This is not the right crowd and you know it
Okay, so my physical health has imploded along with my plans for the day and I am in a terrible mood, but I think I would still be disagreeing with David Eddings.
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skygiants recently re-read The Belgariad. The comments section is appropriate-ironically epic. In the course of pursuing a theory proposed by pedanther—who seems to have been totally right—I found an interview with Eddings. I am not sure when exactly it was conducted; his remarks about prequels suggest sometime between 1991 and 1995, but honestly I don't feel that knowing the year would make much difference to how impressively I disagree with almost everything he says that is not a fact of his personal history and maybe even a couple of those (you cannot cite your intellectual differences with a female parakeet as reasonable scaffolding for your difficulties in writing human women, my dude, or at least you cannot do it without sounding like a dick). For whatever reason, though, this particular glaring ignorance is sticking with me:
"You can have a character say, 'Gee, they bounced one of my cheques' in a contemporary story and everybody will know what they're talking about. But in fantasy you have to invent the entire banking system. You have to invent the theology, sociology and everything else. And when you begin as I did, by dropping three or four aeons of western European culture into a blender—when you throw in peoples who are essentially ancient Romans, French and Spanish noblemen, Vikings and Muslims—when you put all that together and press the 'on' button you get a very strange mix of anachronisms. It gets you thinking about what sort of world it would be with Romans and Arabs living next to each other, for instance."
DUDE IT WOULD LOOK LIKE OUR ACTUAL HISTORY. SO WOULD THE INTERACTION OF VIKINGS AND MUSLIMS. ALSO PLEASE TELL ME THE ISLAMIC WORLD WAS NOT YOUR MODEL FOR THE ANGARAKS BECAUSE IF SO THE ORIENTALISM IN THESE BOOKS JUST WENT SO FAR PAST ELEVEN IT EXCEEDED ESCAPE VELOCITY AND BLASTED OFF INTO THE STARS AND THE STARS REALLY DID NOT DESERVE THAT.
I am sure someone yelled at Eddings in his lifetime about his conceptions of history and anachronism. I don't see how you could not. But I just found them and I am beginning to feel that Santayana should be revised: those who cannot remember the past are not only condemned to repeat it, they are condemned to reinvent it and believe they have created something totally unprecedented—strange enough for high fantasy—when in fact it was just people's lives. Even in high-gloss extruded fantasy product, that annoys me. The end, no moral. Just, seriously, don't do that.
skygiants recently re-read The Belgariad. The comments section is appropriate-ironically epic. In the course of pursuing a theory proposed by pedanther—who seems to have been totally right—I found an interview with Eddings. I am not sure when exactly it was conducted; his remarks about prequels suggest sometime between 1991 and 1995, but honestly I don't feel that knowing the year would make much difference to how impressively I disagree with almost everything he says that is not a fact of his personal history and maybe even a couple of those (you cannot cite your intellectual differences with a female parakeet as reasonable scaffolding for your difficulties in writing human women, my dude, or at least you cannot do it without sounding like a dick). For whatever reason, though, this particular glaring ignorance is sticking with me:"You can have a character say, 'Gee, they bounced one of my cheques' in a contemporary story and everybody will know what they're talking about. But in fantasy you have to invent the entire banking system. You have to invent the theology, sociology and everything else. And when you begin as I did, by dropping three or four aeons of western European culture into a blender—when you throw in peoples who are essentially ancient Romans, French and Spanish noblemen, Vikings and Muslims—when you put all that together and press the 'on' button you get a very strange mix of anachronisms. It gets you thinking about what sort of world it would be with Romans and Arabs living next to each other, for instance."
DUDE IT WOULD LOOK LIKE OUR ACTUAL HISTORY. SO WOULD THE INTERACTION OF VIKINGS AND MUSLIMS. ALSO PLEASE TELL ME THE ISLAMIC WORLD WAS NOT YOUR MODEL FOR THE ANGARAKS BECAUSE IF SO THE ORIENTALISM IN THESE BOOKS JUST WENT SO FAR PAST ELEVEN IT EXCEEDED ESCAPE VELOCITY AND BLASTED OFF INTO THE STARS AND THE STARS REALLY DID NOT DESERVE THAT.
I am sure someone yelled at Eddings in his lifetime about his conceptions of history and anachronism. I don't see how you could not. But I just found them and I am beginning to feel that Santayana should be revised: those who cannot remember the past are not only condemned to repeat it, they are condemned to reinvent it and believe they have created something totally unprecedented—strange enough for high fantasy—when in fact it was just people's lives. Even in high-gloss extruded fantasy product, that annoys me. The end, no moral. Just, seriously, don't do that.
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There are sort of elves in Jane Yolen's White Jenna (1989); they turned up suddenly in a universe otherwise established to contain humans and not even magic in the conventional sense. The author had to write an essay entitled "Oh God, Here Come the Elves!" in order to cope. I thought that was fair.
I also read Piers Anthony, do I get some sort of bad fantasy reading award here?
If you want? Piers Anthony is a common affliction! Every couple of years I think about re-reading Macroscope (1969) and then I decide I really don't want to know in which capacity the Suck Fairy has visited it.
But I saw this last night last thing and I'm still laughing at the mere mention of the female parakeet.
I'm glad! (And I think not actually reading the rest is a valid, even life-affirming decision.)
The only thing I don't understand is what his wife actually had to do with any of it, given the incomprehensiblity of small female minds.
After reading that interview, honestly I don't know. I knew he considered her a co-author long before she was credited as such; in fact he seems to have published nothing further after her death. But he comes across so strongly as incapable of considering anyone else's viewpoint that when he praises his wife for her support and her input without which he wouldn't be able to write female characters, I literally have no idea what that means.
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Yeah, I don't think I probably tried hard enough to deserve that - I read Eddings and Brooks and then turned my back on every fantasy book that was longer than 300 pages, part of a trilogy+ and involved a sword and a hero. (Although I do fondly recall one I read once about some guy who got one of those swords of prophecy and the sword was really obstreperous and kept getting him into trouble).
Anyway, after about 2000 I sadly read only YA and children's fantasy because I had given up on adult fantasy being interesting, or at least interesting and available in my library. And I was a children's librarian and I had to read a lot of YA for work and that took a lot of reading time and energy! (It was the era of epics, David Almond aside.)
But he comes across so strongly as incapable of considering anyone else's viewpoint that when he praises his wife for her support and her input without which he wouldn't be able to write female characters, I literally have no idea what that means.
The mind does boggle, I have to admit. 0_o The female parakeet thing is something that really ought to be a parody and is so very Eddings that I can only thank you for your sacrifice in reading the interview and extracting it for us. :-D
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That strikes me as fair!
The female parakeet thing is something that really ought to be a parody and is so very Eddings that I can only thank you for your sacrifice in reading the interview and extracting it for us.
You're welcome. It will be with me forever.