[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

I like Erikson's prose, and I like philosophically oriented (or theoretically informed) fantasy. Bakker seemed very promising at first, but it's difficult to reconcile his supposed theoretical sophistication with reports of his work's misogyny, his statements about imagining his readers as male, his demonization of sexuality, etc. etc. Is Bakker worth committing to reading anyway? I don't want to get invested in the characters and the world only to find that the authorial perspective is too repugnantly stupid to be worth my time (Tolkien's crypto-Catholicism...).

Also, how does Bakker's dialogue compare with Erikson's?

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 31 May 2016 - 09:50 PM

[Studlock]

Bakker is not a misogynistic in the sense that he, or his work, actively hates women. I think a lot of the claims of misogynistic come from the fact that the world he's examining is built around metaphysical assumptions of medieval Europe (the great chain of being and so on). This puts his women characters in a spot, within the story, they are metaphysically inferior. This isn't suppose to taken at face value, but rather as horrific. His actual authorial perspective that kind overwhelms the story is his philosophical pet theory of Blind Brain Theory which, as far as I can tell, is an offshot of eliminative materialism, which itself is a somewhat marginal, and radical school of thought within the field of philosophy of the mind.

That being said, I do think that he has a somewhat implicit bias towards his men characters--all of who have fuller and more complete arcs in the first set of books. His women POVs are often one-note and victimized.

[Puck]

I have only read his first trilogy, and I'm pretty sure I haven't seen even the hintiest hint of any demonization of sexuality. Sure, there are in-universe points of view with less than pocitive opinions about it, but whoever cannot keep in-universe voices and authorial intent apart shoult not be reading Bakker. Also, there's lots of sexual violence of all kinds, although last time I checked that's not the same as demonizing it.

Same goes for the supposed misogyny. I don't know what Bakker may or may not have said in interviews or something, but his setting is constructed after medieval Europe and especially the crusades and it's not doing anyone the favour of prettying up the social problms that come along. In-universe, to begin with, women are presented as inferior, both from the points of view of the male characters as well as the female, who - having lived a their lifes within that world - have never known anything else. Again, I've only read the first trilogy, but even there it became more obvious as the story went on that this is not something inherent in that setting - nor to Bakker's personal opinion - but instead a constructed social dogma, with indicidual characters struggling to break through it or indeed refusing to because it's that ingrained into their world. Don't expect grand in-universe revelations to the contrary, though, as Bakker's approach is very bleak and, I guess, seems to revel in all the nasty sides of human nature.

I have no idea why people seem to bring up these things so much about Bakker's writing when there are so many actually offputting, gruesome, stomach-turning things happening in those books. I guess it's the old problem of sex is boooh but violence is totally okay, or something, when it should be the other way around.

This post has been edited by Puck: 31 May 2016 - 11:08 PM

[amphibian]

Studlock, on 31 May 2016 - 10:30 PM, said:

That being said, I do think that he has a somewhat implicit bias towards his men characters--all of who have fuller and more complete arcs in the first set of books. His women POVs are often one-note and victimized.

This changes considerably in the second arc/set of books. Bakker takes us through great and loooong segments with many women with power, without power, with agency, without agency, and they are all crucial to the story told in each book and the overall story. From early reviews of his latest book, this is paying off in huge amounts.

From a 10,000 foot overview, Bakker takes a really crappy world that has tilted itself misogynistic, runs his main character Kelhus through it as Kelhus amasses a following of mostly men, sees Kelhus change entire social systems to build an army to take on the alien threat, and somehow more than half of the most important individuals outside Kelhus's immediate orbit are women because Kelhus wanted it that way/Bakker thinks it's more interesting that way. It's really fascinating - but it does take time for the story to get there and that's often time the more impatient readers won't give Bakker (and end up calling him misogynistic when he's clearly not).

[Studlock]

I haven't yet read the second round of books, but I don't doubt it. I'm waiting for the last book to be released before I dig in.

[Cause]

Bakkers world is horrifying! He calls his short stories set in it the atrocity tales. His books are modelled after the crusades but his setting is modelled after ancient antiquity. Think the ancient Greeks, think the Mongols and the ancient Persians. Yes women have it bad, they are viewed at worst as property and at best as something that a dad, brother or uncle needs to look after until he can find a suitable match and marry her off to a husband. I don't think Bakker is misogynist but his world is. Its a brutal and I think accurate portrayal of how our world used to be (which is scary but for me also thought provoking). Also as Studlock mentions the religions of the world say that women are less than men. Impure women are damned, that means prostitutes but it also means women raped against their will. The world, the societies and their religions are unforgiving to women but again these views are founded in the bedrock of real world parables.

The villains of the book are driven by their primal urges, literally. They kill and rape everything because they are driven to. The 'hero' of the book is the exact opposite, a man who has no primal urges left, he has expunged them all and is driven by pure intellect. He is not a nice man. Its all part of some of the themes that Bakker explores. Intellect or passion in the extreme can all drive us to dark deeds.

The book is dark and the setting is mysoginist but never anti-sex I think. One of the earliest stories the book sets up is the empowerment not of women but of one women in particular. Even here we see how a good thing can be perverted.

If your avoiding the book because you don't want to support a misogynist author I don't think that is the case here. IF you don't want to read a dark and gritty book filled with rape and sexual violence against women because it upsets you than do not touch his work. Sexual violence is one of the cornerstones of the work. Men, women and children are all raped at some point. Bakkers work has also I think always been characterized by a very binary reaction. People either love it or hate it. I think he wrote some of the best fantasy I have ever written, many cant ever get through the first book. That said I would not avoid giving his work the chance based on a belief that Bakker is in anyway promoting his fictional world as a personal belief.

Terry Goodkind used his books to promote his personal views on how the world should be as dictated by his philosophies. Bakker uses his work to explore multiple themes of philosophy. Using a fantastical setting to more clearly explore some of these themes. One of the themes I think being how morality shifts and one of the clearest examples being that today I would think the majority of people and especially men would be horrified by how women were treated.

[Maark Abbott]

Mysogynistic? No. Lacking in Inchoroi members? Yes. There are only two of them, after all. And who are the Dunyain?

[Tiste Simeon]

Eh. I can't remember a single woman in the books except"Generic Kellhus sex slave versions 1-5". But as others have mentioned it is about the context.

Don't let that stop you reading them though. Let the fact that the books are irrepressibly boring stop you from reading them instead!

[Werthead]

Yup, in the first series you had really only three female characters of note, two prostitutes and the Emperor's crazy mother. In the second series that has changed quite significantly, with a powerful sorceress, priestesses of the earth-goddess and the female wielder of a force known as the Judging Eye becoming prominent and major characters. It's certainly a deliberate shift but one that takes quite a while to come around.

Quote

Also, how does Bakker's dialogue compare with Erikson's?

Bakker handles the philosophical stuff far, far better than Erikson does. There's no real comparison on that score.

However, Erikson handles tonal shifts a lot better than Bakker, and has a far better sense of humour. There's a reason for that - Bakker's world makes the world of Malaz look like CARE BEARS at time - but the unrelenting grimness of Bakker can get a bit much at times. Fortunately the books are written well enough to overcome that, and they're (mostly) shorter than most other big epic fantasies.

Quote

If your avoiding the book because you don't want to support a misogynist author I don't think that is the case here. IF you don't want to read a dark and gritty book filled with rape and sexual violence against women because it upsets you than do not touch his work. Sexual violence is one of the cornerstones of the work. Men, women and children are all raped at some point. Bakkers work has also I think always been characterized by a very binary reaction. People either love it or hate it. I think he wrote some of the best fantasy I have ever written, many cant ever get through the first book. That said I would not avoid giving his work the chance based on a belief that Bakker is in anyway promoting his fictional world as a personal belief.

It's worth noting that the overwhelming majority of the sexual violence in the books (against anyone) is mostly implied only and takes place off-page. There are a few scenes which are a bit more gruesome and in-your-face, but they are relatively few and far between. And the absolute overwhelming majority of sexual violence in the books is directed against men.

[Overactive Imagination]

I thought the first book of the first trilogy was a masterpiece. It's a must-read. I haven't started the second trilogy yet, but I'm excited to read it this summer.

The primary female character of the first trilogy is great (forget her name off the top of my head). There are a couple scenes with her that made me want to barf (black semen).

[D'iversify]

Azath Vitr (D, on 31 May 2016 - 09:50 PM, said:

I like Erikson's prose, and I like philosophically oriented (or theoretically informed) fantasy. Bakker seemed very promising at first, but it's difficult to reconcile his supposed theoretical sophistication with reports of his work's misogyny, his statements about imagining his readers as male, his demonization of sexuality, etc. etc. Is Bakker worth committing to reading anyway? I don't want to get invested in the characters and the world only to find that the authorial perspective is too repugnantly stupid to be worth my time (Tolkien's crypto-Catholicism...).

Basically, the key difference between Erikson and Bakker is that Erikson's world operates under the principle that the pre-modern sexual division of labour and marginalisation of women to the home in agricultural societies is going to be undermined significantly in any society where many people of either sex can draw upon non-mundane resources of exceptional power, and that the knock-on effect of this would be a more public role for women in many of his societies. Bakker starts from the premise that his world is going to be constructed as a if it reflected the bigoted metaphysical assumptions of the pre-modern 'meangingful' medieval world, in which society is highly hierarchical and women, slaves and other oppressed groups are actually objectively lower in the world's hierarchy of meaning. Bakker's stated objective is to invert the classical bildungsroman trope of characters finding meaning in a meaningless world by have a protagonist bringing meaninglessness to a meaningful world, much in the same way that (neuro)science, in his opinion, is deconstructing the facade of meaningfulness we impose upon the world of our conscious experience. But Bakker isn't really presenting this as a case of reason bringing light to the darkness - we see clearly in the books that both the defenders of the objective morality of the world and those who seek to undermine it are responsible for atrocity upon atrocity. And a lot of the victims are women, although a lot of them are also men (and men are also victims of sexual outrages to a similar extent, and the tone is fairly similar, i.e. it's not particularly more lurid in the case of women).

[worry]

Is he a good storyteller?

[amphibian]

worry, on 10 June 2016 - 08:13 PM, said:

Is he a good storyteller?

Yes, although he has his main cast do some genuinely abominable things in order to serve their larger goals - which are interesting. On a way, he's similar to China Mieville, Hal Duncan, or other authors who are very upfront with the weird and the sex and the violence - while having a purpose to all of it that is worth the shock and adjustment period.

The manipulation many talk about with Baker's first trilogy is essentially a human computer using super fine skills of observation to create astoundingly appealing personas to get what he wants from each individual person - and many of them realize this mid-action and still proceed onwards. The human computer is the main character and what he wants is to stop aliens from destroying the world - a very noble goal, yet one that no organization or powerful person is even remotely capable of achieving yet. So he sets out to do that.

It's fascinating writing and he steps it up majorly in the second cycle.

[Tiste Simeon]

worry, on 10 June 2016 - 08:13 PM, said:

Is he a good storyteller?

No. But only me and QT seem to think so.

[worry]

Further cementing your places as the board's ultimate cutie-pies.

[Maark Abbott]

amphibian, on 10 June 2016 - 09:25 PM, said:

worry, on 10 June 2016 - 08:13 PM, said:

Is he a good storyteller?

Yes, although he has his main cast do some genuinely abominable things in order to serve their larger goals - which are interesting. On a way, he's similar to China Mieville, Hal Duncan, or other authors who are very upfront with the weird and the sex and the violence - while having a purpose to all of it that is worth the shock and adjustment period.

The manipulation many talk about with Baker's first trilogy is essentially a human computer using super fine skills of observation to create astoundingly appealing personas to get what he wants from each individual person - and many of them realize this mid-action and still proceed onwards. The human computer is the main character and what he wants is to stop aliens from destroying the world - a very noble goal, yet one that no organization or powerful person is even remotely capable of achieving yet. So he sets out to do that.

It's fascinating writing and he steps it up majorly in the second cycle.

Yeah the second series is a notable step up in quality. And for all that I really don't like Kellhus, he's quite a convincing protagonist.

But... THAT IS NOT WAR PAINT, BAKKER. EW, EW, EW.

[Macros]

Tiste Simeon, on 11 June 2016 - 08:14 PM, said:

worry, on 10 June 2016 - 08:13 PM, said:

Is he a good storyteller?

No. But only me and QT seem to think so.

Me too Tiste

[Maark Abbott]

Macros, on 13 June 2016 - 09:23 AM, said:

Tiste Simeon, on 11 June 2016 - 08:14 PM, said:

worry, on 10 June 2016 - 08:13 PM, said:

Is he a good storyteller?

No. But only me and QT seem to think so.

Me too Tiste

So, three servings of 'Who are the Dunyain', then?

[End of Disc One]

Interesting that you guys say the second series is a step up in quality. I only recently finished The Judging Eye but I found it to be a notable step down from the first trilogy. I didn't like how it was more straight forward, but I still enjoyed it and the series has a ton of potential. I look forward to continuing with The White Luck Warrior.

To answer the TC, this is overall one of my favorite series ever...definitely worth trying.

[Maark Abbott]

End of Disc One, on 13 June 2016 - 02:56 PM, said:

Interesting that you guys say the second series is a step up in quality. I only recently finished The Judging Eye but I found it to be a notable step down from the first trilogy. I didn't like how it was more straight forward, but I still enjoyed it and the series has a ton of potential. I look forward to continuing with The White Luck Warrior.

To answer the TC, this is overall one of my favorite series ever...definitely worth trying.

No down-steppers on the slog.