Where are all the good fantasy books
They really don’t make them like they used to anymore.
Hot take: if a novel can be cleanly adapted into an anime, or a ruleset for a roleplaying game, it is a bad book.
(I enjoy me a good anime and RPG as much as the next homosexual)
Not since Tolkien and GRRM has anyone written an epic fantasy that even approaches their worst drafts.
Tolkien gave us a fairytale for adults; reading it transports you into a world that is almost childlike in its mystic wonder, one dripping with magic not because our POVs cast Level 3 Shadow Clone Jutsu when the story demands but because it is lovingly crafted and layered with grand mysteries and marvels, where good and evil are simple and absolute and the characters (men) are emotionally honest and don't hesitate to spill their hearts out to each other at every opportunity without once bothering to hashtag-no-homo and \*that earnestness is as much part of the fantasy as the presence of orcs and elves and epic battles\*.
GRRM materially realizes his world by transporting the reader into the minds of a diverse cast of interesting multifaceted \*people\* with actual personalities and makes them captivating by challenging them with obstacles tailored to those personalities. He not only gives us a meticulously constructed world but also understands that it is the people in it that make it believable and ultimately make us care about the epic fantasy stuff in the first place.
These days every “adult epic fantasy” is only a barely-disguised YA carbon copy that actually wants to be a video game and I say this as derogatorily as I can, myself being an avid millennial gamer.
They all include at least most of the following:
* Teenage protagonist enrolls in a magical boarding school and must learn magic, survive deadly and logistically impractical games & trials, investigate a convoluted mystery, navigate an entirely redundant love triangle, overcome and ultimately befriend the school bully, and save the world as the star student
* Hundreds (often thousands) of pages of poorly edited, poorly paced, basic prose and clumsy exposition that not even remotely earn the page count (bonus points for MCU-style “he’s right behind me isn’t he” snark in scenes involving trauma, murder, dubiously consensual sexual encounters, or other tonally uneven, inappropriate bleakness)
* 90% setup, exposition and info dumps usually delivered by superfluous identical flat characters with no personality besides their function in the story, what would be called “living codex entry party members” in a BioWare RPG 15 years ago (that these books wish upon a star they could be instead of books)
* The story that the author actually wanted to tell all stumbling head over heels in its rush to occur in the last 10% of the book (which has, mindbogglingly, become affectionately known as a “Sanderlanche” when it would be better described as “terrible pacing”) including a Bombastic Final Plot Twist that does not provide closure or catharsis but does set up a sequel
* Some sort of post-apocalypse with too many proper nouns that could maybe have worked as the setting of a Final Fantasy game (charitably) or a weekly shounen for twelve year olds (soberly) but whose logic crumbles under the barest scrutiny as every level of the worldbuilding is riddled with holes and implausibilities since the setting merely exists as an excuse upon which to deliver the Bombastic Final Plot Twist
* Most egregiously to me: a text that is on the whole chiefly concerned with overexplaining the "magic system" and strip it of any sense of mystique (have we really learned nothing from midichlorians?)
You may have noticed that in my rant I have not mentioned the romantasy tropes, which I recognize as a distinct genre, for which I am not the target audience. To all you girls gays and theys out there who love yourself a good Court of Thing and Thing and soft erotica with monsters, good for you, I am glad you're having your moment in today's publishing climate and I am content to live and let live. My fighting words are directed at the Sanderson & Copycats Gang who dominate the capital-E capital-F Epic Fantasy genre I used to think I loved, who are also dominating the bookstores, and who somehow stand on an average 4.57 stars out of 278,237 reviews on Goodreads as of the writing of this post (the actual incomprehensible stats of The Will of the Many, possibly the worst book I have ever read).
This post was brought to you by my frustration 40% through the highly regarded The Fifth Season (N.K. Jemisin) as I’m finding it disappointingly boring.
I remember people used to say about GOT/ASOIAF that it is "fantasy for people who don't like fantasy" but I never expected to be one of those people, so lacking in imagination so as to be bored by the escapism. I now understand it is most contemporary fantasy books that are lacking not only in imagination but also in what sells the escapism in the first place: relatable human drama.
For the record I also enjoyed: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrel (Susanna Clarke) with its very dense 800-some pages all focusing heavily on wizards and magic and fairies yet manages to never lose the mysticism (easily a 5 star read).
Why have we allowed the genre to devolve into "Superhero Cartoons For Children But As Clumsily Written Text"? (The answer is, obviously, that these "grown up" books are primarily read by children.)