THE STEEL REMAINS and the FFFFUUUUU

It seems that after the advent of A Song of Ice and Fire, anything that has enough “gritty realism” and enough iterations of “fuck” in it will be proclaimed the next second coming. Just, you know, as long as the characters swear often enough. Say, how about twenty times a page? No? Well, let’s make that fifty and we’ve a deal!

And there you have Richard Morgan’s The Steel Remains in a nutshell.¹

I think it says something–says a lot of things, really–when one of the positive Amazon reviews of this book begins with:

I’ve been a fan of Morgan’s since his first book, Altered Carbon. His novels generally have the same pattern: The main character is an alienated, burnt-out warrior with dangerous combat skills. He has a tortured past, and is largely amoral and cynical, but nevertheless fights for justice against incredible odds. In the end, he saves the day and maybe better understands his place in the world. Perhaps rightly, his work gets branded as juvenile, violent, and misogynistic (the female characters are somewhat poorly drawn). It’s also great fun to read.

Pretty much. Except the great fun part. This reviewer also compares being gay to eating bugs, which is charming to no end. Some others, fans of Morgan from the sf series, whined that The Steel Remainsis too… “politically correct and multicultural.” Is that, like, shorthand for “I’m a xenophobic homophobe, GET THE GAY AWAY FROM ME EWWWW COOTIES WHAT IF I READ THIS AND WANT TO SUCK COCKS TOO”?

I’d like to say something good about this book, but for the most part it’s unrelentingly mediocre and never rises above the copy-pasted plastic-moulded stereotypes and conventions that mire the bulk of the genre. It’s all here: the barbarian (with the epithet “Dragonbane,” no less) who’s civilized inside and longing for better things than fucking and fighting among the grasslands, the angry anti-hero who pisses people off a lot and solves everything through violence, the elves, the super-elves, and a wizened fortuneteller who tells Our Hero that there’ll be a war between great powers and a dark lord will rise. I didn’t make that up. A dark lord. Will. Rise. For real. The elves are black-skinned, but otherwise they’re long-lived and superior and they sailed away to the west–sorry, they sailed through the planet’s molten core back to their home dimension or planet or something–because they can’t tolerate humans anymore (officially, to the humans, they said “blah blah our works here are done and our time is past”). The super-elves, well, are basically the Sidhe. They’re amazingly beautiful and immortal and cruel. They use glamour and have Very Very Special Powers with which they alter reality and command the elements and zzzzzzzzzzzzz. It doesn’t matter what you call them. Elves are elves are elves, and no amount of exoticifying (they have pitch-black eyes! Their swords glow blu–oh wait) will mask the fact.

I’ve already said it with regards to Morgan’s noir sci-fi novel (which, incidentally, is a novel about how Our Hero shoots people, blows shit up, and fucks women who are dying to get impaled on his almighty dick; “trash” doesn’t even begin to describe it), but I’ve to say it again: there are still people writing that kind of crap without any sense of irony? It’s not like Morgan, despite his Tolkien-related wank,² does anything interesting with those tropes. It’s a straight-up delivery. There’s the decadent emperor (though to be fair, he does come across as something like a real person and acts like an intelligent human being) who has to contend with the irritation of religion cramping his style. The religion’s an out-and-out Crystal Dragon Jesus, complete with an Inquisition and self-righteous priests and crusaders, the works. The empire’s architecture includes “onion-shaped domes” (sigh) but otherwise it’s a generic Holy Roman Empire rip-off. It amazes me how limited people’s imagination can be.³ Perhaps the intention isn’t to do anything special, just write fantasy that’s le-gritty and where people scream FUCKING FUCK a lot. Well, okay, but that’s a pretty boring premise in any case.

It all reads like, I don’t know, Ed Greenwood. Except Greenwood/Wizards of the Coast is too chickenshit to ever write/publish a book where the protagonist is gay. And Morgan’s hero, Ringil, is distinctly gay. In-your-face gay. Openly (to the reader, anyway) gay. You will know he’s gay from the first page. It’s about the only thing that distinguishes this novel. The point’s rammed home–sorry–repeatedly, pointedly, emphatically: you can hardly flip two pages without Ringil talking about sucking cocks, actually sucking cocks, or some other character referring to Ringil as having a reputation for sucking cocks and otherwise receiving cock in various orifices.

In a way, it’s quite fantastic because we need more fiction that treats homosexuality with a modicum of decency, and seeing so many straight neckbeard fanboys put off by the gay is hilarious. But at the same time, there are problematic elements and I’m not sure whether I can congratulate Richard Morgan on his interests in LGBT matters or whether he was just trying too hard to be edgy. It’s complicated. On one hand, it’s a remarkably well-realized portrayal of a gay character as a person without ignoring his sexuality but on the other there’s the rape and I’m not sure I can recommend the book without caveats, you know?

Still, sword-and-sorcery fantasy is usually uniform: it belongs to that unfortunate fantasy ghetto where everything is white heteronormative cookie-cutter, so Ringil is at least better than most (he’s not even white–apparently he’s somewhat brown). And after so many bad stereotypes of gay men I’ve read about (the weepy uke, the flouncy prima-donna types, the tortured angsting delicate flowers–hello, Sarah Monette, Mary Gentle, Elizabeth Bear and Ellen Kushner), the fact that Ringil never conforms to those stereotypes is a pleasant surprise. He comes from the same mould as Elric.⁴ He’s not a wishy-washy duelist–he’s a war veteran; he’s not a submissive doormat who shrieks like a little girl; he’s all manly, all the time. He just doesn’t follow the s&s heroic tradition of impregnating random women and falling into bed with helpful sorceresses, and in any case the only helpful female scholar/soldier he knows is a lesbian. Whereas the sex scenes in Morgan’s first novel Altered Carbon are painfully juvenile, in The Steel Remainsthey’re surprisingly realistic (“the faintly hinted odour of shit from his opened anus”–yeah okay, not pleasant and not romantic, but no one’s going to fault Morgan for writing idealized sex where semen tastes like honey and assholes lubricate themselves). There’s the occasional “wait whut” moments, like Ringil’s heart turning over and tears springing to his eyes after a good fuck with an absolute stranger (admittedly, the stranger’s one of the super-elves) but it’s definitely light-years ahead of the godawful crap that shows up in a lot of fantasy and vindicates my opinion that most authors really should just fade to black.⁵

Sex and refreshing non-girly gay aside, the novel doesn’t… have much else to offer. It picks up somewhat past the midpoint, but essentially it hinges on people trying to chop other people’s heads off. To wit: Morgan doesn’t seem able to build tension on anything but violence–there’re a few court-intrigue scenes and those are a welcome relief, but mostly chapters begin and end with a main character getting into trouble and getting out of it with a sword, a lance-staff, or throwing knives. Maybe I’m boring, but these bore me stupid really fast. There are only so many ways you can write about thrusting, parrying, side-stepping and blah-de-la-blah before it becomes monotonous, and forcing all tension to rest on violence/potential violence is as lazy and unimaginative as having characters scream FUCKING FUCK FUCKSTAIN SHIT FUCK FUCK all the time. Which Morgan’s characters do anyway, compounding the ennui.⁶ Where’s the inter-personal relationships? Tension that springs from, I don’t know, plot as opposed to wading your way through a few hundred low-hitpoints redshirts? Literally, nothing happens but a lot of fighting. There’re attempts at characterization mostly done through heavy-handed flashbacks and an awful lot of italicized text (both, again, being lazy devices; both, as well, being the same shortcuts used in Altered Carbon), but there’s really not much to characterize. Ringil is not only similar to other s&s heroes, he’s also nearly identical to Morgan’s SF protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs.

Oh. There’s a surprise plot twist at the end: RINGIL IS THE DARK LORD! That will rise! Uhhh, okay then. I’m not sure what to make of it and I don’t know where the fuck it came from. Is the reader supposed to see it as a culmination of accumulated violence? His homicidal tendencies? The time he spent in the “gray places” getting a bit mad and seeing alternate realities? Having just murdered the closest thing he’s had to a one true love? I don’t know. It doesn’t cohere, it doesn’t make narrative sense, it doesn’t make any kind of sense, even if it makes me vaguely curious (but not curious enough to pick up the next book when it comes out unless I find it used, as I found The Steel Remains).

All in all, the book breaks the heteronormative convention of the sub-genre (but even then, the scenes where Egar the Barbarian gets handjobs/blowjobs/tittyfucks read like attempts to pacify people who find the gay icky) and there’re rare bits of competent prose (though you will be hard-pressed to find any chunk of prose that doesn’t have “fuck” or “fucking” in it), but like most of Gollancz’s recent lineups, it’s overrated all to hell and hopelessly formulaic.

Time to go read some Jeff VanderMeer.

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[1] And The Blade Itself, too, for that matter–though Abercrombie’s even more mediocre. That pile of dreck even comes with its very own Conan clone, Gandalf clone, a party of adventurers out to find some magical secret/object/whatever–and that’s just the start. Scratch that, even Abercrombie (who otherwise praises The Steel Remains a lot) thinks the swearing is “waaaaay too much” and that in one book, Morgan probably used more iterations of “fuck” than Scott Lynch did in two books. I suspect that if you really count them, the instances of “fuck” in The Steel Remains will easily equal and possibly even surpass those used in the entire ASoIaF published thus far.

[2] Where he made an ass of himself (promoting your own book at the end of such a rant can’t be anything but tacky, and I’m saying this as someone whose opinion of LOTR is unflattering) and where a lot of Tolkien fans made themselves look like absolute fuckwits. There were so many screams of “HE IS JUST JEAAAALOUS.”

[3] I’ve always wondered what the western culture would’ve been like if it had developed without the dubious assistance of Christianity, and have been looking for alt-history fiction along that line. So far, no luck except for The Years of Rice and Salt, which isn’t exactly that but still has an interesting premise.

[4] This isn’t even a conjecture on my part. Morgan explicitly thanks Michael Moorcock for the influence of Elric, Hawkmoon and Corum (the fact that he’s a Moorcock fan does elevate my opinion of him a bit, though I’d rather he took inspiration from Moorcock’s more inventive works). That reminds me; do you notice how a lot of fantasy heroes look really similar? Drizzt, Anomander Rake, Geralt of Rivia? All have white hair and two out of three wield large swords. Ringil, not surprisingly, also goes around with a special broadsword the elves made for him named the Ravensfriend. I’m not a fan of giving special names to special swords to start with, and Morgan takes this to a hilarious extreme: one of the viewpoint characters, Archeth (a half-elf btw; she’s the lesbian), goes around with something upward to a gazillion throwing knives–and every single one comes with a name. Bandgleam, Laughing Girl, Quarterless, and I’m sure I missed a few. They’re so… witty! Who the hell comes up with these names? Who the hell names every single knife she owns? They’re throwing knives. That’s kind of… disposable.

[5] Unfortunately, that includes GRRM. I’m sorry, but “his pink mast” and “her Myrish swamp” are horrible, unless it’s a parody. And I don’t think Cersei trying out sex with a woman or Sam Tarly losing his virginity was supposed to be that, you know? Idk.

[6] Look, I’m not exaggerating. Morgan uses “fuck” and “fucking” in place of punctuation. No matter the occasion, no matter the character’s culture or personality–they all swear with more or less equal frequency, and in an identical manner. And they rarely use any other profanities apart from the obligatory “Hoiran’s/Urann’s balls/twisted dick!” English is limited in that department, but there are more creative curses.