The Sword and Laser discussion
“Concerning Historical Authenticity in Fantasy, or Truth Forgives You Nothing” by Daniel Abraham
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Applying historical realities in a fantasy novel that is based on the historical past does not sound that far fetched to me.It's like good science in a science fiction novel. Not absolutly necessary, but without it, just call it a fairy tale.
But - having said that - like most red blooded males - I'm a sucker for a kick-ass lady warrior with a huge sword.
R. Scott Bakker's just posted a new entry on his blog that contains his reactions to Daniel Abrahams's comments. http://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2012/05...As Abraham acknowledges, “there are legitimate reasons for racism, sexism, and sexual violence to be part of a fantasy project,” he just doesn’t think that historical realism is one of them. But he’s wrong. The Realism Defence you might say, only rings true when it doesn’t stand alone, when the author actually has something to say about premodern history and our relation to it. Otherwise, it’s probably just a post hoc rationale.
...despite what Abraham says, the Middle Ages were chauvinistic through and through. Research shows that our contemporary conception of morality in the West is very peculiar—and quite unnatural, in fact. The live and let live logic that informs so much of moral reasoning simply did not exist before the Enlightenment. Where most of us acknowledge a certain degree of moral uncertainty, our prescientific ancestors did not. Your ‘place’ was your place no matter how brutally unfair or oppressive it might seem to some disinterested observer. You played the role allotted, and if you refused out of some sense of outrage, well then, your goose was pretty much cooked.
As Abraham says, some of those roles were relatively commodious, but most of them quite simply were not.
The Western Exceptionalism argument isn't persuading me to Bakker's view and it doesn't explain, "Why is fantasy anchored in Europe?"
Sean wrote: "The Western Exceptionalism argument isn't persuading me to Bakker's view and it doesn't explain, "Why is fantasy anchored in Europe?""From Daniel Abraham's post:
"The roots of epic fantasy aren’t with King William II. They’re with King Arthur, and so they’re timeless. Historical accuracy isn’t what we come here for."
I would agree with Mr. Abraham that the roots of fantasy are with King Arthur. My understanding is that fantasy is an outgrowth of medieval romance; specifically the Arthurian legends,adapted from French sources,by Tennyson and Sir Thomas Malory. If I am wrong, someone please correct me. My information is based on articles/interviews I've read, not on any training in literature.
You might be interested in reading this older SFFWorld.com article that R. Scott Baker wrote, called Why Fantasy and Why Now. While it doesn't go into why fantasy is anchored specifically in Europe, it does suggest why fantasy is rooted in pre-Enlightenment worlds.
" The world we live in has been revealed by science to be indifferent and arbitrary. Where we once lived in a world steeped in moral significance, now we live in a world where things simply happen. Where once the meaningfulness of life was an unquestioned certainty, the very foundation of rationality, now we must continually struggle to 'make our lives meaningful,' and do so, moreover, without the sanction of rationality. Questions of the meaningfulness of life have retreated into the fractured realm of competing faiths and the 'New Age' section of the bookstore. In our day in age, the truth claim, 'My life has meaning,' is as much an act of faith (which is to say, a belief without rational legitimation) as the truth claim, 'There is a God.'
It is no accident that fantasy is preoccupied with our pre-Enlightenment, pre-crisis past. The contemporary world is a nihilistic world, where all signs point to the illusory status of love, beauty, goodness and so on. This is not to say that they are in fact illusory, only that at a fundamental level our culture is antagonistic to the claim that they are real. Nihilism is a fever in the bones of contemporary culture, afflicting all our assertions of meaningfulness with the ache that they are wrong.
Fantasy is the celebration of what we no longer are: individuals certain of our meaningfulness in a meaningful world. The wish-fulfillment that distinguishes fantasy from other genres is not to be the all-conquering hero, but to live in a meaningful world. The fact that such worlds are enchanted worlds, worlds steeped in magic, simply demonstrates the severity of our contemporary crisis. 'Magic' is a degraded category in our society; if you believe in magic in this world, you are an irrational flake. And yet magic is all we have in our attempt to recover some vicarious sense of meaningfulness. If fantasy primarily looks back, primarily celebrates those values rendered irrelevant by post-industrial society, it is because our future only holds the promise of a more trenchant nihilism. One may have faith otherwise, but by definition such faith is not rational. Faith, remember, is belief without reasons."
Mr. Bakker's Dragons Over Spaceships: Fantasy and Science Fiction as Cultural Prostheses is a more philosophical/academic discussion that touches on some of the same topics in the SFFWorld.com article.
But an excerpt:
The idea that the race, gender, or sexual roles of a given work of secondary world, quasi-medieval fantasy were dictated by history doesn’t work on any level. First, history has an almost unimaginably rich set of examples to pull from. Second, there are a wide variety of secondary world faux-medieval fantasies that don’t reach for historical accuracy and which would be served poorly by the attempt. And third, even in the works where the standard is applied, it’s only applied to specific, cherry-picked facets of the fantasy culture and the real world.