Found this piece in the Washington Post:
Stephen King, James Frey nominated for Bad Sex in Fiction Award
While not specifically about fantasy literature, I thought it might be interesting to readers of this blog, as there is certainly a lot of bad sex (and idiotic romance) in fantasy novels. I found Mark Charan Newton's sex scenes with Brynd in Nights of Villjamur and City of Ruin to be awkward. Alaya Dawn Johnson didn't handle the topic well in The Burning City (there was a sentence in one of the flashback scenes along the lines of "they had sex right there"). In The Serpent Bride by Sara Douglass, there's a lot of talk about "mounting" and such. While it may be a technically accurate term, it makes me think of dogs or horses or something, not people.
The examples I listed above are cases when I think the authors wanted to be serious; there are some sex scenes in other fantasy novels that are intended to have shock value (e.g. Richard K. Morgan's The Steel Remains and Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold) and I put them in a different class all together.
Linked to from the Washington Post piece is yet another article from The Guardian:
Why is there no good sex in fiction prize?
Some interesting points are made in both; I particularly like the discussion of how prizes are given out in individual categories (best fantasy novel, best travelogue, etc.) of literature but not for writing about certain things -- best sex, best description of a sunset, etc. Because some fantasy writers definitely ARE better than others at describing battles, coming up with magic systems, describing travel, etc.
I'd like to add my own category; best description of food or a meal without being completely boring. Some offenders immediately come to mind: George R.R. Martin and L.E. Modesitt, Jr. (And J.V. Jones is certainly good at describing one man's disgusting eating habits in the Book of Words series -- an impression is conveyed, though I'm not sure what it is.)
Anyway, something to think about, I suppose.
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