Vox rebukes Game of Thrones

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« on: May 15, 2013, 12:08:20 am »
Quote from: sciborg2
http://www.speculativefaith.com/2013/01/18/on-the-throne-of-bones-a-q-and-a-with-vox-day/

"After A Dance with Dragons came out, I was talking with a friend who was as disgusted with that epic disappointment as I was, and he was lamenting that with Martin having gone south, there wasn’t anything worth reading in that genre. I always wanted to write a fat fantasy and figured I couldn’t do all that much worse than Martin had, so I decided I would return to the world of Summa Elvetica. This time, however, I would throw out the intellectual fireworks that no one seemed to notice or care about anyhow and focus solely on writing a good story with strong, memorable characters."

"And to those who will roll their eyes at the idea of “a Christian answer to George Martin” and imagine it is meant in the Stryper sense, let me hasten to disabuse you of that notion. A THRONE OF BONES is neither an homage nor an imitation, it is a challenge. It is intended as a literary rebuke."

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« Reply #1 on: May 15, 2013, 12:08:26 am »
Quote from: Curethan
Our old freind Vox, is it?
Is it any good?

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« Reply #2 on: May 15, 2013, 12:08:32 am »
Quote from: Callan S.
Cool, then I can use him as an excuse to write a book (or finish my nanowrimo 50k draft), cause I couldn't do all that much worse than vox had!

Of course the Bakker version is: A throne of boners
It's layered, see - boners are mistakes, to remind us of our foibles, plus it allows for more references to pendulous phallases!

Anyway, Vox is giving that strange inutteral critique that people sometimes give - where they can only say something is bad, but they can't fill in anything else (or nothing else needs to be filled in - when they give the negative, that's enough information for the rest of us). Or that they merely blend into a crowd of people who say likewise, and need not identify any individual thoughts of their own on the matter.

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« Reply #3 on: May 15, 2013, 12:08:37 am »
Quote from: Duskweaver
It's funny. I started reading that interview expecting to get a good chuckle at the silly blind Christian fanatic. But, by the end, I found myself thinking "this guy has a point". I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a Christian, but there is, IMO, something lacking in a fantasy work that is unrelentingly grimdark and anti-heroic. That's why I prefer Steven Erikson and Robin Hobb to GRRM and KJ Parker, and part of the reason why I eventually gave up on Warhammer.

Fantasy needs the ugly to make the beautiful seem real, but it also needs the beauty to give the ugliness a point. Outright nihilism serves no-one and isn't really much fun to read.

Maybe, just as there needed to be anti-Lewises and anti-Tolkiens, the time has come where we need anti-Pullmans and anti-Martins?

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« Reply #4 on: May 15, 2013, 12:08:42 am »
Quote from: Madness
EDIT: Oh, Duskweaver... I so wish you could have experienced the Vox engagements contemporaneously before this.

Quote from: Vox Day
Second, I conducted a little experiment last fall. I wrote a column I thought was really important on a book that has the potential to completely change how we think about economics. The following week, I wrote the dumbest, most simplistic column I could imagine. When the latter received ten times more traffic, comments, and Facebook likes than the former, I realized that I really needed to do something else.

Engaging genre readership with the motifs of their culture and subverting them? Yeah, Bakker's interaction had no effect on him...

Quote
The response I hope readers will have is to grasp the depth and the nature of the love and affection between the married couple concerned, while the meta response I hope they will have is to reflect upon the difference between way sex is depicted in my work and the way it is depicted in the works of other writers of epic fantasy such as George R.R. Martin, R. Scott Bakker, and Joe Abercrombie.

...

Quote from: Vox Day
And to those who will roll their eyes at the idea of “a Christian answer to George Martin” and imagine it is meant in the Stryper sense, let me hasten to disabuse you of that notion. A THRONE OF BONES is neither an homage nor an imitation, it is a challenge. It is intended as a literary rebuke.

What a great interview! Lol. I can only hope Bakker reviews A Throne of Bones on TPB :D.

By the way, sci, I'm moving this to Misc. Chatter. Cheers.

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« Reply #5 on: May 15, 2013, 12:08:50 am »
Quote from: Callan S.
Quote from: Duskweaver
Fantasy needs the ugly to make the beautiful seem real, but it also needs the beauty to give the ugliness a point. Outright nihilism serves no-one and isn't really much fun to read.
It depends - if the book perhaps gives ideas as to methods of being better (in some moral context), I'd agree.

If it just has people just being nice just because they are and hope just exists cause it exists, I'd say it serves no one. Except as entertainment.

That's probably the bigger genre break - not actually being 100% entertaining. Even as that kinda breaks a promise in the industry between readers and authors. Even as such a break would be a kind of a betrayal.