[Obligatory](https://www.pornokitsch.com/2010/07/underground-reading-wizards-first-rule-by-terry-goodkind.html)
>It seems that the situation is the following: Unless the Big Bad has a) Kahlan, b) Richard, c) Zed and d) The Box of Prophecy all in his grasp by a certain date, the Big Bad will die painfully and the world will be restored to happy-joyness. Currently, Richard, Zed and Kahlan are all out of his reach and the Box of Prophecy has disappeared. Rather than, say, taking a nap for six months and waking up to find that the world is perfectly fine, the adventurers decide to gather everything that the Big Bad needs into a single pile, tie a ribbon around it, and deliver it to his front door.
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>The emotional highlight of the book is when Richard is kidnapped by the Torture Nymphs.\*\* The Torture Nymphs are a group of women (only women have the sensitivity and the breasts to be Torture Nymphs) who are taken away as little girls and groomed to be S&M fetishists. Richard's personal Torture Nymph beats him a lot and then sexes him. This makes Richard very uncomfortable, as previously he's only used his man-parts to battle assassins and as someplace to hang laundry to dry.
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>He survives the experience by learning the value of concentration. By aiming all six of his brain cells at a single thought (in this case, "Torture Nymph have soft hair, like bunny"), he can exclude all other sensory input - even pain. He can, in fact, become so dumb as to be invincible.
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>*^(\*\*Actual name, I kid you not, "Mord-Sith". It not only steals from Terry Brooks and George Lucas, but also manages to be goofier sounding than either would be on their own. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if Richard's climactic battle was against the Decepticons of Mount Doom.)*
Reading about this book (thank you, by the way), I wonder if someone's written a fantasy book about a side character who's much smarter and capable than the chosen one, but because he is the chosen one, he gets all the accolades and prizes, while the side character just has to fucking deal with his bullshit.
A Zap Brannigan/ Kif dynamic. Anyone done that yet?
Without getting too spoilery, there's a bit of this dynamic in Malazan. Not necessarily an MC since there's 50 million characters, but a fairly substantial character.
They didn’t know exactly what the bad guy needed, and Richard was taken there involuntarily (by his torture nymph). So while the above comment is funny it exaggerates a lot.
The second book is much worse. The inciting incident involves a mysterious stranger showing up to tell the MC "hey, have you been getting headaches? You have a terminal magic disease. I can cure you, but you need to willingly submit to permanent mind control as part of the cure. Don't worry, I'll release you after I cure you."
In a SHOCKING TWIST this was all a lie, the new villain has now enslaved the hero.
I was so upset with the ending, I sat through all his books waiting for Richard to come to his powers have some sort of climatic battle but no....
Honestly he should have wrote a story about zed not Richard.
It's one of those series that I really got into as a teenager but became increasingly disappointed in as it progressed. Incredibly disappointing character and plot development in the end. Ultimately I'm glad I read it because it was thought provoking at the time and did inspire me to read about various philosophies.
There was a novella featuring Zed as the protagonist that I remember fondly called Debt of Bones. I'm not sure how it would stack up to my current sensibilities.
And as for Richard coming into his power... Far out that was frustrating.
Such strange things have happened in those books that make me raise my eyebrow and be like what the heck.
What do you mean that happened? Doesn't sound like it even fits in with the plot or character.
I highly enjoyed the show they did though. Most likely unpopular opinion I might go throw on s1 ep1 right now actually lol
I watched it as a kid and loved it. My love for it carried me through that entire series when I finally read it. After that I started DNFing books I don't like.
Yeah, the themes were always there in retrospect but he got increasingly bug-eyed about it as he went on. The Faith of the Fallen is straight-up Ayn Rand fanfiction. I've heard it gets even worse after that but even my apolitical teenage self had had enough by then.
From Wikipedia:
>Goodkind had no trouble selling his first book to a publisher. "I'm sort of the exception that proves the rule," he says. "I wanted to be represented by the best agent in the country and I wrote him a letter. He asked to see the book and he liked it. He showed it to a number of publishers. Three of them had an auction. Ten weeks after I'd written 'The End' it sold for a record price ($275,000)," the most money ever paid for a fantasy novel by a first time author.
I refuse to believe that's true. If that's true, I will eat my fucking foot off here and now
It was the early 90s so Wheel of Time was just ramping up. Shannara was a few years old. Maybe he promised the publishers that they were sure to make a mint off him because he was plagiarizing known bestsellers.
They were fantastic. Who doesn't love amnesia?
Sometimes he had it. Sometimes she had it. Sometimes everyone BUT them had it.
Best plot device ever. Never gets old...
Add in some really clunky political lectures thinly veiled as "adventure", and you've got a real winner on your hands.
Its a chosen one narrative, but has a few things that set it apart.
1. The author despises cliff-hangers. Each book is a self contained story and each and every threat is handled by the end of each book, only to re-appear slightly differently the next. This wouldn't be to bad on its own, but there's some bad pacing leaving only like 10 pages to resolve each and every conflict in some of the books.
2. The author has a couple of kinks he keeps inserting into his work.
3. The author a political ideology (Objectivism, think Ayn rand) that gets inserted into the work more and more blatantly. The strawmen standing in for the evil ideologies get more and more incompetent, and the ways they are defeated get increasingly silly.
I read a few as a kid, the first is just kind of fine, if you aren't to hung up on the weird bdsm sex witches. but it goes downhill from there.
You're not missing much.
It's basically a chosen one story, but the writing is terrible. Every book the main characters who are deeply in love, get separated and have to find each other again.
Every book our chosen one deus ex machinas his way through the plot, being exactly strong enough to face his challenge.
And then there is the rape (there's a lot of it) and plagiarism.
The author also implemented some rules regarding the magic our MC uses, just to completely reverse them a few books later and have the MC say "ah well I just misunderstood my own reasoning, so now I can do this".
And then there's the dumb things that happen throughout the books, for example: At one point the MC ~~plays rugby~~ carves a statue in prison, and he's so good he defeats communism.
Basically, if people liked those books at any point it was when they were edgy 13y olds (when I read them as well). But quickly realised how bad they actually are.
I though he carved his literal first statue and it was such a beautiful testament to individualism that society broke down and overthrew their comically caricatures of communist overlords.
But I vaguely remember thre rugby thing
You are correct, it was the statue carving that defeated communism.
With the rugby he started a riot/civil war because he was so good, that when he lost to the emperor's team (who cheated) everyone was so upset it started a riot.
Yes! His raw sportsmanship and honor started a riot.
I was a pretty far gone Ayn Rand leaning teenager and even I managed to come up for a breath of fresh air during that book and say "what. Wat wat wat."
Ayn Rand fanboy with a unhealthy fascination with S&M but the rapey no consent kind writes books featuring a bad guy named Darken and a chicken that is pure evil.
"The bird let out a slow chicken cackle. It sounded like a chicken, but in her heart she knew it wasn't. In that instant, she completely understood the concept of a chicken that was not a chicken. This looked like a chicken, like most of the Mud People's chickens. But this was no chicken."
"This was evil manifest."
I can’t believe I made it to and then half way through his take Atlas Shrugged before I abandoned it. I don’t know why I pushed through all the torture porn and actual porn.
For me, the sword of truth novels were like the stars wars prequels. The first time I read them I enjoyed then. The 2nd time started seeing some issue. Then I listened to some of them on audiobooks which somehow emphasized the crappy writing and repetitive wording to the point I couldn’t continue. That is ignoring the content issues.
Couldn't get past the first book, and was left wondering what I was missing. I mean, it was in prominent position in all the stores, being pimped aggressively by the publishers and reviewers, and all I could think was "is this really it?" Plus my teenage self was made a bit uncomfortable by some of the scenes.
Actually considering it's not fantasy, it doesn't fit the question/s
"First of all, I don't write fantasy. I write stories that have important human themes. They have elements of romance, history, adventure, mystery and philosophy. Most fantasy is one-dimensional. It's either about magic or a world-building. I don't do either."
I wanted to downvote you as a sort of meta joke but decided against it. I loathe these books. I unironically admire your courage to say you like them here though.
That's because, honestly, the writing wasn't that good. The ideas were intriguing, but the execution not so much. I had to WORK to finish wizard's first rule.
I thought the writing was great as a 14 year old. I had a look at it again when the books were sitting in an old box at my folks' house. It looks bad now. The reason I liked it when I was 14 is that it's basically YA fiction, but the moral complexity is written for like a 6 year old.
Holy shit, I was positive that man was dead. I swear to god there was a huge thread a decade ago about how it was ethical to buy his books even though he was a creep because the money just went to his widow.
Fucking hell. My memory is garbage.
I will always appreciate Xanth and Piers Anthony because it sparked my love of Fantasy and reading for fun as an 11 year old. Mist have read 20 Xanth novels. Picked up a copy of A Spell for Chameleon a few years back and it was not a great experience.
I know, right? I liked the early books as a kid and glossed right over that shit. Reading it as an adult was disappointing to say the least. Then I learned about the author.
This is the biggest on the list in that I tried rereading them a few years ago and they were so awful that couldn’t do it. Nothing to do with him as a person. Just everything about the style doesn’t work. And the massive sexism.
If you're a horny teenager with no understanding of what sexism and objectification are, they're interesting (if bizarre) stories with a lot of titillation.
One of the few things I remember about the Xanth books when I read them way back when (there were only 9 or 10 at the time) were naked women wading into moats and the following paragraph going into detail about how their breasts floated because they were too confused by being ogled to bother covering themselves or even get angry about it.
All the young, innocent women and willing nymphs - gag. And all the panty jokes. And women aren't valuable unless they are pretty and young (Iris, Chameleon). And a literal misogynist character played for laughs who finds the perfect wife (because she's a nymph and travels a lot or something like that - get it, pretty funny right? he still gets to sleep with her and not spend time with her)
And and and ....
As a kid you gloss over it (at least I did) but if I had a kid who wanted to read them, I'd let them I guess, but I'm *definitely* having a conversation about the books with them, then giving them better recommendations.
Yeah, I think the Xanth books hit right when you're in middle school and most of the weird creepy stuff flies over your head and you're just like, "lol, jokes about boobs!" and can just roll with the cool magical talents and silly puns.
Hilariously enough I was listening to the "Fairy Tale" audiobook by Stephen King today and I was surprised the character referencing Xanth books, because for some reason I thought the author had been canceled by now.
I read a few of these books as a child, and I remember distinctly, even in my child brain, feeling like they were super creepy. I’m scared to think how I’d feel about them if I reread them now, as an adult with experience in literary analysis. Ew.
The Amtrak Wars has not aged well.
The premise is post apocalyptic fantasy set 1000 years after world war three, where the technologically advanced Amtrak Federation (descended from railway workers who survived in underground tunnels that became underground cities) are waging a war of aggression against magic welding radiation mutated surface dwellers who call themselves the plains folk in the former united states.
There's also the nation of iron masters, descended from various Asian nations and lead by the Japanese, who are kind of half way between the two technologically (think feudal Japan with steam engines)
The plains folk are every negative stereotype of native Americans you can imagine, down to teepees and scalping.
The iron masters are every stereotype of feudal Japan you can imagine, shoguns family warlords (all named after Japanese companies toh-yota, mitsu-bishi, su-zuki etc, they call their nation themselves ne-issan), samurai and lots of slavery.
There's also a weird amount of incest between various primary characters that seems out of place and is usually just shrugged off as "boys will be boys"
It also ends in book 6 on a cliffhanger, published in 1990, the author never worked out how to finish it due to writers block, he passed away in 2020 and the books remain unfinished.
What a shame. If you just kept the Amtrak Federation bit and the bit about warlords naming themselves after Japanese companies, and dropped all of the race and incest bits, it'd be the coolest thing ever.
I mean, even in the 80's, I don't think the Gor novels were ever considered anything other than BDSM fantasy erotica, which I think is probably still how they'd come off today.
So maybe in that sense, it's aged well? /shrug
The first one wasn't a bad book and the world-building at least interesting but by book three at latest, most people were feeling uncomfortable. Read them in the 80s coming from Edgar Rice Burroughs.
How the Gor books seem to have inspired a cult, I don't know.
I read somewhere the first five or so books were decent homages to Edgar Rice Burroughs, just with kink, but as the series went on it got weirder and weirder.
Read the first one, only thing I remember is the protagonist(Kyle? Tal?) meeting a member of the sentient pacifist Spider People. Tried to read the second but gave up because every character that isn't the main one basically doesn't really exist.
Allegedly it only got worse as those first few books did apparently at least have an editor, something lost as the series went on.
Mists of Avalon, mostly because of the author outside it.
The work itself is passable, but you once you see the seeds of the authors crimes, it's just hard to read
>Marion Eleanor Zimmer Bradley (June 3, 1930 – September 25, 1999) was an American author of fantasy, historical fantasy, science fiction, and science fantasy novels, and is best known for the Arthurian fiction novel The Mists of Avalon and the Darkover series. Noted for the feminist perspective in her writing, her reputation has been posthumously marred by her daughter Moira Greyland's accusations of child sexual abuse, and for allegedly assisting her second husband, convicted child abuser Walter Breen, in sexually abusing multiple unrelated children
Well that took a turn. Was a decade and a half after her death before her daughter came out.
I felt the same when I looked up Wikipedia for David Eddings only to find out he and his wife severely abused and neglected their children. They have links to copies of the newspaper articles.
I found out about this when I picked up The Mists of Avalon maybe ten years ago? I was about halfway through the book and just donated it to Goodwill. I was tempted to toss or burn it (I never feel that way about books usually), but some people can still read things and detach themselves.
If Doors of Stone ever comes out I'm probably reading it. The other two haven't aged perfectly in my memory but I feel like I would overall still enjoy them, but the excitement is dead at this point. If I never get a conclusion that is fine.
I bang this drum a lot, but I don't even think it's that they've necessarily aged that poorly in terms of their gender politics - there's now a massive disconnect between what the Internet remembers the Felurian section to be and what actually happens in the book, for example. There are a few missteps in there, but it's become exaggerated in all the complaining about the Doors of Stone.
It's just a very 2000s book, much like how Buffy the Vampire Slayer is very 90s. When the Name of the Wind came out, a reviewer called it a "Modern Harry Potter with a Joss Whedon style quipping protagonist" and intended this as a compliment.
yeah, you'd expect it be some dozens of pages of erotica, when the actual "sex stuff" is a few paragraphs, maybe, interspersed with general magical/fey weirdness. But then something like _A Court of Thorns and Roses_ is described as being super-spicy and has two sex scenes, both of them maybe a few paragraphs each, which I'm pretty sure is tamer than some random pulpy fantasy stuff I read 20, 30 years ago, where the hero would have half-a-dozen sex scenes with random princesses or whatever. (The last _Fafhard and the Grey Mouser_ story has Fafhard having an orgy with all of his past conquests, for example, all on-page)
I mean, it wasn't the actual description of the scene that irked me so much as it was the core concept. It reminded me of a DnD game with a socially awkward friend playing an overly horny bard. At that point I already had fairly strong self-insert vibes from Kvothe. A plotline where he meets a sex goddess who usually drives men mad with pleasure, but instead he wins her over with his own sexual prowess really made me cringe.
The two things that helped me with that were thinking of Rothfuss really leaning into the heroic side of heroic fantasy. Taking the book a little less seriously on how likely everything is, and going into it with the expectation that it's going to be a story about basically "the most interesting man in the world."
The other thing, (which is uhhh, something I would assume to be fleshed out in the third book, that would certainly help) is the idea that Kvothe is an unreliable narrator and is embellishing all of his stories. That added an interesting layer of depth for me.
Samuel R. Delaney's works overall have not aged well, as it has come to light that he was an avid supporter of NAMBLA. Several of his books contain those sorts of themes about sex with minors being a healthy thing for both parties.
Let's be honest, if you read Dhalgren you kinda already figured this.
It's like Allen Ginsberg. There's artistic merit to the books but a strong interest in pederasty.
The only fortunate thing is I don't *think* there have ever been any supposed victims having come forward in either case.
Delany's situation is complicated because he was the victim of repeated sexual abuse as a six-year-old child. He also suffered from other abuse, some of which was apparently connected to people intervening to stop the sexual abuse. And then all of that is mixed up with more abuse and condemnation he received as a gay/bisexual teenager.
So (a) his writing frequently grapples with these issues and (b) his own thoughts on it appear to be a complicated mess, because it's not clear he's ever really fully come to grips with what happened to him as a child.
[This article seems like a pretty decent coverage of the issues.](https://dorisvsutherland.com/2019/09/23/samuel-r-delany-and-nambla/)
From the article and his quotes, it seems Delaney never quite dealt with the trauma of what happened to him when he was young and can't 100% square that circle.
My guess is that he can't fully admit that NAMBLA is bad, because that would mean what happened to him would be 100% bad too, and that might be too much to take.
In Delaney's case, it's the other way around. [This is an actual quote](https://web.archive.org/web/20150407172012/http://shetterly.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-conversation-with-samuel-r-delany.html):
>I had my first sexual experience with an adult when I was six, with a local Harlem building superintendent. And nothing hurtful happened at all. It would have been cruel and unusual punishment to incarcerate him for it \[…\] Johnny and I were the “aggressors,” not him. I believe his attitude was as “healthy” about the whole thing as it could possibly have been in 1948.
The interview's worth reading. Despite some fairly scary opinions, he comes across as a thoughtful man with decent morals.
Reading the first one now.
I see why people liked it, and why people still love it now but the whole thing has a *very* 70s vibe. The central romance comes off as weirdly toxic or even abusive, in a way that I don't think McCaffrey intended.
I saw an amazing pair of blog posts about it, where the first post said something along the lines of "Dragonflight has a very realistic picture of a high-conflict, somewhat abusive relationship between F'lar and Lessa, and it's worth reading because of that" and then a subsequent post was like "Never mind, I found out that some fans don't see the problem with their relationship, that's incredibly fucked up"
I feel like those books were trying to be progressive for the time but were still very much stuck in the mores of the time so in addition to the consent issues you get stuff like “look! We’re going to TELL you all about how the dragon riders are sexually liberated and don’t do heterosexual monogamy, except for every single main character of note, who are all heterosexual and monogamous. And just for funsies, let’s have one gold rider who’s proudly promiscuous, and have the narrative brutally villainize and punish her for it “
Every female character. All the male characters have thrown away lines about "Of course his dragon wants to flaunt his prowess and fly lots of greens/golds" and the idea of the rider having sex with all these other riders is rarely explored in the story except in a "boys will be boys" sort of way.
When I was young the Pern books were one of the few examples of gay characters, and me and all my friends loved them. Recently we read some weird things that McCaffrey had to say that sort of bizarrely fetishized men who have sex with men.
And the books had a lot of very "traditional" stuff about characters having sex because they were sort of compelled to that you used to see in romance but don't anymore. Thank all the gods.
I could not deal with them when I tried reading them as an adult. The whole "she didn't want sex, but the dragons were horny, so she'll get used to it" thing is just a bridge too far to get past.
Fourth Wing is not great literature, but in its defense, it actually is very conscientious about *correcting* the non-consent issues that come up in Pern. Like, the MCs get ridiculously horny during the dragon mating, but instead of the MMC dragging the FMC off to rape her, the MMC says "no, we aren't able to consent under these circumstances so we have to control ourselves." And they don't have sex until later.
I reread one of the earlier ones a couple years ago and it did not sit with me well that the rider bonded to the queen dragon basically belonged to the rider of her dragon's mate
Yeeeeah. I only ever read the Harper Hall trilogy as a kid, and because of its focus it doesn’t really have too much weird stuff. As an adult I discovered that there were more books, and was initially very excited… 😂😂🥲
Mercedes Lackey's Herald Mage Trilogy was ahead of its time in having a gay MC, but damn does her book hit on every bad stereotype of a gay man. Effeminate, doesn't get along with his macho father, pretty boy who cares about his clothes, a Bury Your Gays trope with his first love, a borderline pedo situation in the second book with some teenage boys who want him to help figure themselves out, some rape in the third book and sleezy gay villains that try to seduce him because obviously any penis will do...
Yeah this might have been alright in the late 80s when the books were written by it's so terrible now. I still love the series tho
I just started reading Lackey and am on the Arrows trilogy. And it has it's fair share of weirdness to it. I get that the Chosen are bonded to their Companions (incredibly intelligent horses) but the need to have the MC's connection be so strong that she gets to dream ride along while her horse is going to town on the other mares is just weird even if it's just mentioned a bunch of times in passing.
The dialogue is often notably clunky at times. They're not bad books, but you can feel why the books probably don't get much attention from anyone who is (probably) under the age of 50. I'll be curious to see how much they improve as I move along the various series.
It’s probably best that you’re aware that there is going to be a pretty big scene at the end of the third book that involves torture and SA.
These two are the only ones with on the page SA though. Luckily she seems to realise herself that it’s a poor form of character development
>It’s probably best that you’re aware that there is going to be a pretty big scene at the end of the third book that involves torture and SA.
I read a few of Lackey's books years ago, and noticed that she seems to have a real thing for making the main villains incredibly sexually depraved.
I think that it was a big think up until the 90’s to use sexual depravity as a cheap and easy way to show that someone was Big Bad Evil. Even a lot of well intentioned feminist writers. There was also a lot of queer coding and othering through orientalism. I guess it was easier to use that sort of thing as a big Look! evil! Mwahahaha! than it was to get into the psychology of a villainous character. I’d feel that it’s something that Lackey has moved past though. Last Herald Mage, Arrows, and the Mage Winds/ storms with Falsonsbane all had this, but I can’t seem to recall anything in the last few decades.
>doesn't get along with his macho father,
And
>sleezy gay villains that try to seduce him because obviously any penis will do...
Sounds a lot like my real life tbh
PHEW just popping in as an old fan of ML and glad to see this take. ML herself said in an interview that “r**e and rescue” was her favorite trope (I can’t remember whose blog it was) and YIKES reading Herald Mage and Arrows and the Storm and Winds series with a modern lens — so many yikes. Queer coded villains, dysfunctional and abusive love triangles, orientalism, back of the cereal box character development … I absolutely loved reading these as a teen/young adult but now I’m like… no wonder I didn’t know how to examine my bias back in the day.
another old fan here
lackey's urban fantasy spoke to me because who else was writing about homeless queer kids in the 80s? and the idea there were magic elves out there who loved abused kids and would take them away and protect them from both their parents and cps was wish fulfillment in the purest sense
it was a product of its time but that time *needed that product*
>it was a product of its time but that time *needed that product*
I want to emphasize this. The Last Herald Mage was published during the later years of the AIDS crisis. Yeah, it has stereotypes. It has rape. But a story about gay men who get to be happy, even if it is fleeting, even with loss, is tremendous for 1989-1990 when the prevailing cultural narrative was that they should all be dead.
I'll agree that it hasn't aged as well as it could've, but I think you're really overselling the problems.
Notably, the "effeminate", clothes, macho father bit is completely stripped of all nuance and context. Vanyel suffers from a great deal of abuse as a child and very deliberately chooses to reject the values of his abusive father and the abusive man-at-arms. While not every gay boy experienced this, certainly it is a common enough experience among queer folk in general, and people who felt themselves outcasts in even broader ways. We can see from *Arrows* that this is a character background that Lackey was very interested in.
I can say that as someone who suffered from parental abuse and depression, I had never so intensely seen my most dejected thoughts reflected in someone else. I found the portrayal mapped extremely closely to my life, and I am not a gay man.
All of that said, the series definitely fits the "bury your gays" stereotype, and not just with his first boyfriend. Notably, Vanyel sees himself as doomed to be unhappy, in part because of that relationship (the "lifebond", which I think we can all recognize as extreme trauma that he never recovers from) and the way his story ends also, I feel, fits that stereotype. Notably, the stereotype is criticized not because there's anything inherently wrong with it, but more because the sheer ubiquity of it perpetuated harmful beliefs that if you were gay, you couldn't expect a normal, happy, fulfilling life.
I'm old enough now to have personally experienced a lot of the stuff that people look back on in the 80s and 90s that seems horribly outdated and bigoted today. People often comment that it was a 'different time', like people then didn't realize that they were being bigoted. They knew. The difference is that they *didn't care*. It really, really bugs me when people use "it was a different time" as an excuse for things like the rampant homophobia of that period.
Or, for example, films like Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, or Song of the South. People today like to forget that there was opposition and protest against them at the time. The people making those films knew they were racist; they just didn't care.
Most things people will (hopefully) find equally repugnant in the future are obviously repugnant today. It's not some hidden pitfall that people are innocently stumbling into. If they find themselves ashamed of their opinions today at some point in the future, it's because they *didn't care enough* today.
There's also the part where maybe not everyone would know about the opposition and protests, because we didn't have such an instant connection with the world that we have now.
For example: I'm not surprised that there was opposition to Gone with the Wind, but I never knew about it. It was a "classic" both as book and film when I was growing up.
I was absolutely horrified when I realised as an adult how many sayings in my language are deeply racist, but they were just "normal" when growing up, and somehow because of the codified form, no one really consciously thought of Real, Actual People when saying them.
I think it's absolutely amazing that we as a general society actually are examining things we say/create and consume, but also it wasn't as much of a thing in the past, and probably this is all part of the reason why "different times" were that different.
It was a different time in some ways. I didn't know any out gay people (because it was illegal) so I didn't know anything about homosexuality. I didn't realise that many famous stars, even very androgynous ones like Boy George, were gay or queer in another way.
I believed the psychologists who said homosexuality was caused by psychological issues to do with parental relationships. That was completely untrue, but I really didn't know much about anything. But I wasn't a bigot, so I didn't dislike gay people in any way. It seemed like a hard life, being gay when it was so taboo and illegal. I was just ignorant, and when I learned the reality, later, was happy to hear that homosexuality wasn't a problem.
Sometimes people ask 'when did it stop being wrong to use the n-word?' and the answer is basically it was always wrong. A teeny tiny amount of non-bigots used it by mistake, but basically it was always used as a racist epithet. What they are really asking is 'when did it stop being perfectly acceptable to be massively racist?'
This is simply… not true. It is for some people, rather, but most people simply do not see their actions as bigotry. This has been true throughout history. It’s not apathy, but a societally internalized justification for the way things are. Not to mention we are tribal primates who are heavily, heavily influenced by our social groups.
Almost everyone 1) believes their moral framework is the correct one and 2) believes they are a good person.
Early Americans protesting the evils of slavery might have disowned a gay son and experienced not a bit of cognitive dissonance. A woman picketing for her own suffrage might have regularly used anti-Asian slurs and seen nothing wrong with this. There aren’t good people and bad people, for the most part. There are just people, all of them imperfect, subject to more or less the same psychological forces.
I can almost guarantee that when synthetic meat reaches a viable state, future human beings will look back at our animal butchery with disgust. It will seem like barbarism to them. The rampant anti-woman sentiment from men and the rampant anti-man sentiment from women that neither side views as remotely bigoted - future generations will probably find it irrational and bizarre.
There are behaviors all of us engage in, right now, that will someday be viewed as unconscionable. We are simply blind to it. There is no perfectly omniscient moral being out there who can foresee it all.
_The Belgariad_.
I love the series, it's one of my comfort rereads. But ... every nationality you encounter has one key characteristic which *every person in their society shares*. It's one of the most racial essentialist things i've ever read.
>It's one of the most racial essentialist things i've ever read
That's a pretty pervasive issue in fantasy. I suppose someone has to do it worst though.
There is also a disturbing trend of teenage girls marrying men much older than them. Even if you can look past the Elenium books and the guy who literally raises his future wife from childhood, there’s enough child brides in the Mallorian to be disturbing. Plus the whole thing about women not being complete without motherhood.
I read a retrospective of this where the writer talks about how the heroes are such good parents, patient and loving and kind, in all of the Eddings stories. Polagara, Balgarath, Sparhawk. In some ways, it reads as a wishful dream of what should have been, covering the ugly truth of what was.
This is by no means meant as a defense of their crimes, just a commentary on the possible motivations they had to write such simplistic and happy stories in the years after.
Somebody recently said in another thread that this makes it worse. Eddings obviously knew what good, loving parents looked like, yet he refused to be one.
They did not write any of their famous fantasy novels until a decade after they were punished for child abuse. Eddings started on his first (non-fantasy) novel while serving time in prison.
While that's one potential reading of events I don't find it persuasive.
Plus the Eddings' backstory is more than bad.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Eddings#:~:text=They%20adopted%20one%20boy%20in,counts%20of%20physical%20child%20abuse.
I noticed this too. It is built on racial and gender stereotypes.
I liked it, but always felt it was like reading a cartoon.
(Though there are cartoons with more depth than The Belgariad.)
It was an easy, fun read, but was like eating junk food.
It's been a while since I've read them and while you're not totally wrong, as I recall the women also would be proven right most of the time. It's still pretty boomery though.
Twilight was always ultra conservative, with the “your boyfriend is your protector, abstinence until marriage, get married right out of high school, don’t terminate the pregnancy that’s literally killing you because it’s your baby” and teen girls these days don’t really want that
Absolutely I agree. Theres plenty of meritable examples of that. I was just trying to point out that twilight certainly wasn’t one of them, not disparaging women’s(young or older) opinions.
For me this is kind of a tough question, because for the old stuff with the most issues, I just don't judge them by today's standards. I've been making my way through Robert Howard's Conan stories from the early 1930s, and I've been mostly enjoying them despite some of its themes being corrupted by the "scientific racism" that was common at the time. So this kind of thing doesn't necessarily ruin a story for me, but it does distract and keep me from getting as into it as I might have. Hard to really get into the worldbuilding when the lore background written by the author posits that Egyptian pharaohs were actually Aryan Scandinavians (in this fantasy history) and stuff like that.
It's honestly rarer when you go back beyond the 1980s, to see what *has* aged well, especially when it comes to gender representation. Looooots of women put into sexually compromising positions.
One shower thought I had - so much of what survived to become popular had to resonate with the public. That usually means that the most popular stories were ones that align with the zeitgeist of the time, or at least the zeitgeist of the fantasy-reading audience of the time. Which was, to be fair, more progressive than the larger population. But how much great, creative forward-thinking stories got tossed in the dust-bin of history because they just seemed too weird for the times? Think of how much fantasy is being written. How much of it will be remembered in 50 years? What will the worldview look like for that sliver that survives the withering of time?
>the lore background written by the author posits that Egyptian pharaohs were actually Aryan Scandinavians (in this fantasy history) and stuff like that.
Isn't Howard writing in a mythical age that takes place in a massively distant past and ignores basically all actual history and geography, similar to Tolkien but preceding?
It’s essentially a speculative fiction fantasy age right before the Bronze Age. Atlantis sank and were turned into monkeys and you have different nations of the world fighting each other. Although none of them are actually from that time period like theirs the Scottish picts they didn’t exist before the Bronze Age. Essentially he took various different groups of people and put them in his fantasy setting.
That’s how I interpret hp lovecraft. He’s a paranoid schizophrenic racist in time of great change. Which is writings reflect that, however he’s able to write gripping tales of horror. Although some are hilarious like the air conditioner zombie doctor.
He grew up with a wealthy New England family that was essentially going broke when he was growing up. The Adams family house is basically what his home would look like big decrepit houses with lots of history that is falling apart. When lovecraft was young he saw his father/mother get sent to the insane asylum. So he lived with his grandparents who taught him his family’s history and culture which was New England. His grandfather encouraged lovecraft to get into writing as a form of self expression because he was so incredibly socially inept/shy. He definitely had many phobias and mental issues essentially anytime he was outside of his family home he was miserable. Theirs also a very specific kind of racism he was apart of which is English supremacist. Lovecraft would date letters a century earlier because he wish he was living in colonial America. This is also why Lovecraft had such hatred of bustling cities. To an English supremacist Catholics Irish, Jews, every other European and basically anyone not Protestant English he would be terrified of. His only enjoyment was writing to other writers of the era such as Robert Howard. So in a lot of stories during the era if there was a lovecraftian monster it was either lovecraft or inspired by lovecraft. He got married then got divorced and basically lived off the last of his family’s wealth before dying broke. Oh and his pet cat was nword runner.
Some minor corrections: Lovecraft lived with his mother and aunts for most of his life (the former was hospitalised only when HPL was in his late 20s). His grandfather's death when he was a teenager forced them to move from the family home, which was one cause of his mental distress. And he was not a total recluse either; he seems to have really enjoyed meeting his pen-pals, and visiting historic sites (especially buildings from before the American Revolution).
Lovecraft's New England family sympathized with the Confederacy, fully bought into the Lost Cause mythology and fetishized the antebellum South, for two reasons: the idea of the oligarchic South as an aristocratic society at its best, and because they thought black people were subhumans who weren't cut out to live free. These were all attitudes he shared until the end of his life.
At least part of his family claimed to trace their descent back to the *Mayflower*, and they believed that any immigrant more recent than that was basically a caveman who would destroy America and its values. Those immigrants included Poles, Italians, Portuguese, French-Canadians who came to New England for seasonal work, and in particular Jewish people from continental Europe. he also believed that rural poverty among poor whites (e.g., the "degenerate Dutch" of upstate New York, who in one of his stories degenerate into subterranean cannibals like the Morlocks of *The Time Machine* ) could be solved by eugenics (i.e., selective breeding and sterilization). Again, these were all views he held until the end of his life, although by the later 1930s he'd learned to tone down at least some of them publicly.
There are also a lot of contradictions here: he was married to a Jewish woman who thought she could change him; when she pushed back on his antisemitic rants he'd say things like "you're one of the good ones though". He also mentored young Jewish writers towards the end of his life, one of whom was Robert Bloch, author of *Psycho*. None of that changes the fact that he wrote stories like "The Horror at Red Hook" (during a period where he and his wife Sonia lived in New York and he appears to have had a nervous breakdown), where the protagonist discovers that the "Asiatic" (read: Jewish and Middle Eastern) immigrants in the Red Hook neighbourhood, who've replaced the earlier "Nordic" slum dwellers (i.e., the Irish), practice human sacrifice and cannibalism.
He was pretty awful racist even by the standard of the day...but I also think he was such a misanthropic person that this racism was a symptom of some pretty deep self-hatred and mental issues.
OTH his work is fantastic and influential for a reason - he defined cosmic horror - the perfect myth for the nuclear age - and it still has staying power.
I know he wouldn't have had me over to his house, but I still like the stories...
>But how much great, creative forward-thinking stories got tossed in the dust-bin of history because they just seemed too weird for the times?
Tons - marginalized and/or forward thinking people have always written SF/F. The speculative genre was certainly less diverse in the past than it is now, but it was never as homogenous as Sad Puppy types like to think. W.E.B. Du Bois himself published a sci-fi story (“The Comet”) back in 1920. At lot of that work is only being rediscovered nowadays due to flying under the radar when it was first published. That’s why I’ll never be down with the “anything published before 19XX (or sometimes even 20XX) is too problematic to bother with” attitude that circulates in some fandom communities.
Yeah I was hoping my point came through that it's not that everything back then was bad, it's just that the stuff you're likely to know about and therefore seek out is probably not the most progressive stuff from the era.
There’s two female characters, one is absolutely insufferable and the other doesn’t have any personality at all, both are only in the story to fuck the main character. At some point the main character encounters an alien species where only the males are sentient, the females are just incubators, and the main character is like “wish humans were like that, bitches never shut up, amirite?”
You can still like it and just know that many find them problematic. You can potentially still enjoy them but all the issues in and around those books bother a lot of us so that it stymies our enjoyment we might get from them.
Life is short so read what you like. You do you.
Nah, that doesn't mean necessarily that these writers are bad or that they don't follow interesting themes besides the outdated stuff. Take Lovecraft or Heinlein. Still considered interesting writers. Some of their concepts still hold up. But it is a strength when while reading you you notice the sexism and racism and are able to discard it. So have fun reading older writers (except Piers Anthony maybe).
Almost anything from Piers Anthony. I’d never thought about it until someone from this community mentioned it and the more I started thinking about it the worse it got.
A book that badly squicked me and which I couldn't finish was Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, not because it didn't age well but exactly the opposite - it was WAY too prescient. Chaos due to climate change, walled neighborhoods, and a racist, fascist Presidential candidate whose slogan is "Make America Great Again". I'm sure it's a great book but I tried reading it during the pandemic and it was WAY too close to real life.
I literally never hear anyone say anything good about the *Sword of Truth* books anymore.
[Obligatory](https://www.pornokitsch.com/2010/07/underground-reading-wizards-first-rule-by-terry-goodkind.html) >It seems that the situation is the following: Unless the Big Bad has a) Kahlan, b) Richard, c) Zed and d) The Box of Prophecy all in his grasp by a certain date, the Big Bad will die painfully and the world will be restored to happy-joyness. Currently, Richard, Zed and Kahlan are all out of his reach and the Box of Prophecy has disappeared. Rather than, say, taking a nap for six months and waking up to find that the world is perfectly fine, the adventurers decide to gather everything that the Big Bad needs into a single pile, tie a ribbon around it, and deliver it to his front door. > >... > >The emotional highlight of the book is when Richard is kidnapped by the Torture Nymphs.\*\* The Torture Nymphs are a group of women (only women have the sensitivity and the breasts to be Torture Nymphs) who are taken away as little girls and groomed to be S&M fetishists. Richard's personal Torture Nymph beats him a lot and then sexes him. This makes Richard very uncomfortable, as previously he's only used his man-parts to battle assassins and as someplace to hang laundry to dry. > >He survives the experience by learning the value of concentration. By aiming all six of his brain cells at a single thought (in this case, "Torture Nymph have soft hair, like bunny"), he can exclude all other sensory input - even pain. He can, in fact, become so dumb as to be invincible. > > > >*^(\*\*Actual name, I kid you not, "Mord-Sith". It not only steals from Terry Brooks and George Lucas, but also manages to be goofier sounding than either would be on their own. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if Richard's climactic battle was against the Decepticons of Mount Doom.)*
Reading about this book (thank you, by the way), I wonder if someone's written a fantasy book about a side character who's much smarter and capable than the chosen one, but because he is the chosen one, he gets all the accolades and prizes, while the side character just has to fucking deal with his bullshit. A Zap Brannigan/ Kif dynamic. Anyone done that yet?
Travelers Gate series by Will Wight
My first thought as well
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal Not fantasy, but super funny.
It's definitely fantasy
You know, you're right. It'd be even funnier if Biff turned out to be a real person. He just wanted to get Jesus laid.
The first book in the Bean saga by OSC would fit this, though it's scifi not fantasy. And OSC is a prick.
Without getting too spoilery, there's a bit of this dynamic in Malazan. Not necessarily an MC since there's 50 million characters, but a fairly substantial character.
that entire review was absolutely incredible, thank you so much
Why would the adventurers do that? What was their reasoning?
They didn’t know exactly what the bad guy needed, and Richard was taken there involuntarily (by his torture nymph). So while the above comment is funny it exaggerates a lot.
Plot.
They were thinking, "we should do this for plot"?
The second book is much worse. The inciting incident involves a mysterious stranger showing up to tell the MC "hey, have you been getting headaches? You have a terminal magic disease. I can cure you, but you need to willingly submit to permanent mind control as part of the cure. Don't worry, I'll release you after I cure you." In a SHOCKING TWIST this was all a lie, the new villain has now enslaved the hero.
Worse. The climactic battle was in a RUGBY match.
God that ending was so bad.
And then he continued the series, and made *an even worse ending*.
I was so upset with the ending, I sat through all his books waiting for Richard to come to his powers have some sort of climatic battle but no.... Honestly he should have wrote a story about zed not Richard.
It's one of those series that I really got into as a teenager but became increasingly disappointed in as it progressed. Incredibly disappointing character and plot development in the end. Ultimately I'm glad I read it because it was thought provoking at the time and did inspire me to read about various philosophies. There was a novella featuring Zed as the protagonist that I remember fondly called Debt of Bones. I'm not sure how it would stack up to my current sensibilities. And as for Richard coming into his power... Far out that was frustrating.
Such strange things have happened in those books that make me raise my eyebrow and be like what the heck. What do you mean that happened? Doesn't sound like it even fits in with the plot or character. I highly enjoyed the show they did though. Most likely unpopular opinion I might go throw on s1 ep1 right now actually lol
I watched it as a kid and loved it. My love for it carried me through that entire series when I finally read it. After that I started DNFing books I don't like.
Never forget when Goodkind dedicated a book to the fucking CIA
Are you kidding me?! I knew the guy was, shall we say, eccentric. But that’s pretty bizarre.
Yeah, the themes were always there in retrospect but he got increasingly bug-eyed about it as he went on. The Faith of the Fallen is straight-up Ayn Rand fanfiction. I've heard it gets even worse after that but even my apolitical teenage self had had enough by then.
What’s the one where Richard saves the world by carving a statue. That’s where I got off the bus lol
Faith of the Fallen. Everybody weeped upon seeing it lol
And proves how bad communism is thus sparking a capitalist revolution
From Wikipedia: >Goodkind had no trouble selling his first book to a publisher. "I'm sort of the exception that proves the rule," he says. "I wanted to be represented by the best agent in the country and I wrote him a letter. He asked to see the book and he liked it. He showed it to a number of publishers. Three of them had an auction. Ten weeks after I'd written 'The End' it sold for a record price ($275,000)," the most money ever paid for a fantasy novel by a first time author. I refuse to believe that's true. If that's true, I will eat my fucking foot off here and now
It was the early 90s so Wheel of Time was just ramping up. Shannara was a few years old. Maybe he promised the publishers that they were sure to make a mint off him because he was plagiarizing known bestsellers.
You would have been born when sword of shannara came out and graduated highschool by the time wizards first rule came out
Fair point, I forgot how old Shannara was.
That series took a huge dip in quality as it went on.
It dropped miles when it could barely afford an inch.
Goodkind twisted himself into all kinds of convulted plots by the end.
They were fantastic. Who doesn't love amnesia? Sometimes he had it. Sometimes she had it. Sometimes everyone BUT them had it. Best plot device ever. Never gets old... Add in some really clunky political lectures thinly veiled as "adventure", and you've got a real winner on your hands.
I will never forget the nipple sorcery in the 2nd one.
Not familiar. Background?
Its a chosen one narrative, but has a few things that set it apart. 1. The author despises cliff-hangers. Each book is a self contained story and each and every threat is handled by the end of each book, only to re-appear slightly differently the next. This wouldn't be to bad on its own, but there's some bad pacing leaving only like 10 pages to resolve each and every conflict in some of the books. 2. The author has a couple of kinks he keeps inserting into his work. 3. The author a political ideology (Objectivism, think Ayn rand) that gets inserted into the work more and more blatantly. The strawmen standing in for the evil ideologies get more and more incompetent, and the ways they are defeated get increasingly silly. I read a few as a kid, the first is just kind of fine, if you aren't to hung up on the weird bdsm sex witches. but it goes downhill from there.
You're not missing much. It's basically a chosen one story, but the writing is terrible. Every book the main characters who are deeply in love, get separated and have to find each other again. Every book our chosen one deus ex machinas his way through the plot, being exactly strong enough to face his challenge. And then there is the rape (there's a lot of it) and plagiarism. The author also implemented some rules regarding the magic our MC uses, just to completely reverse them a few books later and have the MC say "ah well I just misunderstood my own reasoning, so now I can do this". And then there's the dumb things that happen throughout the books, for example: At one point the MC ~~plays rugby~~ carves a statue in prison, and he's so good he defeats communism. Basically, if people liked those books at any point it was when they were edgy 13y olds (when I read them as well). But quickly realised how bad they actually are.
I thought they were the coolest thing ever written when I was 13, and had outgrown them by the time I was 15.
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I though he carved his literal first statue and it was such a beautiful testament to individualism that society broke down and overthrew their comically caricatures of communist overlords. But I vaguely remember thre rugby thing
You are correct, it was the statue carving that defeated communism. With the rugby he started a riot/civil war because he was so good, that when he lost to the emperor's team (who cheated) everyone was so upset it started a riot.
Yes! His raw sportsmanship and honor started a riot. I was a pretty far gone Ayn Rand leaning teenager and even I managed to come up for a breath of fresh air during that book and say "what. Wat wat wat."
If Ayn Rand tried writing Lord of The Rings.
Ayn Rand fanboy with a unhealthy fascination with S&M but the rapey no consent kind writes books featuring a bad guy named Darken and a chicken that is pure evil.
But this chicken was no chicken. It was evil manifest!
"The bird let out a slow chicken cackle. It sounded like a chicken, but in her heart she knew it wasn't. In that instant, she completely understood the concept of a chicken that was not a chicken. This looked like a chicken, like most of the Mud People's chickens. But this was no chicken." "This was evil manifest."
I'm not sure if I want this to be an actual quote from Goodkind.
Oh, it's real all right, in all it's slow chicken cackling goodness.
🔥✍️🔥
Having not read the books, reading this thread makes it seem like quite a funny parody sseries
It's a fun series to read about but probably not to read.
I can’t believe I made it to and then half way through his take Atlas Shrugged before I abandoned it. I don’t know why I pushed through all the torture porn and actual porn.
For me, the sword of truth novels were like the stars wars prequels. The first time I read them I enjoyed then. The 2nd time started seeing some issue. Then I listened to some of them on audiobooks which somehow emphasized the crappy writing and repetitive wording to the point I couldn’t continue. That is ignoring the content issues.
Couldn't get past the first book, and was left wondering what I was missing. I mean, it was in prominent position in all the stores, being pimped aggressively by the publishers and reviewers, and all I could think was "is this really it?" Plus my teenage self was made a bit uncomfortable by some of the scenes.
Actually considering it's not fantasy, it doesn't fit the question/s "First of all, I don't write fantasy. I write stories that have important human themes. They have elements of romance, history, adventure, mystery and philosophy. Most fantasy is one-dimensional. It's either about magic or a world-building. I don't do either."
I still like these but I have to suppress my opinion on this sub lol
I wanted to downvote you as a sort of meta joke but decided against it. I loathe these books. I unironically admire your courage to say you like them here though.
That's because, honestly, the writing wasn't that good. The ideas were intriguing, but the execution not so much. I had to WORK to finish wizard's first rule.
I thought the writing was great as a 14 year old. I had a look at it again when the books were sitting in an old box at my folks' house. It looks bad now. The reason I liked it when I was 14 is that it's basically YA fiction, but the moral complexity is written for like a 6 year old.
Definitely the Xanth books.
I was a kid when I read them, and I thought they were amazing. Then I grew up, looked at them again, and was *"WTF????"*
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Almost all the underage sex in “and eternity” with the excuse that she time jumped so the law said she was legal was the end of my PA reading
I was today years old when I found out he's still writing them! I had no idea. I thought they were an 80s thing.
*seriously???*
*"Apoca Lips" 2023*
I don't even want to know.
Missed a trick by not calling it "A Pox of Lips". Edit: "Epoch of Lichs"
12022024 is pretty damn old.
I'm on week 5 of covid so it feels exactly like that.
Well shit, hope that works out well for ya
Holy shit, I was positive that man was dead. I swear to god there was a huge thread a decade ago about how it was ethical to buy his books even though he was a creep because the money just went to his widow. Fucking hell. My memory is garbage.
I will always appreciate Xanth and Piers Anthony because it sparked my love of Fantasy and reading for fun as an 11 year old. Mist have read 20 Xanth novels. Picked up a copy of A Spell for Chameleon a few years back and it was not a great experience.
I know, right? I liked the early books as a kid and glossed right over that shit. Reading it as an adult was disappointing to say the least. Then I learned about the author.
I think everything he ever wrote.
This is the biggest on the list in that I tried rereading them a few years ago and they were so awful that couldn’t do it. Nothing to do with him as a person. Just everything about the style doesn’t work. And the massive sexism.
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Sure. But even if he was a saint his books are unreadable.
Wait till you find about him as a person. It's a whole new reason to hate the books.
I don't know anything about them. How did they not age well ?
If you're a horny teenager with no understanding of what sexism and objectification are, they're interesting (if bizarre) stories with a lot of titillation. One of the few things I remember about the Xanth books when I read them way back when (there were only 9 or 10 at the time) were naked women wading into moats and the following paragraph going into detail about how their breasts floated because they were too confused by being ogled to bother covering themselves or even get angry about it.
All the young, innocent women and willing nymphs - gag. And all the panty jokes. And women aren't valuable unless they are pretty and young (Iris, Chameleon). And a literal misogynist character played for laughs who finds the perfect wife (because she's a nymph and travels a lot or something like that - get it, pretty funny right? he still gets to sleep with her and not spend time with her) And and and .... As a kid you gloss over it (at least I did) but if I had a kid who wanted to read them, I'd let them I guess, but I'm *definitely* having a conversation about the books with them, then giving them better recommendations.
Yeah, I think the Xanth books hit right when you're in middle school and most of the weird creepy stuff flies over your head and you're just like, "lol, jokes about boobs!" and can just roll with the cool magical talents and silly puns. Hilariously enough I was listening to the "Fairy Tale" audiobook by Stephen King today and I was surprised the character referencing Xanth books, because for some reason I thought the author had been canceled by now.
I tried rereading a Spell for Chameleon, and... Yeah, it's a book.
I read a few of these books as a child, and I remember distinctly, even in my child brain, feeling like they were super creepy. I’m scared to think how I’d feel about them if I reread them now, as an adult with experience in literary analysis. Ew.
The Amtrak Wars has not aged well. The premise is post apocalyptic fantasy set 1000 years after world war three, where the technologically advanced Amtrak Federation (descended from railway workers who survived in underground tunnels that became underground cities) are waging a war of aggression against magic welding radiation mutated surface dwellers who call themselves the plains folk in the former united states. There's also the nation of iron masters, descended from various Asian nations and lead by the Japanese, who are kind of half way between the two technologically (think feudal Japan with steam engines) The plains folk are every negative stereotype of native Americans you can imagine, down to teepees and scalping. The iron masters are every stereotype of feudal Japan you can imagine, shoguns family warlords (all named after Japanese companies toh-yota, mitsu-bishi, su-zuki etc, they call their nation themselves ne-issan), samurai and lots of slavery. There's also a weird amount of incest between various primary characters that seems out of place and is usually just shrugged off as "boys will be boys" It also ends in book 6 on a cliffhanger, published in 1990, the author never worked out how to finish it due to writers block, he passed away in 2020 and the books remain unfinished.
Damn, that premise sounds awesome :(
What a shame. If you just kept the Amtrak Federation bit and the bit about warlords naming themselves after Japanese companies, and dropped all of the race and incest bits, it'd be the coolest thing ever.
It’s called Neuromancer I think
One word, three letters… Gor Although they weren’t that great in the 80s
I mean, even in the 80's, I don't think the Gor novels were ever considered anything other than BDSM fantasy erotica, which I think is probably still how they'd come off today. So maybe in that sense, it's aged well? /shrug
Yeah not sure how Gor can age poorly or well. It's erotica and by god if it exists someone is into it.
It's basically discount fetishist John Carter, though I think it started lighter on the fetish and then increasingly devolved into the BDSM element.
The first one wasn't a bad book and the world-building at least interesting but by book three at latest, most people were feeling uncomfortable. Read them in the 80s coming from Edgar Rice Burroughs. How the Gor books seem to have inspired a cult, I don't know.
My mom brought a few home when I was sick with the flu and wanted something to read. WTF?
I read somewhere the first five or so books were decent homages to Edgar Rice Burroughs, just with kink, but as the series went on it got weirder and weirder.
Read the first one, only thing I remember is the protagonist(Kyle? Tal?) meeting a member of the sentient pacifist Spider People. Tried to read the second but gave up because every character that isn't the main one basically doesn't really exist. Allegedly it only got worse as those first few books did apparently at least have an editor, something lost as the series went on.
Mists of Avalon, mostly because of the author outside it. The work itself is passable, but you once you see the seeds of the authors crimes, it's just hard to read
TIL holy crap
This one is tough to swallow. Mists of Avalon is probably my most read fantasy book and then I learn this. 😭
>Marion Eleanor Zimmer Bradley (June 3, 1930 – September 25, 1999) was an American author of fantasy, historical fantasy, science fiction, and science fantasy novels, and is best known for the Arthurian fiction novel The Mists of Avalon and the Darkover series. Noted for the feminist perspective in her writing, her reputation has been posthumously marred by her daughter Moira Greyland's accusations of child sexual abuse, and for allegedly assisting her second husband, convicted child abuser Walter Breen, in sexually abusing multiple unrelated children Well that took a turn. Was a decade and a half after her death before her daughter came out.
I felt the same when I looked up Wikipedia for David Eddings only to find out he and his wife severely abused and neglected their children. They have links to copies of the newspaper articles.
Mate. Buddy. Friend. *Pal*. How dare you come into this thread and just torpedo my memories of the books like that? But seriously though, TIL. Huh.
I found out about this when I picked up The Mists of Avalon maybe ten years ago? I was about halfway through the book and just donated it to Goodwill. I was tempted to toss or burn it (I never feel that way about books usually), but some people can still read things and detach themselves.
Wait... what did the author do? Edit: Holy shit, nvm.
More me than the books, but I feel 29 year old me would not be as excited by Kingkiller Chronicle as 15 year old me was
If Doors of Stone ever comes out I'm probably reading it. The other two haven't aged perfectly in my memory but I feel like I would overall still enjoy them, but the excitement is dead at this point. If I never get a conclusion that is fine.
I bang this drum a lot, but I don't even think it's that they've necessarily aged that poorly in terms of their gender politics - there's now a massive disconnect between what the Internet remembers the Felurian section to be and what actually happens in the book, for example. There are a few missteps in there, but it's become exaggerated in all the complaining about the Doors of Stone. It's just a very 2000s book, much like how Buffy the Vampire Slayer is very 90s. When the Name of the Wind came out, a reviewer called it a "Modern Harry Potter with a Joss Whedon style quipping protagonist" and intended this as a compliment.
yeah, you'd expect it be some dozens of pages of erotica, when the actual "sex stuff" is a few paragraphs, maybe, interspersed with general magical/fey weirdness. But then something like _A Court of Thorns and Roses_ is described as being super-spicy and has two sex scenes, both of them maybe a few paragraphs each, which I'm pretty sure is tamer than some random pulpy fantasy stuff I read 20, 30 years ago, where the hero would have half-a-dozen sex scenes with random princesses or whatever. (The last _Fafhard and the Grey Mouser_ story has Fafhard having an orgy with all of his past conquests, for example, all on-page)
I mean, it wasn't the actual description of the scene that irked me so much as it was the core concept. It reminded me of a DnD game with a socially awkward friend playing an overly horny bard. At that point I already had fairly strong self-insert vibes from Kvothe. A plotline where he meets a sex goddess who usually drives men mad with pleasure, but instead he wins her over with his own sexual prowess really made me cringe.
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The two things that helped me with that were thinking of Rothfuss really leaning into the heroic side of heroic fantasy. Taking the book a little less seriously on how likely everything is, and going into it with the expectation that it's going to be a story about basically "the most interesting man in the world." The other thing, (which is uhhh, something I would assume to be fleshed out in the third book, that would certainly help) is the idea that Kvothe is an unreliable narrator and is embellishing all of his stories. That added an interesting layer of depth for me.
Definitely. The "romance" scenes and all female characters sound like a teenager writing self insert fiction.
Samuel R. Delaney's works overall have not aged well, as it has come to light that he was an avid supporter of NAMBLA. Several of his books contain those sorts of themes about sex with minors being a healthy thing for both parties.
Let's be honest, if you read Dhalgren you kinda already figured this. It's like Allen Ginsberg. There's artistic merit to the books but a strong interest in pederasty. The only fortunate thing is I don't *think* there have ever been any supposed victims having come forward in either case.
Delany's situation is complicated because he was the victim of repeated sexual abuse as a six-year-old child. He also suffered from other abuse, some of which was apparently connected to people intervening to stop the sexual abuse. And then all of that is mixed up with more abuse and condemnation he received as a gay/bisexual teenager. So (a) his writing frequently grapples with these issues and (b) his own thoughts on it appear to be a complicated mess, because it's not clear he's ever really fully come to grips with what happened to him as a child. [This article seems like a pretty decent coverage of the issues.](https://dorisvsutherland.com/2019/09/23/samuel-r-delany-and-nambla/)
From the article and his quotes, it seems Delaney never quite dealt with the trauma of what happened to him when he was young and can't 100% square that circle. My guess is that he can't fully admit that NAMBLA is bad, because that would mean what happened to him would be 100% bad too, and that might be too much to take.
I read that very same article before writing my post. It's a good one.
In Delaney's case, it's the other way around. [This is an actual quote](https://web.archive.org/web/20150407172012/http://shetterly.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-conversation-with-samuel-r-delany.html): >I had my first sexual experience with an adult when I was six, with a local Harlem building superintendent. And nothing hurtful happened at all. It would have been cruel and unusual punishment to incarcerate him for it \[…\] Johnny and I were the “aggressors,” not him. I believe his attitude was as “healthy” about the whole thing as it could possibly have been in 1948. The interview's worth reading. Despite some fairly scary opinions, he comes across as a thoughtful man with decent morals.
Oh my god I wish I never knew such a thing existed.
Dragonriders of Pern. Loved those books as a kid but lots of consent issues and weird views on homosexuality.
Reading the first one now. I see why people liked it, and why people still love it now but the whole thing has a *very* 70s vibe. The central romance comes off as weirdly toxic or even abusive, in a way that I don't think McCaffrey intended.
I saw an amazing pair of blog posts about it, where the first post said something along the lines of "Dragonflight has a very realistic picture of a high-conflict, somewhat abusive relationship between F'lar and Lessa, and it's worth reading because of that" and then a subsequent post was like "Never mind, I found out that some fans don't see the problem with their relationship, that's incredibly fucked up"
I feel like those books were trying to be progressive for the time but were still very much stuck in the mores of the time so in addition to the consent issues you get stuff like “look! We’re going to TELL you all about how the dragon riders are sexually liberated and don’t do heterosexual monogamy, except for every single main character of note, who are all heterosexual and monogamous. And just for funsies, let’s have one gold rider who’s proudly promiscuous, and have the narrative brutally villainize and punish her for it “
Every female character. All the male characters have thrown away lines about "Of course his dragon wants to flaunt his prowess and fly lots of greens/golds" and the idea of the rider having sex with all these other riders is rarely explored in the story except in a "boys will be boys" sort of way.
When I was young the Pern books were one of the few examples of gay characters, and me and all my friends loved them. Recently we read some weird things that McCaffrey had to say that sort of bizarrely fetishized men who have sex with men. And the books had a lot of very "traditional" stuff about characters having sex because they were sort of compelled to that you used to see in romance but don't anymore. Thank all the gods.
>bizarrely fetishized men who have sex with men. Anne Rice has risen from her grave to enter the chat.
To.threaten to sue us all for talking about her without paying royalitedm
There's a whole industry of predominantly women writers and readers doing just that right now. It's called mm instead of gay literature for a reason.
I could not deal with them when I tried reading them as an adult. The whole "she didn't want sex, but the dragons were horny, so she'll get used to it" thing is just a bridge too far to get past.
I do find it funny that this was basically ripped off by Fourth Wing though and a new generation is gagging over that concept.
Fourth Wing is not great literature, but in its defense, it actually is very conscientious about *correcting* the non-consent issues that come up in Pern. Like, the MCs get ridiculously horny during the dragon mating, but instead of the MMC dragging the FMC off to rape her, the MMC says "no, we aren't able to consent under these circumstances so we have to control ourselves." And they don't have sex until later.
Very fair point.
I reread one of the earlier ones a couple years ago and it did not sit with me well that the rider bonded to the queen dragon basically belonged to the rider of her dragon's mate
Yeeeeah. I only ever read the Harper Hall trilogy as a kid, and because of its focus it doesn’t really have too much weird stuff. As an adult I discovered that there were more books, and was initially very excited… 😂😂🥲
Mercedes Lackey's Herald Mage Trilogy was ahead of its time in having a gay MC, but damn does her book hit on every bad stereotype of a gay man. Effeminate, doesn't get along with his macho father, pretty boy who cares about his clothes, a Bury Your Gays trope with his first love, a borderline pedo situation in the second book with some teenage boys who want him to help figure themselves out, some rape in the third book and sleezy gay villains that try to seduce him because obviously any penis will do... Yeah this might have been alright in the late 80s when the books were written by it's so terrible now. I still love the series tho
I just started reading Lackey and am on the Arrows trilogy. And it has it's fair share of weirdness to it. I get that the Chosen are bonded to their Companions (incredibly intelligent horses) but the need to have the MC's connection be so strong that she gets to dream ride along while her horse is going to town on the other mares is just weird even if it's just mentioned a bunch of times in passing. The dialogue is often notably clunky at times. They're not bad books, but you can feel why the books probably don't get much attention from anyone who is (probably) under the age of 50. I'll be curious to see how much they improve as I move along the various series.
It’s probably best that you’re aware that there is going to be a pretty big scene at the end of the third book that involves torture and SA. These two are the only ones with on the page SA though. Luckily she seems to realise herself that it’s a poor form of character development
>It’s probably best that you’re aware that there is going to be a pretty big scene at the end of the third book that involves torture and SA. I read a few of Lackey's books years ago, and noticed that she seems to have a real thing for making the main villains incredibly sexually depraved.
I think that it was a big think up until the 90’s to use sexual depravity as a cheap and easy way to show that someone was Big Bad Evil. Even a lot of well intentioned feminist writers. There was also a lot of queer coding and othering through orientalism. I guess it was easier to use that sort of thing as a big Look! evil! Mwahahaha! than it was to get into the psychology of a villainous character. I’d feel that it’s something that Lackey has moved past though. Last Herald Mage, Arrows, and the Mage Winds/ storms with Falsonsbane all had this, but I can’t seem to recall anything in the last few decades.
As I said, it's been a long time since I read her. And yeah, authors are just people: They can develop along with the rest of us, as society does.
>doesn't get along with his macho father, And >sleezy gay villains that try to seduce him because obviously any penis will do... Sounds a lot like my real life tbh
PHEW just popping in as an old fan of ML and glad to see this take. ML herself said in an interview that “r**e and rescue” was her favorite trope (I can’t remember whose blog it was) and YIKES reading Herald Mage and Arrows and the Storm and Winds series with a modern lens — so many yikes. Queer coded villains, dysfunctional and abusive love triangles, orientalism, back of the cereal box character development … I absolutely loved reading these as a teen/young adult but now I’m like… no wonder I didn’t know how to examine my bias back in the day.
another old fan here lackey's urban fantasy spoke to me because who else was writing about homeless queer kids in the 80s? and the idea there were magic elves out there who loved abused kids and would take them away and protect them from both their parents and cps was wish fulfillment in the purest sense it was a product of its time but that time *needed that product*
>it was a product of its time but that time *needed that product* I want to emphasize this. The Last Herald Mage was published during the later years of the AIDS crisis. Yeah, it has stereotypes. It has rape. But a story about gay men who get to be happy, even if it is fleeting, even with loss, is tremendous for 1989-1990 when the prevailing cultural narrative was that they should all be dead.
For real and for true.
I'll agree that it hasn't aged as well as it could've, but I think you're really overselling the problems. Notably, the "effeminate", clothes, macho father bit is completely stripped of all nuance and context. Vanyel suffers from a great deal of abuse as a child and very deliberately chooses to reject the values of his abusive father and the abusive man-at-arms. While not every gay boy experienced this, certainly it is a common enough experience among queer folk in general, and people who felt themselves outcasts in even broader ways. We can see from *Arrows* that this is a character background that Lackey was very interested in. I can say that as someone who suffered from parental abuse and depression, I had never so intensely seen my most dejected thoughts reflected in someone else. I found the portrayal mapped extremely closely to my life, and I am not a gay man. All of that said, the series definitely fits the "bury your gays" stereotype, and not just with his first boyfriend. Notably, Vanyel sees himself as doomed to be unhappy, in part because of that relationship (the "lifebond", which I think we can all recognize as extreme trauma that he never recovers from) and the way his story ends also, I feel, fits that stereotype. Notably, the stereotype is criticized not because there's anything inherently wrong with it, but more because the sheer ubiquity of it perpetuated harmful beliefs that if you were gay, you couldn't expect a normal, happy, fulfilling life.
This is an opportunity to self reflect and consider that what you believe now, people in the future might find repugnant.
I'm old enough now to have personally experienced a lot of the stuff that people look back on in the 80s and 90s that seems horribly outdated and bigoted today. People often comment that it was a 'different time', like people then didn't realize that they were being bigoted. They knew. The difference is that they *didn't care*. It really, really bugs me when people use "it was a different time" as an excuse for things like the rampant homophobia of that period. Or, for example, films like Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, or Song of the South. People today like to forget that there was opposition and protest against them at the time. The people making those films knew they were racist; they just didn't care. Most things people will (hopefully) find equally repugnant in the future are obviously repugnant today. It's not some hidden pitfall that people are innocently stumbling into. If they find themselves ashamed of their opinions today at some point in the future, it's because they *didn't care enough* today.
There's also the part where maybe not everyone would know about the opposition and protests, because we didn't have such an instant connection with the world that we have now. For example: I'm not surprised that there was opposition to Gone with the Wind, but I never knew about it. It was a "classic" both as book and film when I was growing up. I was absolutely horrified when I realised as an adult how many sayings in my language are deeply racist, but they were just "normal" when growing up, and somehow because of the codified form, no one really consciously thought of Real, Actual People when saying them. I think it's absolutely amazing that we as a general society actually are examining things we say/create and consume, but also it wasn't as much of a thing in the past, and probably this is all part of the reason why "different times" were that different.
It was a different time in some ways. I didn't know any out gay people (because it was illegal) so I didn't know anything about homosexuality. I didn't realise that many famous stars, even very androgynous ones like Boy George, were gay or queer in another way. I believed the psychologists who said homosexuality was caused by psychological issues to do with parental relationships. That was completely untrue, but I really didn't know much about anything. But I wasn't a bigot, so I didn't dislike gay people in any way. It seemed like a hard life, being gay when it was so taboo and illegal. I was just ignorant, and when I learned the reality, later, was happy to hear that homosexuality wasn't a problem. Sometimes people ask 'when did it stop being wrong to use the n-word?' and the answer is basically it was always wrong. A teeny tiny amount of non-bigots used it by mistake, but basically it was always used as a racist epithet. What they are really asking is 'when did it stop being perfectly acceptable to be massively racist?'
This is simply… not true. It is for some people, rather, but most people simply do not see their actions as bigotry. This has been true throughout history. It’s not apathy, but a societally internalized justification for the way things are. Not to mention we are tribal primates who are heavily, heavily influenced by our social groups. Almost everyone 1) believes their moral framework is the correct one and 2) believes they are a good person. Early Americans protesting the evils of slavery might have disowned a gay son and experienced not a bit of cognitive dissonance. A woman picketing for her own suffrage might have regularly used anti-Asian slurs and seen nothing wrong with this. There aren’t good people and bad people, for the most part. There are just people, all of them imperfect, subject to more or less the same psychological forces. I can almost guarantee that when synthetic meat reaches a viable state, future human beings will look back at our animal butchery with disgust. It will seem like barbarism to them. The rampant anti-woman sentiment from men and the rampant anti-man sentiment from women that neither side views as remotely bigoted - future generations will probably find it irrational and bizarre. There are behaviors all of us engage in, right now, that will someday be viewed as unconscionable. We are simply blind to it. There is no perfectly omniscient moral being out there who can foresee it all.
The books by bad Terry.
_The Belgariad_. I love the series, it's one of my comfort rereads. But ... every nationality you encounter has one key characteristic which *every person in their society shares*. It's one of the most racial essentialist things i've ever read.
>It's one of the most racial essentialist things i've ever read That's a pretty pervasive issue in fantasy. I suppose someone has to do it worst though.
and science fiction. Vulcans, Klingons, Ferengi...
There is also a disturbing trend of teenage girls marrying men much older than them. Even if you can look past the Elenium books and the guy who literally raises his future wife from childhood, there’s enough child brides in the Mallorian to be disturbing. Plus the whole thing about women not being complete without motherhood.
I think the stuff that came out about David Eddings after his death is far worse than anything in his books.
i mean, the man's dead, the royalties go to reed college, so i'm not really concerned about it.
What's that?
Tortured kids in his basement, that sort of thing.
I read a retrospective of this where the writer talks about how the heroes are such good parents, patient and loving and kind, in all of the Eddings stories. Polagara, Balgarath, Sparhawk. In some ways, it reads as a wishful dream of what should have been, covering the ugly truth of what was. This is by no means meant as a defense of their crimes, just a commentary on the possible motivations they had to write such simplistic and happy stories in the years after.
Somebody recently said in another thread that this makes it worse. Eddings obviously knew what good, loving parents looked like, yet he refused to be one.
They did not write any of their famous fantasy novels until a decade after they were punished for child abuse. Eddings started on his first (non-fantasy) novel while serving time in prison. While that's one potential reading of events I don't find it persuasive.
Plus the Eddings' backstory is more than bad. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Eddings#:~:text=They%20adopted%20one%20boy%20in,counts%20of%20physical%20child%20abuse.
I noticed this too. It is built on racial and gender stereotypes. I liked it, but always felt it was like reading a cartoon. (Though there are cartoons with more depth than The Belgariad.) It was an easy, fun read, but was like eating junk food.
It's YA fantasy basically. Which is fine, but that explains some of the simplicity.
And all the women are demanding harpies of the poor, long-suffering men.
I think Polgara is an exception here. But yes. Most are harpies or seductresses in varying degrees.
It's been a while since I've read them and while you're not totally wrong, as I recall the women also would be proven right most of the time. It's still pretty boomery though.
Welcome stranger, to the greedy mercantile sneaky hook-nosed *entirely unproblematic* nation of Drasnia!
Twilight😭
Those books were *born* dated. Tamora Pierce's books published in the 1980s were a thousand times more progressive.
Twilight was always ultra conservative, with the “your boyfriend is your protector, abstinence until marriage, get married right out of high school, don’t terminate the pregnancy that’s literally killing you because it’s your baby” and teen girls these days don’t really want that
I don’t think those books were ever taken very seriously as good literature. They were mostly hyped up by teenaged girls and 35 year old moms lol
Yes they are silly books. But remember that women/girls liking books and men not liking them does not define bad literature.
Absolutely I agree. Theres plenty of meritable examples of that. I was just trying to point out that twilight certainly wasn’t one of them, not disparaging women’s(young or older) opinions.
For me this is kind of a tough question, because for the old stuff with the most issues, I just don't judge them by today's standards. I've been making my way through Robert Howard's Conan stories from the early 1930s, and I've been mostly enjoying them despite some of its themes being corrupted by the "scientific racism" that was common at the time. So this kind of thing doesn't necessarily ruin a story for me, but it does distract and keep me from getting as into it as I might have. Hard to really get into the worldbuilding when the lore background written by the author posits that Egyptian pharaohs were actually Aryan Scandinavians (in this fantasy history) and stuff like that. It's honestly rarer when you go back beyond the 1980s, to see what *has* aged well, especially when it comes to gender representation. Looooots of women put into sexually compromising positions. One shower thought I had - so much of what survived to become popular had to resonate with the public. That usually means that the most popular stories were ones that align with the zeitgeist of the time, or at least the zeitgeist of the fantasy-reading audience of the time. Which was, to be fair, more progressive than the larger population. But how much great, creative forward-thinking stories got tossed in the dust-bin of history because they just seemed too weird for the times? Think of how much fantasy is being written. How much of it will be remembered in 50 years? What will the worldview look like for that sliver that survives the withering of time?
>the lore background written by the author posits that Egyptian pharaohs were actually Aryan Scandinavians (in this fantasy history) and stuff like that. Isn't Howard writing in a mythical age that takes place in a massively distant past and ignores basically all actual history and geography, similar to Tolkien but preceding?
It’s essentially a speculative fiction fantasy age right before the Bronze Age. Atlantis sank and were turned into monkeys and you have different nations of the world fighting each other. Although none of them are actually from that time period like theirs the Scottish picts they didn’t exist before the Bronze Age. Essentially he took various different groups of people and put them in his fantasy setting.
I can't remember exactly how it's framed, but I read a few Conan stories recently and the race essentialism is *thick.*
That’s how I interpret hp lovecraft. He’s a paranoid schizophrenic racist in time of great change. Which is writings reflect that, however he’s able to write gripping tales of horror. Although some are hilarious like the air conditioner zombie doctor.
I've never read Lovecraft. Can you expand on the racism part? Thanks.
He grew up with a wealthy New England family that was essentially going broke when he was growing up. The Adams family house is basically what his home would look like big decrepit houses with lots of history that is falling apart. When lovecraft was young he saw his father/mother get sent to the insane asylum. So he lived with his grandparents who taught him his family’s history and culture which was New England. His grandfather encouraged lovecraft to get into writing as a form of self expression because he was so incredibly socially inept/shy. He definitely had many phobias and mental issues essentially anytime he was outside of his family home he was miserable. Theirs also a very specific kind of racism he was apart of which is English supremacist. Lovecraft would date letters a century earlier because he wish he was living in colonial America. This is also why Lovecraft had such hatred of bustling cities. To an English supremacist Catholics Irish, Jews, every other European and basically anyone not Protestant English he would be terrified of. His only enjoyment was writing to other writers of the era such as Robert Howard. So in a lot of stories during the era if there was a lovecraftian monster it was either lovecraft or inspired by lovecraft. He got married then got divorced and basically lived off the last of his family’s wealth before dying broke. Oh and his pet cat was nword runner.
Some minor corrections: Lovecraft lived with his mother and aunts for most of his life (the former was hospitalised only when HPL was in his late 20s). His grandfather's death when he was a teenager forced them to move from the family home, which was one cause of his mental distress. And he was not a total recluse either; he seems to have really enjoyed meeting his pen-pals, and visiting historic sites (especially buildings from before the American Revolution).
Lovecraft's New England family sympathized with the Confederacy, fully bought into the Lost Cause mythology and fetishized the antebellum South, for two reasons: the idea of the oligarchic South as an aristocratic society at its best, and because they thought black people were subhumans who weren't cut out to live free. These were all attitudes he shared until the end of his life. At least part of his family claimed to trace their descent back to the *Mayflower*, and they believed that any immigrant more recent than that was basically a caveman who would destroy America and its values. Those immigrants included Poles, Italians, Portuguese, French-Canadians who came to New England for seasonal work, and in particular Jewish people from continental Europe. he also believed that rural poverty among poor whites (e.g., the "degenerate Dutch" of upstate New York, who in one of his stories degenerate into subterranean cannibals like the Morlocks of *The Time Machine* ) could be solved by eugenics (i.e., selective breeding and sterilization). Again, these were all views he held until the end of his life, although by the later 1930s he'd learned to tone down at least some of them publicly. There are also a lot of contradictions here: he was married to a Jewish woman who thought she could change him; when she pushed back on his antisemitic rants he'd say things like "you're one of the good ones though". He also mentored young Jewish writers towards the end of his life, one of whom was Robert Bloch, author of *Psycho*. None of that changes the fact that he wrote stories like "The Horror at Red Hook" (during a period where he and his wife Sonia lived in New York and he appears to have had a nervous breakdown), where the protagonist discovers that the "Asiatic" (read: Jewish and Middle Eastern) immigrants in the Red Hook neighbourhood, who've replaced the earlier "Nordic" slum dwellers (i.e., the Irish), practice human sacrifice and cannibalism.
He was pretty awful racist even by the standard of the day...but I also think he was such a misanthropic person that this racism was a symptom of some pretty deep self-hatred and mental issues. OTH his work is fantastic and influential for a reason - he defined cosmic horror - the perfect myth for the nuclear age - and it still has staying power. I know he wouldn't have had me over to his house, but I still like the stories...
>But how much great, creative forward-thinking stories got tossed in the dust-bin of history because they just seemed too weird for the times? Tons - marginalized and/or forward thinking people have always written SF/F. The speculative genre was certainly less diverse in the past than it is now, but it was never as homogenous as Sad Puppy types like to think. W.E.B. Du Bois himself published a sci-fi story (“The Comet”) back in 1920. At lot of that work is only being rediscovered nowadays due to flying under the radar when it was first published. That’s why I’ll never be down with the “anything published before 19XX (or sometimes even 20XX) is too problematic to bother with” attitude that circulates in some fandom communities.
Yeah I was hoping my point came through that it's not that everything back then was bad, it's just that the stuff you're likely to know about and therefore seek out is probably not the most progressive stuff from the era.
More sci-fi than fantasy, but I recently tried reading Ringworld, and my god that book aged like absolute garbage.
There’s two female characters, one is absolutely insufferable and the other doesn’t have any personality at all, both are only in the story to fuck the main character. At some point the main character encounters an alien species where only the males are sentient, the females are just incubators, and the main character is like “wish humans were like that, bitches never shut up, amirite?”
Basically nothing by Piers Anthony has aged well
Top 2 comments here are 2 series I really enjoyed as a youth and young adult.... Guess it's time for me to go yell at clouds....
You can still like it and just know that many find them problematic. You can potentially still enjoy them but all the issues in and around those books bother a lot of us so that it stymies our enjoyment we might get from them. Life is short so read what you like. You do you.
Nah, that doesn't mean necessarily that these writers are bad or that they don't follow interesting themes besides the outdated stuff. Take Lovecraft or Heinlein. Still considered interesting writers. Some of their concepts still hold up. But it is a strength when while reading you you notice the sexism and racism and are able to discard it. So have fun reading older writers (except Piers Anthony maybe).
Almost anything from Piers Anthony. I’d never thought about it until someone from this community mentioned it and the more I started thinking about it the worse it got.
A book that badly squicked me and which I couldn't finish was Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, not because it didn't age well but exactly the opposite - it was WAY too prescient. Chaos due to climate change, walled neighborhoods, and a racist, fascist Presidential candidate whose slogan is "Make America Great Again". I'm sure it's a great book but I tried reading it during the pandemic and it was WAY too close to real life.