Help
QuickTidal, on 16 August 2018 - 01:57 PM, said:
TheRetiredBridgeburner, on 16 August 2018 - 06:04 AM, said:
amphibian, on 15 August 2018 - 11:03 PM, said:
How do you think Gemmell treats his women characters?
What do you like about his writing?
What do you like about his writing?
I don't completely disagree that the books are indicative of the time they were written, and that he falls into tropes and writes typical heroic fantasy. However, it's never spoiled my enjoyment. You could argue there's some teenage nostalgia involved for me, but whereas other books I read at the same time have fallen by the wayside (A Song of Ice and Fire being a prominent example) I still re-read Gemmell semi-regularly. They're something fun and comfortable I go back to when I don't want something new.
For me, there's a spare elegance to the writing. There's no more description or fluff or complexity than is strictly needed, and I have always liked his characters. They're all flawed and to me they read as human. The books have always been stories of people. they just happen to have funny names and live in a made up place.
I don't agree with the women thing entirely. Probably holds true for some but Virae, Jianna, Caessa, Danyal off the top of my head all certainly have more about them - Caessa in particular is the exact opposite of the rescue fetish, she's a freaking psychotic serial killer when you get right down to it, traumatic tragic backstory or not.
I adore Virae though, so I'm possibly a bit biased.
I wholeheartedly agree with TRB and Mac here.
And let's not forget Sigarni, who has her own duology as a badass protagonist.
Amph.
Do you REALLY think that holding an old 80's/90's heyday fantasy author up to the Bechdel test (something that, though written in an indie comic in the mid-80's, didn't gain widespread notice util at LEAST the early 2000's) is doing anything good for anyone? If you start holding authors prior to the 2000's up to the Bechdel Test, they will OFTEN if not ALWAYS fail it. That's the whole goddamned point of it. That's WHY the test became such a phenomenon in the 2000's, BECAUSE of those holes in the social structure of fiction in previous eras. It's fine to hold up authors after the 2000's to it and "tsk tsk" at them...that I get, they have no excuse...it's widespread enough that it should make creators think before writing in this day and age. Anyone before the 2000's lived in a different era, and attempting to hold them to modern gender standards is a waste of time because it's not going to work. Leave people in the time they wrote the things they wrote. Yes, we can hold up Tolkien as having had some bad tendencies with regards to social structures based on his era of the early 20th century...but what on earth is the point? What purpose does that serve? I can look at it, see that it was a bad thing resulting from the era he wrote in, take that lesson, and STILL enjoy the hell out of his work.
Real Life Example: China Miéville, when I met him, signed my copy of EMBASSYTOWN with a quote by Rudyard Kipling...should I have gotten into it with him about Kipling's clearly racist and imperialist leanings? Or can we all just accept that 19th century Imperialist Brits were all racist and move on to see what good there is in the fiction of the era? I like Kipling (one of the first books I ever read was KIM)...but I'm WELL aware of his more racist underpinnings and can take that lesson while still enjoying his work. I'm not willing to throw the classical baby out with the bathwater.
Nice point about Kipling. I loved reading the original Jungle Books and Kim and yet its this same guy who talked about the White Man's Burden. If you ever want a brief and humourous account of Kipling's imperialist views, read Servants of the Queen, a short story in the Jungle Books. Yet this same person was eerily prescient about the hubris of Empire and was worried about its downfall.
BTW - what about 90s authors? Does Robert Jordan pass the Bechdel test? I am pretty sure he does, though in a very annoying way.
