A few months ago I came across someone objecting to the notion of “guilty pleasures”. I think it was a science fiction or fantasy author (I failed to make a note at the time, which is a shame), which makes sense: genre writing often comes up when people are admitting to their guilty pleasures. Googling finds me an excellent statement of the case against the notion:

Second of all, the term ‘guilty pleasure’ makes the person who uses it sound like a snob. Probably because when they use the term they are being a snob. To say you have a guilty pleasure is to say that you have a form of enjoyment that you feel is beneath you. … The unthinkable alternative would be to embrace everything we like and make no apologies. —Jocko Benoit, Cafe Terminus

And that’s of course why genre writers object to the notion: their creative output is too frequently “beneath” readers who wish to claim a more discerning taste in literature.

I am just this kind of a snob, but I’m trying to become less of one. I don’t consider SF a guilty pleasure; I don’t even consider EE “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series a guilty pleasure, and that is hilariously bad in terms of literary quality. But there is a sense of the phrase that I think is worth preserving even in a non-snobbish critical vocabulary.

Imagine a sadist with a conscience: he enjoys hurting people, but he feels bad about it. A reformed alcoholic may enjoy his first drink when he falls off the wagon, but he’ll regret that enjoyment later. Adultery is presumably pleasurable at the time. These all deserve the name “guilty pleasures”. And there’s a type of reading that fits the same pattern.

I get pleasure from reading wish-fulfilment fantasies of power and violence, but I feel guilty for it.

I re-read Stephen Donaldson’s Gap series last year. That’s the one where the narration sympathises with an unrepentant rapist. I’m glad to say I didn’t get any pleasure from that aspect of it,1 but I didn’t notice anything particularly problematic when I first read those books in high school. I enjoyed them. I feel guilt for that pleasure: what else should a “guilty pleasure” be?

Less painfully, I enjoy Charlie Stross’s Laundry Files. Their protagonist is a programmer and tech geek, whose geeky skills come in unexpectedly handy for casting magic spells, and who manages to rise to a position of some influence in a bureaucratic organisation despite having a strong anti-authoritarian streak, a well-functioning sense of irony, and a complete inability to keep his mouth shut. This pleasure is guilty because it’s so transparently about effortless wish fulfilment, when read by a programmer and tech geek with an anti-authoritarian streak and a feel for irony.

The word “effortless” is important there: I don’t think there’s anything inherently problematic about wish fulfilment in literature per se. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is a wish fulfilment fantasy in which the values of humility, steadfastness, and courage have a power that is denied to them in the real world. If anything, I would say taking pleasure from that particular aspect of Tolkien’s work is laudable.

This is where, sadly, I have to come back and dump on genre writing again. “Sword and sorcery” fantasy2 all too frequently functions as power fantasy3 in which the agency of the characters is expressed through their ability to inflict physical violence. And both fantasy and science fiction share a penchant for whitewashing: for portraying societies that elide non-white people (hence the term) but also women, people of non-binary gender, sexual orientations other than binary-hetero, the very old and the very young, and so on and so on. Because these genres deal with invented worlds, if the imagination of the author fails then the world invented will reflect what the author sees as “normal”; in turn, that world might feel deceptively comfortable to someone who shares the same norms. In both these cases, these are guilty pleasures for me.4

Which brings me to a more complicated case.

Steven Brust’s Dragaera novels have an assassin, Vlad Taltos, as protagonist and frequent narrator. He’s not a heroic assassin, whatever that would mean; he’s a minor mob boss who kills people for money. He’s also extremely likeable. The story is told in his words, with a constant stream of wisecracks and sardonic humour (and the occasional efficient execution). I enjoy the power fantasy of being quick with a clever retort, and even quicker to whip out a rapier and skewer anyone the retort doesn’t subdue: that’s a (relatively minor) guilty pleasure. There’s more to the power fantasy: Vlad is friends with some very powerful sorcerers and warriors (including a two hundred thousand year old undead wizard), and by the time we’ve reached book five or so he’s on a first-name basis with the Empress and with at least one god.

And then something unexpected happens. In the third novel published in the series, Teckla, Vlad’s wife becomes a socialist agitator (very dangerous behaviour in a feudal empire; it leads to a revolt, which is suppressed and the revolting Easterners massacred) and his inability to understand her motivation is a major factor in the breakdown of their marriage. Yes, you read that right: our power-fantasy hero has his marriage fail. Another major factor in the breakdown is his wife’s disapproval of his profession; to ram the point home, Vlad’s grandfather (who is written as a strong moral authority) comes right out and tells him that killing people for money is bad.

The following books (the series runs to 14 at present, of an intended 19) contain just as much violence and power fantasy,5 but they also show Vlad’s slow moral awakening, as he struggles to fit these perspectives from people he loves and respects into his worldview. At the same time, both we and Vlad are learning more about the economic and political workings of the Empire: Brust is a Marxist and his political and social awareness pervades the series.

So on the one hand we have a classic power fantasy with violence as the default solution to all problems; on the other hand, exactly those tricks of narrator identification and sympathy that make this work are also working to drag the reader along as Vlad realigns his moral compass.

I enjoy the series enough to reread it occasionally. I’m still on the fence about whether I should consider this a guilty pleasure; so far I’m leaning towards no, so long as I don’t skip Teckla.

Notes:

  1. I re-read it to extract what I could of plot and setting, which I remembered being intriguing. I’m also pleased to say that it was much less so than I remembered. “Pleased” because I’m overcompensating for enjoying these when I was younger, by now hating them passionately. [↪]
  2. “Fantasy” the literary marketing label. [↪]
  3. “Fantasy” the trope or technique. [↪]
  4. When I catch myself enjoying them, which is not often. It’s especially hard to notice that you’re comfortably enjoying a whitewashed setting: it’s like fish noticing the water they swim in. [↪]
  5. And it’s mostly just as fun. Teckla is less so, as you’d expect from a book about the failure of a marriage. [↪]