Fantasy novels good or evil?

I read this piece my m moorcock some time ago, called "starship stormtroopers", which was abt the very issue raised by our thread starter. I believed it for years, b/c it was very persuasively written, but as it turns out, it was a little bit bogus.

the main things wrong w/fantasy novels that I have read (I've read a few of them in the last couple of years) are:

many of them appear to be quite astonishingly poorly written - the main problem being the dialogue, which is too often "contemporary-american", and thus not terribly good at the whole sense of "otherness" that one might want.

there are far too many of them.

the covers are often quite lurid and trashy, leading the poor reader to also purchase a copy of e.g. "a la reserche du temps perdu" so s/he can tear off the cover, and glue it over e.g. "the wheel of time" so fellow bus passengers will not point and laugh. This doubles the cost of reading this stuff.

there's no indication of when the novels in question were written, nor of relevant subgenres (historical fantasy would be just as unfair to include as westerns, if you want that defense on the table), nor anything at all to suggest how representative the sampling was ("fantasy novels" is not a monolithic category);

the "white" and "POC" percentages add up to 100%, which either means no fantasy novels with nonhuman protagonists were sampled or race was interpreted creatively -- apparently they didn't include any Tolkien, or they did and are stupid;

so many of the categories are anachronistic, in their phrasing at a minimum, and arguably in their conceptualization.

My own sentimental favorite to get greater attention is P.C. Hodgell; her three fantasy books are EXTREMELY underrated. Meanwhile, while Guy Gavriel Kay has moved more from fantasy to elaborate and fantastical alternate history, the treatment of good/evil in fact being complex shades of grey is marvelous.

Hm, interesting question in any event.

when you consider the huge prevalence of female-protagonist "romantic fantasy," aka "light fantasy," or whatever other subgenre label you want to swallow

Mercedes Lackey to thread!

This reminds me of something Le Guin (who I should include with Garner and Alexander there, for Earthsea obviously) once said about Katherine Kurtz, quoting a chunk of dialogue from an early Deryni book and noting that while the trappings were right enough in an SCA way (Kurtz being one of the original organizers, I believe), the dialogue was simply too...well, I hesitate to use the word 'modern,' I'm not sure if Le Guin said that herself, but she found that it could be easily transposed from a political novel of the present time with little change. She found that lack of other very much a loss, though you could at the same time make a case for it being a bit of unintentional demystification, epic landscapes and different rules of time and space balanced against a perceived down-to-earth human approach.

What other genre serves as a container for the overflow of another? No one says, "Well, it isn't romance, so it must be mystery," but "it isn't science fiction, so it's fantasy" is so common that it forms the substance of the form-letter rejections in the industry.

Mercedes Lackey to thread AGAIN.

OTM. I have met m lackey fans, and they are er possibly likely to be troublesome.

p c hodgell eh ned? I'm sure I did read one of hers, something about a weird, fucked up individual woith a blind wild cat? iirc it was pretty ok, is it worth picking up any more, if i can find any? I do have this urge to read something "otherworldly", or summat like that anyway.