Babel Clash

Sexual politics may be part of the reticence to write overtly sexual characters but that isn’t the only reason a lot of male fantasy writers shy away from it in my opinion. First and foremost, it’s outside the comfort zone for them – on a basic level, the more you explore female traits and characteristics the easier it is to just get it wrong. That’s one reason why I’m so glad my principle editor is a woman; Lou’s great for bouncing ideas off but I’ve really seen the value of being aware Jo will give me a ‘friendly’ clout round the head if/when I get something wrong on the female characters.

So first we have the fact that it’s one more thing to learn, writing female characters, and the more you explore them the greater the chance female readers will disagree with your efforts. Secondly, the more sexuality we have, the more the book can be classified in someone’s head as something else. I walked into Waterstones today and say a display that said ‘Dark fantasy’ (as I went to rearrange the SFF shelves to make my books more prominent – don’t judge, we all do it!) but what they meant by dark fantasy was actually the romantic fantasy that increasingly is nothing more than erotica with window dressing. That in itself has a readership that often won’t be picking up Stormcaller or Sasha on the next shelf, because it’s only the veneer of fantasy that they want, nothing more.

Thirdly, sex scenes (a likely result of overt sexuality in a novel) in fantasy are often either trite, cliched and at least faintly ridiculous or, well, a bit too gritty and realistic. The one sex scene in Joe Abercombie’s First Law series stuck in the memory for the wrong reasons, as erotic as pigs rutting (if they rut, or is there another term?) and distracted from the rest of the book rather. Unless you make it look like a period drama with overblown romance, you run the risk of having a mix of sweat, mud and bodily fluids that comes across faintly disgusting and weird.

But having said all of that, the more you rounded and real a character, the better their influence on the whole novel. If they’re a sexual person, you can’t hide from that and you’ll embarrass yourself by doing so. Doranei, a major character in the Twilight Reign, only got to that position because a female character, Zhia, started flirting with him and derailed the scene – creating a whole extra plot thread that has hugely benefited the series and that would never have happened without Zhia being sexually aggressive. But with the rise of Twilight and other fantasy romance, are mainstream fantasy books free to do more on that front, or increasingly constrained in what they can show without being looked (even further) down upon?

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