[Jagh-o-matic]

What do I mean by "Jagh-o-matic?" Nothing whatsoever. Gotta have a display name.

I'm here because I believe MBotF has some lasting literary merit. Granted, the chances of someone cracking this open 1,000 years from now are comparable to the chances of my being the jackpot winner on that Super Lotto ticket from last week I haven't checked yet, but still.

I've read quite a lot of things in my time, and I don't believe anyone has come close to creating a work like this. I've been thinking about categorization a bit - "epic fantasy," an irritatingly slippery term, is probably as old as the Stone Age, but I find that, looking through what is obviously fantastical, from Homer to Arthur on down, there is generally some level of understanding, whether implicitly acknowledged as a literary device to facilitate allegorical explication, or held out as stone cold truth (Genesis, Moses, discuss) that the backdrop setting is the universe we all live in.

The explicit world-building genre - "I'm writing a story that takes place in a completely made-up universe, and I'm being up front about it, and you're going to like it. In fact, the unbound nature of that universe is itself a key factor in the story" - seems to me a more recent innovation. Perhaps the flip side of science fiction, which is the place where the nature of our universe, not just the people living in it, gets to be a feature of the story. No, scratch that, the nature of our universe has always been a critical component of most of our best fantasy - mythology.

I ramble ... point being, the world-building genre has waited for Steven Erikson to arrive. To borrow from Sir Isaac Newton, he does stand on the shoulders of giants, but boy does he elevate style and substance. More later, probably in other threads.

[nacht]

Very well put.
But how the future will perceive the work is perhaps irrelevant.
When creative output was minimal, a nice yarn can take epic proportions. Maybe producing something that stands out among a lot more competition is perhaps a greater achievement.
And history, it is probably all lies anyway (or atleast "spin")

[Jagh-o-matic]

Excellent point. The ancients surely produced many orders of magnitude less written output than we do per unit of time. Nowadays we are awash in literacy and people who can afford to write instead of farm. It is tough to stand out. I disagree slightly on relevance, however. Just my personal bias, but I believe in the "test of time." It is true that if you take something like "Beowulf" it is hard not to stand out because, well, how many other Dark Ages Anglo-Saxon epics come to mind? However, restricting our time frame to the modern era, I think there is a bit of winnowing that goes on. Some things that are currently forgotten and considered utter crap may be revered in future, but I tend to believe (sans evidence) that a lot of stuff falls below a certain threshold of quality and will never reemerge.

Now, define "quality."

Edit: I tend to hope that a lot of stuff will never reemerge.

This post has been edited by Jagh-o-matic: 24 April 2013 - 05:07 PM

[HoosierDaddy]

Welcome to the site!

1,000 years is a long time, but obviously we are quite fond of the work as well. Snotty and elitist are bandied about.