I’ve been
reading Steven Erikson for years, loving every word in his epic, 1,000 paged
volumes. I go on binges, reading them on
weekends when I don’t have other work, finishing in the wee hours of the
morning. I love Brandon Sanderson, too, and
even (blasphemy!) think his last few Wheel of Time books are better than RobertJordan’s. It’s the way he writes: the
fast-paced sentences, the fragments, the realism.
It’s like George R.R. Martin or Stephen R. Donaldson or even Stephen King. There’s a feel to their fantasy that makes things immediate. Dangerous. And not just in a blood and guts kind of way (though they definitely bring the gore). It’s the impact of their words, the way the sentences roll together to create images, pictures of things so strange and different yet so real. It’s dark and gothic – the Southern kind, not the British. Why wouldn’t anyone love immersing themselves in these worlds? I know I’m not the only one… just look at how popular Game of Thrones has become.
But it wasn’t until I started following Joe Abercrombie on twitter that I began to hear the word Grimdark and the controversy surrounding it (Abercrombie’s twitter handle is @LordGrimdark). There is a deep divide in the fantasy world – there are those who love this kind of “bankrupt nihilism,” as Leo Grin calls it in his article denouncing the depravity of what he considers anti-fantasy, and there are those who hate it, as Grin and many other Tolkien-ites do. In a nutshell, Grin charges that these novels ignore the pure, poetic, mythic qualities of classic fantasy, eschewing conventional tropes for what he calls “postmodern blasphemies.” Now it may just be me, but his supposed digs just make me want to read this stuff all the more.
Joe Abercrombie wrote a great reply to the kind of poo-pooing Grin and others have posted over the last few years. I won’t go into too much detail here, as his article is definitely worth reading in its entirety, but I will say that it helped me think about why I love this sub-genre so much. It isn’t conventional; it doesn’t always show us what we want to see or give us the plot lines we want to happen. Grimdark is new, not just because of when it was written, but also because of how it reinterprets and reinvigorates older themes and motifs. Grimdark fantasy, just like postmodern literature, takes the tropes we all know, things that have been repeated over and over unto cliché, and makes them new again. The guy in black who wields an axe, rides a nasty, face-chomping stallion, and has a disfiguring facial scar? Not actually the villain. And the guy we’ve been following around, the nice guy with the moral code and the magic blade? The so-called protagonist of our story? He might actually be a complete idiot who gets everyone killed in the end. Or he might die right before the battle, never to complete his story or rescue the girl or kill the dragon. And that’s the point. These novels defy expectations to get at that “deeper meaning” the purists are so hung up about.
And, in truth, that’s what I love most about Grimdark fantasy. Literary modernists despise postmodernism because it doesn’t dig deep – they claim there is no depth to such fiction, only surface. Yet the postmodern gets depth through surface, through quantity as much as quality. And that’s why I think Grimdark fiction makes sense. It’s postmodern in its approach to what came before –all the conventional elves and ogres and disguised princes get new life through recreation. Their stories are new again, reflecting the needs of an audience who’s been there and done that and seen the movie already.
But what do the rest of you think? Is Grimdark the new wave in fantasy or just a quick blip in the radar? Is it worth reading or a waste of time? And how do such works and their authors fit into the larger debate about grit and its place in literature? How does this fit alongside writers like Cormac McCarthy or Chuck Palahniuk or Bret Easton Ellis?
It’s like George R.R. Martin or Stephen R. Donaldson or even Stephen King. There’s a feel to their fantasy that makes things immediate. Dangerous. And not just in a blood and guts kind of way (though they definitely bring the gore). It’s the impact of their words, the way the sentences roll together to create images, pictures of things so strange and different yet so real. It’s dark and gothic – the Southern kind, not the British. Why wouldn’t anyone love immersing themselves in these worlds? I know I’m not the only one… just look at how popular Game of Thrones has become.
But it wasn’t until I started following Joe Abercrombie on twitter that I began to hear the word Grimdark and the controversy surrounding it (Abercrombie’s twitter handle is @LordGrimdark). There is a deep divide in the fantasy world – there are those who love this kind of “bankrupt nihilism,” as Leo Grin calls it in his article denouncing the depravity of what he considers anti-fantasy, and there are those who hate it, as Grin and many other Tolkien-ites do. In a nutshell, Grin charges that these novels ignore the pure, poetic, mythic qualities of classic fantasy, eschewing conventional tropes for what he calls “postmodern blasphemies.” Now it may just be me, but his supposed digs just make me want to read this stuff all the more.
Joe Abercrombie wrote a great reply to the kind of poo-pooing Grin and others have posted over the last few years. I won’t go into too much detail here, as his article is definitely worth reading in its entirety, but I will say that it helped me think about why I love this sub-genre so much. It isn’t conventional; it doesn’t always show us what we want to see or give us the plot lines we want to happen. Grimdark is new, not just because of when it was written, but also because of how it reinterprets and reinvigorates older themes and motifs. Grimdark fantasy, just like postmodern literature, takes the tropes we all know, things that have been repeated over and over unto cliché, and makes them new again. The guy in black who wields an axe, rides a nasty, face-chomping stallion, and has a disfiguring facial scar? Not actually the villain. And the guy we’ve been following around, the nice guy with the moral code and the magic blade? The so-called protagonist of our story? He might actually be a complete idiot who gets everyone killed in the end. Or he might die right before the battle, never to complete his story or rescue the girl or kill the dragon. And that’s the point. These novels defy expectations to get at that “deeper meaning” the purists are so hung up about.
And, in truth, that’s what I love most about Grimdark fantasy. Literary modernists despise postmodernism because it doesn’t dig deep – they claim there is no depth to such fiction, only surface. Yet the postmodern gets depth through surface, through quantity as much as quality. And that’s why I think Grimdark fiction makes sense. It’s postmodern in its approach to what came before –all the conventional elves and ogres and disguised princes get new life through recreation. Their stories are new again, reflecting the needs of an audience who’s been there and done that and seen the movie already.
But what do the rest of you think? Is Grimdark the new wave in fantasy or just a quick blip in the radar? Is it worth reading or a waste of time? And how do such works and their authors fit into the larger debate about grit and its place in literature? How does this fit alongside writers like Cormac McCarthy or Chuck Palahniuk or Bret Easton Ellis?
What I usually do is ask, why? Is a work of fantasy grim just for the hell of it? Is it grim because it makes the plot or characters more interesting? Is it dark and gritty just because that sort of thing is popular and the author wants to be seen as cutting edge? I'll read the first two and toss the third. I love dark settings and I don't really care WHY the setting is dark so long as it's not just the author showing the world how awesome his writing is.
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