Sam Sykes Hates Fun

I have become convinced that everything fun happens only when I’m somewhere where there is not fun.

I’m absolutely certain that, whenever I decide to not come to World Fantasy Con, George R.R. Martin will show up ten minutes after it begins by driving through the hotel doors what will go down in history as a “battle-ready golf cart,” an orangutan riding shotgun, with a shotgun, before dusting off his brightly-colored gleeman clothes and proclaiming to the stunned onlookers: “Hey everybody!  We’re all gonna get laid!”

During that year, they’ll probably solve a Scooby Doo mystery involving Terry Goodkind in a rubber mask and Peter Brett will learn the meaning of Christmas.  And I’ll be off somewhere at a lame Halloween party holding back a large man’s greasy ponytail as he explains to me the superiority of Silver Age Drizzt versus new and gritty Drizzt in between vomiting out steaming globs of Cheetohs and tequila.

A more pertinent example would be the Writing YA workshop run by James A. Owen, one of my good friends and favorite authors, in which he said this (paraphrased to me, secondhand, while I was inebriated, by a friend who was there, but also inebriated at time):

Say what you will about Stephenie Meyer, but she managed to make holding hands sexy and desirable.

At the risk of heaping a little more sweetness on what is already a decidedly sugary load: it’s a testament to James that his secondhand words inspire an epiphany on my part.  And, if you’ll permit me one more indulgence in an anecdote, I’ll share it with you.

It’s really difficult for anyone to respond to criticism of any kind, much less the kind that occurs when someone takes exception to something you intended to do.  Thus, when I get complaints that my worldbuilding is lacking, there is no swearing, people survive too frequently and there is no sex in the first two books, I don’t rightly know what to do.  Or rather, I didn’t quite know what to do until James put it into perspective.

And thus, the conclusion: in indulging in the Epicness (Epicity?  Epicureanism?  Epicality?) of Epic Fantasy, we lose something.  And I think that “something” is the sense of wonder that (I feel) should permeate this genre more than anything.

A lot of the worldbuilding in The Aeons’ Gate is skimpy by design.  A lot of that design comes from preference, of course.  I, personally, don’t have a colossal love for fully-fleshed-out cultures and societies in which the joy comes from seeing the nuances, economies and etiquettes come into play and subsequent clash with each other (though I greatly envy those authors who can do it well, let alone the few that can do it extremely well).  But a lot of it is driven by logic: when the society is forgotten or a mystery, the characters get to discover it with the reader.  When the world is unexplored, we get to see it through the eyes of someone who never has.  When the wondrous becomes mundane, it becomes a chore, at least in the character’s eyes.

It’s the same logic that drove me not to overly define the intricacies of shictish society, the cultures of pants-stealing lizardmen or the mating rituals of the dragonmen (No.  Never.  Never ask).  It’s the same logic that drove me to have racial tension and societal distrust.  I wanted this to be new for everyone who was involved in it: the reader, the characters and even myself, to some degree.

But that’s worldbuilding, and we’ve talked enough about that over this blog that we don’t need a tremendous more discussion.  And I did mention sex, didn’t I?  Also death.  So, permit me to be slightly subversive and apply this logic to that.

I think, in the name of being gritty, we sometimes forget why we’re supposed to care.

Let me clarify before things get out of hand: this is not a rant about how nihilism is infecting our beloved fantasy, how our prose poetry and moral values are being corrupted.  Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t dig on the traditional fantasy all that much.  But at the same time, it would be unethical not to investigate the “other side.”  I resent the idea that grit is its own genre (rather than a feel or mood) and one mutually exclusive to anything else, but I feel that this is a rather popular perception that we should probably talk about.

The point is that: character death for shock value is meaningless.  Portraying sex to show how grown-up fantasy has become doesn’t really accomplish that.  Swearing for the sake of swearing isn’t really going to impress anyone.

I’m not leveling any of these accusations against the more classically gritty authors, but I do note that it’s frequently bemoaned in a lot of communities: “Where’s the death?  Where’s the sex?  Where’s the cursing?”  A lot of this comes back to my last post in which there are a lot of people clamoring for more of the same thing, but I think it’s worth studying exactly why you can’t throw these in at audience request.

Bluntly: they are there for the characterization.  A character’s death should not be brought out as an author’s way of saying “THINGS JUST GOT REAL, HOMEY” but rather as a means for inspiring loss, inspiring change.  It can alter the plot, sure, but it will do so by altering the characters.  And, frankly, it can be done without a character death.  That’s a highly effective way of doing it, sure, and in the hands of someone who knows how it will affect the other characters, it changes everything (R.I.P. Ned Stark).  But when it’s thrown around just to display the raw grit of it, it will shock, you will know that people can die, but it doesn’t inherently raise the stakes unless it affects the other characters.

It’s the same with sex and romance: it’s not there as a payoff or a goal, but rather as another conflict.  Sex is meaningless unless it’s done as a means of portraying characterization.  It can titillate, of course (though that has its own hazards, Hamiltonian-style), but it shouldn’t be there just to get all up in your grill and say “look how adult this is, look.”  It needs to have consequence.  It needs to have conflict.  It needs to affect things, otherwise it’s filler.

But does it need to have wonder?  Either of it?

Well…

It would be silly to suggest that you need to have every sex scene read like two virgins discovering each other and themselves for the first time and getting all poetic about it.  And yet, that element of discovery should be part of it, I feel.  That discovery that comes from realizing what loss is, that change can be difficult to accept even without death and what those people mean to you when they do change.  The discovery that comes from realizing what one person meant to you or what they didn’t mean to you when the sex went down.   The discovery that can come from just what holding hands with the right person means.

They don’t always have to pleasant discoveries.  They don’t always have to be overt.  They don’t even have to be obvious.  But I do think that, if they’re done well, they’re there.

It occurs to me that, if you haven’t read The First Law Trilogy or Best Served Cold, you are a villain.  Also, something that might be spoilers below.

If I had to cite an example, I’d argue that Joe Abercrombie illustrated these points (as far as death and sex went) rather well during his main trilogy and subsequent stand-alone Best Served Cold. Lots of people died, true.  Many of them named, true.  But the core characters?  It’s been ages (and they really do deserve a re-read), but I don’t think any of them died.  But did they walk away from it unchanged?  No.  Not even a little.  Death, it could be argued, wouldn’t change them.  It was too familiar to them.  It was the unbearable sense of being more than death that ultimately got them.

Same with the sex.  The sex was gruff, coarse, aggressive and, ultimately, meaningless.  It didn’t stop Shivers from going nuts.  It didn’t make Monza stop and reconsider (save, arguably, at the very end).  That which should have, did not (which is what Mr. Abercrombie does well), that which shouldn’t have, did.  It was a subversion, of course, but it was discovery, it was wonder, if untraditional.

That is the summation of it: in bowing to the traditions of “epic,” I think we lose things.  In building worlds too great,  we lose a sense of wonder and discovery that comes with it.  In the interests of racking up a body count, we lose an idea as to why it’s important that people die in the first place.  In the interests of sexing ourselves up, we forget exactly why it’s occasionally awesome to be holding hands with someone.

And because this is a Sam Sykes blog post, it has to be inherently anti-establishment: don’t sweat what “epic” should be.  Don’t sweat the deaths, don’t sweat the sex, don’t sweat anything else that should be.  Worry about what is, what you have, what you ought to do.

You make it work.  The genre does not.