Day: July 8, 2016

I don’t watch the news anymore. Once in a while I’ll flip past to reinforce my disgust with a system that is more interested in filling a 24 hr cycle with fabrications of what matters than really digging deep enough to consider what is really going on. It is for this lack of watching that I am so behind on the most recent shootings of black men by cops. I found out from Apple. An article by Micheal Eric Dyson popped up denouncing the shooting and the response. Later as I was surfing for more information I came upon information about the snipers in Dallas, TX who have opened a Guerrilla war on the cops.

This is wrong.

We as a collective race are angry, but we cannot be angry at the idea of cops. We cannot indiscriminately murder cops and make the problem worse. This does nothing to solve it and in fact furthers the argument of why cops are killing black men. Again, this is wrong. This is counterproductive. I fear this is also the isolated situation of a state and city that is batshit crazy when it comes to race. Dallas is madness and anyone paying attention to this blog or this situation must not conflate black anger with what is happening there. Unfortunately, I know that most people will conflate the two and for a very long time every stop of a black man will carry an extra edge of potential violence. Every Black Lives march will be in the shadow of a near military response.

None of it will make our country safer, smarter, or better.

Apologies for not posting this last night. There was no internet connection available. Here is the post I wrote below in its entirety:

 

I’ve been trying to figure out what it is about Brandon Sanderson that pains me. It took some time and a lot of reading—both of his stories and his website—but I think I have it figured. You see, Sanderson is a master of the game. He’s figured out how to create worlds and systems of magic that are both consistent, familiar, and completely engaging. Now normally this is a good thing, to be engaged by a story and a world, but here it isn’t entirely wonderful. In fact, it is a real problem. You see, Sanderson exposed a system that is older than Tolkien and hasn’t done much by way of evolution since before I was born. Fantasy is a genre that is repeating itself. There are no Tall Towers, no new worlds to explore and nothing that hasn’t already been said about Dragons, Elves, and the Fae. Or is there?

 

The problem of innovation starvation is that people (writers, etc.) are so entrenched in the rules and the tropes and the works of old that they rarely deign to make something entirely new. Most fantasy falls under one of a series of boilerplate ideas and, if you’re really daring, it hits several. Largely fantasy is concerned with magic—if not defined by it. The way magic is presented shapes the way the world is presented. In Sanderson’s Elantris, magic is a huge part of the culture and those touched by the power live in a special place. The story itself details the fall of that magical place, which anyone whose read fantasy of any sort can recognize as a trope or tenet of the fantasy story. When I first created Emil Torath I did so under that same auspice and wound up trying to tell stories in a way (and a world) that has already been done to death. In truth, the last really innovative fantasy story I read isn’t even seen as fantasy. It’s seen as Urban Fantasy, which is defined now as a genre unto itself.

 

The clock is running out, so I will continue this at a later time, but the main argument here is that there isn’t anything new happening in fantasy and if you want to be successful as a writer in this genre—I mean really successful—you gotta come with something new. Only, what new is left in a genre that is focused on a dead past?