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Burning Rain posted:couple of friends mentioned reddit discussing the list, and by 'discussing' I mean 'dismissing it due to lack of dragons or spaceships'. pro click: https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/5jjp2w/the_10_best_books_of_2016/ I'm sorry but I don't want to read intellectual books. I want to read about heroism and monsters and medieval times and magic and dragons. These lists never include the space operas, the high fantasy, or even the science fiction fantasy I adore. I thought I'd change when I was older but I'm 20 now and I've never enjoyed one of those hoiety toiety im better and smarter than you books.
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Dec 22, 2016 13:03
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I want to gently caress. I want to gently caress badly
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Dec 22, 2016 16:06
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pepperoni and keys posted:I'm sorry but I don't want to read intellectual books. I want to read about heroism and monsters and medieval times and magic and dragons. These lists never include the space operas, the high fantasy, or even the science fiction fantasy I adore. I thought I'd change when I was older but I'm 20 now and I've never enjoyed one of those hoiety toiety im better and smarter than you books. I googled this and found a really funny and dumb blog post http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2013/01/why-doesnt-fantasy-sell-in-japan/
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Dec 22, 2016 16:28
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so uh, is that a quote or real salt
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Dec 22, 2016 17:18
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Also real talk why is 90% of fantasy about knights and dragons and elves you would think a genre built around the concept of literally making everything up would allow for more branches of creativity than Tolkien clone #5569483
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Dec 22, 2016 17:22
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Because the people who write and read fantasy want to gently caress the dragons
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Dec 22, 2016 17:24
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dragons are loving amazing. I'd like to gently caress one for sure
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Dec 22, 2016 17:26
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you can't gently caress a dragon the dragon fucks you
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Dec 22, 2016 17:29
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Also, is there anything more obnoxious than people who reply to top 10 lists at the end of the year going "ugh, there are so many amazing books every year why rank them like this?" Top ten lists don't matter. No remembers where Hemingway appeared on top 10 lists. They exist solely as a way for a publication to raise awareness about certain books for end of the year shopping. Its an arbitration of marketing, not of value. People whining about top 10 lists is why we have NPR creating a 500 book meta chart out of fear of being seen as not inclusive enough.
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Dec 22, 2016 17:33
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Ras Het posted:I googled this and found a really funny and dumb blog post http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2013/01/why-doesnt-fantasy-sell-in-japan/ good post
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Dec 22, 2016 17:36
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Ras Het posted:I googled this and found a really funny and dumb blog post http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2013/01/why-doesnt-fantasy-sell-in-japan/ quote:The Anglosphere is virtually self-sufficient in literature. Most of us reading this blog would probably populate our entire top ten lists with novels written in English, and be justified in so doing (though vulnerable to charges of a want of sophistication). Lesser languages necessarily rely to some extent on imports. 
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Dec 22, 2016 17:41
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Ras Het posted:You're being unfair here. Those redditors aren't mad because the list doesnt feature fantasy, but because they're racist and the list features black authors it's not necessarily an either/or thing
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Dec 22, 2016 18:22
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They were marketing the Finnish edition of Pale Fire as a thriller and selling it in the thriller section.
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Dec 22, 2016 19:36
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it certainly thrilled me, in a way
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Dec 22, 2016 22:39
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:They were marketing the Finnish edition of Pale Fire as a thriller and selling it in the thriller section. Caveat: a pretty well known Nabokov scholar Juhani Tammi advises againts reading the Finnish translation, calls it bad. E: and while I'm on that rear end bridge, Painovoiman sateenkaari was a really shoddy translation that no one seems to have even proof-read. Jerome Agricola fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Dec 22, 2016 |
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Dec 22, 2016 22:50
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:They were marketing the Finnish edition of Pale Fire as a thriller and selling it in the thriller section. It's a murder mystery! That's p hosed up.
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Dec 23, 2016 00:15
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Also real talk why is 90% of fantasy about knights and dragons and elves The roots of the genre are relatively narrow, being basically like 5 anglo american guys from the late 19th and early 20th centuries who liked myths. tolkien being so popular probably didn't help either because it meant that some of the earlier more interesting writers were largely ignored by subsequent ones. There's also never been anything equivalent to the new wave of science fiction in fantasy, and it doesn't seem to attract many authors with even a hint of literary sensibility(not very surprising). That's all i'm going to post about fantasy because it's bad. Ras Het posted:I googled this and found a really funny and dumb blog post http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2013/01/why-doesnt-fantasy-sell-in-japan/ holy poo poo "But there just aren’t ever going to be as many great novels written in languages with fewer writers and readers to begin with. So the Japanese LOTR, the Japanese Chronicles of Narnia, the Japanese ASOIAF haven’t been written. And probably never will be: one of the crushingly sad things about globalization is that if you import wheels, people are disincentivized to reinvent the wheel for themselves—creativity stifled by sufficiency, originality smothered by second-hand ideas."
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Dec 23, 2016 00:15
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manga is the superior fantasy vehicle
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Dec 23, 2016 00:53
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Japan doesn't write fantasy because they already had the final one
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Dec 23, 2016 02:43
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Also real talk why is 90% of fantasy about knights and dragons and elves This is thankfully not as much of a problem as it used to be. I'm still struggling to think of any sufficiently literary works of fantasy, though. Gormenghast, maybe?
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Dec 23, 2016 05:14
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Solitair posted:sufficiently literary works of fantasy I think I found your problem
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Dec 23, 2016 05:20
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Solitair posted:This is thankfully not as much of a problem as it used to be. Thank God, I was deeply concerned about the literary integrity of the wizard genre
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Dec 23, 2016 06:02
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Solitair posted:This is thankfully not as much of a problem as it used to be. I'm still struggling to think of any sufficiently literary works of fantasy, though. Gormenghast, maybe? Master and Margarita, Little, Big, Borges, etc Just all these come with the Harold Bloom seal of approval.
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Dec 23, 2016 10:32
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it's difficult to point out good fantasy because (even more than sci-fi), when any given work that could fall under fantasy is really good, it feels kind of dumb and reductive to label it with a fixed genre because it basically just means "has some weird magic stuff in it". Like you could call Gormenghast/Master and Margarita fantasy but you probably shouldn't. It doesn't tell you anything useful about the book. It's kind of like the thing about calling Pale Fire a thriller I guess to get away from fuckin fantasy chat: I just finished The Sorrows of Young Werther and now I'm an incel in his honour. It was a good read but not really super deep or interesting Lunchmeat Larry fucked around with this message at 11:04 on Dec 23, 2016 |
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Dec 23, 2016 10:53
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Master and Margarita, Little, Big, Borges, etc Fantasy is a genre, not some kind of checkbox for 'fantastical' content. I don't know what Little, Big is but the others are writers working in a different tradition to fantasy writers, with different elements and stylistic choices. They're also not writing in english.
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Dec 23, 2016 13:46
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A human heart posted:Fantasy is a genre, not some kind of checkbox for 'fantastical' content. I don't know what Little, Big is but the others are writers working in a different tradition to fantasy writers, with different elements and stylistic choices. They're also not writing in english. Little, Big is some English book about fairies that Harold Bloom liked.
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Dec 23, 2016 13:49
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Ras Het posted:Little, Big is some English book about fairies that Harold Bloom liked. Ah, carry on then
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Dec 23, 2016 13:57
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A human heart posted:Fantasy is a genre How do those works not fit in the genre? Not enough elves?
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Dec 23, 2016 14:09
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:How do those works not fit in the genre? They don't have anything to do with the roots of that genre? Bulgakov wasn't working in the same tradition as an Eddison or a Tolkien, he was satirising life in the soviet union and retelling a story from the bible. Borges was building on modernism as well as earlier latin american and spanish language writers. You're focusing purely on content and not style or context.
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Dec 23, 2016 14:20
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A human heart posted:They don't have anything to do with the roots of that genre? Bulgakov wasn't working in the same tradition as an Eddison or a Tolkien, he was satirising life in the soviet union and retelling a story from the bible. Borges was building on modernism as well as earlier latin american and spanish language writers. You're focusing purely on content and not style or context. Bulgakov is actually drawing on medieval and renaissance mythological tradition like Tolkien, just different sources It's a fantasy of Satan bedevilling the residents of Moscow... one might call it a sort of urban fantasy.
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Dec 23, 2016 14:36
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More seriously, Lord of the Rings is such an idiosyncratic work that using it as a genre benchmark is a misstake. It's a really odd combination of epic and fairy-tale, and tons of authors imitate it without really understanding where Tolkien was coming from.
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Dec 23, 2016 14:48
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:More seriously, Lord of the Rings is such an idiosyncratic work that using it as a genre benchmark is a misstake. It's a really odd combination of epic and fairy-tale, and tons of authors imitate it without really understanding where Tolkien was coming from. The point is exactly that tons of authors imitate it. Meanwhile the problem is that it's extremely bad
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Dec 23, 2016 15:28
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Excuse me but the hot new trend in manga is western RPG settings with stats and numbers and video game poo poo.
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Dec 23, 2016 15:41
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any book that doesn't focus the majority of its energy on a detailed magic system that I can transfer to weekly tabletop night is a waste of time imo
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Dec 23, 2016 16:43
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The Dresden Files is the same as Ficciones, because both are about things that haven't happened.
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Dec 23, 2016 16:52
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Dec 23, 2016 17:04
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e: ^^^ qed Like any book barn (or whatever) thread, the real lit thread only comes alive discussing fantasy. e2; dennis cooper thinks that dodge rose was one of the best books of the year. Read it, people, because it was. Jerome Agricola fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Dec 23, 2016 |
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Dec 23, 2016 17:04
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I finished reading The Sellout. It was pretty funny but I'm not sure it was meant to be 🤔
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Dec 23, 2016 17:06
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e: that sounded better in my head
Tim Burns Effect fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Dec 23, 2016 |
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Dec 23, 2016 17:09
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your daily reminder that genre is a distinction of marketing not of content god bless
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Dec 23, 2016 17:25
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