In the streets of Waterdeep, conspiracies run like water through the gutters, bubbling beneath the seeming calm of the city’s life. As a band of young, foppish lords discovers there is a dark side to the city they all love, a sinister mage and his son seek to create perverted creatures to further their twisted ends.
And across it all sprawls the great city itself: brawling, drinking, laughing, living life to the fullest.
Even in the face of death.
Many writers you read as a teen you liked, and then when you rediscover them years after a dreadful certainty dawns: this is shit. The Suck Fairy hasn’t come around for a visit, it was always there and you were just too ignorant to realize. The difference is that with Ed Greenwood you recognize the inherent shittiness even when you’re a teen. I think pretty much the only way to read anything he’s touched and think it’s awesome is if you have no capability to recognize good writing or if you are his close friends in which case it’s impolite to outright tell him, “Dude, you can’t fucking write!”
Beyond that, however, this book attempts to touch on class struggle and then promptly discards that idea in favor of upholding the status quo and oppressive oligarchy. It carries out, uncritically, many tropes that makes SFF so regressive, so this won’t be so much a review of this individual book as an overview of certain genre trends, of which this book is extremely illustrative: to wit, certain gendered things and an inability among many fantasy writers to recognize that oppression is an institution, not isolated acts committed by individuals.
This post is likely the most publicity Ed Greenwood’s gotten in twenty years outside his immediate fandom and the seething cesspit of his own licenses. I’m not sure there’s a deeper nadir than this in genre short of being one of those people who self-publish things with terrible covers and worse writing, though even then I’m not sure if your average self-published genre novel contains writing more terrible than Ed Greenwood’s, as that would be a rare feat: Greenwood’s excrement is frequently of the Jim Theis order of magnitude.
Yes, it’s that bad.
So, anyway, the writing is absolutely fucking shit. While Elaine Cunningham is vaguely decent as far as writers of this caliber go, she’s not exactly Helen Oyeyemi let’s just say, and neither her middling prose nor her almost-there female characters are quite enough to elevate the book to the coveted height of “not shit.”
The cast consists of a bunch of noblemen who are indistinguishable except by the color of their cloaks, in true Power Rangers style except with less personality. The other half consists of two girls, one the daughter of the well-off merchant Dyre and the other her servant. The authors attempt to explore class struggle, “attempt” being the keyword and “abject failure” being the result. First we have Naoni, who falls in love with a nobleman, and when he presses her for why she hates the aristocracy so much has this to say–
“Once, not so long ago,” Naoni hissed, “there was a young and beautiful lass, a commoner who loved a young noble. Loved and was loved, or so she believed, until the day she knew she was with child, and shared that joy with her lord-and had his gates slammed shut in her face. Her kind and faithful lord promptly took a wife of as high station as his own.”
[...]
“When she was large with child, he sent masked men to snatch her away to a country estate. The ride was hard, and her time came early. Lying there broken on a fine bed in a strange house, she was told her babe had died. Then she was bundled back into her clothes, still dusty from the ride that had brought her, taken back to the street she’d been seized from-and tossed to the cobbles.”
[...]
“I believe it. I believe it all,” Korvaun told her. “Many take anything they can grasp, caring nothing for others, yet not all nobles are like that, I am not like that.”
The puzzling part is that it isn’t as though Naoni needs a specific reason to trust men (since she lives in a patriarchal, deeply sexist culture) or rich people (since she lives in a society with super-rich aristocrats who abuse their wealth and power). In fact, this bit of plot reads like a romance trope, with all the problems that connotes, and the easy fix that entails. She doesn’t trust noblemen because one ruined her mother? Why, all she needs is the right nobleman who will be nice to her rather than a jerk like that one so she can learn “not all nobles are like that, I am not like that.” Which is a refrain for him throughout, a refrain of many people of majority, and which misses the point by something like “several galaxies.”
“I’d never considered before that the commoners might get angry at, well, the way of things.” Mirt’s gaze turned mocking, and Korvaun found himself burning with embarrassment. “I mean, at what we young nobles have always done—pranks and swordplay and jollity. The common folk always just seemed to—”
“Get out of the way as best they could, an’ otherwise just stand and take it?”
[...]
“An uprising would be terrible. It must be forestalled, and you… are of common birth, wise to the streets, and yet are… well, widely rumored to be—” Mirt’s eyes were bright and steady, offering no aid at all, and Korvaun wallowed in blushing embarrassment for a breath or two ere he managed to blurt: “—a Lord of Waterdeep!”
Mirt allegedly represents the “commoner,” clearly identifying with them when he tells the nobleman, “Ye should be grateful he managed to speak so bluntly, instead of trailing off into cursing the way most of us coarse lowborn do.” The trouble with this is that it doesn’t work, because Mirt doesn’t represent fuck-all except himself. He is a Lord of Waterdeep, with all the privilege and power that suggests. This is like a white boy pretending he can speak for black people because some of his best friends are black. This, again, is a common thing in fantasy; we have princes running around agitating for better treatment of their commoner friends in the interest of equality and justice–but mind you, it’s only those individual peasants they care for. Their friends or people who took them in or whatever.
This is also how City of Splendors ends: the Dyre girls (dire girls, lol) are uplifted, along with their servant Lark, but the status quo remains much the same. Even Lark, the working-class girl, doesn’t want any “New Day” (a proposal to upset the existing system):
“I’m happy for Lord Thongolir,” Lark said briskly. “When next you see him, tell him I’ll need four hundred. Nigh every tutor in the city has been in here asking for it. A ‘cautionary tale,’ they’re calling it. ‘Tis high time people paid attention to stories of their past. Mayhap they’ll be slower to start New Days if they know how the old ones ended!”
–instead she wants things to stay just as they are, because as she often insists, she “knows her place and [wants] no other.” Naoni marries one of the noblemen, she and her sister Faendra start their own businesses, and Lark gets into the publishing industry by printing the works of yet another nobleman. The goal isn’t so much to make things better in general for people who aren’t the richest and most powerful; the goal is to make sure these individual characters, who happen to be among the not-so-powerful, wind up comfortable and happy. None of them cares about anyone else sharing their class or oppression. The thing to do, instead, is to only interact with aristocrats who are “nice.”
In fact, this is Ed Greenwood’s solution for everything: one of the cities in Forgotten Realms is some sort of utopian city-state ruled by Alustriel, one of the Chosen of Mystra. Shadowdale is overseen by Elminster, another Chosen. Waterdeep is taken care of by Khelben and Laeral, both Chosen of Mystra. Cormyr is ruled by a dynasty that’s been approved by a number of “good” wizards. You can see where this is going.
The trouble with writers like Greenwood is that they think like children. For example, even if you were to remove Obama tomorrow the US would still send out drones to kill brown-skinned teenage civilians–and possibly babies–on account of their brownness. Greenwood and other such overgrown children believe the thing to do would be to elect someone else if they even believe anything ought to be done, without regard for the fact that all US presidential candidates are interested in robbing other countries. This is the approach NK Jemisin takes with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and Kingdom of Incest Gods, more or less, and despite my low opinion of that entire trilogy it is the right approach. Not the incest, obviously, but the dismantling of power structures: at the end of it the all-powerful ruling dynasty, the Arameri, surrenders its supremacy.
Most fantasy authors do not understand this. Despite their professed disdain for monarchy (as these tend to be fauxgressive “liberals”) their main fixation is with the search for the good ruler, not in smashing oppressive institutions. Partly this springs from the fact that they’ve never experienced oppression, straight white men comprising the majority of them, and so they don’t quite understand for example that sexism and racism are institutions rather than acts of prejudice committed by individuals: this is why they will cry “racism!” when someone calls them a honky. Instead they cling to this notion that if everyone was nice everything would be nice, or more particularly the notion that if everyone was nice to them everything would be nice. The other factor is that they are not very intelligent people; they’ve bought into the propaganda-narrative of good versus evil, the righteous ruler versus the despotic usurper. They believe in this deeply despite bleating that they love democracy, which is why Obama getting elected was a Big Deal (“the good ruler”) when the rest of the world–though not the people who handed him a Nobel Peace Prize–knew perfectly well nothing would change when it comes to US foreign policies. There’s a ridiculous amount of importance placed on the individual, on the personality (much more so than actual deeds or accountability), that it erases all awareness of the greater structure.
There is, then, a belief in being “one of the good ones.” A man who claims to be feminist says he’s a good guy, not like those other guys which ignores that as a man he participates in and benefits from misogyny just like “the other ones.” By shifting the blame he not incidentally makes himself out to be innocent, in much the same way as whites who say “but I never owned slaves! I don’t see race! I treat everyone just the same regardless of the color of their skin!” This all culminates sooner or later in “Why should I be blamed for what other people of my ethnicity/gender do? It’s them! Not me!” because nobody likes to be held responsible and everyone thinks big problems are the result of a few evil people at the top being evil–because they are evil, Sauron/Voldemort-style–rather than widespread issues that have been ingrained and normalized. This is not unique to a few writers; SFF is obsessed with the righteous monarch or messiah in all its forms (yes, including “democratically elected” leaders).
Oddly, though I wouldn’t call him enlightened (and if anything he was racist, and had giant fucking issues with women), Frank Herbert recognized this at some level: that removing the “bad” emperor doesn’t remove all problems–Paul Atreides becomes the next force for oppression, bringing about a regime as dictatorial and warmongering as that of the emperor he dethroned. In contrast, George Lucas and JK Rowling offers fare much more palatable: remove Palpatine or Voldemort and you will be fine. This ignores the fact that the Jedi Order and the wizarding world are both fucked up and are part of–if not the–problem. Both stories fixate on removing the figurehead. The wizarding world is still backward and primitive. Hogwarts still exists as an institution of division and moral absolutism; muggles continue to be treated as subhuman. The solution is not to kill Palpatine or Voldemort; it is to nuke the Jedi Order and the wizarding world, Hogwarts and all, from orbit and carpet-bomb what’s left so nothing can grow there ever again. Oppressive institutions should be smashed, because as long as they exist they’ll be perpetuated even in the absence of an almighty dark lord.
Scorecard
Beyond the problems outlined above, City of Splendors does a number of other crappy things worth mentioning.
Her lips found his, and they were warm and sweet and willing.
When at last they broke apart, breathless, Naoni murmured, “Now, that, my lord, is a beginning!”
Korvaun chuckled and stroked her cheek. “Nay, love, let it be an ending—for this night. Let the priests chant their prayers first, so you never have reason to fear dishonor or scandal.”
[...]
“Have I reason to fear dishonor or scandal?”
“No. Not while I live.” As this was simple truth, and because she gazed at him with such shining trust, Korvaun took a ring from the smallest finger of his right hand and slid it onto her finger.
“You have my pledge and my heart—and I’ll give you my name as soon as the ceremony can be arranged.”
Naoni’s smile was dazzling. “Give me your love, and I’ll be content.”
[...]
Yet when bright morning came, neither lord nor lass doubted that the whispered promises between them would be well kept.
So, this is straight out of a romance novel, probably something like “The Duke Who Won Her” or something equally insipid. Naoni who previously proves to be a sensible, practical young woman discards everything on the strength of a nobleman’s promise, because LURRRRVE. She mistrusted nobles, but because this one particular noble is nice to her she discards all that and leaps at the prospect of LURRRVE: she doesn’t even care that this means she will get absorbed into the aristocracy, the status quo she previously loathed. The language is telling–she continues to call him “my lord,” and the narrative refers to them as “lord and lass” rather than “lad and lass.” The power differential is upheld and emphasized at every turn. You’ll see something like this in many romance novels, so this isn’t confined to just fantasy (and both romance and fantasy are incredibly reactionary shit).
Relief and gratitude shone on Naoni’s face, making her look like a lamp lit from within, and Taeros wondered why he’d ever thought her plain.
This is a man who thinks a woman is beautiful only when she looks relieved, grateful, and in short in his debt/implicitly under his power (in this case, under his friend’s–another nobleman’s–power). The point is driven home repeatedly that Naoni was wrong to hate all nobility; her mother just ran into bad apples. This again is another point of rhetoric favored by those who refuse to take responsibility for participating in and benefiting from privilege: “Not all men are scum, some of us are NICE GUYS.”
a petite lady in dark leathers, whose hair danced behind her like the mane of a proud horse. My, what a beauty! Korvaun watched her in open admiration
[...]
Gods, but she was beautiful. Not in the overpainted, gilded, exquisitely coiffed manner of noble matrons, nor yet in the slyly wanton lushness of the best tavern dancers, but… like a graceful wisp of a temple dancer, yet with something of the imp about her, too, in her dark leathers. Asper gave Korvaun a smile that made him blush as she handed him a decanter to match the one she’d given Mirt, stopper and all, and trotted out of the room, unstrapping and unbuckling as she went.
[...]
Did Mirt’s lady always wear dark, skintight leathers? Roldo Thongolir was swallowing and staring openly, and Korvaun knew just how his friend felt. Asper drew the eye with every lithe movement, that mare’s-tail of ash-blonde hair dancing behind her, and a slender sword bouncing at her hip. When she was in the room, it was difficult to look elsewhere
This is one of those things that show up a lot when physically capable women show up in fiction: fanservice. She can’t just be physically capable, she has to be sexy and skintight leathers literally. You can almost hear Greenwood fapping in the background.
She suppressed an urge to tug at the low-cut bodice. Faendra’s gown was absent from much of her upperworks and clung to her hips as if it was dripping wet. Lark had never stepped out of doors in such scant garb, nor, for that matter, had her mother. This was a strange city, to be sure, where fine ladies showed the world more flesh than Luskan’s dockside whores! But then, Lark thought cynically, judging by the gems on lavish display around her, these noblewomen got a better price for their… wares.
[...]
If they reached out to crush him, as a man swats a stinging fly, what would befall Naoni and Faendra? Who’d stand with them, against… oh, gods. Who but those nobles: Helmfast, Hawkwinter and the rest? Men who wanted but two things from his daughters, their charms and their coins—and would be gone the moment they’d snatched both.
There’s some pretension with regards to some secondary-world fantasy that it is an egalitarian society. Forgotten Realms is one such setting. But very quickly the author shows his true colors, and it is usually a he, and pulls a Jim Butcher. Incidentally, these two paragraphs are from completely different sections and different perspectives: one a servant girl from another culture, one a merchant (male) from Waterdeep. The servant thinks in terms of female bodies as commodities. The merchant thinks his daughters will be helpless because they are girls, and also because their bodies are commodities. Ed Greenwood may oink that his is a gender-equal world, but I think we should endeavor to train him out of telling lies by socking him in the nose every time he does so. Similarly–
“No,” Dyre said heartily, “I don’t want your coins, yet I do want to share some news with you, and the words we may exchange shouldn’t be overheard by anyone. My home comes furnished with not only ‘prentices but daughters and servants, whose hearing, I shouldn’t have to tell any of you, can be far keener than even their tongues.”
Some chuckles arose. Of the five men in the room, only Hasmur Ghaunt was unmarried, and only Dyre had buried a wife. All of them had been blasted, at one time or another, by the dragonlike temper of Goodwife Anleiss Lhamphur.
–is a meeting between merchants. Observe that they are all men, and there’s a lazy cliche that one of them has a henpecking wife. Despite its purported egalitarianism both women of the merchant class and aristocracy are second-class objects. Again, this also happens a lot across a variety of settings. Pretty much all tie-in fiction is like this as it’s burdened by the writer’s sexism.
All I know is that someone in the Westwind can get messages to Texter, or perhaps my notes are carried by magic, untouched by any hands but Texter’s and mine.”
This isn’t offensive, but it’s quite the howler. A man named TEXTER. Whom you get messages to magically. So, yeah. Ed Greenwood!
Rissy (@TheRedRaptor)
/ July 3, 2012I remember being sixteen, and a friend gave me a copy of “Spellfire.” I was sooooo excited about it, because of the cover with the dracolich fighting the adventurers. I also remember throwing the book across my room because I was angry that anything so horrible had been published.
braak
/ July 3, 2012The biggest problem I had with Harry Potter (and one that, once I’d thought on it, I could never quite get over, no matter how much enthusiasm was heaped on the books by friends and family) is that the conversation didn’t go like this:
Harry: Why do we have to keep wizards secret from the muggle world, Hagrid?
Hagrid Why, Harry, if muggles knew about us, they’d be wanting magic to solve all of their problems!
Harry: Yeah. Okay. So?
But no, all fantasy is conciliatory, reactionary, anti-revolutionary. Michael Moorcock once wrote a good piece on it, here it is: http://flag.blackened.net/liberty/moorcock.html
(The second biggest problem is the moral implications of the fact that Hogwarts is an institution that takes 25% of the kids, puts them into Shithead House, treats them like an Evil Wizard Fifth Column for their entire lives, and then acts like its on a moral crusade by killing those kids off when they turn bad.
“Oh, hello kids! We’ve looked into your soul, and determined that some of you are brave, so you’ll get to go live in this awesome tower and get supervised by one of the cool teachers, a hilarious ghost, and also hang out with our world’s only celebrity. You guys, on the other hand, are slimy cowards, so we’re putting you in this basement that’s haunted by some kind of psychotic murderer ghost, with that one teacher who’s a complete fucking asshole, and also sometimes you’ll think you’ve won the house cup — by being good at sports but also not having discipline problems and just generally excelling at your studies — except then Harry Potter will do some fucking bullshit and we’ll literally take it away from you to give to him and his house (remember, the one with the kids who AREN’T slimy cowards?), because god fucking forbid the celebrated Harry Potter should have to suffer the ignominy of NOT getting all the awards.”
Yeah, no wonder everyone in Slytherin is an asshole.
Every time I read something about the Houses, I expect it to turn into a scathing criticism of the public education system in Britain, but nope. No one at all seems to have a problem with this.)
green_knight
/ July 3, 2012Well, there’s also House ‘full of swats but not much good for anything else’ and House Dullard so kids really only have a one-in-four chance of ending up in House Awesome.
And yes, there’s something deeply disturbing about writing kids off before they haven’t even started school, because the expectation is that they’ll turn evil, or at least be underhanded horrible all their lives.
gefnsdottir
/ July 4, 2012I was under the impression that Slytherin valued “resourcefulness, cleverness, determination, and a certain disregard for the rules” (from the HP Wiki) along with cunning, none of which are necessarily bad qualities (how many times does Harry break the rules?) but it seems like there had to be a token evil house. I was hoping that some of them would turn out to be decent people when the final battle came around, but…that didn’t happen.
braak
/ July 4, 2012Yeah, man, they SAY that, but did you ever see anyone in the books actually ACT that way?
gnipahellir
/ July 6, 2012There is actually a Harry Potter fanfic which is more or less exactly about what you described above (the “Yeah. Okay. So?” part).
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality
And yeah, I know, fanfiction, but this one is actually pretty good, honest.
braak
/ July 6, 2012Heheheh. That is actually pretty funny.
Aliette de Bodard (@aliettedb)
/ July 3, 2012@braak: OMG yes. The treatment of Slytherins in Harry Potter just plain infuriates me.
saajanpatel
/ July 3, 2012Heh, I never really understood the Slytherin thing either. Alan Moore actually does criticize the British educational system in Century, specifically using Potter as his foil….but that book has it’s own problems related to sexual assault for grim dark’s sake.
I think the question with voting in Obama is an interesting one, because I think many people – in the US at least – have heard that voting is the most important thing you can do…which leads to the obvious question of what more can you do?
We had our share of sit-ins and protests, and from there teaching and traveling and trying to learn from other communities…and then some more protests or boycotts or work at non-profits…and yet it seems everyone agrees most of the world’s still bad because it’s all a big system.
So what should people do?
(I don’t mean this as a sarcastic or nihilistic response, I’m genuinely curious what people think the solutions are.)
Emil Söderman
/ July 3, 2012Ed Greenwood is interesting, and yes, I’ve never met anyone who’s claimed his novels aren’t anything other than shit. (although some people with questionable taste thinks it’s the kind of shit that is vaguely amusing to prod at and occasionally throw at passersbies to see how they react)
He’s also creepy as FUCK (to the degree when teenage me considered him creepy as fuck) some of the stuff he’s said about female FR characters (Alustriel in particular) is just…. Ewww.
But that said, his fame never rested on his novels. That’s not why he’s, and I put this in quotation marks “important”, it’s because he writes sourcebooks for the Forgotten Realms. (he’s not neccessarily much better there, mind, it’s just that even his fans seems to regard his novels as mainly an embarassing kind of aside to his sourcebook-writing)
Mind, even among FR novels Greenwood is considered particularly dire, and the FR novels I’ve read at the very best only reaches “brainless idiocy that’s somewhat amusing”.
More generally, I tend to be both somewhat receptive to and somewhat disagree with these kinds of critiques (and I suspect this is at least partially from coming, ideologically, from a social-democratic, revisionist family with all that entails) Yes, oppressive structures remain, they’re tough to dismantle, but that does not mean that systemic change has to come all at once, or even that all oppressive systems are equal. (funnily enough I find your talk of carpet-bombing to embody what you are criticizing to a greater degree than not) A regime that carpets-bombs opponent regimes and engages in economic and cultural policies of domination is, on the whole, a lot more pleasant than one that works people to death in forced labor camps. Obama is the representative of an oppressive system (one that he helps perpetuate) but he’s still mariginally better than Bush. Yeah, the lesser of two evils is still evil, but it’s also *lesser*. And to claim that it isn’t trivializes the actual suffering of those in the marigins.
Now, there are of course arguments to actually prefer a more oppressive regime in the long term (since it spawns it’s reaction, shows the true fascist face of the state, and basically makes oppressive structures more visible) I’m not really sympatethic to that argument, but it should be acknowledged.
Star Wars is actually somewhat interesting in some of it’s incarnations because it actually shows this (from what I’ve read in synopses and timelines, I’m not that much into tie-in-fiction beyond the KOTOR stuff) In that while the Republic is restored… It tends to not work very well since it was those very same republican institutions that spawned the Empire in the first place. The “reactionary” nature of the Rebel Alliance means that it just ends up re-enacting the fall of the republic again and again, since the corruption and other issues that lead to the Palpatine’s rise is never actually addressed.
I’d actually say awareness of this problem isn’t exactly uncommon in SFF; However, very few seem to really know what to do about it. At most it tends to be re-cast as a constant cycle of inherent-in-the-system bad rulers. (I’m actually reminded of a book I read as a kid, I think it was called “Veronica”, about a bunch of pirates helping the lost prince to overthrow his evil uncle…. Only to later on find that the prince was slowly turning into a (mariginally more pleasant, but still) copy of his uncle) with no real solution in sight. (probably becuase there has been no real solution presented: All attempts to date of creating a new set of non-oppressive structures have at best resulted in structures that are still oppressive but mariginally less so, or ones that are just as bad or worse, we’re obviously not free of oppressive structures) ASOIAF and to some degree Abercrombie kind of does this. (although the latter kinda fails because he has these structures being manipulated by a pair of immortal sorcerers, but there’s still a bunch of people pointing out that even without them they’d probably still turn out the same)
I’m reminded of some of the communist YA from my youth (mainly Wernström’s “Trälarna” (“The Thralls”, where thrall is both a viking-era word for slave and literally means “those who work”)) and even they tended to have problems with going beyond the “endless succession of oppressive structures” bit.
Hobb does this thing in the Soldier Son books where the conflict is stalled (if not solved) by pointing the colonizers in a different direction (essentially giving them resources to try to reclaim lost provinces in the west rather than continuing their colonization of the east) but the resolution is kinda Deus Ex Machina-y (also bad culturally approporiative romance novels actually serve a role on this) so I’m not sure that counts. At least it acknowledges the structures though.
This is I think at least a kind of problem that most fantasy authors are at least *aware* of in a way that they’re not of other issues (partially because of Moorcocks little rant, as mentioned, but partially because it’s generally been a pretty common thread in fantasy discussions) now, that doesen’t mean that fantasy authors don’t choose to ignore the problem (becuase they like wirting about kings and stuff or whatever)
Inverarity
/ July 4, 2012I’m a Harry Potter fan, but yes, to all of this.
Also, I know who Ed Greenwood is because I played AD&D way back in the day. If you think his prose stinks, try digging up one of Gary Gygax’s novels. Oh gods… and I don’t even remember what sort of horrors you might unearth in them from a SJ perspective.
gefnsdottir
/ July 4, 2012Oh, and who the fuck is Ed Greenwood? I’m a prolific SFF reader and I’ve never heard of him.
Koby Itzhak
/ July 4, 2012Cannot agree more with everything said about HP.
As for why certain people expect you to know Ed Greenwood, it’s what was said above, but it goes beyond that. Ed Greenwood literally created the Forgotten Realms (which makes his writing sins that much worse). They’re his invention, licensed to Wizards of the Coast. That means anybody who writes there is writing in his world, and the connection with WotC means that anybody who read the usual generic fantasy crap as a kid (Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Eberron, etc) know authors who recommend him. It goes beyond that – if you read something of R. A. Salvatore and liked it, you would search out his other books, and come to Forgotten Realms.
The only okay books that came out of this were Elaine Cunnigham’s, but I always feel she never actually manages to get there.
K. Rainova
/ July 4, 2012I remember reading an adventure novel about a slave girl (Black ancestry, thus the slave status, but “white and delightsome” otherwise), her cloudcuckoolander Nice Guy admirer and an otherwise competent young woman who was so in luuuuurve with the aforementioned nice guy that her only ambition in life was getting him and the slave girl together.
I was about 7 at the time (my concept of slavery at the time was “it’s like life imprisonment that you didn’t deserve”), and even then I had some problems with the book, such as:
- why does the competent woman has to pose as a guy to get shit done and no one has a problem with it?
- why is the competent woman motivated solely by the desire to help her luuuuurve, not to save the slave girl from abuse?
- what if the girl didn’t catch the eye of the nice guy – who’d rescue her then? what if she didn’t like the nice guy? what if she doesn’t like the nice guy and is just forced to choose the lesser of two evils?
- what about the other slaves, all untold millions of them, whom the novel conveniently disregards?
And finally:
- How did a white-skinned woman get to be a slave anyway? If any of her female ancestors were white, she’d be free. That means all her ancestors were white free men and black slave women who didn’t get rescued from them.
…Holy shit. I didn’t know the word “rape” at the time, but I understood the horror or rape and the treacherous hypocrisy of the “heroes”. And it is really creepy to see that book lauded at review sites as “beautiful”, “poignant” and “heartwarming”.
I actually love fantasy as a genre, both for its power-fantasy escapism and implied horror. But a vast majority of fantasy books either deny and/or appropriate the horror (happy peasants, tormented nobles, or both), and fans internalize that shit and then say that, for example, privatizing the land’s natural resources and growing filthy rich is awesome, and using the profits to hire a man to rape his wife until either of them dies is double awesome. Yes, seriously.
saajanpatel
/ July 5, 2012“fans internalize that shit and then say that, for example, privatizing the land’s natural resources and growing filthy rich is awesome, and using the profits to hire a man to rape his wife until either of them dies is double awesome. Yes, seriously.”
WTF?
K. Rainova
/ July 5, 2012Yes, that’s from Vera Kamsha, #2 bestselling Russian SFF writer. I can’t really give a page reference because I’m not touching that shit with an 11-ft. pole, but that particular scene was retold to me by the two top-ranking members of her fandom as “proof” of “brilliant writing” and “deep characterization”. Paraphrased:
Gary Tzu: That woman is a bitchy lowborn power-hungry bitch! She should be punished for her arrogance! Hey you, husband of bitchy woman whom she hates because she’s a bitch!
Husband: Yes?
Gary Tzu: She hates you and won’t let you have sex with her, right?
Husband: Well yes, but I sort of hate her too.
Gary Tzu: Okay then, I’ll pay you a fuckton of money for every child born to the two of you. And since our world is so magickal that you can clearly see who is of Truly Noble blood (hint: it’s me) and who is born to the lowly swine like you two, don’t try to cheat. So whip out that dick and get to work.
Husband: YAY RAPEYTIMES!!!
Fangirls: How brilliant! How exquisite! How noble!
Add to that ugly fat gay slave-trading Middle Easterners vs noble beautiful effeminate gods-chosen Europeans, a fixation on manpain and total disregard for human lives (example: one warlord defeats the other, blah blah grimdark massacre, corpses everywhere, and they are both saaaaaad because they can’t continue their beautiful rivalry), glorification of mass murder, and an apparent total lack of female characters with whom the reader is supposed to sympathize.
To be fair, the #1 bestselling author is even worse (he’s a full-blown neo-Nazi), but, like George Lucas, he gets regularly bashed by fans (while raking money). Kamsha’s fangirls don’t tolerate any criticism (to the point that the aforementioned two of them closed their money-making blogs to all new visitors because trolls might read them).
saajanpatel
/ July 5, 2012Thanks for the recap, that is some creepy shit. I’m sure it’ll be translated to English…*cringe*.
Next Friday
/ July 6, 2012Have you read “Ruthless Tolerance” anthology? They think they are subversive! Asshats.
Who is #1 now? I wasn’t following…
Alasdair Murray
/ July 4, 2012You know, funny as these reviews are, I do have to wonder why you continue to put yourself through them. I mean, you’ve read Ed Greenwood’s stuff before, you knew what this was going to be like. Reading shitty novels all the time can’t be much fun, or very healthy for your blood pressure… but I’m glad you do, because the end result is always an entertaining read.
(I only know of Greenwood because you’d covered him in the blog before; before that, I would have said ‘who?’ and then ‘oh, the Forgotten Realms guy. So he’s the one responsible for Elminster…’)
Emil Söderman
/ July 4, 2012Oh yeah, another old one that does the “It doesen’t really matter who’s in charge” bit: Asimov. Bel Riose, dead hand, etc. etc.
Alex D MacFarlane (@foxvertebrae)
/ July 4, 2012Wow, he claims that sexist shit is gender-equal? Ed Greenwood, your head is buried very deep in the shit-producing regions of your body. Pop it out a while and see how the world actually works. Or asphyxiate. Either works, really.
Also: Roldo Thongolir. Roldo Thongolir. I lol’d.
the twisted spinster
/ July 5, 2012It sounds like Tolkien fanfic actually.
saajanpatel
/ July 4, 2012Three random things:
1) There’s a weird disconnect between D&D gamers and “modern” SFF fans. Regardless of opinions on their works, was pretty surprised when gamers didn’t know the likes of Abercrombia and Rothfuss.
2) Even TSR/WotC acknowledged Greenwood as more of a worldbuilder, idea guy. I know they said as much when then partnered him up with some dude or dudette to tell the story of Elminster’s origins.
3) Technically, Greenwood did note that he wanted to examine the questionable sanity of the Chosen as immortal conduits for a greater goddess. But the company (I think WotC) at this time didn’t want to, as far as I understood it, tarnish the likes of Elminster and the Seven Sisters.
Avery Shy
/ July 4, 2012So I googled Ed Greenwood and Alustriel. This is what he had to say:
“She concieved every nine months and a day or two, giving Faerun a succession of healthy males over a series of easy births (and being little constricted or uncomfortable while pregnant, because rather than acquiring a ballooning belly, the High Lady always put on weight all over, and retained her poise, balance, and activities).”
I don’t think this guy knows how pregnancy works.
http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?topic=12699.25;wap2
(This is just messed up. I can’t find the actual original source from Greenwood himself, just people saying he said this, so maybe it’s an urban legend?)
In the few books I’ve read with her as a character, I was always impressed with her political power, her poise, her intelligence. Apparently, she’s only this way because Wizards of the Coast told Greenwood he couldn’t write about her being an orgy-hosting baby factory.
Can’t we just have ONE powerful female character whose power is unrelated to sex? (Catti-brie in no way counts.)
I love free-loving characters, but defining a woman’s entire role by her sex life is just… uuuugh.
meishuu
/ July 7, 2012Re: Pregnancy.
Well, she is not human so that’s entirely possible! (/sarcasm) But really, as someone who works at a perinatal hospital I can’t help but actually laugh out loud at that.
the twisted spinster
/ July 5, 2012I have come to the conclusion that the whole American “thing” with monarchy is because of Disney. Fucking Walt Disney rules our country from the grave, his rotting zombie army of princesses and the princes who rescue them marching through our collective brains. Snow-fucking-White was the first movie I ever saw (I’m talking about the original from-the-thirties cartoon). As a family in the 70s we’d all gather ’round the tv set every Sunday to watch the Walt Disney Hour. When Disney started building a World in my state (Florida) it was as if the Gates of Paradise were going to be open.
I can’t explain how central Disney is to the American consciousness. People get married at Disney World. People collect the movies and carefully store them. Disney owns everything. Disney is our true god. (That scene in Planet of the Apes, only instead of an atomic bomb, they’re worshiping a giant radioactive statue of Mickey.) When Prince Charles and Princess Diana got married? It was a frenzy of “it’s just like something from Disney!” Even I can’t escape. I have a pair of Tinkerbell pajamas. Okay, they were given to me. And they’re comfy. But still.
So that’s why we heart monarchy here in the Land of the Free and Democracy blah blah blah (and also why we keep treating the presidential elections as a contest between Who’s The Best Disney Prince): because we worship the cartoons we watched in childhood. There’s no actual thought given to it. Greenwood writes his dreck (which is completely unoriginal and only its complete lack of any sort of distinguishing character at all saves him from being sued by someone) because he knows his audience is into that lords-’n'-ladies shit, and probably is himself, because being a “lord” means a Man can be a Protector and Someone To Look Up To. Instead of a mundane boring old American dude who no one would run to for protection much less look up to.
And yeah Tolkien too, but if it hadn’t been for Disney’s constant pounding of the Princesses Are Best theme Tolkien would have a much smaller following. I blame Disney for everything. Now that I don’t live in Florida, it’s quite okay to nuke Disney World from space. Just to be sure.
Also these fucking fireworks are hurting my head.
Ron Levy
/ July 5, 2012Disney is also why the alicorns in MLP:FiM are princesses and not queens.
Alasdair Murray
/ July 5, 2012the twisted spinster: you’re probably right about the place of Disney in modern American culture, but to be fair, the fascination with monarchy is a lot older than them (and Tolkien). Disney only took advantage of a trend that already existed. I’d say it goes back at least to the Romantic movement of the 19th century, when there was a massive revival of interest in ideals of nobility and chivalry thanks to novels like “Ivanhoe”. The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, which many Disney movies are based on, were also published early in the 19th century. Although of course the stories themselves are much older…
Anyway, wherever it started, as a Brit I have to say I find the modern American obsession with monarchy (and ours in particular) deeply depressing. You guys actually had a revolution to escape being ruled by kings! Keep it that way! That’s not to say America is perfect – it’s far from it, of course – and you’ve still got your own political dynasties, like the Bushes and the Kennedys. But at least in theory, anyone can be President, and ultimate power vests in the people. Over here, it’s still the case that ultimate authority *literally* passes by birth. And yet it seems many Americans would prefer that? Gah!
(Maybe you wouldn’t like our royals so much if you had to pay for them…)
Gourmet Neurovore
/ July 5, 2012Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t the Royal Family actually turn a profit? As I recall, they’re more a useless, slightly inbred appendix than something seriously damaging or influential.
green_knight
/ July 5, 2012I don’t know about an actual profit, but they’re doing a lot of representational work, which in Germany, for instance, an elected figurehead does. The function is largely ceremonial and also costs the country a lot of money – I don’t feel that the Queen is a bad bargain. (Also, a certain amount of her expenditure goes on employing people, and I’m all in favour of employing people and feel happy to pay taxes for that part.)
I’m having a difficult time with this. In principle, I am very much in favour of democracy, but right now both the Royal Family and the House of Lords are making much more sense than our elected Prime Minister and his cabines of millionaires who have *no* sense of social obligation whatsoever.
narrativeeschatology
/ July 11, 2012They may turn a profit, but their public ceremonies are used to fuel right-wing narratives and to crush dissent. I very much doubt that Brits would be so happy about the increasing civilian uses of the Army, for example (in policing the Olympics and Wimbledon, and proposedly in schools) if they hadn’t been softened up by the Royal Wedding and Jubilee in relatively quick succession.
the twisted spinster
/ July 5, 2012Oh I know that the fascination goes way back. Disney just made it really, really popular. BD (Before Disney) the idea of parents encouraging their daughters to think of themselves as “princesses” was anathema in American culture. The Puritan female ideal was still unrealistic and repressive (women were supposed to be virtuous because of the Sin of Eve, etc.) but it rejected the idea of aristocracy as being part and parcel of worldly vanity. In this country at least, the Romantic movement focused more on the glories of nature and the simple, pastoral life as opposed to the greed and nastiness of urban life and the pursuit of wealth. It’s true there was always a current of enjoying stories about faraway royals, because American colonists came from Europe and brought the culture with them. It turns out it’s easy to reject the outward trappings of a political system, but culture is not so easy to get rid of, especially if you’re not vigilant but instead indulge in fantasies all the time.
To be fair, it’s not *all* Disney’s fault, they just expanded on a growing trend — as European monarchies were losing power, empires were shrinking and collapsing, and grubby war was turning Europe the faraway place of fairy tale castles into a muddy, ugly battleground, and as modern life generally was seen as ugly and grubby, people were glomming more and more onto the sort of unrealistic “aristocrats in marble castle in bucolic landscape” stories. And then movies — really, the whole problem is movies took over America (and then the world, but we were first — we’re number 1!) and people here just live too much as if they were in a movie not real life. So, you know, destroy Hollywood. (And then the Hydra will sprout a hundred new heads, etc.)
Seth Ellis
/ July 5, 2012a twisted spinster, Alasdair Murray – Just one armchair theory to add to the speculation about America’s love of monarchy and Rightful Heir stories. A lot of the appeal of those stories actually has to do, perversely, with the American cult of individualism. There’s a lot of vague, generic talk about “meritocracy” and the power and the rights of the individual here, and we like stories that reflect those ideas. But when you combine ideas about meritorious individuals succeeding with the kind of privilege acrookedmind’s dissecting here, what you get is stories that don’t say, “I deserve success because I worked so hard for it,” but “I deserve success because of my inherent qualities.” A lot of Rightful Heir’s Inherent Qualities guarantee their success regardless of whatever their actions happen to be. There’s a long, interesting essay about Harry Potter as Calvinism that makes a similar point.
American Rightful Heirs are always just good plain folks who roll up their sleeves and get down to the rulin’ because, darn it, somebody’s got to do it. The Rightful Heirs just happen to be the best qualified for the job, what with the timeless call of their eternal destiny and whatnot. Bujold’s Chalion novels are an example, I think. We want to have it both ways: we want to imagine ourselves both exceptional and plain, and the plainness acts a justification for the exceptionalism, a slight touch of “realism” to sell the fantasy.
But that’s quite a tangent from Forgotten Realms, which I had in fact forgotten all about before this review.
the twisted spinster
/ July 5, 2012Oh yes — having our cake and eating it too is an art form here. It’s the idea that your wealth and privilege isn’t due to exploitation of those under you plus the more ruthless acts of your ancestors but instead you “deserve” them due to some cloudy kind of “merit” (like “nice guys” deserve sexy girlfriends “because”). So that way you don’t have to feel guilty about being rich and privileged, because dammit you worked hard… at something. At being a nice rich guy who always tips no less than 15% and is “respectful” to the gardener.
acrackedmoon
/ July 5, 2012This would also explain why so many Rightful Heirs are hidden when they were babies as farmboys, so they grew up knowing just what it’s like for the peasants!!! unlike the other lazy, good-for-nothing, decadent aristocrats who’ve been privileged and spoiled all their lives.
the twisted spinster
/ July 5, 2012There’s this idea, especially in Anglo-American thought, that adversity automatically makes you a better person. If we actually believed that, though, we’d be a lot less racist and sexist; most Americans anyway think that “no a/c in the summer” equals “adversity.” Well then I’m living proof that adversity usually makes you bitter and mean.
But anyway, anytime someone starts burbling about the moral superiority of small towns & rural living & shite, I just bring up that passage from the Sherlock Holmes story The Copper Beeches, where he smacks down Watson’s paean to bucolic country life by pointing out that at least in the city other people are close by: in an isolated country house, no one can hear you scream. Just once I’d like to see someone turn this trope on the head in fantasy and write about a “hidden prince” who is beaten and raped by his peasant guardians, and who becomes the Dark Lord or something because of it. And then he sets the Good Shire full of Ye Jolly Olde Rapistes on fire and kills them all. A happy ending! Hey, I do have this computer don’t I…
BRB, typing.
Gourmet Neurovore
/ July 5, 2012You… uh… sure we need more rape in fantasy, there?
Seth Ellis
/ July 5, 2012@the twisted spinster–This is all true, but I don’t think the motives behind the classical fantasy tropes are even that complex. It’s just lazy writing: the Rightful Heir grows up in a vaguely picturesque version of “poor”–they have to carry water, gasp–in a kind of junior-year-abroad tourism among the less fortunate. They were there, man, they know.
the twisted spinster
/ July 6, 2012Should have appended that with “j/k.” No, we definitely don’t need more rape in fantasy. I think that market’s pretty glutted.
We do, however, need more science fiction where the aliens come from planets with no more than one moon and especially no spectacular giant ringed ones that in reality would make the planet they orbit uninhabitable due to earthquakes & radiation & stuff.
Seth Ellis
/ July 5, 2012@green_knight (I can’t thread replies): George Bernard Shaw, who was sort of a middle-class socialist, argued for the continued existence of the Royal Family on the basis that cults of personality will always exist, and it’s better for them to be centered on ceremonial figureheads than on elected demagogues who can do real damage. But opinions vary on that one.
braak
/ July 6, 2012Heheehh. Ahhhh, George Bernard Shaw. Is there any end to your madness?
green_knight
/ July 6, 2012My main objection is that if you get a bad egg (see, ahem, Edward VII) they’re damn hard to get rid of. Then again, after two years of Cameron there appears to be no way to get rid of him or rein *him* in, so I don’t now what the practical implications are.
Alharen (@Alharen)
/ February 4, 2013“Partly this springs from the fact that they’ve never experienced oppression, straight white men comprising the majority of them, and so they don’t quite understand for example that sexism and racism are institutions rather than acts of prejudice committed by individuals: this is why they will cry “racism!” when someone calls them a honky.”
I’d say it also accounts for the denial of white and male privilege. Which leads on to such great things like “BLARG BLARG REVERSE RACISM” or “Male life has been cheap in the history of our species”.