Do Fantasy Books Really Need To Be As Long And Meandering As My Posts?
(Minor spoilers for the Harry Potter series and medium spoilers for the A Song of Ice and Fire series contained within.)
In the wake of the death of Google Reader (which is only mostly dead, I guess, but still), I accidentally sparked quite a thing on Google+ this morning. I was responding to this post (warning: medium spoilers for the last few books of A Song of Ice and Fire) by Sean T. Collins. In it, he writes about how the last of the Harry Potter book fails to deliver on the earlier books’ promises of social justice (and his related hope that George R. R. Martin’s books won’t drop the ball). That’s actually a pretty interesting conversation, but it’s only tangentially related to where I’m going here.
Anyway, I linked to Collins’ post on Google+ along with some comment about how I think Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (hereafter, HP7 – a nomenclature I will adopt for discussing all books in the series) is underrated in its terribleness (I called it “aggressively terrible” at the time). Needless to say, I got some pushback! I’ll summarize my argument, but then I’d like to pivot to a deeper discussion of why exactly we read fantasy.
My main complaint about HP7 is that it’s just too long. There are sub-complaints about the proliferation of MacGuffins, the walk-in-the-woods scene, the pseudo-Christian showdown between Harry and Voldemort, and some other things, but what that all comes down to is length – or, more accurately, flab. Some books are long because they need to be; most that are long are that way because their author or his/her editor is undisciplined. From the Publishers Weekly review (which I found on Amazon):
It’s hard to escape the notion that the first three volumes were more carefully edited than the last four. Hallows doesn’t contain the extraneous scenes found in, say, Goblet of Fire, but the momentum is uneven.
That’s about as negative as the reviews not written by me get, I guess, but it is the (Hor)crux of my complaint. HP3 is a really great book – one of the best pieces of children’s literature written in the last 20-odd years. I challenge you to find a single wasted word in the entire book. HP7, by contrast, is full of so much extra nonsense that I could probably cut as many words out of it as there are words in HP3 without losing any major plot points.
I’m not picking solely on Potter here. What struck me about Collins’ post is that he tied HP7 together with the Meereen segments of A Dance With Dragons, which I also found, as above, aggressively terrible*. These scenes interest Collins because they make a comment about social justice; they turn me off because they’re sloppy and boring. And, to make matters worse, and to finally get to my point after all of this text, Martin himself has said he will never do a POV character from Essos because the story isn’t about Essos. Dude! If the story isn’t about Essos, why are you writing a story about Essos?
So: my point. This stuff drives me crazy. I have next to no interest in reading 1,000-page books in 10-book series (so why do I keep doing it?) if 500 pages of every book are not about the central story. I want a story! It doesn’t have to be a pure plot-based narrative – I rather enjoy the R. Scott Bakker books E.D. keeps proselytizing about, and those are very contemplative books where a lot of what’s going on isn’t really “plot” – but there shouldn’t be things in it that don’t matter to the story itself.
I suspect this doesn’t drive other people crazy. These books are 1,000-plus pages for a reason. As our libertarian interlocutors would say, the market is incentivizing this behavior. People do seem to really care about all this stuff. “World-building”, I guess. I don’t. I mean, I want a world where everything that happens is coherent and fits together with everything else that happens, but I do not care all that deeply about what the people in the next village over like to put on their eggs. (And I for sure do not give a crap about Tom Bombadil.)
I’m not sure I have anywhere I’m trying to go with this. Maybe I’m the Jerry Seinfeld of the League (notwithstanding that “Did you ever notice fantasy books are long and full of details you don’t care about?” is a terrible standup routine). Maybe we can put it on the pile of fantasy vs. sci-fi posts we’ve had around here – fantasy is building a world, sci-fi is slightly altering a world that already exists. In any case, I do think this is one problem (among many!) that keeps fantasy confined to its ghetto status. If it bothers me this much, and I’m a pretty prolific fantasy reader, how in the world does it make the uninitiated feel?
*I think a good indication of what I mean by “aggressively terrible” is “not just awful, but written such that it could only really be intended to piss off anyone fool enough to try to read it without skimming”. Think interminably long, boring, and contributing almost nothing to the story.
I really enjoyed dance and I think a lot of it was specifically because of the world building chapters.Report
ADWD doesn’t suffer solely from the boringness of world-building as an exercise. It’s also really incredibly stupid world-building. Essos is almost entirely uninteresting. It’s the Robert Jordan/George Lucas lazy-ass style of world-building, in which every member of a country/planet acts exactly the same as everyone else from the same place. Can you accurately describe to me the differences between the various citizens of Meereen and how I would recognize them in a lineup?Report
Possibly? I don’t recall the regional peoples being monolithic. Mereen had the freed slaves, the moderates (under the Green Grace), the closet old guard and then the active old guard (the Sons of the Harpy).
Since the story is told from a characters POV that necessarily limits the scope in a way that it wouldn’t if it was told in a different narrative style.Report
<blockquote>Can you accurately describe to me the differences between the various citizens of Meereen and how I would recognize them in a lineup?</blockquote>
Pleasants/Ex-Slaves: Limited clothing, olivine skin.
Nobility: Taller, red-dark hair shaped into horns (unless they’re completely shaven), with an overly large wrap designed to make walking difficult.Report
I have a theory about Dance. (Spoilers follow. You have been warned.)
Game begins abut a decade after after what should have been a heroic victory, Robert and Eddard defeating Aerys the Mad King. Things have gone badly downhill. Robert is a terrible, incompetent king. The kingdom is bankrupt. The court is run by intriguers like Varys and Littlefinger. Now the Hand has been murdered. (By the way, I’ve never figured out Littlefinger’s exact motive for that. Did he just assume that he’d profit from whatever chaos ensued?) This is the background for the story that unfolds over the first three books.
Storm ends with a few things that look positive. Dany frees the slaves and decides to learn how to become a wise ruler. Jon is elected head of the Watch. Arya finally escapes from the Riverlands. Joffrey dies and Tommen becomes king. Martin’s original plan was for a hiatus of six years or so before the fourth books began. I’m guessing that all of these positive things have gone to hell too, and what we’re slogging through in Feast and Dance (Dany’s political problems, Jon’s political problems, dragons making bad pets, the start of the Targaryen restoration) was intended to be referred to as backstory rather than described in detail.Report
This is somewhat plausible, except for all the really bad things going on at the end of Storm, such as the Red Wedding. It ended, I believe, on a note of uncertainty.Report
Right. The sick part is that he never intended to put this stuff on the page, but then it got too complicated, so he wrote TWO LONG BOOKS about backstory. If that ain’t exactly the kind of world-building I’m complaining about, I can’t think of anything that would be.Report
I thought it was so that he could become the Lord of the Vail.Report
Stay away from the Wheel of Time books. A dear friend said that the last 50 pages of each book made the first 950 worthwhile.Report
Word.Report
Too late.
Although those are a nice example of how even fantasy that goes completely off the rails can be saved. Sanderson’s books are not great, but they are vigorous and muscular and fresh in a way the 7 or so in the middle were really, really not.Report
Maybe, maybe? I should read them?Report
It’s nearly to the point of skip the middle ones and just read the Sanderson ones.Report
I was unable to get past the first hundred pages of the first Jordan book.Report
The first hundred pages were slow, but it picks up. It really does.Report
“The first ten million years were the worst, and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.”Report
Anne McCaffery’s books just flew by… Then again, I hear the Mars Trilogy is long too…Report
Did you read her books about psychics? Pegasus somethingorother… or the ones about the Ship who Sang? Enjoyed those until she started teaming up with other authors.Report
HP3 is a really great book – one of the best pieces of children’s literature written in the last 20-odd years.
It is by far the best of them, which is a damned shame. If it had been like HP4-7, I’d have given up on the series and saved dozens of hours.Report
I was a fan of HP5, myself.
But I would be.Report
HP5 was decent, but HP3 was the best – I agree. These authors need editors instead of yes-men damnit.Report
Really? Personally, HP3 was my least favorite book. The plot is mostly a one-off thing with limited connection to the rest of the series, it relies on an absurd deus ex machina that we never see used again even though it would be incredibly useful (the time-turners), and so forth.Report
Hmm. Phoenix, to me, was the most bloated and the biggest chore to finish.Report
I had a hard time dealing with Harry’s teenage rebelliousness, partly because it was annoying to read but mostly because it seemed unrealistic given the gravity of the whole situation and was an obvious device to keep him once again from consulting the knowledgeable, experienced, powerful adult wizards and just plow forward into his own adventures.
After the first book, she never really found a plausible motivation for Harry to avoid asking for help, but the HP5 solution was particularly unpleasant.Report
The one I keep hearing about is Erikson’s Malazan series. It’s done now (at least the main seqeunce): 10 books, all of them doorstops. It has 31 flavors of aliens practicing 57 varieties kinds of magic. I read the first one, was lost almost the whole time, but am told that if I keep reading, things will become clear. (This assumes, of course, that I remember things in more detail than “I was lost.” Or that after finishing book 10 I’ll immediately re-read the whole thing.) For me this does not add up to “You should read them.”Report
I have read several of these, and there really are brilliant moments, but they are too long, and the first one is a mess. They do get better, though.Report
I’m just completing my re-read of the Malazan series. I realized halfway through that, as much as I enjoyed the series, I couldn’t recommend it to almost anyone. It personally engaged me in a way few books – let alone fantasy series – have. But it’s a hard sell to most people, and even most fantasy fans.Report
As someone who enjoys reading the occasional doorstopper – while I value economical prose, I also grade on a sliding scale. Writing is difficult, and writing thousand-page tomes that are actually entertaining often strikes me as a monumental feat. After all, the world has no shortage of twenty-page short stories that mind-numbingly dull.
So yeah,most of the Meereen chapters in A Dance with Dragons were awful, as was the dull Iron Island politicking in A Feast for Crows. The endless descriptions of Swedish bureaucracy in Steig Larsson’s books, even more so. And great as it is, even War and Peace gets pretty boring at times, especially during Pierre’s funny-but-tedious dabblings with Freemasonry.
So yeah, there are days when I wish every writer was as fastidious as Borges. But I’ll also forgive a lot if a writer can successfully transport me to another world.Report
This is, I think, the real strength of Martin’s first three books, which are Not That Boring (although still a little more boring than is maybe strictly necessary). He creates a world I’m interested in with characters I want to see, and he flips around the genre conventions I’m used to, and all that stuff that everyone says about these books. But then he just loses it completely.Report
And the interminable desciptions of furniture in the unabridged Princess Bride almost ruin the book.Report
am convinced that overly long descriptions of a particular set of things indicate some degree of fetishism on the author’s part. (as opposed to someone like Faulkner, who appears to just be more verbose about everything).Report
There’s nothing wrong with world building if world building is the point. If the narrative is the point, there’s all sorts of things wrong with world building.
For the record, I just threw out 2100 words of world building. I’m afflicted with this disease.Report
Personally, I like world-building that happens in the background while the story is told. The more I learn incidentally the better. Same with back story.Report
This is very hard, as a writer.
You have to make sure that you’re revealing the worldbuilding properly. You don’t want your reader to stand up and say, “Oh, that’s just a gimmick!” and throw your book across the room. The incentive to provide too much worldbuilding rather than too little is hard to ignore.
You really need to learn to trust your reader, and that’s hard.Report
But that’s mostly crazy. How many other books spend hundreds/thousands of pages establishing backstory? I guess you can say this is unique to fantasy – maybe it really is the point of fantasy – but almost any other novel that spent 1000 pages outlining the GD history of Portugal as something tangentially related to the plot would be pilloried.Report
Most people who write fantasy are probably crazy.Report
But that’s mostly crazy.
I’m not so sure. Consider the reception & reputed influence of this book, for instance. Or, somewhat less dramatically, this one. Neither is short on backstory and lengthy asides.
I know your title is meant as a joke, but I think there’s a reasonable argument to be made that the game has changed. I reread The Great Gatsby last week; it’s a beautiful, delightful, and slender book, but is it the sort of effort top writers put their shoulders to nowadays?
Long-form, conversational escapes seem to be where the action is lately. That includes blogging, television, and video games. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for elegant brevity as well, but if we’re living in an attention economy there are definite advantages to length. It just becomes a matter of how spellbound you can keep people.Report
That’s an interesting point. It’s certainly borne out by a lot of trends in both popular and literary fiction. My only caveat is that Infinite Jest – considered the crown jewel of DFW’s tragically short career and renowned for its inhospitality to the average reader – is the length of a SINGLE GRRM book. Even DFW didn’t need 10,000 pages to write the most insane novel of his generation.Report
Yeah, but a lot of Infinite Jest is in that tiny footnote type (incidentally, has there ever been a book more suited to an e-reader?).Report
I don’t think the game has changed, ie this is something new; it’s that the game has gone back to what it used to be. I read Ryan saying “almost any other novel that spent 1000 pages outlining the GD history of Portugal as something tangentially related to the plot would be pilloried.” and I think of the 19th century & before. Melville & Hugo weren’t exceptions, they were exemplars. Even-more-so than everyone else, maybe, but not really contrary.Report
Jim Butcher does a pretty good job of this with the Harry Dresden series, and did it well with the Codex Alera series. His books aren’t door-stoppers and the action goes pretty quick, so there’s little time for long detours in world building. And, Terry Pratchett’s Disc World series is about the same.Report
And Steven Brust’s Dragaera. There’s lots of world, but we learn about it in bits and pieces, largely from unreliable narrators who mix in bad puns.Report
This is generally a good method. Minus the puns.Report
Jim Butcher’s Dresden series is an impressive example of what a writer can accomplish when he focuses on creating tightly crafted, fast-paced, complete stories which build upon one another. The later books are significantly better than the earlier ones, not because the early ones were bad, but because Butcher develops the characters from book to book, so you feel like you are growing with them.
Now don’t get me wrong; Butcher is not a great novelist by any means, but he is tight, disciplined and readable in a way that GRRM, Jordan and Erikson just aren’t. He neatly avoids the 2 traps that, for me, kill long fantasy series: first, when the novel is a self-contained episode in which things happen and then afterwords everything resets to zero as if nothing ever occurred, a la Scooby Doo, and second, when the book consists of sound and fury signifying nothing from cover to cover, a la Robert Jordan, GRRM, etc.Report
I think I’ll quote Adam Roberts:
The appeal of doorstop fantasies is not necessarily the plot or the characters, but the fact that they’re basically RPG sourcebooks. They describe every part of the world in such fine detail that the reader can easily imagine themself a part of it and construct their own stories in it. (I mean, this is what causes a 350-page story to turn into a 1000-page dictionary.)Report
Oh my goodness, I’ve never read this fellow before, but these Wheel of Time reviews are gold.Report
Martin’s world would be a hell of a place to set an RPG. Because everything depends so much on characterization, and on Singular Characters at That.
I love his world, but it’s not really RPG material. To do it well forces the GM to
1) Create viable “Personalities” for the big cheeses
2) Create some way of leveling people up from n00b to “able to talk with big cheese” (I’m rejecting the “start with nobility players” route, as it involves a ton of backstory…)
Jordan’s work is fantastic for RPGs — you get reasonably structured societies, and the degree of “questiness” of your average shmoo is a lot higher.Report
Not sure if you’re aware of this, but there’s been two separate RPGs set in Westeros–one by Guardians of Order (which went out of business a few years ago) and the current edition by Green Ronin.Report
Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality series. In the second book, the Devil sends the main character to different planets just for the purpose of distracting him. The author admits this. And we’re supposed to sit there and read the adventures on different planets which are acknowledged as having nothing to do with the story. Yeesh. Needless to say, I didn’t make it to book three of that series.Report
Yes, HP7 was at least a disappointment. First, it was predictable. That’s not a bad thing in and of itself; a good story teller can entertain you even if you do know how things are going to end. Second, though, the book was at least 100 pages too long, which detracted from the story telling. Finally, the whole critical bit about what wands thought about property rights was just lame. Again, not necessarily by itself, but if it’s that important then it should have been introduced much sooner. If wands care about who owns them, don’t they also care about what they’re used for, and how competently? Or if not, why not?
Of course, it’s a whole lot easier to criticize a novel or a series than it is to write a good one.Report
I agree with the criticism of HP7. As I read it I keep waiting for something to happen. But notice that the previous sentence is in the present tense; because as much as I agree with Ryan’s criticism, I still enjoy the book. I enjoy every book in the series, and have read each at least 4 times.
I guess I am different in that I do like long books and long series. I so often find myself disappointed when the story arc ends. I want more Harry Potter books–surely something interesting happens to them all after Voldemort’s death, no?
But then I’m a huge fan of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series. There’s hardly a one of them I haven’t read at least 5 times–it’s my standard bedtime reading, and despite there being 20 1/4 books in the series, I still want more.
The same with Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, although I’ve only re-read those about three times each.
Not that I disdain Ryan’s tastes at all. I just find it interesting how different they are from mine.Report
Aubry/Martin!
“Jack! You have debauched my sloth!”Report
Holy toledo, North, I literally read that line just last night! (HMS Surprise.) What a cheerful coincidence.Report
I want more Harry Potter books–surely something interesting happens to them all after Voldemort’s death, no?
Apparently not, since they all just end up married to their middle school sweethearts.Report
No, no, that was just a dream sequence the night following the battle. There’s a fantastic story about the campaign to be the next minister of magic, with Lucius Malfoy illegally funding ad campaigns and the remaining Death Eaters imperiousing wizards on their way to the polls, unstoppable because there are so few aurors left. Then there’s a huge battle over the budget of the Ministry of Magic, with accusations of corruption in the Department of Mysteries. And of course there’s the backstory of Harry’s inability to become an auror because he never passed his NEWTS, and his increasingly decadent behavior as he realizes he’s rich enough he doesn’t actually need to work, ever, which leads to a nasty divorce with Ginny, followed by his descent into a severe alcoholic depression. And Hermione’s quest to find her parents in Australia and return their memories to them, only to find they’ve disappeared in the bush and are believed to have been eaten by dingos…or have they? And that doesn’t even cover the Romeo and Juliet style romance between Scorpius Malfoy and Albus Severus Potter, which requires the wizarding world to decide whether to allow wizard-wizard marriage.
It’s gold, I tell you.
Hell, maybe I should try this NaNoWriMo thing.Report
<i> And that doesn’t even cover the Romeo and Juliet style romance between Scorpius Malfoy and Albus Severus Potter, which requires the wizarding world to decide whether to allow wizard-wizard marriage.</i>
You’ve not been going to fanfiction.net have you?Report
Scorpius Malfoy? He’s not into wormhole technology and bondage gear by any chance?Report
You’ve not been going to fanfiction.net have you?
Heh, never been there. My daughter goes there a lot, though.
Scorpius Malfoy? He’s not into wormhole technology and bondage gear by any chance?
That depends on whether J.K. Rowling would sue me or not.Report
Where does this leave us with work like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, which as far as I can tell is nothing but details nobody cares about? I mean, how many pages does it take Titus to walk down that hallway in book 2? Granted, it is not a book for the fantasy novice.
If the issue is world building, then I think it depends entirely on the reader: is it a world that you want to spend time in? Ryan, you might not care about Tom Bombadil, but I love Middleearth. I want to go to there. Maybe not the first five, or even ten, times that I read LOTR or the Hobbit, the longer I spend rereading those books the more meaningful those kinds of details become to me.
Then again, Shannara has spun wildly out of control, while Discworld represents an almost perfect exercise in fantasy world building. Don’t care for Rincewind? Go visit some other part of the realm. Witches give you itches? Spend more time in Ankh-Morpork.
You will never convince HP die-hards (or god help me Twi-hards) that any part of their beloved worlds are soul-crushingly dull. I don’t think it’s length that keeps fantasy in the ghetto, it the lack of imagination by the myriad authors STILL trying to recreate LOTR who crowd out the actual talent.Report
Agreed Shannara has bloated terribly. I cut him off after his third trilogy.
Also agreed: Diskworld is the perfect balance. We’re going to really feel it when Pratchetts illness shuts him down.Report
The Tom Bombadil diversion is a pretty important part of The Fellowship of the Ring.
The problem is that the demand is there for more, more more, so writers feel obliged to give it to us. Might as well be them getting paid for it instead of others writing histories and map books and encyclopedias.I do much prefer to have it separate, though. If I could have a concise version of ASoIaF, I would love it.
Iain M. Banks does a great job of building without going overboard, IMHO.Report
The Tom Bombadil diversion is a pretty important part of The Fellowship of the Ring.
Seconded. Tom’s character is about the tantalizing possibility of escape from one’s duties, a possibility not open to mere mortals. Think of Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. Tom is the opposite of that. Which means he’s not human.
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If only Tom wasn’t Ned Flanders..Report
Brandon Sanderson does world-building well, especially when it comes to the elaborate magic systems he’s famous for.
There are always rules, and you almost always discover them at the same time as the characters do. And you will discover there are more rules than you initially thought, and maybe some of the rules you thought there were aren’t quite what you thought they were.Report
I am actually half-convinced that it is not technically possible to accomplish the kind of series that Jordan and GRRM attempted without it turning into some kind of god-awful mess a few books in (You may note that most people think tha tboth GRRM and Jordan started to lose control of the series after book 3).
Writing one viewpoint character is challenging enough; you cannot just keep adding characters and attempting to cover all of the angles without the story spooling away from you. The technical difficulty in keeping the narrative under control is absurd.
I actually think that A Song of Ice and Fire would be a significantly better series if GRRM had decided to stick with one or at most two or three viewpoint characters at a time and only switched away from them at their deaths.Report
A late thought… does anyone else here read the Dream Park novels? Anyone who does as disappointed with the latest one as I am?Report
Not after the first one, no. I gave up n Niven a long while ago.Report