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PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Hello there, everybody.
This is Pat Rothfuss with The Story Board.
And today we are going to be talking about sex and fantasy,
or fantastic sex, or however you want to parse that
particular--
PETER V. BRETT: *** fantasies.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Yeah, *** fantasies and you.
With me we have some lovely guests today.
And I'll start over here--
Jacqueline, if you'd like to introduce yourself briefly.
JACQUELINE CAREY: Hello, I'm Jacqueline Carey, best known
probably for the historical fantasy series "Kushiel's
Legacy" set in an alternate medieval province.
And if you're familiar with it, you know
why I'm on this panel.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Hahaha--
and Peter?
I am Peter V. Brett, author of the "Demon Cycle"
books from Del Ray--
"The Warded Man," "The Desert Spear," and shiny new in a
couple of days, "The Daylight War." And "The Daylight War"
contains a lot more sex than my previous books, which
already had a little bit.
So this is something I've been thinking about a lot while
I've been working on this book and kind of biting my nails to
see how everybody reacts to it.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: And Robert.
ROBERT V.S. REDICK: Hi there, I'm Robert V.S. Redick, and
I'm the author of "The Chathrand Voyage" quartet, an
epic fantasy series also published by Del Ray and by
Gollancz in the UK.
And as of 48 hours ago, the last book in the series came
out-- "The Night of the Swarm." Yes, it's an epic
fantasy series that actually has come to an end.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: I'm jealous.
JACQUELINE CAREY: Congratulations.
ROBERT V.S. REDICK: And yeah, I started off with some pretty
young main characters.
But they got older, and plus, this is a naval fantasy.
And you can get into a lot of trouble on a ship.
So the incidence of sex increased a lot as time went
on, especially in this last volume.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Well, there are so many different ways we
can go here.
I'll probably just say, the reason that I wanted to do
this as a panel specifically is because, in my second book,
I went from-- in my first book, which really had no sex
to speak of.
And then, in my second book, there was some sex.
And the howling that occurred because of this was really
startling to me.
I know that I was playing with a little bit of fire, because
most epic fantasy is very firmly in Tolkien's shadow.
And Tolkien really didn't have women in his
books, let alone sex.
So I knew that I was kind of bracing for some grumbling or
some unhappiness or some prudishness.
But I've really been surprised.
Because if somebody is just a little prudish, or it's not to
their flavor, that's fine.
And they'll usually say, oh, I didn't really care for that.
But I've found people to be genuinely offended and hurt--
like personally I'd betrayed them by somehow including sex
in this book.
And it's really made me think about this subject a lot.
JACQUELINE CAREY: What kind of demographic
are you talking about?
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Well, and that's just it.
I think, in a lot of ways, the demographic for my books is a
little broader than I had always anticipated.
In the last week, I've gotten fan mail from a boy who's 13
and a woman who's 78.
And I get a little bit of crossover
with mainstream stuff.
But some people are really--
there's some moral outrage, some real
genuine vitriol out there.
And here's what the maddening thing is-- because there are
some terrible things in my second book.
But never once has a reader contacted me and said, boy,
you know, your main character killed 30 people, some of them
in cold blood and some of them very horribly.
And I won't ever be reading your stuff again, because
that's really horrific.
No one has said that.
PETER V. BRETT: Yeah, you never get that.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: No, you never get that.
But he had a bunch of enthusiastic consensual sex,
and suddenly, I'm the devil.
So this is something that I think really bears discussing.
Have you guys experienced similar reactions?
PETER V. BRETT: I have, and I think part of it--
I agree with you-- is that fantasy, particularly epic
fantasy-- obviously in urban fantasy and there are other
subgenres where sex and romance are much more common.
But in epic fantasy, because it's rooted in Tolkien and
Brooks and even in Robert Jordan, for years and years
there was no sex at all.
I can't think of any of the books that I was reading when
I was growing up that had real sex in them.
And so now, we have this new crop of authors who are grown
up and including that sort of thing.
And I think that's shocking to people who are firmly rooted
in the genre.
But there's also something else that I want to point out
that I was thinking about when you first
brought up this topic.
Most readers, I would hope, haven't
actually killed anyone.
And so, when they read about characters killing people,
they have to kind of project themselves into that.
And maybe it's not as personal to them.
Whereas most people have had sex, or have wanted to have
sex and not been able to, or have been turned down for it,
or had a bad *** experience one way or another.
And so sex is a personal thing to them.
And their feelings about it are personal.
And when you have a character that reacts to it and deals
with it differently than their personal view, that's
something that effects people on a very--
I keep using the word personal-- but on a very
personal level.
Whereas *** is something that they have to project
outward, and therefore are able to keep emotional
distance from.
And so I think that that has a lot to do with it, because
you're right.
In my books, people get eaten--
eaten by monsters, killed by other people, betrayed--
and nobody says a word about it.
But heaven forbid two people have sex.
It suddenly becomes a huge thing.
And it's interesting--
or if you hurt an animal.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Did it happen with you, Jacqueline?
Because I know for me and for Peter, the amount of sex in
the books--
in my first one as opposed to my second one--
is very different.
So do you not get that so much?
JACQUELINE CAREY: I don't, and I suppose it's because of
expectations.
And when your debut novel features a divinely touched
masochistic courtesan, you're raising the bar pretty high
for outrage.
I get more outrage for not writing enough sex.
But I will say that one of the reasons I
started that series--
I love epic fantasy.
And so much of it, especially at that time,
was devoid of sex.
And that's an intrinsic part of the human experience.
And it just felt something major was being excluded from
the epic fantasy experience.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Yeah, I know Jemisin is constantly catching
flak for it, because she writes this epic secondary
world fantasy and there's great, big god sex right in
the middle of it.
But there, it was in the very first book of her series.
And so maybe it's just the way it was packaged or marketed,
but I know she catches flak for it all the time.
It's like there's a significant portion of the
fantasy readership--
and maybe it's just a very vocal minority--
where it's like they're worried they're going to get
girl cooties or something off of these books that people
have sex in.
Robert?
ROBERT V.S. REDICK: You know, honestly I haven't.
I've had some rather vague and all-inclusive complaints that,
oh, the tone of your book has changed.
Sometimes they've said it's really darkened, and I've had
some outrage about that.
But reading between the lines, I think sometimes it has been
the appearance of sex.
That's really guesswork on my part, because I'm looking at
someone who may say this, and then I may not know that
person at all.
So if they don't absolutely nail down that it's the sex
that's bothering them, I don't know.
But I'm interested, whether it's because of what Peter was
analyzing--
and I think that's very plausible.
The situation we're in, in the United States at least, is
that violence is extremely normalized in people's media
diets and has been for 50 years, whereas sex is not to
the same degree.
And explaining why that is, again, is
another thing all together.
But people bring expectations from television and from
movies and from games and all sorts of other places there.
But also I think-- as you've said, Pat--
we have a certain training in expectations just within epic
fantasy, too.
And it's something in Tolkien that just doesn't wear very
well for me as the years have gone by-- that whole absence
of women, that absence of a *** sphere.
But I guess it's a bit sacred for some people, that absence.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Yeah, and when I did say prudishness,
that's language that's looking for a fight.
And a fight is not really productive here.
But I do like what you say.
You're right, violence is very culturally acceptable.
And it is a huge part of our media diet.
And I will admit that a lot of my fan mail, a lot of my fan
response, comes from here in America.
Not even North America, because I know in Canada, for
example, you can't use war in the title of
a television show.
There, they're much more careful in terms of
restricting violence in their media, whereas sex is not as
much of a thing that they try to restrict or censor.
ROBERT V.S. REDICK: Yeah, Germany as well.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: The only reason why I know about that
war thing is, there was some kids show.
It was called "War Planets." And my friend told me how they
had to redesign, effectively, the title page for that.
Because you couldn't call it "War Planets." War was not
acceptable.
And it almost ties back to the whole "Bowling for Columbine"
thing, where we live in this culture that is very accepting
of violence.
ROBERT V.S. REDICK: I was just going to add, I was watching
television in Germany a few years ago, and there were
*** in prime time pretty often, but just
so much less violence.
It really was just what people were tolerant of and expecting
to find, I guess.
PETER V. BRETT: Yeah, but I think that that's something
that's actively changing now.
I think that it was a lot easier to censor things when
TV networks had a lot of control and the FCC had a lot
of control over what was going on on the radio.
But now, any kid growing up with an internet connection
has seen far filthier stuff than we ever dreamed of when
we were growing up.
And so I don't think that they can put a lid on
those things anymore.
And especially because it's not just us that are writing
fantasies that have sex in them now.
Most of the modern authors are doing it.
And so I think that, in a few years, it'll be the norm.
It won't be something that's such a surprise anymore.
And people will understand that when they're
picking up a book.
I think that a few years ago, the fantasy section was a very
safe section, and you could have your younger kids go over
and pick out fantasy books.
And you wouldn't have to worry that they were going to get
sex education from it.
There might be sword play and killing, but there wouldn't be
any coitus.
And Pat, in your case, "The Name of the Wind" was a very
safe book in that regard.
There wasn't a lot sex.
You could give that book to anyone who's old enough to
read that book.
Anyone who is at the reading level that could read that
whole book, it would be safe for them to read.
Whereas the second one, if people are not comfortable
with their kids reading about sex, there is a lot of it.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: There is a lot of it.
And not being a dad now, I do appreciate some of that.
So here's the thing, how about this?
If we're going to do it--
and by it, I mean write about it-- and by it, I mean sex--
how do we do it well?
Because when I was working on my second book and I turned it
into my editor, she said, you know, you're being
a little coy here.
This has been built up to for a long time.
It's a transformational experience in
this character's life.
And if it happens all offstage, your readers are
going to feel justifiably short changed.
And so she really pushed me to write more of the sex in the
actual story.
And I resisted it.
And then eventually I realized she was right, and I sat down
and wrote it up.
And it was really hard for me, because I
don't do a lot of that.
For you guys, when it came time to write it, did you just
kind of do it the way you do all the rest of your writing,
or did you do research, or what?
PETER V. BRETT: Well, it--
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Not to lead anyone into making admissions
they're not comfortable with publicly, but--
PETER V. BRETT: Well, I'll go first I guess.
So in terms of research, there were a couple of cases, in the
first two books at least, of *** violence in my books.
And those cases I researched the hell out of.
Well, we seem to have lost Pat, but I'll keep talking and
fill up the space until he's back on.
I researched the hell out of that, because I wanted to be
very careful to be respectful of the issue.
It was something that I wanted to say something about.
And now, when readers write to me and say, well, that
character would never have had consensual sex after being
assaulted, I can say, well actually, look.
Here's a bunch of case studies that say that that
happens all the time.
And so that sort of thing I researched.
But I was also very careful to not be graphic about things.
Because I wanted the sex to be in the story.
Because it was part of the story and necessary to take
the characters to develop the way I wanted them to develop.
But I didn't want it to become gratuitous.
I wasn't looking to write a stroke book.
Not that there's anything wrong with that if that's what
you're working on, but that wasn't my intent.
And so balancing that, where you can't just fade to black
but you also don't want to get so graphic that it becomes a
distraction to the story, is tricky.
And sometimes, you're right, I would fade
to black too quickly.
And then people would say, well, that scene didn't work.
And then I would go back and make it too graphic, and
people would say, well, now it's too porny, or whatever.
And so it's a touchy thing, and I think
part of that is because--
not that we're treading new ground.
But particularly in this genre, there's not a lot to
fall back on of examples of people who did it right,
particularly in what we were reading when we were younger.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Yeah, well how about Jacqueline-- how
about with you?
Because you were in there right at the beginning in the
first book.
And so much of it is just vital to the story.
JACQUELINE CAREY: Yeah, I've been thinking about the
question, how do you do it well?
Research definitely was an issue, because I was dealing
with BDSM, and that's something I wanted to treat
very respectfully.
So from the get go I made consensuality a sacred tenet
in this society.
In terms of the scenes themselves, yeah, it is a
balancing act.
And I try to keep the focus on the emotion and the
psychology.
So you're describing enough of the physical, but the real
oomph comes from what's going on emotionally and
psychologically.
And I've had people often say, re-reading your books--
that the scenes themselves are not as graphic as they were in
their minds, because you're just trying to give the reader
enough to go there.
ROBERT V.S. REDICK: Yeah, I totally agree with that.
Less is so often more.
Because sex is mental as much as it is physical.
It really is.
And you can steal so much of the spur by being too
graphic-- well, for certain readers, for a
certain kind of audience.
Some people very much want the graphic.
But I think, for me as a reader, there's just nothing
more boring than a sort of anatomical map
of the whole act.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: And I do think there's an interesting
comparison between the whole sex and violence thing.
Because I feel the same way about my violence.
If you're having a scene where people are fighting, or if
there's legitimate physical conflict, for me, the focus
should always be on the emotional impact.
And I try to keep the description of
the event to a minimum--
just what the reader needs.
And in any sort of violence, you are dealing with that
whole potential of being too graphic as well.
At what point do you stop being exciting and you just
start being, again, gratuitous?
Who have we read that has done a good job of this?
Because I think it's a bit of a rarity.
It is, it's just a bit of a rarity.
And how about this--
not so much what do you think would you hold up as an
example of the best.
But what have you read and you've enjoyed the books and
you just liked them and they had sex in them?
Can you think of some?
ROBERT V.S. REDICK: Well, speaking within epic fantasy,
it's hard for me.
But I'll tell you, a book that I consider very much a
fantasy, an American classic, and a ghost story, is Toni
Morrison's "Beloved." And sex is throughout that book, but
it hovers over it awfully lightly.
It's a book that makes every scene
physically extremely real.
There's a solidity to those scenes that is just miraculous
I think, and she does it with very few words.
And so even when two people are coming together, you feel
the physicality of that intensely.
But it's still done with such a light touch, because she
sort of gets in and gets out with a minimum of
description--
and just enough, again, to make it searingly alive with
that choice particular detail or two or three or four maybe.
And then she's gone again.
And I've found that a tour de force in the use of sex.
JACQUELINE CAREY: The author that I recommend most often to
my fans is Guy Gavriel Kay.
And I can't think specifically of there being sex
scenes in his books.
But I know that they do have an adult emotional sensibility
and sexuality is included.
And also he does good alternate history.
But that's one that I would say.
PETER V. BRETT: I would say C. S. Friedman was one of the few
authors that I was reading when I was a little bit
younger that incorporated sex I think kind of seamlessly
into her books.
To the point where I never really felt that there was
anything terribly graphic going on.
I couldn't call back to that and say that it really stood
out, but consistently through her books, there were
characters that were sexually active.
And it was blended into the story in a way that didn't
stand out as being anything other than the appropriate
thing at the time.
But then, I do feel that there was a change in the way I
viewed the genre that happened.
Not to be trite here, but when I read Game of Thrones and
there was sex in it that struck me as being--
wow, you don't see this in fantasy everyday.
This is fantasy that's meant for grownups to read, because
you're dealing with complex emotions and things.
And what really struck me about it was the honest truth
that sex gets people into trouble all the time.
You look throughout history, so many historical events were
driven by two people who shouldn't have been having sex
having sex.
And I felt that he did a good job of capturing how that
passion can overpower your good sense and get you into
trouble with a lot of different characters.
Not just the obvious Jaime and Cersei, but there were a lot
of character who just, over the course of their life, came
to a situation where passion overruled good sense.
And it started a war or a loss of an alliance or somehow
otherwise threw their life into chaos.
And that's the reality of the world in a lot of ways, and
something that you don't see in a lot of books.
And I thought he did a good job of capturing that.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Yeah, that element of realism is
something--
even in books with a lot of sex, that piece of it doesn't
show up very often.
The real-world consequences of--
because it is.
It's a huge part of anyone's life--
sex--
and to have it not in at all doesn't feel realistic to me.
And to have it just be there as icing on the cake doesn't
seem realistic either, because it's complicated.
It really complicates a life.
PETER V. BRETT: If you're so careful about how you present
it that you, for lack of better work, white-wash it a
bit, you're not presenting the reality of it any more than if
you keep it out entirely.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: And I'm going to throw out a couple
examples just as interesting.
When I was a kid, some of Piers Anthony's sci-fi--
all the aliens doing it.
I thought that was the coolest thing back in high school.
Because it was like--
PETER V. BRETT: [INAUDIBLE]
had a little dirty in it, too.
There were a lot of bouncy, jiggly parts-- some nymphs
running around naked.
He never got too graphic, but you could tell that there was
a dirty guy on the other side of those books.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Well, but the sci-fi ones, it was--
you're having two non-humanoids doing it.
And I was reading a lot of sci-fi back at that point.
And while there might be some sex in there, it's like
suddenly watching these two completely alien creatures
engage in completely alien sex.
It kind of blew my 13-year-old, 14-year-old mind.
Another one, Heinlein--
again, he's mostly in sci-fi.
And I know that there's going to be a slew of eyebrow-raised
comments, because Heinlein is one of the few authors you can
still start a fight about these days.
But I very much enjoyed a lot of Heinlein's
portrayals of sex.
And to take it a little bit out of the
realm of the usual--
"1984." Now, not it not showing the sex itself,
because of course this is bigger than just showing two
people doing it.
What I'm thinking of is the real physical intimacy between
those two characters in "1984" where he ended up--
just the way that he would reach out and--
I still remember after five years since
I've read this book.
He reached out and he put his arm around this woman's waist,
and it was a revelatory experience for him, that this
woman was so vibrant and alive, and this was magical.
And then later, towards the end of the book, after
everything has gone south, he meets her again and he puts
his arm around her out of habit.
And he says it was like touching a plank of wood.
And that was possibly the most horrifying bit out of that
entire horrifying book--
the loss of that magical, physical intimacy that they
were experiencing.
And I don't know if I will ever be able to write anything
as genuinely horrifying as that little bit--
that love expressed in a physically intimate touch, and
then having it not be there anymore.
It was just destroying.
JACQUELINE CAREY: I was going to say, you still sound pretty
devastated.
PETER V. BRETT: Did you read that book for the first time
as an adult, or did you also read it in high school?
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: I read it the first time as an adult--
yeah, first time as an adult.
PETER V. BRETT: Because I think we see things
differently.
Because I remember--
I read that in high school, and I don't
remember any of that.
But I think it was probably before the *** awakening in
my life, or whatever.
And if I read it as an adult, I would probably have an
entirely different reaction to it.
And I think that you see that a lot.
You'll go back and read something, and you'll be like,
oh wow, that's much more graphic than I thought it was.
Or you'll go back to something that you thought was really
graphic when you were younger, and read it as an adult and be
like, oh, that's Tuesday.
ROBERT V.S. REDICK: But you know, that example, Pat, and
just hearing you talk about it and hearing how it resides in
your memory--
that really gets back to what I was going to say in answer
to your question about how one tries to do it well.
And I think that *** fiction that lasts in my
reading, in my memory, is always very much about
something else.
It's not just--
whoa, he's hot, whoa, she's hot.
That's definitely going on perhaps, but there's some
other way that it's resonating that is just so much more
important--
or at least equally important, and probably more
determinant--
of the arc of your character development in your story.
And when that's present, there's a charge to the act,
or to the attempted act, or to the implication of the act, or
the desire even, that just raises
everything to another dimension.
And when it's not there, then it's not there.
But if I just can put in the other very simple answer that
I would give to that question of, how do we
try to do it well--
in my case, there really isn't any BDSM.
The sex is usually consensual if it's on the page.
It's often trans-species, a humanoid human with another
kind of humanoid.
And that was a great challenge and a lot of fun.
An extreme example of that is I have a *** relationship,
and I didn't see it coming at all as a writer.
It just slowly developed that these two people are in love
and one of them happens to be a human and the other happens
to be eight inches tall.
And they get together.
But it's definitely one of those situations where you
don't want to be too explicit.
It would stretch the bounds of credulity way past the
breaking point, perhaps.
But I have had people come up to me and stare at me and get
their courage up and say, how did they--
what did they?
And I'm like, that's for your imagination.
But I would take those scenes, and every other scene,
including just between two human beings, and if we're
only talking about 50 words--
I swear I've written 25,000 words total to get 50 words
that, for me, hit that balance between revealing and not
going too far in the direction of explicit.
And I can remember weeks total just for the last book of
doing that.
Here's this scene, this scene, this scene, and I probably put
in weeks to get a few pages.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Yeah, and you know, your example
reminded me of maybe my favorite, best example of a
good job at this.
Back in the day, Phil Foglio wrote a comic series called
"XXXenophile"--
X-X-X xenophile.
And it was ***.
It was funny, sex-positive, hot ***.
It wasn't degrading to women, it didn't vilify the act of
sex, it was intelligent, there were stories.
And sometimes, it was just goofy.
The little vibrator repairman story I remember was
hysterical, where the guy keeps showing up and is like,
vibrator repairman.
And the woman's like, I don't know what's wrong with it.
And he keeps missing all these obvious passes.
And then finally, he shows up and there's a guy.
And he's like, yeah, I don't know, maybe it's just the
batteries that need changing, but I don't know how to get
this panel off.
And the vibrator repairman's like, no, it's no good.
I think you need other help.
These were hysterical stories, and I think they sold.
Back in the day, they sold and sold and sold and sold.
But now adays, they just aren't talked about very much.
You can't really get them except online.
And I remember I talked to Phil about it, and I said, so
is "XXXenophile" ever going to come back?
Because in the day, I thought that they were just fun
because it was kind of sexy and ***.
But I went back and I re-read some of them,
and they are smart.
They're smart and good and it's a good influence on the
culture to reflect that you can have sex in a book or a
book that's just about sex and have it be fun and lovely.
And when I asked him about it, he said, well, maybe when
we're not members of the PTA anymore.
Maybe then we'll put it back in print.
Because again, in this particular culture, that's
really viewed negatively.
PETER V. BRETT: Which is interesting, because you don't
get to be on the PTA unless you've had some sex.
JACQUELINE CAREY: Good point.
PETER V. BRETT: It's kind of a requirement.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: How about this--
without pointing fingers or naming names, unless people
care to, what have you seen when people have written sex,
or included these *** elements in their book, that
have really gone south for you?
There was stuff that you just don't like to see, or it might
be a deal breaker for you, or you think that it's bad
exercise of the craft.
What has shown up there that you would really
advise people to avoid?
ROBERT V.S. REDICK: Oh, I have an answer for that that I was
just dying to share.
I don't know if anybody else has read this book.
It was sort of a sleeper in the speculative fiction
community, although it was a pretty big hit in literary
circles maybe.
Has anybody else read Chris Adrian,
"The Children's Hospital"?
John Crowley gave it to me.
He said, this should win the World Fantasy Award.
And I read it and I think he's right.
It's this amazing, amazing, crazy, huge epic fantasy in
which Children's Hospital of Boston becomes a Noah's ark
and the world is destroyed in a flood.
It's really astonishing.
But he had a whole lot of agendas, and usually he dealt
with them with amazing dexterity.
With sex, I don't know what was going on but he just about
gratuitously ruined this book, I thought, with sex.
And I could tell how it was supposed to be working
phonetically, but it didn't cross the line past explicit.
Because everything in there was just hyper-explicit--
the violence, the sickness of the children in the hospital--
everything.
I think the appropriateness was fine, but he
used it as a hammer.
And I think that's just a danger with any powerful
element in the story, isn't it?
You're trying to make a point rather than letting whatever
point the reader finds in it bubble up from below.
PETER V. BRETT: So one example I would give--
I want to be careful with this, because I don't want to
sound like I'm knocking the book that I'm about to talk
about, because I actually liked it quite a bit.
And now all of a sudden I'm blanking on the-- oh, I don't
know if you guys have read "The Steel Remains"
by Richard K. Morgan.
Richard had a bit of an agenda, I think.
I don't know Richard personally.
He wrote a great epic fantasy book.
"The Steel Remains" is a fantastic book, and I really,
really liked it.
It's smart and it's exciting and has a lot of
great things, too.
But I also think that he introduced a main character
who was homosexual and almost took delight in slapping the
reader in the face with it by having prolonged scenes of
really, really graphic sex.
And I think that, to an extent, what he was trying to
do was either desensitize the reader to it or just get you
used to, this is how it is.
And in a lot of ways, I think it worked, and i think it
worked well.
And it's a great book.
But there were a few times where, as we were talking
about, it's like, OK, we've been on the mechanics of the
act for a few pages now, or at least it seemed
that way at the time.
It is true, particularly with sex in books, that if
something has an impact on you, you'll remember it as
being a bigger thing than it actually was.
You'll go back to it and be like, oh, that was eight
sentences, when you'll remember it as being this huge
portion of the book.
So I saw what Richard was doing and I applaud it and I
think that it was done well, but there were a couple of
times where it's like, OK, you know?
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: That's really funny for me to hear,
because I read that one and the sequel, and I don't
remember any sex in it, let alone any--
PETER V. BRETT: Really?
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Yeah, I don't know what
that says about me.
PETER V. BRETT: Well, I have the sequel on my reading list
for the next couple days, so please don't tell me anything
about that one.
But no, I was really struck with it in a couple of scenes.
But again, I say it was a great book, so I'm not saying
that he didn't know what he was doing.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Jacqueline, how about you?
JACQUELINE CAREY: One of the first fantasy books I read
with sex in it, and we were talking about that earlier,
was Stephen Donaldson, "Lord Foul's Bane"-- not exactly one
of the most positive affirmations.
But in terms of contemporary authors, people ask often,
where do you think the line between a book that contains
sex and erotica is?
And for me, it's an issue of pacing.
And of course whether or not it drives the plot would be
the main thing, but then also, pacing.
If suddenly you get to a sex scene and the pace slows down
so that every act is described in the whole mechanics of it--
again, nothing wrong with that-- but then you're
probably venturing more into erotica.
And I think there are--
I know of one long-running paranormal series that has
pretty much gone from plot-driven
to straight-up erotica.
ROBERT V.S. REDICK: Sex-driven.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Sex-driven--
character-driven, plot-driven, and sex-driven.
There are your three options.
For me, if I were to pick out just one or two things-- and I
agree with everything you guys have said where, when it
starts to detract from the story, when it feels preachy,
when you're using it to hammer home some agenda, that becomes
odious no matter what mechanic it is.
For me, with sex in particular, it's when maybe
the person has put good thought into how the sex is
going to influence the story, but they might not have spent
as much time as they could have in terms of examinating--
examinating, good lord--
examinating what the *** mores are revealing about the
society, or what sort of cultural beliefs they might
accidentally be perpetuating by showing--
Like what you said, Jacqueline, about how you
wanted to make consent a huge foundation of this world,
which I think you did very, very well.
And you showed this being a part of their culture.
I remember reading your book and you see the stage show
where it's dance and sex and it's ***.
And everyone's like, wow, these people are really good.
This is high art.
And it really showed that this is a different culture, a real
different world, and they were playing by
different cultural rules.
But it was still very sensible.
Sometimes you see somebody's sex scene, and while it's
still important to the story and all that, there's weird
dominance issues between men and women.
I remember reading a story in a series.
It was urban fantasy, and at this point you've had a human
having sex with a vampire and a human having sex with
werewolves, and maybe werewolves and
vampires having sex.
And then the whole focus of the book is, there were these
people who were engaged in something that was really,
really wrong and disturbing and horrifying.
And eventually you find out that
they're engaging in polyamory.
And everybody in the book is like, [INAUDIBLE].
It is, they're like, these people are
all doing it together?
And it was just the underlying assumption that everyone is
really horrified beyond speech, like we all know that
this is wrong, right?
And I was so disappointed in those books, because maybe
that's how that person feels or maybe they've just absorbed
that cultural belief.
But if that's the case, then you really owe it to your
readers to examine what cultural beliefs you might be
mindlessly regurgitating into your story so that you don't
accidentally teach little girls that it's best to be
pretty and keep your mouth shut.
That is not something you want to perpetuate in your books.
You don't want to perpetuate the fact that people who are
living consensual alternative lifestyles are
evil just out of hand.
I was disappointed in that book.
PETER V. BRETT: Did you feel that that was author
intrusion, where the author was expressing their own
morality through that? or did you feel that they were
showing, these characters are from a culture that would be
horrified by something like that?
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: I didn't feel like the author was
coming in and making a point about those poly folk.
What it did feel like to me is, main point of view
characters were so horrified, but this main point of view
character has been *** a vampire, you know?
And she has been on the wrong side of all this public
bigotry and people judging her for her relationships.
And then she just blindly does it without any self
examination to these other people doing this other thing.
And it just struck me as really odd.
And maybe there was a deadline.
Maybe those chapters got written quickly.
But it bugged me.
It really bugged me.
PETER V. BRETT: I think we all have times in our lives when
we judge something by instinct.
We have a knee-jerk reaction where we judge something, and
then somebody calls us on it, and we're like, oh yeah,
you're right.
I had no business judging that--
or at least those of us who are capable of
self-reflection.
ROBERT V.S. REDICK: Yeah, but hopefully that all vanishes in
the first or second edit, or at least gets transformed.
JACQUELINE CAREY: Yeah, I'm surprised an
editor didn't flag that.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Well you know, the thing
is, it wasn't egregious.
It wasn't like, let's go burn all the poly folk.
But it was there.
And truthfully, it probably bugged me because these days,
really, if you're in this community and you're writing
and you're being published through a reputable publisher,
nobody would ever hold forth on something like that with
the underlying tone being, being gay is wrong.
It really wouldn't fly.
But it was there--
PETER V. BRETT: Well, it still happens.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: It still happens, but for the most
part, if it's making it through a reputable publisher
and you're part of the community, we tend to be--
JACQUELINE CAREY: It's no longer
an acceptable prejudice.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Exactly, it's still a prejudice but we
pretend that we don't do that anymore.
And I just read Philip Marlowe's "The Big Sleep." Or
no, Chandler's--
that was written back in '45, one of those original noir.
And it's full of the main character just
talking about the ***.
And it's so matter-of-fact and out of hand.
It's like, well, that's what those people are like.
And the murderer ended up being a *** and well, you
can't expect any better from those people.
And it was just [INAUDIBLE].
ROBERT V.S. REDICK: There's also social
objectification of women.
You can't encounter a woman in that book that isn't just
there for Marlowe to make a one liner about, pretty much.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Exactly, and she gets stroppy
and he slaps her.
And it's so matter-of-fact that you know it's a
reflection of the time in which it was written and
certain cultural beliefs that it was OK to promulgate there.
And so I constantly am paranoid that I might
accidentally let some of that creep into my own work and
effectively poison the next generation of children by just
secreting what I accidentally soaked up when I was younger.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
ROBERT V.S. REDICK: --people who don't have that worry,
Pat, I think.
If you're not possessed of the ability to worry when you look
at your own work, that's when you're going to do something
just really egregious.
It's not when you feel like, I better be thinking, I better
have my whole self together when I tackle this.
PETER V. BRETT: And also [INAUDIBLE] the approach
you're writing with the agenda of not doing something like
that, to the point where that becomes your focus and not
telling a real story through real characters who have real
beliefs of their own.
Then the author intrusion comes in and will ruin your
book anyway.
And so it's good to be able to self-reflect, but you don't
want to overthink that.
Because then you're going to be forcing yourself on your
characters in a way that's not going to
ring true to the reader.
ROBERT V.S. REDICK: I don't know if this is too big a
subject to get into now.
Just tell me.
But that point that Pete makes always comes back to mind for
me, in the last couple of years particularly, when we're
talking about *** violence.
Because I think it is something
that a lot of writers--
a lot of women writers, but not just women writers-- have
very rightly brought to the fore and brought to our
attention in recent years.
There's a hell of a lot of ***.
And that it's not always done sensitively.
And yet, there's also a hell of a lot of
*** in the real world.
There's a hell of a lot of ***
abuse in the real world.
And I found myself actually, as I'm moving forward beyond
"The Chathrand Voyage" books, thinking about that a lot.
Because I'm writing a war story now.
And I've been wondering to what degree is it healthy that
I'm conscious of this debate at all?
Or should I more just be writing and trying to be the
most thorough, sensitive, smart, capable
writer I can be?
And I don't think there's an easy answer to that.
I think that being more aware of this debate
has sharpened me.
But I don't want to edit myself and think, look out,
there's this red light that's come on for the speculative
fiction community that says, no more ***.
No more *** abuse.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
ROBERT V.S. REDICK: It's an essential thing to think about
in the context of war.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: It is, and I think about that a lot.
I was trying to decide if I wanted to touch on that
subject in this area, or if it might be--
I've got a panel planned for women in fantasy, handling
female characters.
Because the *** issue ends up being--
the debate that Robert was talking about is, a lot of
times *** is used as this cliche go-to tool to force
cheap character development on someone, or to
give someone a backstory.
And I know there's a big backlash
against it in the community.
And rightly so, because a lot of times it is not handled
intelligently or well.
And then there's the other side of the argument, which
is, what do you do when *** is a legitimate part of the
landscape and to not talk about it is to be kind of
complicit in not focusing on it as a problem?
I'm so with you in terms of that being paralyzed between
those two intelligent viewpoints.
ROBERT V.S. REDICK: I don't feel paralyzed at all.
I find that it's just one more thing that I have to be
conscious of in looking at myself.
I don't want to be cowardly and say, this is something
that is going to get me in hot water.
I also don't ever want to do it badly.
So I think it's healthy that it's out there.
But it's like what Pete was saying.
You can't be so conscious that you whitewash it when it
really belongs in the story, when it really is there
because it is something you've been thinking hard about,
something that is fundamental to character, to someone's
history, whatever it might be.
PETER V. BRETT: Were you about to say something, Jacqueline?
I'm sorry.
JACQUELINE CAREY: Yeah, but go ahead.
PETER V. BRETT: I can wait.
JACQUELINE CAREY: OK, I was going to agree with the-- if
it's integral, it's integral.
And I think it's always better to have more awareness.
But you're right, you absolutely have to get out of
your own way once you start writing.
And apropos of sex and violence, when I had the first
idea to do the "Kushiel's Dart" and the whole series,
the idea of a heroine who was submissive and masochistic in
nature was something that I really had to think long and
hard if it could be done, if it could be done well, if I
could do it well.
And one of the reasons I decided to was to really try
and overturn or subvert these tropes of *** violence and
create a heroine who refuses, essentially, to be a victim.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: [INAUDIBLE] did a great job, by the way.
And I never really thought of it in those terms.
Boy, I would have been terrified making that decision
in saying, my main character is going to be female,
submissive, masochistic, but still strong.
Talk about a long row to hoe there.
PETER V. BRETT: I have this bad habit
of reading my reviews.
And I've developed a thick skin from it.
And after a while, they all start to seem the same and you
can skim through them and just read the ones that have
something different.
But I came across one recently that was representative of a
certain portion of the reviews that came out and said, I was
reading this book, I was really enjoying this book, and
then I got to the scene with the *** violence and now I
will never read another book by this author again.
And part of it was a knee-jerk, well, he's just
using it for cheap character development.
And I think that there's a history of that.
And so people can assume that when it's not
necessarily the case.
But she went on to say that this is a fantasy.
And I read fantasy to escape the real world.
And if I want to read about *** and violence, I can just
turn on the news or read the newspaper.
And I want to read about a fantasy world that maybe men
are better in this world, and they don't have this problem.
And so we should have that in fantasy, because fantasy
should be about a better world that we would want to be in,
or whatever.
And that really struck me, because whenever I read a
review like that, part of me is just like, oh, I don't like
to lose a reader.
I don't like to have somebody not like my work.
And so there's a personal thing there.
But also, for someone to say, I expect you to excise from
the world everything that makes me uncomfortable or that
I don't like, strikes me as A, impossible, because you can't
do that for everyone.
And B, it robs the story of the realism
that allows you to--
what do you call it?
Willing to suspend your disbelief.
ROBERT V.S. REDICK: Sell a good story?
PETER V. BRETT: Well it really lets you feel like
this world is real.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: And that actually is a great segue to
the last thing I wanted to ask.
Because I think we all agree that you're trying to tell a
realistic story.
Especially one focused on maybe a character or two--
that sex is kind of by necessity an element of a
person's life, right?
And so therefore, to exclude it can really damage the
realism of the story and of your world and
all of these things.
And we picked on Tolkien a little bit earlier.
Maybe I picked on him.
I at least brought him up.
So let's bring him back up here.
Does this mean that "The Lord of the Rings" would've been
better with sex in it?
And I think we probably have to agree--
no.
PETER V. BRETT: What if it was elf on dwarf?
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Then it would be better.
And similarly to what you were talking about, Robert, where,
if you're dealing with a story like "The Black Company" or
these gritty realistic war stories--
and you're right, the use of *** as a tool of war is--
I was going to say well-documented and that
sounds so stupid.
But it is--
PETER V. BRETT: It's hard to separate.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Does that mean that it would've been
better to show this happening in Minas Tirith?
Would that have improved the story?
ROBERT V.S. REDICK: I guess I'm going to sort of take a
fudge reply.
Because I guess I have this philosophy that whenever that
sort of question comes up, would this book have been
better with X, Y, or Z, you just don't know.
You just don't know.
I mean, could it have been executed?
Can I stretch my imagination to imagine "The Lord of the
Rings" better?
I can.
Can I easily imagine it ruined by the inclusion of sex?
I sure can.
That's an easier thing to imagine.
So would it have been?
Yes, in a certain miraculous turn of the
kaleidoscope, maybe.
But we don't know that.
I don't think that it's absence is crippling for me.
Again, I'm only an expert on my own reading responses.
PETER V. BRETT: You would have to make the story into
something that it's not in order to include
that at this point.
And that was obviously not the story he wanted to tell.
He wanted to write a children's book.
And I think in his mind, particularly starting out with
"The Hobbit" he wanted to write something that was safe
and any child could read it.
And I think "The Lord of the Rings" had a lot of that, too.
And to say, let's go back and retroactively force that in,
is no different than George Lucas or Steven Spielberg
going back and taking out the guns or
taking out the smoking.
Or even in the case now of "The Hobbit" movie where
they're trying to inject a bunch of stuff into the story,
you may end up with a product that's also good.
But you're doing it by taking the original product and
making it into something that it's not.
It's an interesting philosophical discussion, but
I wouldn't actually like to see someone go
and try and do it.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: That is a little horrifying.
ROBERT V.S. REDICK: But you know, if he had had sex, I
think it would have been elf on dwarf.
And I'm not even kidding.
Because it was many, many years after my first formative
read of "The Lord of the Rings" that I finally read all
of the appendices to the last word and read that wonderful,
and here's what happened later, sort of throw away
essay he has in there where you find out that, at the end
of ends, Legolas builds a boat on the shores of So and So.
And he and Gimli sail off together, and they're the last
two of the company to leave the shores of Middle Earth.
It was so sweet, you know?
And there was some eroticism going on there, at least in
that writing that I think, in another world, another time,
he might have liked to play with that.
JACQUELINE CAREY: It is a pretty
bromantic book, or work.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: It is, and what I keep coming back to,
because obviously, when I ask myself that question--
because it was mostly me playing tennis with myself
saying, am I right to have all this sex in the book?
Yes, I need it for realism.
I need it because--
and then I go, well if I need this for this in my story,
then does the lack of it hurt other stories?
And I think what it comes down to is a lot of people assume--
because you read Tolkien when you're little and you love it.
And so you want to write fantasy, because you love it.
And so you look at Tolkien and you go, well obviously that
means I need to create a fake language.
But that's not the key.
The key is that Tolkien was a geek for language.
And therefore, that was part of his books.
And he's a geek for history, and it was
a part of his books.
And he was a geek for his own creative mythology, and so it
was part of his books.
And he was a geek for of the Edas, so he ripped
them off in his books.
And so all of those things maintain a continuous tone.
Whereas I am a geek for economy--
PETER V. BRETT: Sex?
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: And biology and engineering and sex, yeah.
And so all of those things I like to have in my books.
And I hope that they feel consistent in their tone.
I'm looking at the clock.
We're getting towards the end.
Are there any other questions you guys wanted to throw out?
PETER V. BRETT: Well, there was one thing that we talked
about before, and we didn't really get into it.
And I don't know that it's that important now, the
concept of--
at least for some of us, where we start out in our books with
our characters being very young and therefore not
sexually active.
And having that change over the course of the series, and
that create an imbalance in the books where some books
have more sex than others.
Because in some books, the characters are too young to be
sexually active or sexually interested.
And others, they're of the age where they're getting married
and have relationships and having those relationships
drive the story.
And you obviously have to include it there.
So that was something that we had talked
about talking about.
But I don't know if there's anything to add to it now.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Yeah, I think those of us that are
writing coming of age stories run much more of a risk of
accidentally betraying reader trust.
Jacqueline, for your books, if they get to your second book
and they're offended at the sex, then something really
went wrong in their heads.
JACQUELINE CAREY: They missed something big in book one.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: But yeah, I don't know how we might soften
that blow with the coming of age story or with the story
that grows in the telling where it becomes more of a
gritty war story, or you go from somebody who's living a
safe life to somebody who's living a dangerous life.
I think, ultimately, some people want the same sort of
story all the time.
They want a very safe story.
And that's why everyone--
yeah, I don't know.
I really don't know.
ROBERT V.S. REDICK: Well, you can't soften that
blow in real life.
So how much we can soften it and still--
bye Pat, you disappeared again--
how much you can soften it and still write the book you
believe in, I don't know, or a book that's going to be
believed in.
Yeah, I definitely face that issue that you're talking
about, Pete.
And it was a live issue in my mind for a long time.
And I had lots of conversations with my trusted
readers before I got to the point where my characters were
naturally becoming more sexually active.
And I remember real well a reader who I really trust
who'd seen the books and manuscript.
And he would say, I've read so many fantasies where it's just
all about, will they, won't they, will they, won't they.
And I get so tired of that.
It's as if once you do it, the problems are over, or the
tension between two people are over, which they are just so
manifestly not.
I could have needed different advice.
But at that moment, I really needed that advice.
Because I think that in the draft, I was artificially
holding back.
Some little unexamined thing in my head was saying, well,
this is a form of drama that I can't give away too soon.
Because once I give it away, I won't have anything left.
I was holding it.
And then I realized, this is going to be happening now, and
this is naturally going to be happening now.
And God knows it didn't answer all the questions or I hope
get rid of very much drama.
You know, there are pregnancies that resulted from
it, there was marriage, there were new jealousies, there was
falling in and out of love and in and out of attraction.
And it just went merrily forward.
But the characters were young.
They were also stuck on a ship and they were also forced in
all kinds of ways to mature very fast
as people are sometimes.
PETER V. BRETT: I noticed this a lot with Robert Jordan.
It's been kind of on my mind, because I just finish "A
Memory of Light." So after 15 years or whatever, I finally
brought "The Wheel of Time" to a close in my mind.
And so it was an emotional experience even if it wasn't
just Jordan at the end.
But one of the interesting things about it was that over
the course of the let's say 11 books that Jordan wrote, there
were so many different character POVs where there
were two characters who had the will they or won't they
thing going on forever.
And it reached a point by the last Jordan book where there
were a dozen open romances, or at least it felt that way,
where if these people would just shut up and admit that
they like each other,
everything would come together.
And then when Brandon Sanderson took over the series
and tried to tie it up and bring it to the end,
there was one book--
I think it was the second of the three that he wrote--
where he basically just started tying up every single
one of those romances all at once.
And it happened in such rapid succession, it was like, wow,
everybody got married or got laid or whatever in one book.
And it felt, in some ways like, all right, well he's
bringing the series to a climax.
But also, it showed just how unnatural it was over the
course of the series to have these romances
drag out for so long.
People had gotten friendzoned accidentally, because they
just couldn't admit that they liked each other.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: For you Jacqueline, because you
started off with the sex being an obvious part of the series,
did other things come up later that caused a similar
difficulty for you, where things went in a direction and
that change led to similar anxiety with you?
JACQUELINE CAREY: Nothing that would be on a par.
I think it was more having to incorporate enormous amounts
of backstory over and over.
But basically, no.
But one thing I wanted to say, happily I get a lot of
wonderful reader response.
And I've heard in particular over the years from a lot of
readers who are survivors of some sort of *** abuse who
have found catharsis and empowerment in the books.
And that's a wonderful thing.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: That maybe would be a nice note to end
on, because I did talk about the handful of people that
have *** about there being sex in the books, or they're
offended, or they're upset, or they're unhappy.
But truth be told, there have been people who have written
in and said, you know, it's nice to see this handled in a
mature way.
I had a 16-year-old girl respond to somebody on my
Facebook wall with the most brilliant
and energetic rebuttal.
This guy threw off this little post that was like, what's up
with all the sex?
Why do blah blah blah?
And she jumped in.
She was like, I'm only 16 and I realize how
important this is.
Why can't you?
And then she laid out the four reasons why it was important
to have this in the book.
And I'm like, can I use this in a blog later?
It was great.
So I think that the people that do have real serious
problems with these things are a very vocal minority.
And we probably should not give them more
credit than is due.
PETER V. BRETT: There's always that with reader mail, where
the people that are upset about something are much more
likely to take the time to write to you than the people
who are really happy with something.
And it's true.
For all of the reviews and all of the letters that I've
gotten from people that were upset with things that I did
in the books, there were one or two people who wrote to me
where it was really touching-- some of whom I've actually had
a lot of correspondence with-- that said, hey, I was a victim
of something very similar to what happened in the book.
And I really felt like you got it right and you approached it
in a way that was respectful and showed the character, what
they had to go through, and how they came out the other
end of it and were a stronger person for it.
And that was enough to wipe out all of the negative
responses that I had gotten by people whose knee-jerk
reaction was, oh, well, he put this in there, and therefore,
he's the devil.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: That's why we're doing it, you know?
If we can get one or two of those, then we know that we're
doing something right.
So I think we are a little bit over our time, which is
as it should be.
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all of my
lovely guests and as well as Geek and Sundry.
Thank you guys so much for showing up today.
JACQUELINE CAREY: Thank you.
PETER V. BRETT: Thank you.
ROBERT V.S. REDICK: Thank you, Pat.
That was great fun.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: And we'll all talk to you later.
ROBERT V.S. REDICK: All righty.
PETER V. BRETT: Thanks for having us.
ROBERT V.S. REDICK: So long.