melannen | FMK#1: Arthuriana

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FMK#1: Arthuriana

OK! I should have all the fiction sorted and reshelved by tonight, so WE'RE DOING THIS. If I manage to do this weekly we should be done in only a year!

Here's how it will go: I will post a list of 10-20 unread books that I own. Sometimes it will be themed, sometimes it will just be random. It will be a poll, and you folks will get to vote F, M, or K for each book.

F means "melannen should have a single night of ill-considered passion with it and then decide whether to turn that into a long-term thing or dump it with prejudice."
M means "melannen should commit long-term and continue to keep the book in her bedroom indefinitely."
K means "melannen should dispose of it posthaste."

This may remind people of a certain familiar game. Unfortunately I don't think DW polls have any way to force a three-way choice like in the game, so it's a free vote for each title. (Also I don't think I could agree to give up 1/3 of my books anyway.)

I will read the book with the most F votes, hopefully within the next week, and then post about it here.
I will dispose of the book with the most K votes, *if* there are enough total K votes on all titles to make a quorum (i.e., if only one person votes K in the whole poll, I don't consider myself bound to their vote.)
All other titles, I will think about very hard and take your votes into consideration!

Feel free to vote even if you only have a vague idea about the book or author. Or even if you've never heard of it but think the title is cool. That's why I bought most of these, after all.
Feel free to vote F on terrible books just because you want to make me read them.
Please leave comments with more information on the book or justifying your votes if you do have things to say!

Anon/no account votes and comments are on. Some background on me and my library if you wander here from far away: I am an SF fan and aspiring SF writer (emphasis on "aspiring" rather than "writing" rn). I would like to keep books that are a) good and/or b) important or foundational texts in the genre and/or c) help balance the proportion of books not by/about white dudes in my library.

Got that?

Poll #18011 FMK #1: Arthuriana

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 30

View Respondents

The Eagle and the Sword, A. A. Attanasio (1978)

F
9 (90.0%)

M
0 (0.0%)

K
1 (10.0%)

The Merlin Effect, T. A. Barron (1994)

F
10 (76.9%)

M
3 (23.1%)

K
0 (0.0%)

The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley (1982)

F
7 (30.4%)

M
4 (17.4%)

K
12 (52.2%)

Ass't'd Prince Valiant Hardcovers, Hal Foster (1978)

F
6 (46.2%)

M
2 (15.4%)

K
5 (38.5%)

King Arthur and His Knights, Henry Frith (1884)

F
9 (69.2%)

M
3 (23.1%)

K
1 (7.7%)

The Merlin Conspiracy, Diana Wynne Jones (2003)

F
10 (47.6%)

M
10 (47.6%)

K
1 (4.8%)

King Arthur and His Knights, Sir James Knowles (1860)

F
7 (58.3%)

M
4 (33.3%)

K
1 (8.3%)

The Pendragon Cycle, Stephen R. Lawhead (1987-1989)

F
10 (62.5%)

M
1 (6.2%)

K
5 (31.2%)

Merlin's Godson Trilogy, H. Warner Munn (1974)

F
6 (66.7%)

M
0 (0.0%)

K
3 (33.3%)

The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, John Steinbeck (1976)

F
9 (56.2%)

M
2 (12.5%)

K
5 (31.2%)

The Merlin Trilogy, Mary Stewart (1970-1979)

F
12 (57.1%)

M
7 (33.3%)

K
2 (9.5%)

The Sunbird, Elizabeth Wein (2004)

F
13 (72.2%)

M
5 (27.8%)

K
0 (0.0%)

The Book of Merlyn, T. H. White (1977)

F
10 (47.6%)

M
9 (42.9%)

K
2 (9.5%)

Merlin's Booke, Jane Yolen (1986)

F
10 (66.7%)

M
4 (26.7%)

K
1 (6.7%)

The Last Defender of Camelot, Roger Zelazny (1980)

F
9 (52.9%)

M
4 (23.5%)

K
4 (23.5%)

(Books on the topic I have read and am definitely keeping: the Mike Ashley anthologies, Parke Godwin's Firelord, a mysterly Goldsmith "King Arthur" that is hilariously bowdlerized, Sutcliff's Arthur books, Twain's Connecticut Yankee, White's the Once and Future King, lots of pre-1860 retellings and sources, lots of "nonfiction".)

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I am voting "kill" for the only one of those I've read, Mists of Avalon (I did not vote in the other questions, because that wouldn't be fair), because its author was a terrible person. Like, if you want to investigate why, the trigger warnings and the things to insert in the [] in the Google phrase "Marion Zimmer Bradley []" are "child sexual abuse" and "rape".

That said, when I read Mists of Avalon years before finding out about all of that, I liked it well enough to read the whole series. (I'm not sure that means it's good, though. I was a lot younger then.) And I'm pretty sure it has the status of "important text in the genre" of feminist SFF. So you may want to discard my vote. Just. Now you have the context, and also understand why I got rid of every book in my library Bradley ever had anything to do with. (I'm still sad about Tiger Burning Bright, as that cooperation with Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey was phenomenal.)

Yeah, I know about Bradley's history, but she is also very much "foundational text in the genre" and I have a whole stack by her because my last clean-out predated me finding out about most of it. The only one of them I've read is Tiger Burning Bright (which I don't think I will be able to get rid of despite its many problematic bits because there are so many good bits too.) (I dumped my Card last clearout but I kept Pastwatch because some books are important enough that for me it's worth detaching the author from the work. It's not like the authors are getting any money from me, I only buy used unless I want to actively support the author.)

I voted "F" because I think I want to read Mists of Avalon so I can say I have read it and then dump it. (Probably I want to read one Darkover book too, just so I can say I did? And then dump the whole pile, at least the non-cowritten ones.) But if enough people vote to dump-without-reading for Mists of Avalon, that will save me the trouble...

*nodnod*

I agree with alexseanchai here because The Mists of Avalon, besides being extremely anachronistic on modern Wicca in sixth-century Britain, is really, really rapey. Contextualizing the book with Bradley's history is beyond unpleasant.

A lot of the "King Arthur but in a (vaguely) historical context" things I have read are rapey for some reason. :/ I wonder if Bradley is the reason or she just latched onto it because it suited her interests.

I remember reading it when I was a teen because so many of my friends LOVED it both for the feminist slant and the poly story, and just finding everyone weird and unlikable, and the sex... pretty sketchy.

I also voted kill on it, because it seems like it might be time to dig out this foundation and lay something else down.

That was me.

Dreamwidth still logging me out.

ETA: I voted F on a couple that I've been interested in though haven't read or haven't read recently, but you're already keeping the M ones for me.

My reaction to Darkover was the same as to TMA, incidentally.

Edited 2017-02-20 18:16 (UTC)

Ugh, I am sorry about the continuing DW issues, that is deeply sucky. :/

I feel like feminist poly Arthurian should be my thing, but somehow whenever I consider actually picking it up it doesn't call to me, so it keeps sitting on the shelf. Maybe that was a good call.

I voted F because it is so influential but it does have all the issues discussed above. Also, the poly as I recall is not really that great but I remember thinking it was homophobic. It has been years since I've read it, but I remembered the poly presentation bothered me as unnecessarily negative. So maybe just kill it!

I voted "K" but that's because I dislike the book and have no particular need or interest in grounding myself in modern traditions Arthuriana, as if/when I fuck around with Arthuriana I go back to the mediaeval stuff to start with.

So for me it really comes down to why you'd want to read it? I mean if one's interest is actually modern SF, and modern reinventions of the tradition, etc, it's probably indispensible, and see below: re Horrific People and their Art.

Yeah, I mostly go back to the medieval stuff as a source, but I also want to Not Be the person who accidentally re-writes the book everybody else has read because they haven't done the background reading, you know? If I end up echoing something as popular as MZB in something I write, I want it to be on purpose, especially given the issues around her.

But then again we might be starting to reach the point where a lot of arthurian fans never bothered with it either, as opposed to in the 80s/early 90s where it seemed like everyone had.

Edited 2017-02-20 23:21 (UTC)

I think you could probably serve that end with a good Cliff Notes type read and tagging for an alpha or beta reader who knows it well, too! So.

Oh my god I had forgotten MZB was involved with Tiger Burning Bright and now I retroactively have to scrub my brain I loved that book when I was a teenager.

:(

IIRC, the one time I re-read it post-teenager I ended up pretty much skipping one of the three POVs entirely but still loving much of the rest. I wonder if they each wrote one of the POVs, and if so, which is the one I skipped....

FWIW: if we were to actually feel horrible for enjoying all art ever created by Hideously Awful People, we'd be consigning most art in history to the furnaces. (My favourite example being Beethoven, who utilized his position to steal his nephew from said nephew's mother and then drove said nephew to the brink of suicide, and who was basically emotionally abusive to everyone in his life ever, so.)

Horrific people can, in spite of themselves, make good art. The art doesn't justify their horrificness, but their horrificness also doesn't automatically remove their art. *hands*

Yeah. I honestly didn't expect people to come down this hard against Mists of Avalon since I know there's still a lot of nostalgia for it! And I can't help but wonder how much of the "burn it all" reaction to MZB is because she's a woman that a lot of other women felt safe with and now feel really betrayed by - there will be plenty of Old White Dude authors coming up later who were known rapey douchebags* who I doubt will get this kind of response. (Asimov, for one.) Because somehow people don't turn against white dudes as hard as they do against other people, when they do turn.

But there is the bit where knowing what you know about a person makes it harder to overlook things in their fiction that you might have previously made excuses for, and you start having trouble thinking of it as great art because now all you can see are the gaping flaws.

*admittedly mostly not as bad as MZB, but then we don't know the bitter details for a lot of them the way we do her.

I also think that there's a certain amount of . . . *grasps* like I found MYSELF stamping very hard on a not particularly admirable impulse, post-finding-out, which is that I just don't LIKE MoA and never have, and never liked any of her other stuff, and everyone else did and I always felt Pressured or Judged. So finding out she was a Terrible Person hit this really strong inclination to a more violent rejection and labelling all of her stuff as TAINTED OMG!! (I had the same impulse with Card, mind.)

Which I personally feel is bullshit, and I know a lot of women, especially either older women or women who were raised in particularly repressed backgrounds, where it really was the first thing they came across that gave them a feeling of identification/etc, and that's a shitty way to treat THEM, so I did stamp on that impulse.

Like I think you're right too - I think there's a lot of stuff contributing to the reactions I've seen. But when it comes down to it, I strongly feel that judging art by the moral failures or successes of the artist is a mug's game. Lots of horrible people make good art, and lots of wonderful people make terrible art, and the art remains, and all we can do is use the art to make US better, regardless of the person who made it. /rambling

Which may be self-justification because my favourite example is actually very germane to me, because on the one hand I find everything he did REPREHENSIBLE and that's just the stuff we have confirmation of (we have no idea what he actually DID to end up with his nephew deciding death was better . . . ), and then on the other you will take the 9th out of my cold dead hands. SO.

Thank you; I was unaware of this, and now need to process.

I hit "F" for everything I'd never heard of, which was at least half your list.
I hit "M" for the Mists of Avalon because it's foundational, but I'm not surprised to see all the Ks.
"M" for The Sunbird, even though I haven't read it, because it's a cool premise by the author of Code Name Verity so it cannot possibly be unworthy of your Arthuriana collection.
Diana Wynne Jones is an auto-M.

The Sunbird is weird and fantastic. Elizabeth Wein's series argues for deep interconnections between post-Roman Britain and Ethiopia, which is just terrific as far as shaking us all out of our preconceived models of Arthuriana goes.

I picked it up because it's so rare to find something that even acknowledges the existence of medieval Africa, much less focuses on it, so I am glad to hear that it's also good.

It's part of a larger series, but I think there's enough background built into the book that you can understand what's going on with Medraut even if you haven't read the previous Winter Prince. (Short form: he's traumatized from familial abuse and has an exceedingly complex relationship with his legitimate half-siblings, one of whom is present in the book and the other of whom is lost from page 1.) That's really all you need to know. The other really good thing about The Winter Prince is that it shows how much Britain as a whole is impoverished and living in the ruins of the Roman Empire.

I could probably have guessed all that backstory just from his name being Medraut. :D I think I'll be fine. And I love the stuff about living in the ruins of Rome ~~since that is probably what my retirement will be about lbr~~

Mind you, The Winter Prince is also a very good book. I like the rest of Wein's Arthuriana, but I love that one without reservation.

Oh, right, Code Name Verity! I wondered why so many DW people were going all in for that one, now it makes sense.

I haven't read many of these and have heard of even fewer, so I only voted for one thing and that was an F for Stephen Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle. I loved these books as a young teen, however, do be aware that they are from a Christian publisher and thus have some weird "the good guys are/became Christians and that led the way to victory" type stuff in them. Because it's been like 25 years since I read them, I don't remember much other than loving them at the time, so I don't know how I would feel reading them now. If the Christianism isn't too intrusive, they might still be enjoyable, so I think they at least deserve a try.

Well, "the good guys became Christian and that led them to victory" is basically the theme of a lot of the old historical Arthur sources, so it's not as weird as it would be in a lot of books. I've been doing a lot of Dark Ages history lately and there is a lot of that, as you would expect in an age of kings converting.

I voted K on those because they are rapey as fuck and IMO don't do enough that's original to make up for it.

Valid! Yeah, going through this list I was realizing that a lot of stuff I had assumed was influenced by MoA actually predated it.

Feel free to discard my votes as I am unqualified to comment on Anglophone Arthuriana.

I was actually kind of surprised when I saw your votes! It looks like you voted to kill the one that is all about how Morgaine is amazing and read all the ones about how Merlin is the best?? (Not that I have read any of them, so what do I know.)

I voted against Mists of Avalon for the reasons exposed above and based myself on "help balance the proportion of books not by/about white dudes in my library" for the rest (I voted for books by authors with female names).

Ah, that's reasonable.

I voted F for a lot because you;ve kept most of the things I recall my from own Arthurian kick on your retain list.

The exceptions are M for Mists of Avalon - foundational certainly, I read it more or less when it come out and despite jarring in places it is still on my shelves. I've not re-read it in decades though. I stumbled over MZB with The Planet Savers (probably around 1975) and them went on to inhale all the published Darkover novels and buy others as they came out through the 70s and 80s. I adored them and keep meaning to go back and re-read and see with four decades of experience whether they still hold up for me. Heinlein and MZB were my intro into the genre and despite the horrifying revelations about MZB I can just about detach the author from the work (and I bought them all decades ago).

Zelazny would be a definite M for me too - because Amber.

I have kind of sneaking suspicion that if we really knew all the details of Heinlein's personal life (which he very carefully kept away from the public while he was alive) we might have reason for horror there too, so yeah, I'm hesitant to condemn without reading any at all? On the other hand idk there's probably a reason I have a whole stack and never felt inspired to dig in even before I knew that stuff.

Zelazny is probably an auto-M for me, although I actually like some of his others more than Amber (Lord of Light, Doorways in the Sand, My Immortal....) But then again some of his stand-alones are not good at all, so that could be one of them.

Voting K for The Mists of Avalon. Yes, it is key in the fantasy genre, but it has the following problems:

1) The arranged rape of both Morgaine and Arthur. The high priestess of Avalon arranges for Morgaine to be the virgin priestess who has sex with King Arthur and therefore mystically marries him to the goddess and the land, not telling her OR Arthur that "hey, this means you're going to be fucking the sibling you haven't seen in seven years." It's also clear from context that neither of them would have gone through with this if they had known in advance.

2) Viviane (aforementioned high priestess and Morgaine's maternal aunt) sets this up because "You are of the royal line of Avalon; so too is he. Could I have given you to a commoner? Or, could the High King to come be so given?"

So yeah. It comes down to purity of bloodlines. I really, REALLY dislike that concept these days.

3) The spelling of Guinevere. Or, as Bradley puts it, Gwenhwyfar. I hate that spelling so much. It rasps on my brain.

4) The way that Bradley treats Gwenhwyfar. Gwen is a shy, agoraphobic, devout Christian who was raised in a convent. She wanted to be a nun, and until her marriage was not familiar with any pagans. She also marries Arthur because she's part of a deal her father made to provide Arthur with horses, and Lancelot (or, as Bradley would have it, Lancelet) is the first man she sees that she's attracted to. She's really not a bad person.

But Bradley hates her.

Morgaine, who is Bradley's mouthpiece, is constantly impatient with Gwen's Christian piety, belief in sin, and reluctance to have sex with Lancelet. The narration more often than not portrays her as a prude, a fool, and fundamentally useless. She is basically the embodiment of every emotion and belief system that Bradley does not like. You've heard of straw feminists? Gwen is a straw queen.

5) And then there is this part, which, in view of her husband's pedophilia and her own incestuous rape of her daughter, is VERY uncomfortable:

Every man she had desired had been too close kin to her-Lancelet, who was the son of her foster-mother; Arthur, her own mother's son; now the son of her husband ...

But they are too close kin to me only by the laws made by the Christians who seek to rule this land ... to rule it in a new tyranny; not alone to make the laws but to rule the mind and heart and soul. Am I living out in my own life all the tyranny of that law, so I as priestess may know why it must be overthrown?

In other words, incest isn't wrong; it's just illegal by the laws of those tyrannical Christians!

I didn't like that even before I found out about the sexual abuse of her daughter. Now it just reads as an Authorial Tract.

6) There's a great deal of ableism. Gwen is regarded with contempt for her agoraphobia (the narration treats her mental illness as something that she could overcome if she just tried), Kevin (one of the Merlins) is often seen as repellent because he limps and he's a hunchback, and so on.

7) People who are small and dark of hair, eye and skin are seen as kin to the Fae, i.e., not quite human. Again, I'm not very comfortable with dark-skinned people being dehumanized these days.

It's better written than many books. But it also has some poisonous ideas and attitudes. I didn't enjoy the mix.

The thing is that most of your specifics are stuff that comes up over and over in Arthur retellings because of the way the 'canon' works and the way people in different times attempt to make sense of it - I think all of that but the pitiful Gwen is more or less in Firelord, for example (which actually, to my shock, predates Mists of Avalon.) A lot of it's in Sutcliff, too.

Maybe I should just assume that nearly everything that's considered groundbreaking in Bradley was already out there in other stuff I've already read and don't need to read it.

Of course, knowing what we know about Bradley, the rape and incest and grooming and so on seems waaay creepier and not just someone playing with the canon.

Edited 2017-02-21 02:05 (UTC)

I read Mists of Avalon so long ago, I only recall that I read it. It wasn't something I loved enough to keep. I had the entire run of the Darkover series up until last year, when I gave them a last read and sent them on their way. (Mostly space issues.)

I voted F for Mary Stewart's Merlin trilogy. I read the series as each book was published. I still own The Crystal Cave. I'd give that one a M, and a F to the second. Unless you are a completist, I'd skip the third.

Alas my Mary Stewart is a 3-in-1 omnibus so it's keep all or nothing.

Edited 2017-02-21 01:58 (UTC)

That must be a bruiser of a book!

It's actually smaller than Mists of Avalon!

Voted F on Diana Wynne Jones because you should read The Merlin Conspiracy ASAP, but then you should keep it. Also, despite the title, it's really debatable whether that one is Arthuriana. There is a (different) DWJ that is, but it's kind of majorly spoilery to describe it as such.

Edited (clarity) 2017-02-21 01:35 (UTC)

I don't think The Merlin Effect is actually all that arthurian-y either, but if you put Merlin in the title it's fair game. *G*

Now I'm trying to think which of the list of DWJ that I haven't read yet would be more Arthurian and can't come up with any good candidates.

The Merlin Effect is Merlin-y. In that it's all about the Merlin-and-his-crap end of the spectrum, not really to do with Arthur and his crap.

I read it a lot as a kid and have some lasting fondness for it. <3

I had The Ancient One as a kid and read the crap out of it, but the main thing I loved about it was the giving-US-a-Native-American-history part (ok and the volcanoes), so when I finally found the other Kate books and they were definitely not about Native American stuff I was afraid I would stop liking it if I read them....

I missed this poll the first time, but would like to chime in and say that Zelazny's collection Last Defender of Camelot is probably my single favorite Zelazny short story collection, and that is saying a lot, because I adore Zelazny's short work. A ton of my very favorite of his stories are in that collection.

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