Black Gate

Part One: The Adventure Begins

There’s this thing I do when I know a given task will be difficult. I announce my intentions. Loudly, casually, on Facebook, in blogs, emails, telephone conversations.

I talk about my task (usually self-appointed and with no particular due-date) blithely, in capital letters, as if the execution thereof were going to be the easiest thing in the world, done up all djinn-like, in the twinkling of an eye.

Then comes an indeterminate period of time wherein I do nuthin’ at all.

So a while ago – I won’t say how long – I mentioned somewhere that I wanted to write a blogicle about Metal and Fantasy.

I said it once. I repeated it often. I went about soliciting interviews on the subject. I coaxed tutorials in remedial Metal out of long-suffering friends. I spent endless midnight hours with a notebook in my lap and a double bass beat booming from my speakers.

“Why,” you ask, “did you do this to yourself?”

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For all those recovering English majors interested in science fiction criticism, you might want to check out Paul Kincaid’s review of Cheek by Jowl by Ursula K Le Guin and Imagination/Space by Gwyneth Jones.

Also in last week’s Strange Horizons is the always erudite though sometimes unfathomable critic John Clulte’s Scores column, a comparison and contrast between Cory Doctorow and Robert Heinlein.

Also, you can read one critic’s assessment (Niall Harrison) of another critic’s (Gary K. Wolfe) collection of reviews here.

 

One of my favorite modern writers of fantasy is R. Scott Bakker. His PRINCE OF NOTHING trilogy absolutely blew my skull a few years back, and his latest book in that continuing saga is THE WHITE-LUCK WARRIOR, due to be released in Spring 2011.

I’ve been singing the praises of Bakker’s fantasy work for awhile now. His is a fantasy on the scale of Tolkien without stealing any of the usual tropes that go with that scale. His work is brilliant, illuminating, and challenging. In short, it is literary fantasy…i.e. fantasy with literary qualities. “What exactly does that mean?” I hear somebody asking. Well, here’s what I tell my students on the first day of any literature class: Literature is a written work of art that explores what it means to be human.

Literature allows us to view human nature, i.e. the human condition, through the lens of the written word. And the real magic is that good literature transcends time and space. Shakespeare, for instance, is still shedding light on the human condition even though he wrote 500 years ago. But literature is not just for the glimmering “elite” in their ivy-grown universities and ivory towers. Bakker’s fantasies do exactly what great literature does, while remaining tremendously entertaining.

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