Everything is grim, a complaint

[damerell]

I've just been plugging through Kameron Hurley's The Stars Are Legion, and while it's quite well written, my God, is everything awful all the time. This isn't specifically about Hurley, although AFAICT all her stuff is like that, but about this vexing (to me) narrative device of having everything be uniformly dreadful.

I just finished Raven Stratagem (sequel to Ninefox Gambit, not appreciably a happier book), so my benchmark for "awful" is set quite high... but people tell jokes in that universe (albeit mostly gallows humour), they eat pastries (even if that does provide a vector for assassination attempts), they had happy childhoods until something ghastly happened to their parents, etc.

When everything's awful it loses any force. I got to the bit in the Hurley where it turns out someone routinely eats her own mutated newborn, and, well, of course she does. No-one in this world ever tucks into a ham sandwich.

It reminds me of the transition between early Warhammer 40,000 (yeah, never a pinnacle of fine writing) where everything was slightly tongue-in-cheek and modern editions which are entirely po-faced ghastliness. (I think, given modern Blizzard, this sort of thing may be correlated with thinking an excellent design for armour is looking like you covered yourself in glue and rolled around an ironmonger. One reason I usually play Sgt. Hammer in HOTS is she's one of about 2 characters who ever says anything remotely lighthearted, and that game's got more enormous shoulder pads than 80s power dressing. But I digress).

Ghastliness is more effective, I think, when there's some kind of contrast with non-ghastliness. Hope must exist, if only so it can be brutally crushed.

In fairness, I have to mention that there's a bit of a problem here with my contention that unremitting awfulness makes for bad reading; that problem is Edgar Allan Poe. I'm not sure what to say about that. :-/

Comments

[mtbc]

The bit about crushing hope reminds me of the Iain M. Banks simulated Hell, I forget which book that was, but I liked the point.

[emperor]

Surface Detail?

[mtbc]

Yes, definitely, ta.

[damerell]

Well, again, Banks presents some pretty awful universes, but they're not just unremittingly awful. The simulated hells in Surface Detail exist in obvious contrast to not being in those hells. (This is all a bit obvious, sorry.)

[hilarita]

I tried reading The Stars Are Legion twice, and gave up, because the total hopelessness of it all left me totally smegging ungripp-ed. You can get away with total grinding hopelessness, but you either need to be a superb writer, or you need to include things to show it's not completely shit. (E.g. during the slog of Mordor, you do get moments of recalling things that aren't completely horrible, and you do get to swap away at various points to places where it's not so totally grim.)

I think you can also get away with more in short stories, because it's maybe 20 pages of grim at most, and then you can go and look at pictures of kittens until your mind unstoats. But novels leave you in the grim for much longer.

[damerell]

I did finish it and I was glad I read it, but I think I would have enjoyed it more if it had had a joke in it. Hurley is _good_ at this stuff; but then, Yoon Ha Lee is good at their stuff and it's not so unrelenting.

[rowan]

Cormac McCarthy's The Road suffers from a similar problem: the two main characters are good people, though the world they find themselves in and the people they encounter are unremittingly dreadful, until perhaps the end. Baby-eating cannibals abound; I couldn't take it seriously.

[damerell]

Quite! There does come a point where it's all just ridiculous. On a similar basis, _A Song of Ice and Fire_ loves to do this thing where the viewpoint character is apparently killed at the end of a chapter. The first few times it's quite effective but the third time one specific character was "killed" I exclaimed "sheah, right" and went to the Wiki. At that point I think it's fair to say it has lost any narrative force.

[fluffymormegil]

Perhaps the thing to say about Poe is that he chiefly wrote short stories and verse, rather than long-form works?

[damerell]

I agree, but I also think Poe was just better at it and it's something that's hard to do.

[http://xlogon.net/RogerBW]

To my mind Star Trek Discovery suffers similarly: when it drops into the Mirror Universe there's not much bottom of the barrel left to scrape, and it passes into farce.

I'm inclined to agree that this works better in short forms - the contrast can be with the environment outside the story, rather than within the story.

[damerell]

And even the Mirror Universe isn't an unrelenting dystopia...