Yeah... I have mixed feelings about TGOK. When you only have two named female characters in the first three hundred pages, and then by the end of the book you're in double digits of interesting, meaty female parts, it's clear that this was a conscious choice on Liu's part. And on the whole, it's a choice I think was a mistake, because fuck the long game, if your book is broken for the first three hundred pages because of your long game, you've done something wrong.
On the other hand, it's a subtle point, but I do think it's important that when Liu does start telling female stories more substantially, those stories have backstories that fill in what was happening to them in the first half of the book. It's not that he starts adding in women. Those women were always there. And they were always soldiers, farmers, servants, rulers, mothers, daughters, thieves, merchants.
I also think it's a little glib to say that just because he's borrowing a lot of techniques from the classic epics, he's not doing anything revolutionary. He's doing it in a secondary world fantasy, for one thing. And the techniques he's using are techniques that nobody else writing fantasy uses because they are the techniques that strike us as most obstructively old fashioned in those epics. And because they are techniques that are really, really difficult to do well. You need to be able to tell an incredible amount of story in an incredibly small number of words in order to backtrack the way Liu does without slowing down the story. The old epics cheat on this account, by using pop cultural allusions to embed whole other epics in a line or two, but in secondary world fantasy you can't do that (or you can, and Liu does, with the Milton and other quotes, but you can't lean on it.) The difficulty level of pulling off a novel like TGOK is very, very high. And yet for large swaths of it, Liu does pull it off.
no subject
On the other hand, it's a subtle point, but I do think it's important that when Liu does start telling female stories more substantially, those stories have backstories that fill in what was happening to them in the first half of the book. It's not that he starts adding in women. Those women were always there. And they were always soldiers, farmers, servants, rulers, mothers, daughters, thieves, merchants.
I also think it's a little glib to say that just because he's borrowing a lot of techniques from the classic epics, he's not doing anything revolutionary. He's doing it in a secondary world fantasy, for one thing. And the techniques he's using are techniques that nobody else writing fantasy uses because they are the techniques that strike us as most obstructively old fashioned in those epics. And because they are techniques that are really, really difficult to do well. You need to be able to tell an incredible amount of story in an incredibly small number of words in order to backtrack the way Liu does without slowing down the story. The old epics cheat on this account, by using pop cultural allusions to embed whole other epics in a line or two, but in secondary world fantasy you can't do that (or you can, and Liu does, with the Milton and other quotes, but you can't lean on it.) The difficulty level of pulling off a novel like TGOK is very, very high. And yet for large swaths of it, Liu does pull it off.