The discussion is still on at the GW / Chapterhouse / IP post. Paul's Bods commented to put some thoughts on IP beyond gaming and JamesP left a great anecdote showing the extent of GW's past support and relations with players.
Also, re GW's releases for CSM, at BoLS today I linked to this essay, but suggested a fantasy malaise goes beyond literature and into tabletop gaming too. There's a thoughtful response to the essay up in this post at Strange Horizons.
I also wonder if the similarity of a pair of those CSM minis to Tyranid and DE forms, and Warhammer's imaginatively named tomb kings, reflects a way of saving on design time in the age of CAD, if base patterns are easily reused. If so, what are the implications?
Finally, on the subject of Warhammer and support for older games, I'll take the chance to mention Seb's blog, which is doing a fine job helping keep Warhammer Quest alive.
As ever, any and all thoughts are welcome, whether here or deeper down in the posts.
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Finally, on the subject of Warhammer and support for older games, I'll take the chance to mention Seb's blog, which is doing a fine job helping keep Warhammer Quest alive.
As ever, any and all thoughts are welcome, whether here or deeper down in the posts.
4 comments:
That malaise essay is interesting (if a bit long-winded).
Sadly, I don't feel like there is much heart in sci-fi or fantasy these days, with the exception perhaps of young adult fiction. It feels to me as though most of the stuff in the genre is being written by people who are not writers first, they are fantasy and science fiction fans who decided they wanted to be writers. They lack the grand passion, rage or fear of a born writer like Orwell or Philip K. Dick, or the writer's deep psychological need to explore the human condition, like Ursula LeGuin.
They just want to be clever and re-organize tropes, because that's the only way you can go when you're restricted by the very nature of your chosen genre and you lack the intensity to transcend its limitations.
I love F&SF but I rarely read it. I think of modern fantasy and then I think of Dostoevsky, or a book like Giovanni DeLampedusa's The Leopard, and there is simply no comparison. The former are mind-games of self-referential events and characters, but the latter is a deep musing on mortality and the death of worlds.
I think the most important thing that that essay said was to point out that many of these stories don't need to be F or SF. They are journeyman works of fiction doing cosplay. Try imagining any great work of canonical SF without the actual SF, and you can't. It's the narrative possibilities that made the author choose to write in that genre, not their love of elves and spaceships.
That sounds harsh. But it upsets me when I read something truly tragic or exultant, like Poul Anderson's Goat Song or Ellison's Repent Harlequin Said the TickTock Man, and then I read some modern work about time-travelling steam powered detectives who team up with Jane Austen to fight Dracula.
That puts a large part of my thinking too, and very exactly, and it also gives some vaguer feelings a form.
I would add that a journeyman work of fiction does have its value, and it may be that its readers move beyond it and possibly come to a similar understanding to this one in the process. Self-development may need to be a long and even painful process, and maybe tedium helps give capacity the space to form itself.
I'll also add that these genres may well have a fuller potential than others to be a challenge to our world and to us, and that this challenge could be essential to their nature, and essential in general. If so, that's a gauntlet to be thrown down, and this understanding itself could be a source of that grand passion, rage and fear.
I agree on both counts. Now that I think about it, I think that's why I qualified by saying that the young adult genre fiction seems to have more heart. Perhaps it's because it can be forgiven making broad strokes? It's aimed at people still learning the joy of interpreting narratives.
And your second point I totally agree with. There is so much potential in science fiction particularly to explore the world we are making for ourselves. Technology (especially medicine) is going to force us to face some pretty deep questions in the future, and SF is uniquely placed to explore that.
To use my earlier examples, Orwell's 1984 was an exploration of the technology of power and the death of language, and Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep deals with the existential shock we will inevitably face when we create another sentient life form that is not human. You can tell that both of those writers were not trying to be clever; they were frightened and concerned with what they saw as real possibilities. And both of those things are real possibilities.
Think about a direction that the world is going in that scares or angers you, and fictionalize it, and you probably have a damn good SF story.
Thanks for the plug in your recent post by the way, I haven't been on-line much lately.
More insight. In a couple of short comments you've put some arguments that could be very useful. I like the summary in the penultimate paragraph too - it makes the essence quite clear and the discussion easier to follow up.
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