The Fourth Tribe (Or, Going for Baroque)
by rsbakker
So I’ve had this tripartite way of dividing fantasy fans for some time now. There’s the largest constituency, the Adventure Junkies, who want their fantasy to be as kinetic as Clive Cussler. Then there’s the two smaller constituencies: the Weird Junkies, who love smoking from the possibility-for-possibility’s sake bong, and there’s the World Junkies, who want something massive and, most importantly, believeable. I’ve always considered myself a member of the latter tribe, though I’ve never had any issue with the former two. These ‘tribes’ are simply a crude heuristic, of course, a way to regiment and discuss what is in fact an amorphous mass of readers. Personally, I like kineticism, and I sincerely enjoy the possibility bong, but for me, it all comes down the World. The Second Apocalypse isn’t shaping up to be a monstrous metaphysical whodunnit for no reason.
So this is the scheme I’ve been using. Then, via Adam’s Wertzone I was led to the conservative Big Hollywood site and a fascinating little article by Leo Grin entitled “The Bankrupt Nihilism of our Fallen Fantasists.” Grin, apparently, has decided to turn his back on contemporary fantasy, which he believes has been thoroughly coopted by ‘liberal decadence.’ His thesis is rather nicely summed up, I think, by the following:
Soiling the building blocks and well-known tropes of our treasured modern myths is no different than other artists taking a crucifix and dipping it in urine, covering it in ants, or smearing it with feces. In the end, it’s just another small, pathetic chapter in the decades-long slide of Western civilization into suicidal self-loathing. It’s a well-worn road: bored middle-class creatives (almost all of them college-educated liberals) living lives devoid of any greater purpose inevitably reach out for anything deemed sacred by the conservatives populating any artistic field. They co-opt the language, the plots, the characters, the cliches, the marketing, and proceed to deconstruct it all like a mad doctor performing an autopsy. Then, using cynicism, profanity, scatology, dark humor, and nihilism, they put it back together into a Frankenstein’s monster designed to shock, outrage, offend, and dishearten.
Awesome.
Now Adam in his blog response quite rightly points out that more than a little nihilistic despair colours both Tolkien’s and Howard’s work: Even as a kid, I read them as celebrations of things lost, as longwinded eulogies. Given this, you might say that Grin thinks this is fantasy’s vocation, to endlessly eulogize, and that writing that strays into the baroque or revisionary are not only morally and imaginatively bankrupt, they are symptomatic of some great disease of the soul that is presently claiming the world and humanity.
Sound familiar? It should if you read fantasy. This particular salad of attitudes and concepts – moral certainty writ on a cosmic scale – is precisely what you find in almost all premodern works of fantastic fiction, everything from Upanishads to the Holy Bible. Consider the hyperbole. Consider the way he structures his oppositions in the above quote: on the one side you have the sacred, the treasured and the cruciform, while on the other side you have, well, shit and piss.
Pure purity and abject pollution.
Humans are apparently hardwired for this stuff (Pascal Boyer, for instance, has interesting things to say about the psychology and neuroscience of contamination with reference to religion), which is probably why Grin’s declarations resonate with so many Big Hollywood readers. The important thing to remember, however, is that these are intuitions that we all share, more or less. It’s simply the ‘more’ or ‘less’ that determines where we fall on the cultural-political spectrum.
(Note that I’m only referring to a very specific brand of conservatism here. Given the findings of cognitive psychology and neuroscience, it’s hard not to see cultural conservatism as anything other than our conceits and vanities raised to a political ethos. We good. You bad. We chosen. You left behind. We saved. You damned. Our scripture, 100% divinity guaranteed. Your scripture, devil spawn. We pure. You mongrel. And the list just gets more and more embarrassing.
Fiscal conservatism, on the other hand, is a guess (one that I no longer share after 30 years of the Middle-class’s dwindling economic power) that could very well be right (and likely is, when it comes to specific issues)).
The crazy thing is that Grin actually doesn’t think it’s the vocation of fantasy to eulogize. Why? Because eulogies are for funerals, and the ancient ethoi you find in Tolkien and Howard are most certainly not dead, even though their so-called ‘successors’ are bent on suffocating them with their ‘soil.’
This is why (perhaps) the nihilistic despair that seems to obvious to most readers of Howard and Tolkien misses him entirely. Good is still good, and evil is still evil, no matter what those ‘college educated’ nihilists/relativists say. This is a sentiment that has, I would wager, tipped the balance of more than one election.
Grin seems to be an honest-to-God ‘Flat-Brainer’: someone who literally thinks that his yardstick is not bent, that he has not only won the Magical Belief Lottery, he has obviously done so.
Which is to say that Grin is passing judgment on fantasy from a fantasy world – or worlds, as the case might be. The first is the fantasy world where, despite being one more me-me-me schmuck like everyone else, he is obviously right unlike everyone else. The second is the fantasy world where the entire parade of human conceit, everything from our sense of moral certainty to the spiritual inferiority of the Other, possesses objective weight.
Which is why he uses the language and the attitude that I’m continually try to work into my fantasy world! Why I think the above quote is so awesome.
The ‘nihilism’ that Grin blames on decadent individuals (who also happen to be his political competitors) is as impersonal as can be, the result the forces unleashed by the Enlightenment twins of science and capital. Someone like him is bound to see ‘liberal contamination’ everywhere he turns, simply because, like our less tolerant ancestors, he needs to personify those things he does not like. But you don’t need liberal conspiracies or social dystopia to explain the evolution of contemporary fantasy. The transformation of ‘earnest art’ into forms than are progressively more baroque and revisionary is something you find in pretty much all genres of artistic expression. Familiarity breeds boredom, if not contempt. Humans stranded with old equipment come up with new games to play.
Thus the paradox: People are generally allergic to complexity and uncertainty, and so crave the apparent simplicity and certainty delivered by the Same. But they are also allergic to monotony, and so begin to improvise, to complicate and to surprise. ‘To go for baroque.’ The severity of these allergies depends on the sensibilities of the individual: we react to our reading, then rationalize accordingly, typically using what themes that dominate our thinking otherwise. Grin sees contemporary fantasy as the expression of liberal decadence. I see Grin’s diagnosis as the expression of our all too human cognitive shortcomings.
Me right. He wrong! So very wrong!
(This is where my decadent liberal preoccupation with irony shows its contaminating hand).
What Grin has showed me is that there is fourth tribe of fantasy fans out there: the Nostalgia Junkies. I’ve spilled more than a few gallons of electronic ink over the years suggesting that much of fantasy’s appeal lies in the way provides readers the kinds of worlds that humans are prone to cook up in the absence of science, worlds adapted to our psychology, rather than vice versa. Scriptural worlds. Pondering his essay I couldn’t shake the sense that it was more the tone of Tolkien and Howard that he was missing, not the ideological content (which he seems to so clearly misread). The very tone that I have worked so hard – too hard, according to some critics – to recreate in my own fantasy fiction. Elevated, and serious unto lugubriousness.
The tone of Believers.
Either way, he demonstrates what makes fantasy not simply exciting, but so damn important as a literary genre: it appeals to a set of psychological tendencies that the human race can no longer afford. The Fourth Tribe (which we all belong to in varying degrees) is the one that not only resists adaptation to changing socio-cultural conditions, it is also the one most prone to condemn that change, to confuse its parochial intuitions for universal truth, and most troubling still, to personify – which is to say, to hold some identifiable group accountable for its all too human confusion and discomfort.
Fantasy, you could even say, could be the most socially relevant literary genre in the 21st century, insofar as it actually reaches the human constituency that will have the most difficulty adapting to the profound transformations to come. The Grin Demographic.
Not only is Grin wrong, he is living proof that I could possibly be right!
At the very least, he certainly has my brain’s rationalization module working in overdrive…
Mr. Bakker, you’re the fourth response to Grin’s article today, but so far you’re my favorite. I’ve encountered members of the Grin demographic before (most often, interestingly enough, I’ve encountered when recommending your works to people who find it off-putting and nihilistic, but also for other authors that Grin himself mentions – Joe Abercrombie and Steven Erikson), and it never surprises me how self-delusional they can be, especially when the conversation rolls back to (inevitably) Tolkien, and how his world is *inherently* pessimistic. If it’s a story of heroism and friendship as many of them seemed to think, it’s a profoundly dark story of heroics and friendship…
I’m not here to intellectually thump my friends, but I wanted to say I appreciate your take on the State of Things, as always.
You know, Bakker, I was reading some articles the other day concerning social media and the Egyptian “revolution,” after which I revisited some of your blogs from this month. I’m thinking, in some perverse twist of irony, that, by what I think your logic is, you might very well have to write and publish a book entirely through Facebook to accomplish your literary goals. Trust me, they’re literary untapped masses.
Lmao.
Thanks for post. Always enjoy your words. Now maybe I’ll stick my head out of the only WLW speculation, going on on Westeros, and read through the now six page thread there on Grin’s article.
Btw, if I could hound you more personally about your creative writing class, I would. Called up Fanshawe and Western and they don’t seem to be offering any such course – so unless you’re starting your own college, tell us fanatics how we can register?
Just thought I’d post this link. I figure Bakker, and most people who read Bakker, might enjoy this article, if not the site.
Great response to a rather interesting article. At least this one (unlike Docx’s Guardian piece) didn’t send me into a rage. 🙂
OFF TOPIC:
“Soiling the building blocks and well-known tropes of our treasured modern myths is no different than other artists taking a crucifix and dipping it in urine”
Anytime I see reference to Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, I can’t help but think of the wonderful Sister Wendy Beckett and how much I miss seeing her on PBS, strolling through museums and describing (I love her voice) amazing works of art.
This particular salad of attitudes and concepts – moral certainty writ on a cosmic scale – is precisely what you find in almost all premodern works of fantastic fiction, everything from Upanishads to the Holy Bible.
I don’t think that is true. I’m no Bible expert, but anyone looking for mythic grandeur sans the prosaic isn’t exactly going to love the Upanishads.
Not can I think of mythic stories that fit the bill. The kind of fantasy Grin wants seems to exist only in the products of Disney.
I signed up for wordpress just to like this response to that article.
[…] Joe Abercrombie and R. Scott Bakker have all had a stab at demonstrating why this is wrong although Wertzone’s argument is […]
I could just as easily read him as saying the same things you say, Scott. That a bunch of supposed literary types take the tropes of fantasy that everyone/the bulk of the population gets, and fuck with them until the ‘common’ man wouldn’t be seen dead reading the thing.
Further, he may be refering to someone who slashes and cuts at ‘treasured myths’ like a psycho, instead of like a doctor cutting out a tumour. What’s the difference between a doctor and a psycho killer – not alot, but some. And he may be refering to an absence of that difference in how the treasured myths are being messed with.
Perhaps I’m reading intents into his words which aren’t present. But atleast in what he’s getting at, by my measure, seems to match what you do. I’ve never seen you just destroy a myth – in relation to your comment on adapting to a new world, I’ve only seen you adapt myths. Very heavily in some cases. But you can call me wrong on that and say you went about wrecking them and I’ll pay that that was just how I was reading it.
Sorry for another arguement post, if it’s starting to grate.
I will say that I found the darkness that comes before – well, not so much nihilistic, but full of assholes. I did almost just stop reading – it was Achamian that carried me through. I started to get the subtle nuances of the assholes (Cnaiür the most – though I can’t really find Kellhus to be a character, more like a continuing event, like a storm – very few character events with him/it, like his eyes closing without him realising, or heart racing as Esme swayed on the wall), but you know, it was like reading about assholes for the reward of more assholism. There wasn’t much suger to go with the shit load of medicine. Plus just before that I had read a book, I think it was called Orcs (had a plot device of orcs steal US weaponry from a dragons lair), where it literally had two hobbits who were casual murderous canibal psychopaths. I’ll say this, when they murdered a family in their sleep, described in some detail, it wasn’t making a point. It was murder porn with a ‘hah, we made evil hobbits’ stuck on. I flipped to the end and it was just more and more vile shit.
And to be honest your book, right after, almost seemed the exact same. Like horrible acts weren’t about making a point of some sort, or raising hard questions, they were just a sort of snuff movie.
I mean, perhaps your as polarised as Grin? When is it just a snuff movie? Never? They all have some special question or point to make. Just try and make somethign of all of them rather than saying that some movies are just a snuff movie, and perhaps a certain book actually shares those qualities?
From my reading, it was damn close. Again, Achamian got me through, which helped illuminate a broader picture.
One can easily say Grin is wrong, it’s not just nihilism. But your intent to not just write nihilism doesn’t mean much. One can obviously back over ones children in a car without the intent to do so. As much, one could dip into nihilism without actually intending to. Ones intent not to doesn’t somehow stop that occuring.
There’s not so much right and wrong here, just driving and trying not to mount the pedestrians footpath too often…
the king of nothing emerges, to claim his potty crown. i dont understand the apology for annihilating everybody, it seems inevitable that a happy apocalypse will be the singular result.
have a happy apocalypse slogan, and getting your audience to believe it as the only sensible alternative to everything, and vote for you, but it is a bit of a head job on your followers to be told the punch line. why not ask them to bend near your arse and shit directly into their ears.
… waiting for a plop, as bakker falls off his nihlism chair laughing ….
still so unkind, but true nihlists go insane.
hope your rationalisation engine goes nutz, maybe that is how you get high, zeroing more and more things. like i said, misguided, you may succeessfully shit on the universe today, but not exactly memorable
the fact you have gone to all the trouble to make bullshit believable, no matter how contradictory, shows, that you only have self contradiction to get through.
bullshit yourself all the way through to being kind, and i can really start to believe you as a leader. to infinity and beyond shitty.
beware the neitzsche, he snapped his rationalisation box after he eclipsed the world, he clipped himself. its one of those what now questions…. zeroed everything else, now me… now i am superman.
but kindly, i want to talk to clark kent
you can only be nice as you can be nasty, and bakker has shown that he can be exceptionally nasty. soon he will go insane or be exceptionally nice.. that is the part i am waiting for, when the king of nothing finds everything nasty irrelevant.
he is about to kill the nasty in himself, and if he does a kind job, he wont be a mistake. if he doesnt his mind breaks, and he stays nasty for ever, and less read.
your audience is awaiting you to sacrifice your nasty, its unbelievable how much anger you run, with te cruelty for
yourself being contained.
do we find it interesting to watch you go insane with empathy for competition? you study shitty things your whole life for what, not how. you want to know how it works, its easy, you dont let go of shitty, if its valuable to you
your pride in being the shittiest, but believably nice person you know is a lot of grief. you could be a believably shitty, being the nicest person you know instead. surely the old you needs a change, is anyone else askingg you to give up your shitty ways, to have a kinder remainder of your life?
a magnificent turnaround will be liberating, because you were so stubborn at being shitty, hope to inspiringly see you soon on the kinders side
Love the viewpoint.
These “modern”, ‘gritty” books are not an antithesis to Tolkien – they are a response to the Feists, Eddings, and hundreds of copycats (including Harry Potter) that are a coming-of-age story about a young person’s journey to become a hero, which are derivative of Hobbits becoming heroes. During the 80s and 90s it seemed like you couldn’t take a step without tripping over one of these stories. This formulaic approach to fantasy lead others to desire a break with the stereotype and create something new. I don’t see the need to bash this “modern” fantasy…to expect authors to all re-write the Lord of the Rings is quite ludicrous.
The rest of my take is at hippogriff.wordpress.com
[…] https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/the-fourth-tribe-or-going-for-baroque/ […]
glub, I have to assume that English isn’t your first language. I am curious though, I have to agree with Roger, your words are slightly intoxicating; I simply feel as though you are trying to fit concepts from another language into this one.
That aside, I hope you understand that you’ve upset me. I feel that Bakker is one of the most honest people I’ve ever had the privilege to be influenced by. Not to mention, the quick and intelligent mind with an observant realistic eye for the state of our planet and species. If you think he is being nasty then I’m not quite sure what I think of your perspective, glub. Shocked, anyhow, at your assessment of the man and your words towards him.
Hippogriff’s blog brought something to my mind and while I’m not overly set on diving into the quagmire Grin’s comments have created, I thought I’d voice my perspective here before jumping into any Westeros threads.
Hippogriff, knowing or unknowing, refers to the Hero’s Journey, the set of archetypes observed by Joseph Campbell. I’m of the understanding any author would have to, essentially, reinvent the wheel in order to write a story lacking those archetypes. If that is true, what is Grin’s gripe except that he feels fantasy should be forever reserved for our collective escapism, the only true fantasy, that there are worlds “unspoiled” by our all too human nature?
[i]I’ve spilled more than a few gallons of electronic ink over the years suggesting that much of fantasy’s appeal lies in the way provides readers the kinds of worlds that humans are prone to cook up in the absence of science, worlds adapted to our psychology, rather than vice versa. Scriptural worlds.[/i]
Explain more?
The first thing that comes to mind is “wishful thinking”, but I don’t think it’s what you mean.
Maybe a way to retrace worlds so that “meaning” is more evident and discernible? Or it’s just simplification to elements that are easier for the mind to grasp (outside science)?
Yeah, it’s interesting (assuming I get it). It’s like depicting a world that works the way your mind likes to imagine it works, rather than your mind trying to figure out the world and not entirely knowing the whole deal. You might not get it because your describing it as wishful thinking – that’s seeing it from the outside. Think of how you dream at night and how during the dream how things work, with the alien chasing you and such, just seems to be how things work. Yet this is just a story your mind is making – a scripture.
With Scott’s idea of the ‘outside’ I think that Achamian described it as working in that sort of way, and that bit under the mountain with the pict with an eye in his heart, that’s the two worlds blending. I think Scott toying with the idea of what if perception was one to one with reality? Or indeed perception makes reality – ie, magic!
Okay, it’s interesting, so I rambled 🙂
Chekc out this article from 2006, to my mind, http://www.heliotropemag.com/Issue01/pdf/Heliotrope_pg32-38_SkepticalFantasist.pdf
I can’t even finish sentences today….
Should read:
Check out this article from 2006, to my mind, one of Mr. Bakker’s best.
Hey, guys! I just wanted to report that my reality has been devoured alive. I’m currently working on fetching it from Glub’s ravenous stomach. It’s messy in here, I think he had tacos for lunch last night or something.
mike, my characterisation of bakker is upsetting, because bakker is upsetting. his truth doesnt neccessarily have to be cruel, but many propose that cruelty is the truth, and are extremely cruel with the truth. my question is, truth or not, was it kind?
in this light, i cant feel that much kindness shinning through. even if you have a breakthrough in understanding what cruelty people call the truth, how our self delusions become true to our egos, how we justify our psychology, has it improved our communication?
knowing we are self deluded and effectively lying the truth to each other, does that help?
lets say your told that you believe your self delusions are factual, you believe the lies you tell are true. does that help true or false, that just weakens the case for truth and false, and improves my position of relating mistakes of contradiction and self contradiction.
if bakker could write in contradictory terms, without relating to certainty, competition and a couple of other traditionally smart things, the circular nature of his writing would be evident.
hence, you say my writing is hypnotic, because i am looking retrospectively at where bakker is envisaging, i am not learning mistakes from bakker, i am showing him mistakes to learn from
you can only be as wise as mistakes you make
the truth is terribly misleading anyway, so i dont like the word. its usually used when someone wants their version to be truthful
as for english being a second language, i think hemmingway, kinda punchy small words for big ideas works better. especially on smarty types, when big ideas get beaten down with small words
no need to fluff them words up and exclude audiences, they are written to include them, respect given is better than respect received.
challenging bakkers kindness brings out his regard for it, which he joked about. like its an irrelevant 80’s fashion that facts have proven ridiculous.
after you write nasty to death, kind is the only way to go,
I’ve gotta ask, Glubber, at what point are you wrong? Like, by your own definition, not even anyone elses? Or would you say your incapable of being wrong?
Soiling the building blocks and well-known tropes of our treasured modern myths is no different than other artists taking a crucifix and dipping it in urine, covering it in ants, or smearing it with feces. In the end, it’s just another small, pathetic chapter in the decades-long slide of Western civilization into suicidal self-loathing. It’s a well-worn road: bored middle-class creatives (almost all of them college-educated liberals) living lives devoid of any greater purpose inevitably reach out for anything deemed sacred by the conservatives populating any artistic field. They co-opt the language, the plots, the characters, the cliches, the marketing, and proceed to deconstruct it all like a mad doctor performing an autopsy. Then, using cynicism, profanity, scatology, dark humor, and nihilism, they put it back together into a Frankenstein’s monster designed to shock, outrage, offend, and dishearten.
Awesome. is bakkers comment, a celebration of realistic cruelty, call it the truth if that helps.
how is this meant to help avoid the apocalypse of certainty we have all been training to kill ourselves and each other with?
is this kind mike? i really cant see it
jorge, the nobody is you reality that i ate, isnt that filling.
more like an imaginary apetiser, with a twist of certainty
I don’t suppose it really needs to be said at this point, but this sort of thing is why it’s unwise to open your wordpress blog to comments. Sorry it worked out this way.
+1
Herp derp.
Guys, regardless of what Tolkien wrote, the easiest way to get rid of a troll is not to talk to it until the sunlight destroys it, but rather to ignore it until it goes away.
That was funny! *doffs hat*
[…] discussion at Black Gate, at Ominvoracious, from author Scott Bakker (who I daresay might be down here in the bunker somewhere), and of the lack of female authors in […]
[…] in, including Adam Whitehead, John C. Wright, Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist, Paul Smith, and R. Scott Bakker. (Thus far, though, I have seen little about women writers of heroic fantasy, so expect a feature […]
Off topic
So, what’s wrong with me that I have re-read the late David and Leigh Eddings (I was so happy when she finally got co-author credit) series (The Belgariad, The Malloreon, The Elenium and The Tamuli) more often than I have re-read Tolkein?
In no way do I think they (the Eddings’ novels) come anywhere near the pinnacle of fantasy, but I get a tremendous amount of enjoyment from these works. They are my “guilty pleasure” novels.
[…] darker or gritty epic fantasy as “bankrupt nihilism.” Several epic fantasy authors have countered, rightly rejecting this shallow criticism of their approach, but none have noted what I see as the […]
I read Grin’s article and it seemed to boil down to something very simple: using a bunch of flowery, pseudo-intellectual buzzwords to say he doesn’t like Abercrombie et al as much as he did “The Lord of the Rings.” Wow. Brilliant.
[…] predictably, R. Scott Bakker sides with Joe Abercrombie. In fact, I assume he would have been listed among the decadent nihilists, had Grin ever read […]
[…] R. Scott Bakker delves into the psychology that might lead one to misunderstand fantasy as badly as the guy who set […]
Brilliant post. The best I’ve read so far.
This was a great post, very insightful and an excellent rebuttal to the referenced post.
Since this is as good a moment as any to finally do something fanboyish: Love your refutation of Grin’s argument (or, maybe more to the point, how you use Grin’s argument to further your own); of course, this only proves that you are hardwired to try and make the impression that you are more right than everyone else 😉
Anyway, it’s no surprise to me that I kind of like your blog, considering that “The Prince of Nothing” is pretty much my favourite work of contemporary fantasy, full stop (possibly rivaled by the first two volumes of K.J. Parker’s Engineer Trilogy and Hal Duncan’s Book of All Hours). I lLove the world, the way in which the character’s are larger than life, believable and fundamentally broken at the same time, I love to hate Kellhus and how you take a step further from Frank Herbert’s Dune with this character. I was positively shaken when, somewhere in “The Warrior Prophet”, I felt suddenly sure that the whole trilogy was actually a cleverly dusguised essay about how the emancipation from and the subjugation of the material world, as represented in two totally different way’s by the Consult and by Kellhus, can lead to the subjugation of the individual on a cultural scale. That’s how I see it, anyway, and the beauty of it is that you probably look at it in a totally different light, but that the books allow for all kinds of readings. A friend of mine is convinced that it’s all just about how an execeptional leader can seduce the masses, while I’m pretty sure that Kellhus as a leader (and even more as a human being) is pretty much an non-entity, a symptom of the willingness to subordinate oneself to a fetishized notion of absolute truth.
I’m starting to babble, so let me just repeat that I greatly enjoyed “The Prince of Nothing” (and that once, I even lay awake for the rest of the night after putting “The Warrior Prophet” aside, fighting a heated debate against the book and its author in my head), that I also enjoyed “The Judging Eye” (But it really felt just like sa glimpse at the second trilogy, therefore I’m going to postpone my final judgement on it) and “Neuropath”, and that now that I found your blog I’ll certainly become an avid reader of it as well.
Welcome to the blog, Jakob! There’s a link to the second apocalypse forum in the side bar on the right – a fair few posters chew on the gristle together the books leave us with. Sounds like you have a few things you’re left chewing on as well! 🙂
[…] Grin, na zarzuty odpowiedział na swoim blogu Joe Abercrombie, a głos w dyskusji zabrali również R. Scott Bakker oraz Paul Charles Smith. Warto również zajrzeć do artykułu o science fiction w Zjednoczonych […]
[…] a post responding to Grin; so did a number of other people, including John C. Wright (pro-Grin), R. Scott Bakker (mostly anti), and Jeff VanderMeer (fairly neutral and descriptive). Adam Whitehead, Phil Athans, […]
[…] for and against were quickly written: Joe Abercromby’s response. Followed by this, and this, and this, and this, and this, oh… I’m slumming for pingbacks, so […]
[…] we have the somewhat less insane R Scott Bakker who identifies Grin as falling into the fourth tribe of fantasy fans: There’s the largest constituency, the […]