I’ve always been very much a library person—as well as having a home overflowing with books I’ve bought (currently all in boxes because of living in earthquake city, but still, one day …)—so I am very pleased to have been able to accept the Christchurch Friends of the Library’s invitation to be their guest speaker on Tuesday 14 June, at 12.30 pm in the Sydenham Room of the wonderful South Library.

I haven’t entirely decided what I’ll be speaking on yet, but it’ll probably be around my personal path to international publication & being a NZ fiction author published overseas—& maybe just a wee bit of a paean to why writing fantasy is “da bomb.”  😉

Yesterday, I referred readers to a number of interesting (I thought!) articles I’d read otherwhere in internet land. One of them was a two-part interview with Paolo Bacigalupi on the Orbit blog. One of the things that stuck with me in what he said, when speaking about his award-winning novel, The Windup Girl, was this:

“In the end, it took me about three years to write, not including the couple of years before where I’d been working out the world and writing short stories set there.”

You all know that I think The Windup Girl is an outstanding novel. And clearly a few other folk think so, too, because the awards its won include 2010 Hugo, Locus and Compton Crook Awards and the Nebula Award 2009, as well as being named as the ninth best fiction book of 2009 by TIME magazine. Awards aren’t everything, of course, but still—not bad going, huh?

But here’s the thing: what Bacigalupi said in the Orbit interview is that The Windup Girl took him between 3 – 5 years to write. Now there is no way that I can prove a correlation between time spent and quality, but there’s no doubt in my mind that The Windup Girl is a quality book. Equally clearly, it also took time to produce …

This has got me thinking, especially about today’s SFF writing world and the pressure to crank out a completed manuscript in 6 months to a year maximum. And although, once again, I cannot prove a correlation between timeframe and quality, I cannot help noticing several contemporary series where I have loved the first book and been bitterly disappointed with the second and third. I cannot help but wonder how much of this is because the first books are not written to such a tight timeframe, but the subsequent books are—and there just hasn’t been enough time to really get them right?

Effectively, what the 6-12 month standard timeframe means is that books are being treated like a production line item. But are they, really? After all, no matter how much the writer may strive to write to a formula, each plot is still at least slightly different, with some fresh problem to be resolved, and usually has to bring in some new characters as well.  That’s just at the formula end of the spectrum. If an author does not wish to write formula, but rather seeks to try and create something really new with each book, then the going gets even tougher …

I think there is no question that time-to-market matters in our modern world. But what is the flip side of getting products to market quickly if in the end they disappoint readers? And if readers learn that the subsequent books in a series may often disappoint, what does that mean for the market in the medium to longer term? The whole thing about production line development after all, is the ability to replicate uniform design and achieve uniform quality—so if you can’t assure those two aspects through your process, then you’re not going to have a successful operation. So I think my conclusion is that books aren’t an industrial product and don’t suit that sort of model. And if they are an artisan product, where each item has some degree of uniqueness about it, then uniform time/production processes just aren’t going to work, certainly not all of the time—and are probably going to miss the quality/customer satisfaction target a lot of the time.

All food for thought, both as a reader and writer, even if I have no answers but only speculation to share—but from observation and experience, I cannot help feeling that it is no accident that an outstanding novel like The Windup Girl also took time in the making.

Every now and then—okay, quite often really 🙂 —I see an article that I have to share.

Bookish Dreaming: Celebrating Shaun Tan

Shaun Tan

Celebrating Shaun Tan by Australian writer, editor and academic, Gillian Polack, on Bibliobuffet is one of those articles. Here’s how it begins:

“Today I’m celebrating. Shaun Tan has just won a shared Academy Award for his animation, The Lost Thing (following up with an Australian Ditmar Award), and the Astrid Lindgren Award for his work in children’s literature. This is a good moment. Not as good as the moment when I first discovered his work, or the moment when I met him and discovered that I could be shy of someone with whom I have good friends in common and who is gentle and affable and very, very Australian. Shaun Tan is that rare thing—a genuine genius. Enough to drive anyone to shyness.

I want to celebrate, however, and to share his brilliance with you …”

To read the full article, click here.

Checking out Bibliobuffet in full is worthwhile, too … Yet another interesting bookish site: yahoo!

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An Interview with Paolo Bacigalupi (in Two Parts)

Paolo Bacigalupi

You may recall that two of my favourite books last year were The Windup Girl and Shipbreaker, both by Paolo Bacigalupi. And The Windup Girl—entirely deservedly in my opinion—was cowinner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel (together with China Mieville’s The City & The City.)

Recently, James Long interviewed Paolo Bacigalupi on the Orbit blog. Here’s a snippet from Part 1:

” … So in the end, I think the reason I wrote The Windup Girl was at least partially because it was the most ambitious and difficult thing that I could attempt … Of course, then the book turned out to be even more challenging than I’d originally thought.  It had a lot of characters and storylines, it was set in a culture that I needed to learn a lot about, and the mechanics of the world were fanciful enough that I wasn’t sure readers would be able to accept it at novel length.  In the end, it took me about three years to write, not including the couple years before where I’d been working out the world and writing short stories set there.  So, that’s one part, at least. It helped that it seemed like it was a relevant story, and that it had something relevant to say about agribusiness, and energy and maybe economic colonialism …”

To read the full first interview, click here.

In the second interview, Paolo Bacigalupi talks a little bit more about being a writer:

“It’s hard for me to have faith in my stories as I work on them. Hard to believe they should be written. Hard to believe that they’re worthwhile. Hard to believe that they aren’t stupid.  Being surrounded by other writers ameliorates that, for me, at least …”

Again, to read the full second part, click here.

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Navigating A Career: Tips from an Astrophysicist

Professor John Johnson

Talking work practice brings me to a third post that struck a chord this week—not from a writer this time, but from an astrophysicist, Professor John Johnson of Caltech. (Although as a successful academic, I imagine he writes a fair amount as well.) His advice on navigating a career was for graduate students in his academic discipline, but nonetheless, some of his observations resonated with both my personal experience and observation of the writing life:

” … The field of astronomy comprises extremely smart, technically-gifted people who could easily have made very comfortable salaries after they graduated with their B.S. degrees. Yet astronomy grad students spend their days in cramped offices working 10 to 14 hour days for annual salaries that place them squarely below the poverty line. My point is that we’re not doing astronomy for the money. Most of us are in this field because we find it inspiring, exciting and…fun. Right? Isn’t that why were here? Yet, sadly, some graduate students spend a lot of their time being stressed-out and unhappy …”

Am I wrong to think that you could substitute writer / writing career at so many places in that paragraph? I may get shouted down by my fellow writers, but somehow I don’t think so …

To read the full article, click here.

Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?

—

This poem appears in The Two Towers, the second volume in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and is a song of the Riders of Rohan, a people who are basically very Anglo-Saxon/Norse in conception, although they ride horses rather than sail longships. I have always loved its strong elegaic quality and sense of life’s transience, and the grief and loss that goes with that.

Tolkien was a philologist, specialising in Anglo-Saxon, and the language of the people of Rohan, the Rohirrim, is strongly based in that language. The lines in this poem are an adaptation of part of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer (sometimes also called The Wayfarer.)

I did not realise this until I studied Old English at university and recognised the lines. Of course, I then found that the source for The Lord of the Rings adaptation was well-known to just about everyone else! But when I first read The Lord of the Rings at around age 14 (or it might have been 13) I simply thought that the poem was wonderful. So it is—and has been now, in terms of its source, for over a thousand years.

Reproduced here in accordance with fair use.

—

To read the featured poem on the Tuesday Poem Blog—and to link to other Tuesday Poets posting around NZ and the world—either click here or on the Quill icon in the sidebar.

A while back I posted that it’s currently “reading for the  Hugo Awards” time again—and today the first of my two books ‘to be read’ arrived at more door (literally: because they wouldn’t fit in the letterbox the postman hand delivered them to the door.:) )

As you can tell from the title, they’re NK Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (which is up for just about everything this year: a Hugo Award, a Gemmell Award, a Locus Award–and there’s probably more!) and Mira Grant’s Feed.  Mira Grant is a nom de plume for Seanan Maguire, who won the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer last year.

I am very much looking forward to reading both these books, as well as the other Hugo Award nominees—although I am not quite sure when I am going to get to them while the Great Revision is ongoing. But they’re here and on the TBR table: that’s got to be a great start.

Yes, gentle readers, I have been invited—and accepted the invitation—to a Writers’ Tea Party on Sunday September 11th.

I don’t know, there’s just something about being invited to a tea party. It makes me think of Mad Hatters and March Hares—and tea dresses and lace gloves.:)

This particular tea party is held at the Hurunui Memorial Library in Amberley, just north of Christchurch and is hosted by the Friends of the Library (in this case, Hurunui District Libraries, plural.)  The other writers that I will be reading and tea partying  with are James Norcliffe and Joanna Orwin, both of whom I know, so I think it’s going to be a lot of fun. My special thanks to Bernadette Hall for the original invitation (and thinking of me as a potential “mad, March gal.”:) )

And I’m already eyeing up lace gloves! 😉

Well, the “Is Epic Fantasy Misogynist?” 3-parter took a bit of effort, but in fact I only put that together in the late evenings after my working day on the Great Revision (aka the GR) was done. I had a bit of a slow start on the GR this week because of a special visitor who had come a ‘fur piece’ (to quote Faulkner) and therefore merited a modicum of hostly courtesy. (Possibly a misguided ethic on my part but one I don’t plan to abandon anytime soon, the laws of hospitality having contributed—in my view—to holding humanity to the ‘humane’ part of that word for several odd millenia now.)

But once I waved my visitor good-bye early in the week it was all on for the GR. The beginning was slow because I was getting into a new section and had to kind of ‘feel’ my way forward waiting for the lights to come on, but they have now come on with a vengeance and things are rocking along. I do so love it when that happens.

And that’s pretty much me for the week: the GR; the epic fantasy posts; a Tuesday Poem: Yeats’ The Lake Isle at Innisfree, being my Mum’s favourite—because it was Mother’s day last Sunday, of course.

I did reprise the post about Morning Pages—as part of my revision (and general writing) process—on Monday as well. And I have to say, the pages have really helped me stay on the straight and narrow this week: waking up every morning and having the pages to work out/reveal to me: “yup, this is how the revising needs to go today.”  And then I go to the computer and ‘make it so.’  D’you know what else—da pages are never wrong.

Just to reprise the premise of this post series, on Wednesday I began to explore the question of whether I believe it really is true that epic fantasy, as a subgenre, is misogynist and determined that, in order for the answer to be  positive, I would have to conclude that epic fantasy “consistently conveys an inherent hatred of women.”

Yesterday, I commenced the process of looking at a couple of well known series in more detail, beginning with  JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. (Where else could you begin?) And concluded that, like Galadriel at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring, JRR’s seminal work in the epic fantasy subgenre “passed the test.”

Today I am looking at Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series (WoT) and George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (ASOIAF—the first book of which is the recently televised A Game of Thrones) which have been dominant forces in epic fantasy for much of the past two decades. (The Eye of the World was first published in 1990; A Game of Thrones in 1996.)

So let’s take a look.

The Wheel of Time Series

By contrast with The Lord of the Rings, discussed yesterday, Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series (WoT) has a great many female characters, many of them ostensibly powerful and influential. There are the Aes Sedai, the all-female magical power users, who are also political power brokers within the world (a little like Frank Herbert’s Bene Gesserit); the Wise Ones of the Aiel society; and also numerous queens and political leaders—as well as the central female protagonists of Nynaeve, Egwene, Elayne and Moiraine, plus several prominent secondary and tertiary characters. These include the female Forsaken, such as Lanfear, Moghedien and Graendal.

So, lots of strong female characters doing important stuff: there should be no problem, right? Except that, as the series went on, I couldn’t help noticing that all these supposedly strong women  never seem to end up doing anything really important (the exception is Moiraine, but she drops out at the end of the fourth book.)  Rather, they seem to concentrate their energies being catty, bitchy, and petty. In addition, the three central protagonists, Nynaeve, Egwene, and Elayne (and others, but most noticeably and consistently these three) are always more concerned about their clothes and in particular the hem- and necklines that always seem to plunge mysteriously up and down whenever they think about their male love interests/objects of desire (which they do pretty much constantly) than they are with the task at hand, no matter how serious this may be.

The women in the Wheel of Time series are all also—almost without exception, whether on the side of “light” or “dark”—exclusively devious and manipulative, as well as strongly hierarchical (i.e. to the point of being fascist) and into corporal punishment and mortification of the flesh for almost any infraction of “the rules” (read hierarchical-fascist), however minor. They also seem to spend a lot of time either imagining themselves being stripped naked, or being actually stripped naked, or subjugated physically in some other way, when they are taken prisoner. The only place where the hierarchical-subjugative pattern is examined/questioned, rather than accepted (e.g. as with the Aes Sedai and the the Wise Ones) is in the case of the Seanchan and the treatment of damane in Book 2, The Great Hunt.

And somehow, the kick-butt female warriors of the Aiel, the Maidens of the Spear, never get to really fight or do anything useful in a practical sense … Oh yes, that’s right, it’s because the central male protagonist, Rand Al Thor, doesn’t like women fighting and dying for him. So, chivalrous or chauvinist? Given that these women are dedicated warriors and part of a warrior society that has existed for thousands of years, footing it with their male counterparts, I’m going for chauvinist, i.e. Rand doesn’t respect their freedom to choose for themselves as adult human beings.

To be fair to Jordan, in the 5 or 6 books before I gave up on the series (for a whole host of reasons of which the treatment of the female characters was only one, albeit an important one) he never actually got into full-on graphic description of war violence toward women, in terms of rape and mutilation—and the torture meted out by the Forsaken tended to be fairly evenly allocated between men and women (as I recall.) Also, the physical subjugation following capture is not unrealistic in a war situation, especially where the Geneva Convention does not apply.

Overall, however, I consider that the way in which all Jordan’s female characters conform to a very narrow and negative  stereotype in terms of behaviour, character and views, as well as the consistent focus on physical subjugation of the female, whether by other women or by men, makes it difficult not to see Jordan’s treatment of women as inherently sexist at best. But does the sexism and the narrow and inherently demeaning/unflattering view of women—particularly supposedly powerful women—prevalent in WoT cross the boundary into outright misogyny, a hatred of women and the female? I hesitate to state a categoric “yes”, but feel that Jordan’ skirts the boundary very closely in places.

A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire Series (ASOIAF)

According to NY reviewer Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times, the recently released HBO series, ” ‘Game of Thrones’ is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.” The “true perversion”, though, according to Ms Bellafante, “is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise.”

Interesting reading, as I’m sure you can imagine, for one of those benighted female souls who would watch A Game of Thrones—if it ever gets to New Zealand—and has read all four books in the George RR Martin series to date and not because of the sexual perversion to which she refers (a very small part of the overall story and one which pales, in my opinion, in the context of the innumerable political perversions on offer.) But on to the critical point (which I took Ms Bellafante’s remarks to perhaps infer): is George RR Martin’s epic A Song of Ice and Fire (ASOIAF) series misogynist?

Like Jordan, and unlike Tolkien, ASOAIF has a large cast of female characters—too many to really enumerate (it’s a huge series in every sense of the word), but they are certainly diverse. From the very different Stark sisters, Sansa and Arya, one gentle and ‘girl-y’, one fierce and tomboyish; to the child-bride Daenerys who becomes the ‘mother of dragons’; from devoted wife and mother Catelynn Stark; to the incestuous-adultress and inept political schemer, Cersei Lannister; to the awkward female knight Brienne, these women only have one thing in common: they are real women who change and evolve in relation to the circumstances, mostly adverse, that they experience. (OK, maybe with the exception of Cersei—no spoilers, I hope, for all you lucky folk who can view the TV series, but really, she isn’t very bright. Learning is not her strong suit.)

One of the best examples of Martin’s charcter development, in my opinion, is Sansa Stark. When the story begins she is a gentle but also silly teen girl who very much sees the world as she wants it to be—i.e. in terms of her rose-tinted romantic dreams—and not as it is. Needless to say, she lives in an already brutal world that is about to become more so and gets a very rude awakening. (This is not a spoiler—if there is one thing you can be sure of in this series it’s that characters will receive rude awakenings.) Through the subsequent three books, the reader sees Sansa, in many ways still the same gentle girl, become a great deal less foolish and considerably stronger in herself. At no point does she pick up a sword or cast a  magic spell, the evolution lies in her character and her relationship to the world around her—an increasingly brutal world, as I said.

But the thing about the brutality of the ASOIAF world is that it is, from an historical point of view, completely realistic—and there’s absolutely no question, the brutality falls equally upon male and female alike. Also, I never feel that the violence is gratuitous. It always serves a purpose in the story and I never get the sense that the author is gettting off on it for its own sake.

So is A Game of Thrones/the ASOIAF series misogynist? The answer to that, in my opinion, is a resounding “no.”

Conclusion

As I said on Wednesday, I am not in a position to do a comprehensive survey of the entire body of epic fantasy, but I have read a fair bit of it over the years and I believe the discussion of the three major series above represents a fair ‘litmus test.’

Most of what I have read, including other authors such as Lois McMaster Bujold, Kate Elliot, Guy Gavriel Kay, Steven Erikson, Patrick Rothfuss, Midori Snyder and Patricia McKillip with her Riddlemaster trilogy, falls into the Tolkien/Martin camp, where my answer to the question: “are these works misogynist?” is no.

A few, like Jordan, definitely skirt the border into “yes” and some, like Stephen Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant series, may slip over it at times as with the defining rape scene in Lord Foul’s Bane. So the misogynist element is there in some works—but not many, in my experience. And sexual violence toward women is not, in my opinion, anywhere near as prevalent a part of the epic oeuvre as it is in some other forms of Fantasy, such as the dark and paranormal subgenres.  Or in other forms of fiction for that matter, such as crime and thrillers, which I find draw heavily on crimes of violence against women for their raison d’etre.

So in terms of whether epic fantasy as a subgenre consistently conveys an inherent hatred of women, my answer has to be “no.” In terms of those books that do skirt or cross the border into misogyny, the question then becomes whether there are enough of them to write off the subgenre itself as misogynist, i.e. to say that the form itself is inherently driving misogynist writing? Once again, I believe that the answer is “no.”

Yesterday, I began to explore the question of whether I believe it really is true that epic fantasy, as a subgenre, is misogynist and determined that, in order for the answer to be  positive, I would have to conclude that epic fantasy “consistently conveys an inherent hatred of women.”

To read the full post and in particular my discussion of how I might evaluate epic fantasy works to assess whether they “convey an inherent hatred of women”, click here.

As part of trying to reach either a positive or negative conclusion I indicated that, although not in a position to undertake a comprehensive survey of epic fantasy, I would look at a couple of well known series in more detail. The purpose of today’s post is to kick that process off—and the logical and obvious place to start has to be with JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which effectively defined the epic fantasy genre in the middle of last century. So let’s shine the spotlight in that direction now.

The Lord of the Rings

In the past, I have heard allegations of sexism leveled against The Lord of the Rings (LoTR) because of the lack of female characters within the story. I have always partially excused JRR on this count on the grounds of his generation (and because I love the tale, of course) but my question now is whether, as a defining example of epic fantasy, LoTR is misogynist?

Lack of female characters is certainly a stroke against it. But going back to my first experience of the story as an early teen reader, I don’t recall being consciously concerned about the lack of female characters in the same way that I felt uncomfortable when I realized that all the human races allied with Mordor (the Southrons, Haradrim etc) were clearly African/Eastern in ethnic conception. I felt very uncomfortable indeed about that—and even more so when I saw what was in the book faithfully replicated in the screen version.

So why didn’t—and don’t—I feel so uncomfortable about the women in the story? Although there are few female characters in the first book, those we do meet—Rosie Cotton, Mrs Maggot, Goldberry and Arwen Evenstar—while not particularly important to the story, are in no way negative characters, ie weak and venal. I regarded—and still regard—them all as relatively positive portrayals; they’re just not major characters.

Similarly, Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is difficult and unlikable but then so, too, is her son. I never get the sense that Lobelia is unlikable because she is a female: it’s because she is a Sackville-Baggins. (And in fact her ornery character, however disagreeable, nonetheless acquires positive virtue at the end of the story because she has stood up the forces of oppression and been imprisoned for doing so.)

Another female character who appears in the early story in a positve, though nonetheless background —in fact, backstory—way, is Luthien Tinuviel. Luthien was clearly powerful, courageous, and a person of integrity as well as (at least in the story that Strider recounts) saving her lover Beren from Morgoth, the Great Enemy.

Nonetheless, despite such minor positives, I still recall the joy with which I first encountered Galadriel:  a strong, powerful, wise, compassionate but nonetheless dangerous character who appears in real time at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring, but whose influence is felt throughout the continuing story: for example,  when Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas speak with Eomer in Rohan; when Sam and Frodo are questioned by Faramir in Ithilien; and during the passage of Cirith Ungol.

And then there’s Eowyn. I remember how very real she always seemed to me as a teenager: the way she felt trapped within her role and aspired for more; her crush on Aragorn; and the sheer wonder and glory of the fact that she took her fate into her own hands—and because of that was the right person in the right place at the right time to do something really important for the course of the story.

Eowyn is the sword-wielding chick par excellence, but she is also a real person, troubled and lost. She also gets some great lines on the subject of the roles men allocate to women:

“All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more.”

But also said about her, in this case when Theoden is trying to decide who can lead the people left behind when the army goes to Helm’s Deep (the book is a little different from the film.) He has just said that Eomer is the last of his house and cannot be spared, when Hama replies:

” … he is not the last. There is Eowyn … his sister. She is fearless and high-hearted. All love here. Let her be as lord to the Eorlingas.”

I know some readers feel that Eowyn’s eventual turning way from the sword to healing lessens her role—but within the context of a story where the values of civilization and peace, learning and healing and gardening, are set above the sword, I find it difficult to agree with this perspective. As well as choosing life over death, a choice that the value set within the book establishes as the path of strength (as opposed to Denethor’s self-immolation, which Gandalf describes as both weakness and a fall from wisdom), Eowyn also sets aside her crush on Aragorn for the real love of Faramir.

This may seem like a consolation prize in the film version of the story, but as I have always considered the character of Faramir to be one of the strongest and most real in the book, once again I don’t see it that way.

So although there are very few women at all in LoTR and only two that I consider to be major in any way, those two are great characters. In the case of Eowyn, she does question the limited choices on offer to her because she is female and follow her own path. Galadriel is quite simply a powerful and charismatic character—and none of the minor female characters are in any way weak or venal, or portrayed negatively simply because they are women.

The historical  “torment” of Elrond’s wife in the dens of the orcs is referenced, but LoTR does not really explore the brutalities of war a real time way for either men or women. We know that civilians have been massacred in Rohan and we hear of how characters die in battle—but usually deaths and casualities are reported after the event. Even Boromir’s battle with the orcs at the end of Book One is not described in real time, but recounted to Aragorn when he comes on the scene after the event.

Despite the small number of female characters in LoTR, therefore, I do not believe it is possible to make the case that the story is misogynist: there is no sense for me in which hatred of women or the female is inherent in the book.

—

Next up I will look at Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series (WoT) and George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (ASOIAF), the first book of which is the recently televised A Game of Thrones. Both series have towered above the plains of epic fantasy over the past two decades—The Eye of the World was first published in 1990; A Game of Thrones in 1996—and so cannot be ignored.

A few weeks ago, on April 16, I posted on “Why Write Epic Fantasy?”, and in that post I noted that—in my explorations on the epic fantasy topic over the previous few weeks—I had found a few disheartening trends in what folk were thinking and saying out there about my beloved subgenre. The first of these trends was the assertion that:

“epic fantasy as a genre is misogynist, both in the storytelling and the attention paid to female authors of the genre (i.e. your chances of being a successful epic fantasy author are considerably reduced if you’re a gal)”

I have been mulling over the first part of this assertion/observation for the past few weeks, while working on the second instalment of my own epic fantasy series, The Wall of Night. (I mulled briefly over the second part as well, i.e. re the attention paid to female authors in the genre, but quickly decided that even if the observation is 100% true there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it anyway, other than write the very best stories that I am capable of, hope that my own love of epic fantasy shines through to others who feel the same way about the subgenre, and generally hope for the best.)

I have invested more energy in reflecting on whether it really is true that epic fantasy is misogynist—by which I mean: does it, as a subgenre of Fantasy-SciFi consistently convey an inherent hatred of women?  I use the phrase “hatred of women” because that is the dictionary meaning of misogyny.  I define my own discussion in terms of whether or not epic fantasy “consistently conveys an inherent hatred of women”, because in order to make such an assertion about any class of writing I would argue that one or two examples, however odious, do not make a trend.

So then I had to reflect on what would constitute an inherent hatred of women in epic fantasy.

Firstly, I decided that it can’t just be that bad stuff, such as rape, abuse, oppression, happens to women in the story. The reason for my approach is that—as discussed in the earlier posts on epic fantasy, here—these stories are almost always about large scale, world changing events, frequently wars. And if an author is trying to be realistic about war and social conflict, then bad stuff is going to happen to characters, and probably—more often, rather than less—that bad stuff is going to happen to women. The reality is that war is a brutal business and those brutalised in the conflict tend to commit further brutal acts. So the presence of those acts within the book do not, on their own, necessarily constitute misogyny.

The frequency and enthusiasm with which such brutal acts are included in the story, and the degree of detail that the author feels compelled to go into, however, might well cross the line from realism/authenticity into misogyny. The context of the story—i.e. is it about war, or about a society that systematically oppresses women?—is definitely an important consideration, as is whether the story simply accepts the status quo of violence/oppression/exclusion or in some way examines/questions its validity. The range of women characters and their experiences are definitely also an important aspect. For example, are either all, or the majority of, the women in the story present as sex/abuse focii? Or does the story instead contain a range of characters—some of whom happen to be women—with a range of  personalities and approaches to life and resolving the difficulties that arise through the story—which may/may not include difficulties that arise for women in an oppressive society? (Although I’ll admit to enjoying books where the female characters get to deal with problems in life/the universe/everything other than an oppressive patriarchy and variants on sexual abuse.)

For me, personally, I think it comes down to: whatever the circumstances of the story, do women figure as unique characters/personalities? And when they figure, do they figure positively or negatively (i.e. are women, sometimes at least, strong, powerful, compassionate, wise—or are they always weak, venal or irrelevant?) Or could there even, just possibly, be ‘all sorts and conditions’ of female characters, just as there is often a mixed bag of male characters?

I am not in a position to undertake a comprehensive survey of the entire body of epic fantasy against the above considerations. But tomorrow I will begin looking at a couple of well known series in more detail and discuss any conclusions reached against my overall reading in the genre, which has been reasonably extensive over a number of years.