Fantasy Book Club discussion
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Is fantasy getting darker?
Kathy wrote: "I've read books that are dark through intensity rather than blatant violence or sexuality."Can you give examples Kathy?
Bryan wrote: "Here's a question: Is there a difference between darkness of theme/setting and explicitness of depictions of violence/sexuality/language? If there is a difference, how so? By discussing the incre..."I guess it is both, Bryan - overt/explicit writing, as well as how the author refers to the 'darkness'. To me, it is not very different from having love in the background and writing pages of mushy stuff (aka romance).
Having an idyllic, darkness-free world would be unrealistic, and would not provide an appropriate backdrop for conflict & tension. The story may fall flat. Darkness in the background is almost a necessity in fantasy (though making a world iniquitous in every respect is not).
But describing misery in detail, or having rivers of maroon blood flowing across the pages, or having your female characters undergo explicit sexual abuse are conscious choices the author makes.
The difference between the two? Well it is like the difference between a news anchor on CNN/BBC reporting human rights abuse somewhere, and showing photographs of mutilated bodies (view discretion advised!), or in an hypothetical case, airing videos of sexual abuse.
It is not just a matter of degree. The way it engages the audience is different in the two cases.
I wonder . . . does anyone else visualize 'dark fantasy' as a world where wizards are on a trek wearing a long robe and carrying a large staff, accompanied by warriors on horses with bows and swords.And, the clouds are madly enveloping our motley crew, with mists and rain. The sun cannot manage to break through the depth of the shroud.
Sorry. No matter how we discuss this or what we mean - this is the picture in my mind when one says 'dark fantasy'. Just wonder if I am all alone.
Well Sonja, Wiki 'defines' it as:... a subgenre of fantasy that combines fantasy with elements of horror. The term can be used broadly to refer to fantastical works that have a dark, gloomy atmosphere or a sense of horror and dread.
Your description (I like it!) reminds me of LOTR, and more recently, the first movie of The Hobbit. Only the stone giants are missing from the latter :-)
I see - so my mind can only perceive the 'dark, gloomy atmosphere.' :D I avoid horror and dread. They make me scared and cranky. I've never read the LOTR. I did see the movies. The first was good, the second was ok, the third was 3.5 hours too long. (bwahahahaha) I refuse to see The Hobbit.
My sons love them. Have them in all DVD incarnations and enjoy watching them over and over. The movies also inspired their love of fantasy, so I am ok with that.
dunno how about you but my guts felt tight when I read what would eventually reveal itself to be (view spoiler) in Dust of Dreams by S.Erikson... the skies went all dark with cyclopean clouds, eclipsing the sky, it got friggin cold and then... well, the whole description sounded like the end of the world :Pso badass :P
Coming back to the implicit / explicit darkness: For me, there is a big difference btween the two. A mild example of implicit darkness would be Mistborn: The Final Empire (Ruthless ruler, executions, murder). A stronger example of implicit darkness could be, in some parts, Game of Thrones: War, Rape, murder, putting whole villages to the torch, I would not want to live there.Contrast this to the more explicit darkness of the malazan book of the fallen series (Blood and gore) or the First Law Series by Joe Abercrombie (Pretty nasty violence and torture). Those two are, for me at least, the definition of explicit dark fantasy.
Implicit darkness is more abstract. You know on some level that it would suck to live in the world, but you still read the book, possibly even emotionally detached from the implied suffering of the masses. Compare this to the sometimes repulsive violence and suffering that is described in detail in Blood and Bone, where I actually felt sick after reading a scene.
I don't really know if this is a general trend in fantasy. There is surely more of it than there was pre-2000, I would guess, but if it has increased in the last, say, 5 years, I could not say. Many of the bigger cycles are darker today (Malazan, Game of Thrones on some level (as discussed above), all the books by Abercrombie), but the fact that the older cycles like wheel of time are mostly high / epic fantasy (I mean, come on, medieval farmboys can read? Each family has a library of BOOKS?) might play into that (as in: Using the darker theme to stand out compared to them).
Good points, Max. I suppose what I was getting at is that there seems to be some resistance to or distaste for dark fantasy, and I was wondering if it's explicit darkness alone that some people have a problem with, or if it is both explicit AND implicit darkness that bothers these same folks. I know that there are a lot of fantasy readers who don't necessarily have a beef with either, so I suppose this is more of a question for those who do have an issue with dark fantasy.I myself don't have a problem with reading anything as long as it's well-written. I'm just trying to understand the points of view of others.
Bryan wrote: "Good points, Max. I suppose what I was getting at is that there seems to be some resistance to or distaste for dark fantasy, and I was wondering if it's explicit darkness alone that some people ha..."I don't mind darkness whether implicit or explicit, but there has to be something in it all for me to care about. Nothing gets much darker than Cormack McCarthy's books, but I love them nontheless. It's gratuitous violence, slime, sex, rape, etc. that will make me put a book aside. In LOTR, it's the hobbits that I care about as well as some of the other characters. In The Road it's the father and son. I found Erikson frustrating because about the time I began to care about a character, they disappeared. And also because the action/setting/magic had too much video game adolescence to it for my taste, although he certainly is imaginative and creative in his world building and invention of creatures. I've only read one Gene Wolfe and found the main character utterly revolting.
I do think fantasy has gotten darker, along with the world in general. The proliferation of information and appalling news (being able to watch terrorists behead a man) has either numbed us to horror or whetted our appetites for it or changed our tastes so that cleaned up worlds no longer satisfy us. But I think some of these things have also led us to go overboard in our efforts to simulate 'reality', whatever that is. I'm sure mine is different than yours.
Sandra aka Sleo wrote: I don't mind darkness whether implicit or explicit, but there has to be something in it all for me to care about. Nothing gets much darker than Cormack McCarthy's books, but I love them nontheless. It's gratuitous violence, slime, sex, rape, etc. that will make me put a book aside.I completely agree. Violence to prove a point ("This jungle is pretty dangerous" in Blood and Bone, "This guy enjoys his work as torturer" in The Blade Itself, "this piece of magic is pretty nasty" in the battles in the malazan books, ...) can be okay, if written well. Violence for the sake of violence is something that will make me put a book away, although I have not really encountered any book where that was the case.
I guess the two main questions for me are "does the violence have any business being there, as opposed to being there just to 'shock' people", and "is the violence written well". If one of those questions is answered with no, I will most likely not like the book. If they are both answered "yes", I am probably okay with it, as long as the book is good.
Concerning your view on the magic of the malazan book of the fallen, I found it to be a pretty cool magic system, especially since there are visible effects if someone is channeling a warren (IIRC, there was a pretty awesome scene were someone was channeling d'riss and there were small fissures breaking up under his feet and the ground was shaken by small waves). But that is a discussion for another thread, and I can see why you would view it as "too much video game adolescence".
Max wrote: Concerning your view on the magic of the malazan book of the fallen, I found it to be a pretty cool magic system, especially since there are visible effects if someone is channeling a warren (IIRC, there was a pretty awesome scene were someone was channeling d'riss and there were small fissures breaking up under his feet and the ground was shaken by small waves). But that is a discussion for another thread, and I can see why you would view it as "too much video game adolescence". ..."That's of course just my opinion. I recently got Deadhouse Gates in audio to give it another shot. Maybe it's my advanced age.
the magic in mbotf isnt there just to be there and be cute, but is a relevant battle tactics
Razmatus wrote: "the magic in mbotf isnt there just to be there and be cute, but is a relevant battle tactics"Yes, I'm aware of that. I need to check it out again to either vanquish or clarify my issues.
I think some people are wearing rose-tinted glasses. Modern fantasy is darker... than what exactly? Looking back, I'm not exactly seeing a whole bunch of happy bunnies and rainbows in the genre. "The Silmarillion"? "Elric"? "The Once And Future King"? "Gormenghast"? "The Black Company"? "Thomas Covenant"? "Shardik"? "Cthulhu"? Where's the light, where are the clear black and white? Or is it further back? How about "Lady Into Fox" (1922) in which (view spoiler) or "The House on the Borderland" (1908) in which (view spoiler). How far back do you have to go to find this "light" fantasy? Mallory? Mallory is pretty dark!
Even the more pulpy stuff... I grew up reading things like Dragonlance. Well, Dragonlance is full of good people turning bad, bad people maybe being good, and lots of people dying. Its second trilogy has the world's greatest villain as its hero! How about Feist? His 'Shadow of a Dark Queen', for instance, is the adventures of a fantasy dirty-dozen-style team of hardened murderers and rapists in the middle of a distant war. [OK, so the two main protagonists are mostly-innocent and rogue-with-his-heart-in-the-right-place, but it's hardly all sweetness and light, or black and white]. "Deathgate cycle"? Well, one main protagonist is the minion of a brutal dictator and another is a professional murderer. Pern! Pern is mostly pretty straightforward morally... although it does have a lot of sex, plus people being hideously externally digested by rapacious space-fungus as they scream and writhe in agony. Gemmell? Hang on, the Waylander novels are about a cold-blooded assassin gone rogue...
...I reckon I must have missed the 'non-dark' type of fantasy.
Now, graphic, sure. Everything is more graphic than it used to be. Except descriptions of furniture. But pretty much everything is more graphic - the good as well as the bad.
P.S. whoever mentioned how heroic Bond used to be should go back and watch those early films! Connery's Bond is a certifiable psychopath! At least Craig's bond looks pained and conflicted as he kills people - Connery is completely unfazed as he murders, insults and terrorises. There's a scene in Dr No where Bond and the heroine banter about what happened to the man who raped the heroine - she had him poisoned with a slow-acting venom so it took him a whole week to die in agonising pain. ('It wouldn't do to make a habit of it', says Bond). Back then, Bond didn't just make jokes when he killed people, he smiled as he did it, and if necessary he transported corpses around until he found someone he could tell the joke to!
I guess most folks would agree that fantasy has always been dark. The question now is whether it is getting darker - however that is defined (e.g. explicit, graphic, etc).Let me pose the question differently. Have elements of horror crept into mainstream fantasy?
I'd say no, elements of horror have crept OUT of mainstream fantasy. In the past, "fantastic" literature was almost the same as horror, or at least there was a great deal of overlap. Even in a writer like Tolkien, who tried to make fantasy its own thing, something like trying to escape a giant spider lurking in the darkness as you run through the cobwebs clutching at your face and you see the remains of orcs paralysed, wrapped up and then digested slowly alive... it's closer to horror than anything I can think of in, eg, Martin.
Wastrel wrote: "I'd say no, elements of horror have crept OUT of mainstream fantasy. In the past, "fantastic" literature was almost the same as horror, or at least there was a great deal of overlap. Even in a writ..."Hmm, well, that again comes down to implied vs. explicit. When I read that section of LotR, I knew that Frodo would be screwed if the spider caught him and that there were horrible things happening there, but it did not feel revolting to me.
Compare that to Blood and Bone by Esslemont, where (view spoiler) or even G.R.R. Martin where in Book 4 (view spoiler). These are just some examples from current fantasy books.
I don't say that there is more horror today than there was years ago (simply because I have not read all too many older fantasy books), but I'd disagree with the notion that it has become less (although, again, I cannot directly compare it, but judging from the amount of drama in the media concerning the topic of video game violence, I would think that there woild have been quite a bit more drama about those books 20 years ago).
Edit: To get back towards the beginning of my argument: LotR has a lot of implicit horror, I don't dispute that. But todays books have a lot of more explicit horror (at least in "dark" fantasy, less so in "high" or "epic" fantasy like way of kings), in addition to the implied horror of living in a war-torn world like westeros (because seriously, would you like to be a peasant in those worlds?).
Seriously I think what people think of as more 'dark' fantasy these days is simply more sex and gore. That's it. Because otherwise, I agree there were other books just as dark from earlier decades.Never liked the Thomas Covenant series because of how depressing they were, either.
Maybe I'm a total liberal, but I don't see how sex is "dark". Adult, sure(although you can bet your ass I'm going to be teaching my daughter about the joys and dangers of sex long before she's an adult, as I think our culture has a tendency to sexualize teens and pre-teens). Risque...maybe(although NOT teaching kids about sex seems a lot riskier to me). But "dark"? That kind of view strikes me as extremely old-fashioned, not to mention the fact that this sort of thinking usually stems from religions which are patriarchal and mysoginistic in nature.Now, sexual VIOLENCE, on the other hand, certainly qualifies as "dark". Hell, it may even be the definition of dark. It, however, is in a different category from sex, as it is not actually sex, but a disgusting combination of violence and sex.
If we're talking about darkness in fantasy, we need to be clear that we're not just bandying about the old conservative talking-points: sex and violence. Violence certainly represents the darkness in humankind. Sex represents the light.
I agree that people want happy endings. Many fiction readers complain about series because there are cliff hangers and unresolved story lines. Could it be in today's faster world (with less time to read) that readers want a faster happy ending? And okay, I admit I'm hooked on super hero movies!
I think it is human nature to want a happy ending, particularly if the story is darker. People have not changed that much. However, in this era of instant gratification we may have less patience for plot buildup or exposition. I know I have trouble watching older movies because they move so slow. Has "dark" fantasy come to equate violence (both sexual and otherwise)? Do we entirely eschew morality in our novels these days because we feel that the world has lost morality?
I guess it is different for different people and societies. To me, the perceived loss of morality in the world only heightens the need for morally "correct" stories. While that is my personal view, I find many people in my age bracket subscribing to that, at least in my part of the world.To me, explicit misery and morally degraded worlds connote darkness more than explicit violence does. Again, a personal view.
Bryan wrote: "Maybe I'm a total liberal, but I don't see how sex is "dark". Adult, sure(although you can bet your ass I'm going to be teaching my daughter about the joys and dangers of sex long before she's an ..."Sexual violence is exactly what I've seen more of in fantasy lately, so that's an excellent definition.
Kevan wrote: "To me, explicit misery and morally degraded worlds connote darkness more than explicit violence does. Again, a personal view. "With that definition, "A Song of Ice and Fire" and "the Way of Kings" would be dark fantasy. I always felt those two to be less dark than most other fantasy I read.
I'm not saying you are wrong, but we seem to have different views on what makes fantasy "dark" (going back to the problem of explicit vs implicit darkness from farther up the thread). If we use your definition of darkness in fantasy (which would fall into the "implicit" category), are there even any non-dark fantasy stories left? I could not remember a single one where the world was not in large parts morally bankrupt (but then again, I am into dark fantasy, so what do I know about non-dark fantasy).
Max wrote: "Kevan wrote: "To me, explicit misery and morally degraded worlds connote darkness more than explicit violence does. Again, a personal view. "With that definition, "A Song of Ice and Fire" and "th..."
Sure. We have different views on this thread on what constitutes darkness in fantasy. Explicit violence is a big contributor for sure, and I agree with that. In my mind, a couple of additional elements also contribute to it.
Personally, I find A Song of Ice and Fire and Way of Kings a shade darker than LOTR, Hobbit and Earthsea, for instance. Homeland and Way of Shadows are another shade darker. This, of course, is a personal opinion that need not hold true for a majority of readers.
I don't know at what point stories get classified as dark fantasy (I am not into dark fantasy). I looked up Wiki and found a definition suggesting that inclusion of horror make a book dark fantasy.
I am not sure if that is true or not. However, I feel that fantasy has gotten darker over the years.
I´ll agree with whoever said sex isn´t dark. And I´ll repeat myself, even though I deleted my first post. I think "dark" isn´t viewed the same way by all of us. I wouldn´t agree with people that say killing and sex makes book darker. I would say it makes the book more realistic. Not fantasy and definitely not dark.If we´re talking about the world not previously created, the world where normal things like death, romance and sex are showed in completely unique and higher lever, than I´d consider it dark.
Unfortunately, I still haven´t found a book that I could call "dark".
Zayne wrote: "Plus, wouldn't the story be a bit boring if the story had no darkness to it? ..."Agree. Fantasy without darkness would be a fairy tale. Any fiction (fantasy or otherwise) without conflict, struggle & some darkness would be lame. LOTR, which I personally hold above all other fantasy writing, has Sauron, Sarumam, the orcs, etc. Imagine LOTR without them!
Kevan wrote: "Agree. Fantasy without darkness would be a fairy tale. Any fiction (fantasy or otherwise) without co..."Actually, fantasy with a lot of darkness is a fairy tale... before modern retellings got to them. In one of the versions of Cinderella, the sisters chopped off their toes to try and make them fit the slipper.
Carol wrote: "Kevan wrote: "Agree. Fantasy without darkness would be a fairy tale. Any fiction (fantasy or otherwise) without co..."Actually, fantasy with a lot of darkness is a fairy tale... before modern ret..."
Yes, we definitely get the cleaned up versions with Disney.
Sandra aka Sleo commented a long way back that as the world is today, we get much more information. We also get much more intensity in our information – the pictures of war and violence that we see on TV would never have been aired (say) 20 years ago. That intensity feeds over into films, into plays – and of course, into writing. The discussion about what is “darker” (whatever definition we use) seems to me to be about this increase in intensity as much as anything else. Yes, there was some darkness in LOTR – but Tolkien was writing during a war in which people were dying all round him and his own son was away fighting. His view of darkness didn't need to be spelled out, his readers would have inferred it from what little descriptive material he wrote. And he couldn't have written the sort of detail that (say) Abercrombie could write, because it would never have been published … Oddly enough, when you think about it, all the original versions of the Grimm's fairy tales are bloody in the extreme – such as (@Carol) Cinderella's sisters chopping their toes off to try and get the slippers, or the witch who was put into the cauldron and boiled to death. No one minded in the 19th century, or perhaps only the over-educated!The other thing is that writing has become less about “literature” and more about “realism”; Glen Cook wrote as realistically as he could in a fantasy framework, which is probably both why he was so successful in his time, and why to some people (@Kevin) he was a “dark” fantasy writer. I don't find him so – I think he's just realistic in his writing (within his context, of course). That's what I find attractive with Abercrombie too – that he manages to keep a sense of (OK, possible …) realism in his language and description, even as his characters are going through the most bloody and unlikely situations.
I guess that for me “dark” is more about the feel you get off the book – the dark miasma coming up as you turn the pages, the cold of the slime running down your backbone, the smell of the old grave that surrounds you, the knowledge that the thing with the bloody knife is just out of sight, but that it might have something worse than the knife this time … Nothing in the least “literary” can produce that.
David wrote: "Sandra aka Sleo commented a long way back that as the world is today, we get much more information. We also get much more intensity in our information – the pictures of war and violence that we see..."Well said, David. I'm not sure about your last statement though. I am currently listening to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West and I've sort of braced myself against exactly that dark miasma coming up in the next sentence.
Sandra aka Sleo wrote: "David wrote: "Sandra aka Sleo commented a long way back that as the world is today, we get much more information. We also get much more intensity in our information – the pictures of war and violen..."Yeah, Blood Meridian is both ridiculously (excessively, I think) 'literary' AND possibly the darkest book you could ever hope to read.
Wastrel wrote: "Sandra aka Sleo wrote: "David wrote: "Sandra aka Sleo commented a long way back that as the world is today, we get much more information. We also get much more intensity in our information – the pi..."I just finished it and you can say that again!
Sandra aka Sleo wrote: "Wastrel wrote: "Sandra aka Sleo wrote: "David wrote: "Sandra aka Sleo commented a long way back that as the world is today, we get much more information. We also get much more intensity in our info..."Have you read other McCarthy? Personally, I thought his Border Trilogy, particularly the first book, may actually have been better - it was skilled without being ostentatious, and dark and harsh without being cartoonish.
Wastrel wrote: "Sandra aka Sleo wrote: "Wastrel wrote: "Sandra aka Sleo wrote: "David wrote: "Sandra aka Sleo commented a long way back that as the world is today, we get much more information. We also get much mo..."Yes, I've read the Border Trilogy and loved it. I couldn't get through the second one the first time, I was so heartbroken about the wolf, but I did finish it years later and then read the third. And I've read The Road. I read Blood Meridian because I'd heard many think it was his best. I'm no intellectual critic, but I don't agree.
I disagree. Darkness has always been in books. William Shakespeare's stories are dark. Edgar Allen Poe was dark. The Bible is dark. Just because we don't see some of those dark today does not mean that they were not dark for their times. It is all in perception. It's like movies today. Most kids think that they graphics of older movies are lame so they can't get into the movies but, back when we watched them, we were horrified. Aliens was a terrifying movie for me and Exorcist but now kids just watch them and shrug them off. It applies to the same concept of writing. It was dark then and it is dark now. Darkness has always been a part of fantasy. JMO.
Amber wrote: "I disagree. Darkness has always been in books. William Shakespeare's stories are dark. Edgar Allen Poe was dark. The Bible is dark. Just because we don't see some of those dark today does not mean ..."and the perception of what is dark changes, as you say... like we view things based on middle ages as dark, cos their ways seem crude and raw to us, just cos they used more mechanical tools and much was pervaded by spirituality... is today much different in the essentials? nah, everything just went more subtle is all :P
I agree that things haven't really changed. But, the darkness has always been there. I for one don't find anything romantic about a girl killing herself and then the boy killing himself because she did. It's tragic and dark but the teens, at least the ones that I know, romanticize that. The Bible talks about a girl turned away from her home and stoned to death because she was raped. Darkness was always in books, including fantasy.
Wikipedia's page on the history of fantasy shows a sample front cover from Weird Tales from 1935. The painting shows a terrified naked woman surrounded by hissing cobras. There are two stories mentioned on the cover: 'Shadows in Zamboula', which promises "stark horror in the sinister house of Aram Baksh", and 'The Consuming Flame', in which "DOCTOR SATAN spread icy terror in Detroit" (their capitalisation not mine). At the time, apparently, the magazine was notable for the (female) artist's 'provocative naked women' covers, particular for her prediliction for naked women being whipped. The magazine was onyl saved from bankruptcy by the publicity generated when they published a story about necrophilia. This is the magazine that brought us Clark Ashton Smith, HP Lovecraft, Robert Howard, Edmond Hamilton, Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury, CL Moore and Theodore Sturgeon (and apparently the first published work by Tennessee Williams).
Yeah, mainstream fantasy has been dark for quite a while.
I suppose each society defines as "dark" that which defies their mores and taboos. So, I'm guessing "dark" could be a synonym for "transgressive"?In that sense, you could see the existence of fiction that would be "dark" for all points of time in all societies, depending on what would be "dark" according to that society's definition.
Amber wrote: "I agree that things haven't really changed. But, the darkness has always been there.[...] The Bible talks about a girl turned away from her home and stoned to death because she was raped. Darkness was always in books, including fantasy. "
The Bible tells the story of a woman who was gang-raped to death (while her husband slept peacefully nearby, uncaring) and her body cut up into 12 pieces and sent to the heads of the 12 tribes of Judah, so yeah...
Traveller wrote: "Amber wrote: "I agree that things haven't really changed. But, the darkness has always been there.[...] The Bible talks about a girl turned away from her home and stoned to death because she was ..."Must of missed that one Traveller. That is one of the scariest books for me to read. LOL. It's given me nightmares since I was a kid. But, it's unfair to compare it to the fantasy genre. But, Macbeth was a horribly dark story. The Greeks storytellers told some dark stories also in ancient greece. JMO
Sexual violence, death, moral issues, all of that have been around for a very long time in fantasy. It may be more graphic now but I am sure that people got the point when they read them. The way that they are read today could be considered lame (as the kids say) compared to the graphic details of today but it is still the same content.
I agree that if you haven't read certain stories that the opinions would differ. Because if you haven't read them then you wouldn't know anything about them. Therefore are unable to judge the difference except through your own personal knowledge.
;)
Quite so, and I'm fine with that.When I kicked off this discussion, I was of the firm view that fantasy had got darker. After hearing so many opinions, I now qualify that. I am clear that the fantasy I have lately been reading has grown darker. I am yet to determine how representative that is of fantasy in general. I don't limit myself to one genre, and I have therefore read only a fraction of fantasy writing.
What has been more interesting to me is what people feel constitutes darkness in fantasy, and the related discussion on realism & sexual violence in recent writing. Perception of realism is so different in different cultures!
This is probably going to stir some people up, but it's an interesting thing to discuss, so here goes...the Bible is the first dark fantasy novel. It's got lots of murder, incest, armies butchering each other, magicians, prophets, betrayal, a giant, a dragon...it sounds like I'm describing a George R.R. Martin novel(thankfully he didn't include anything like the Book of Numbers)!
Amber wrote: "The way that they are read today could be considered lame (as the kids say) compared to the graphic details of today but it is still the same content...."Agree. Same with TV and other mediums of entertainment. I shudder to think that fifteen years from now, today's "graphic" writing may be considered lame. :)
Bryan wrote: "This is probably going to stir some people up, but it's an interesting thing to discuss, so here goes...the Bible is the first dark fantasy novel. It's got lots of murder, incest, armies butcherin..."It depends on the version. King James wasn't written until the early 1600's. The Bishop's Bible was before it but I am not sure when it was written. But, I agree, it is a very dark book. But, is it really fantasy?
Kevan wrote: "Amber wrote: "The way that they are read today could be considered lame (as the kids say) compared to the graphic details of today but it is still the same content...."Agree. Same with TV and oth..."
I don't even want to think about how graphic they could get.
Bryan wrote: "This is probably going to stir some people up, but it's an interesting thing to discuss, so here goes...the Bible is the first dark fantasy novel. It's got lots of murder, incest, armies butcherin..."I am not sure of incest, but what you describe is pretty much the case for most epics. Mahabharata & Ramayana (Indian epics) that were written close to the dawn of civilization, have those elements. As do Greek & Roman mythology. Mahabharata also speaks of flying vehicles (spaceships?).
The Bible does not hold religious connotations for me as Christianity is not my religion. But I read the Old Testament a few times in my childhood and found it absolutely fascinating.
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I guess that's actually three questions. What do you guys think?