Wherein I do rant.
It's not that I hate all humorous fantasy per se. I am a devotee of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books—though I consider those sort of a species of free-for-all satire, albeit one that makes me laugh out loud in public places—and I am greatly amused by Mary Anne Mohanraj's "Fleeing Gods." (I have not yet read Leslie What's Olympic Games. It's on my to-read-before-some-impatient-friend-clobbers-me-with-it list.) Mostly it's a literary stripe that I just don't read particularly often. This week, I read Esther Friesner's "Last Man Standing" in the January 2005 Fantasy & Science Fiction, and have found myself unexpectedly annoyed.
The story has been favorably reviewed in The Agony Column and I'm sure elsewhere as well. It deals with a sarcastic slave named Namtar who escapes drinking hemlock at the funeral of Gilgameš only to find himself pulled down into the underworld alive by the romantic intrigues of the goddess Inanna; along the way, he runs into everyone from an irate female bartender to the divine Ereškigal to the less than impressed shade of Gilgameš himself, with a side order of scheming priests and vengeful ghosts to boot. In and of itself, it's a very funny story. Namtar follows in a long tradition of wisecracking protagonists who consistently get themselves into hot water and must rely on the same capacity for quick talking to get themselves back out again: he's sort of a servus calidus transplanted from Roman comedy to the ancient Near East; Pseudolus among the mud bricks. The narrative displays about as much reverence as Namtar himself, with lines like "Though the death of gods is sometimes unavoidable—whether to fulfill a prophecy, to respect some hidden rule of the cosmos, to get mortals to sit up and pay attention during temple services, or simply to make for a better story—it can also be a mere temporary inconvenience, like cat-sitting." I didn't find the tone laugh-out-loud hilarious, but the snerk level is evenly high. And who could fail to be amused by the ancient Sumerian pop hit, Love Me, Baby, Like A Sacred Temple Whore?
. . . cut for righteous pedantry.
( Read more... )
It's not that I hate all humorous fantasy per se. I am a devotee of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books—though I consider those sort of a species of free-for-all satire, albeit one that makes me laugh out loud in public places—and I am greatly amused by Mary Anne Mohanraj's "Fleeing Gods." (I have not yet read Leslie What's Olympic Games. It's on my to-read-before-some-impatient-friend-clobbers-me-with-it list.) Mostly it's a literary stripe that I just don't read particularly often. This week, I read Esther Friesner's "Last Man Standing" in the January 2005 Fantasy & Science Fiction, and have found myself unexpectedly annoyed.
The story has been favorably reviewed in The Agony Column and I'm sure elsewhere as well. It deals with a sarcastic slave named Namtar who escapes drinking hemlock at the funeral of Gilgameš only to find himself pulled down into the underworld alive by the romantic intrigues of the goddess Inanna; along the way, he runs into everyone from an irate female bartender to the divine Ereškigal to the less than impressed shade of Gilgameš himself, with a side order of scheming priests and vengeful ghosts to boot. In and of itself, it's a very funny story. Namtar follows in a long tradition of wisecracking protagonists who consistently get themselves into hot water and must rely on the same capacity for quick talking to get themselves back out again: he's sort of a servus calidus transplanted from Roman comedy to the ancient Near East; Pseudolus among the mud bricks. The narrative displays about as much reverence as Namtar himself, with lines like "Though the death of gods is sometimes unavoidable—whether to fulfill a prophecy, to respect some hidden rule of the cosmos, to get mortals to sit up and pay attention during temple services, or simply to make for a better story—it can also be a mere temporary inconvenience, like cat-sitting." I didn't find the tone laugh-out-loud hilarious, but the snerk level is evenly high. And who could fail to be amused by the ancient Sumerian pop hit, Love Me, Baby, Like A Sacred Temple Whore?
. . . cut for righteous pedantry.
( Read more... )
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