That's Not Epic; Or, Why I Don't Like to Admit to My Genre

So, Jerry "Tycho" Holkins, as many of my readers might know, recently posted this magnificent denigration of the Anita Blake series. Without getting into the meat of the article, he summarizes several events in the series, and frankly, stripped of whatever talent for prose Laurell K. Hamilton may have, the sheer silliness of the series is laid bare. These elements are one tip of the many-peaked iceberg of what I hate in urban fantasy as a genre, and why I am so reluctant to use that term to describe my writing, however apt it might be.

There is a tendency in all fantasy, urban or not*, which I have been aware of and had trouble articulating for years. I think the most basic, raw way I can describe it is the tendency to believe that, narratively, "bigger is better"; a conflation of "epic" and "overpowered", and also of "many plot elements" and "good plot". I've seen it at its worst in gaming (even--perhaps especially--in professionally written materials), and I don't understand it.

To address the issue of "epic": I have often heard things defined as "epic" which seem to me to just be silly, masturbatory power fantasies. Take, for example, The Elric Saga—a series which, I will allow, I very much enjoyed, but which is guilty of this very thing. At several points in the series, Elric is faced with monsters/sorcery/gods/whatever that are beyond the capability of he and his allies to defeat, a fact which is usually hammered into the reader's perception via the bathetically horrible death of one of said allies (who, seriously, should all wear red shirts and talk in bad accents, because if their enemies don't kill them, Elric does). Even Elric's supposed impossibly powerful black sword, Stormbringer, can't defeat these foes, though in some cases (I'll note the lizardmen in The Sailor on the Seas of Fate) it does some half-assed sort of damage to them. When Elric does defeat his Unstoppable Horror of the Day, it is never through some ingenious plan on his part, or some noble sacrifice—he always summons Gadonkadonk, Lord of Tree Sloths or Maguffinator the Scuzz Elemental, and they swoop down/up/through the scene and (sometimes after expounding on how much Elric owes them) take care of whatever the problem is.

This isn't interesting. This stirs my blood about as effectively as a swizzle stick. Elric never seems challenged, and he never seems interesting—he always faces impossible odds, and then after some flailing and struggling that is there basically to pad the word count, just calls up today's deux ex machina.

This is exactly my problem with what a lot of people call "an epic story". When all odds the heroes face are impossible, "impossible" loses meaning as a word; when the world seems to be ending every day, saving the world takes on all the savor of punching a time clock at a gym (something which happens in the Buffyverse all the time, but Whedon and his staff have the courtesy to comment on that narratively).

To me, an epic story should include high stakes, but those stakes need not always include the world, and they need not always involve foes who can explode mountains with their mind or shrug off tactical nuclear weapons or what-have-you. While these ideas might make great action movies (and I emphasize might), they make for piss-poor storytelling. The best stories—even the best true epics—involve threats to at most a region (Hrothgar's kingdom in Beowulf), which, granted, was probably the scope of the world to those authors; usually, the stakes are high, but only, or mostly from the perspective of those struggling to attain them (The Odyssey). And while those threats may be supernaturally powerful, or at least very powerful in comparison to the heroes, the heroes rarely attain their victory by just buying a bigger gun—even the world's favorite action heroes tend to win through a combination of firepower and ingenuity (look at the Terminator movies—the first two. Or Die Hard).

A similar issue plagues stories that are just, to use a description which was unfortunately applied to something I wrote, "a grab-bag of magical touchstones"; or, to be more specific, stories which cram in a bunch of plot elements and expect the narrative to somehow mash them up into something fascinating and riveting. Tell me, which of these pieces of vampire fiction would you rather read:

• A story wherein a journalist is bitten by a vampire and tries to control his degeneration into a monster, while dealing with a group of AIDS and cancer patients who want the physical stasis vampirism offers and are seeking a way to "cure" the infected/afflicted portion of the human population through transformation into vampires, ignoring the fact that becoming a vampire brings one's predatory instincts to the fore; or
• A story wherein a man can, thanks to being half-fairy before he was bitten by a vampire, choose to access his new powers whenever the sun sets, but must contend with a nonspecific risk of fully degenerating into a vampire every time he does so, based on a variety of factors; while he faces this problem, he finds himself set against a group of vampire bite victims who can, thanks to their experiences, literally sniff out vampires through the dead blood in their veins, and who want to perform an ancient ritual to transform the moon into a second sun so that vampires will be driven off the planet, too fanatic to care about the damage this will do to the earth.

Yes, that second plot is far, far dumber than the first one, and is absolutely a straw man argument on my part; but this is what most fantasy and urban fantasy books look like to me. For a classic example, check out the Nightside books by Simon R. Green, which include such great scenes as the battle wherein the most fearsome wizards in all of the Nightside face the main character and two men who cannot die, and are then killed to a man by one of those two immortals and the other's demonic girlfriend, before said girlfriend teleports the main characters to a bar run by the descendant of Merlin so they can talk to him about the whereabouts of Lilith, Adam's first wife…

No, there is not much else to the book. This is how the plot of Hex and the City progresses. I guess in theory the main character winds up struggling a little with the discovery he's not wholly human, but it lasts a page and previous to that, he shows about as much humanity and depth as Jason Voorhees. And the Nightside series is middle of the road for urban fantasy—many of the classic, constantly-cited works of urban fantasy have problems like this. You also see the issue in many well-known video games, movies, TV shows, and anime series—a climactic battle in which one character is exploding the other character's head repeatedly, only to have their head reform before they charge in with their overpowered magic item they got because of some nonspecific destiny and cut off one of the eight arms of the villain's true form. There's no life, no conflict, no character development—or when there is, it's so over the top and loaded with pathos that it's about as riveting as an actor on a blank stage clawing at his face and screaming "NOT THE BEES!"

But then, there's the Silent Hill series of video games. There's Tim Powers, whose novels, while they might sometimes involve the fate of the world on some metaphysical level, are usually about the struggle between two characters with the magic just serving as its backdrop. And there's Joss Whedon, who, while he ends the world eight or nine times in the course of eight years, manages to work that level of constant drama into the characters' personalities, and uses it as a springboard for a commentary on the human condition—two words absent from many fantasy authors' lexicons.

This, I think, is my biggest problem with the bloated excuses for "epics" and the overly crowded narrative landscapes: all too often, it seems like these authors are waving brightly-colored flags to distract from the fact that their stories aren't saying much. Their characters don't grow or change; any internal conflict they go through is flat and two-dimensional, sometimes no more than a throwaway line like "I was disgusted". These stories wind up being the literary equivalent of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, without the special effects budget necessary to make the lack of substance interesting to watch. This is why, despite its aforementioned failures, I love the Elric Saga and will defend Moorcock's writing: while sometimes he's hyperbolic, and some of the notes on his narrative instrument are out of tune, the man does give us a little bit of insight into Elric's struggle, and that combined with some strong prose brings the story out of the swamp that mires so many fantasy series. The Song of Ice and Fire, which I have mentioned here before, is so amazing partially because it is about nothing but people (some would argue too many people, but that's a different discussion), with the magic, as I will harp so many times, serving to add a bit of a creepy sheen and a few narrative curveballs to the story.

The world has urban fantasy that does what I would like it to do, it's just not what the world tends to think of when it thinks of "urban fantasy". And that is why, for right now, I am reluctant to admit to my genre. I don't think I'll necessarily revolutionize urban fantasy; I'm not even sure I'll move urban fantasy ten degrees clockwise from where it is right now. But right now, I am working on a synopsis for Done with Mirrors, and my number one hurdle is: "How do I not make this book like every other urban fantasy book I have ever read?" And in that, at least, I have a clear guide, formed though it is from research into the genre's failings. Watch my plot elements. Watch my power level. Don't put the world in peril again. And always, always ask myself this question: how does this forward the internal arc of my characters?

*It is, to my mind, worse in urban fantasy, because the silliness is rendered more blatant when the world surrounding the writing is comparatively normal.