled by the premiere of the Game of Thrones TV adaption.
Now, even the creator himself speaks, for George R.R. Martin breaks his policy not to respond to reviews and weighs in on the negative Game of Thrones review from the New York Times, particularly on the assertion that women don’t read fantasy. Turns out that George R.R. Martin had no idea that he is writing “boy fiction”. Continue reading
The uproar about the negative reviews of the TV adaption of A Game of Thrones at the New York Times and Slate is still going on (you can read my take here). Continue reading
Today, I found the first Maikäfer of the year. The literal translation of the name would be “may bug”, though apparently the English name is the much less poetic cockchafer, which sounds vaguely like an STD.
Here in Germany, the Maikäfer is an iconic symbol of spring. Maikäfer appear in Wilhelm Busch’s Max and Moritz and in a nursery rhyme going all the way back to the Thirty-Years-War. Chocolate Maikäfer are popular sweets.
However, when I was a child, the chocolate version was the only Maikäfer we’d ever see, because the cockchafer had gone nearly extinct due to pesticides by the 1970s. My parents would tell stories of collecting Maikäfer and playing with them and sometimes even getting paid for collecting Maikäfer, but I only saw maybe one or two of them during my childhood, sad specimen kept in jam jars and handed around at school.
However, with chemical pesticides on their way out, the Maikäfer has made a recovery of sorts. In the past few years, I have been seeing a couple of Maikäfer each year. And today, I found the first Maikäfer of 2011. And I took a photo:
The year's first Maikäfer or cockchafer sitting on my hand
And as a bonus, apple blossoms in my neighbour's garden
The Easter weekend is almost upon us and I am busy with other stuff, so here’s a linkdump:
At Grasping for the Wind, urban fantasy writer J.A. Pitts discusses the necessity of (metaphorical) blindness for writers in order to get through the flawed first draft. Found via Jay Lake.
Janice Hardy has a great post on writing description.
Horror writer Scott Nicholson talks about the pros and cons of indie and traditional publishing at the blog of Jim Hines.
The 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction goes to Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit From the Goon Squad. National Public Radio has more on the novel and why it won. Entertainment Weekly has an interview with Jennifer Egan. Jennifer Egan also gives an insight into her writing process at The Wall Street Journal.
Upon winning the Pulitzer Prize Jennifer Egan was also interviewed again by the Wall Street Journal and unfortunately managed to not just play down plagiarism, but also insult chick lit authors in the process.
This is the offending passage, referring to the Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism scandal:
There was that scandal with the Harvard student who was found to have plagiarized. But she had plagiarized very derivative, banal stuff. This is your big first move? These are your models?
This passage is doubly insulting. First of all, because Jennifer Egan comes across as stating that plagiarism is no big deal as long as you plagiarize only worthy books. And finally, Jennifer Egan also insults the authors plagiarized by Kaavya Viswanathan – mostly chick lit authors such as Meg Cabot, Megan McCafferty and Sophie Kinsella, but also Salman Rushdie – by calling them banal and derivative.
Now dismissive attitudes towards chick lit are nothing new. Unsurprisingly, they are particularly common among male writers and critics. Here is an example by crime fiction editor and critic Otto Penzler and here is one by critic Leon Wieseltier as cited by Maureen Dowd in a New York Times column (unfortunately no longer available online, but this link has a copy). Both articles are literally dripping with condescension and the main charge leveled against chick lit writers is that the writers are women and that these women dare write about subjects deemed frivolous by male critics. Still, dismissive attitudes by male critics towards female writers are annoying, but hardly unexpected. Seeing women like Maureen Dowd and Jennifer Egan getting into the act is harder to accept, because what do Dowd and Egan stand to gain by putting down other women writers?
Jennifer Egan closes the interview with the following bit:
My advice for young female writers would be to shoot high and not cower.
Because obviously, writers of chick lit, romance and other oft dismissed genres don’t try to write the best books they can.
Here is a response to Jennifer Egan by Jamie Backman at The Frisky and another response from Sarah of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.
However, it is possible to conduct an author interview without condescending towards other genres. Case in point:
Joshua Palmatier and Gini Koch interview each other. This is a very good author interview and not just because you get two authors for the price of one. Particularly the bits about writing without a synopsis/outline and inspiration struck a chord with me.
Of course, historical accuracy is a very common excuse for misogyny in any kind of fiction. In the romance genre, whenever the discussion gets to the type of historical romance commonly known as “bodicerippers” and particularly the prevalence of rape and violence towards women in general and the heroine in particular in those novels. Whenever a romance reader complains that she (since most of them are female) doesn’t want to read books wherein the alleged hero rapes and abuses heroines or whenever some other reader complains that historical romances are “much too PC” these days, the first argument that comes up is always, “But the rapes and the violence against women are historically accurate”.
Now many historical romance novels are no more accurate than your average pseudo-medieval fantasy in every respect, including gender relations. However, the violence and rape are explained away with “Well, it is historically accurate”.
It’s a stupid excuse, never mind that it isn’t true. If you read novels that were actually written during the time that most historical romances are set, i.e. the 18th and 19th centuries, you won’t find the domineering alpha jerk heroes so common in modern historical romances. Instead, you have Werther from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) who at one point falls to his knees and kisses the pale red ribbons on the gown of his beloved Lotte, whom he is in love with but does not dare to confess his feelings, because she is engaged to another. Werther also cries and whines a lot and eventually commits suicide. Or take Osbert, Earl of Athlin, from The Castles of Athlin and Dunblayne (1789) by Ann Radcliffe. Osbert, whose courage is repeatedly extolled in the text, is captured by his enemy and about to be executed. However, he is very brave and courageous in facing his impending execution, as Radcliffe does not fail to remind us. He is so brave and courageous that he promptly faints once he sees the executioner sharpening his axe*. Those are the real heroes of the late 18th century, whiny Werther and fainting Osbert, and they are very unlike the macho men found in modern historical romances.
Sam Sykes responds to the recent uproar about the alleged genre unfriendliness of the BBC. Like I’ve said before, I understand the sentiment, but I don’t think that the BBC really deserves the blame here, because they do produce quite a lot of genre television.
And of course, the BBC has produced the longest running speculative television show with Doctor Who. Twenty-six years of the original show plus seven years of the new, plus countless audio dramas and tie-in novels, no other broadcaster can match that.
While on the subject, here are some very sad Doctor Who related news: Actress Elisabeth Sladen, who played Sarah Jane Smith in Doctor Who, died of cancer yesterday, aged only 63.
Her character, Sarah Jane Smith, was among the most iconic companions of the classic Doctor Who series. She definitely was my favourite companion and starred in some of my favourite Doctor Who stories such as Pyramids of Mars, Genesis of the Daleks, Seeds of Doom and Masque of Mandragora. I was overjoyed to see her reappear in the new Doctor Who series, though I was never quite happy with what Russell T. Davies did to her character. Spending thirty years pining for the Doctor and eventually being reduced to chaperone/babysitter for a bunch of precocious teenagers in The Sarah Jane Adventures – Sarah Jane Smith deserved better.
When I first read the news in one of those “most viewed articles” boxes on the sidebar of a news site, I was utterly stunned and shocked. Because Elisabeth Sladen was much too young to die, she had not appeared ill and had still been working until very recently. The most recent – and it turned out final – season of The Sarah Jane Adventures was only broadcast in the fall of 2010. Turns out that no one knew she was ill, because she preferred to keep her illness private.
It is depressing how many of the actors, writers, directors and producers who turned the original Doctor Who into the iconic show it was during its heyday in the 1970s are no longer with us. Of course, there still is Doctor Who, but the modern version is no longer the show I once fell in love with, though it took me three seasons and two spin-offs to realize that.
*I happened to be on the London Underground, when reading The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne and I literally burst out laughing when I hit upon the fainting scene, until the whole carriage was staring at me.
Like I mentioned in my previous post, today was my birthday. Well, actually it was yesterday, since it’s already past midnight.
I had a very nice day. The weather was sunny and warm, and because of the Easter holidays, I didn’t have to go to school either. So I went for lunch with my parents and my uncle, who is single at the moment, since my aunt is at the hospital. We went to an Italian restaurant, which we all like. Besides, it’s the only restaurant in the area that is open on Mondays and that isn’t McDonald’s, a diner or a chain restaurant.
I also got some very nice presents, mainly books as well as a very pretty necklace. Okay, so I had actually preselected the books myself on Amazon, but still…
Anyway, I promised some photos and here they are, behind the cut: Continue reading
Today is my birthday. I’ll probably post some photos later tonight, but first here is a linkdump with some more on gender and Game of Thrones, some writing advice, heroes and villains, super and otherwise and finally a signal boost.
So much for women not liking fantasy or never voluntarily subjecting themselves to A Game of Thrones. Here is a thread from the All About Romance forum, where several female posters discuss how much they enjoyed Game of Thrones. They’re not all fantasy readers, either.
Lilith Saintcrow has a great post about how to deal with the fear that occasionally troubles writers and everybody else, too.
Sherwood Smith has two great posts on villains and violence at the Book View Café and at her own blog.
Also at the Book View Café, there’s this interesting post by Steven Harper Piziks on superhero power creep, i.e. the ever escalating power level of superheroes.
And finally a signal boost: Vera Nazarian of Norilana Books has lost her home to foreclosure, is moving cross country with her elderly mother and sick pets and could use some help.
For some reason only known to themselves, the New York Times published not one but two reviews of the upcoming TV adaption of A Game of Thrones. The review by Heather Havrilesky I discussed yesterday at least managed to take the show on its own merits, though Ms. Havrilesky is obviously not a fantasy reader, and made some interesting points that touch upon the recent epic fantasy discussions.
The second review by Ginia Bellafante, which was inaccessible yesterday due to that bloody New York Times paywall, was also written by a genre outsider, but by one who is unwilling to engage with an unfamiliar genre and instead gets condescending. Continue reading
Heather Havrilesky offers an interesting review of the TV adaption of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones at the New York Times. Apparently, this particular article is not behind that noxious paywall, though another review of the same show at the same site is. Continue reading
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