It’s a question of who metal and its literary cousin fantasy are being written for, and who they get written by, and who they are about. No prizes for guessing the three. Now none of this kind of rigid gender bordering is so pressingly relevant, not with Bradley and Le Guin and the mainstreaming of female-created fantasy, but it it completely fascinating.
Actually, don’t read this and re-read Erika’s post, she got it concisely.

As for Perdido– what an interesting thesis. I think I read it that way too; the story isn’t about the individual characters so much as it is about conflicting systems of culture and government. That’s really what I love about good fantasy. Its ability to evoke entire cultures succintly and with great imaginative power is what keeps me reading.

Erika: UK punk had a lot of women up front as well: Siouxsie, Poly Styrene, The Slits (all-women group), The Raincoats (another one), Gaye Advert, Eve Libertine, etc. All the UK metal scene of that period produced was Girlschool who were a good band but were regarded as an exception that proved the rule of male dominance in the metal world. UK Punk was slightly more tolerant sexually (it came out of the Roxy/Bowie/Iggy glam axis) and a lot more tolerant racially with numerous ties to the London reggae scene.

All if this is not to say that women can’t and don’t love metal, because clearly they do, just the way that women like me love sword-and-sorcery (the most metal genre of writing, for my money). But there’s something extra poignant about being nostalgic for something that your gender never had much opportunity to participate in in the first place.

Finally, since some people mention China Mieville upthread, I think it’s interesting to examine Perdido Street Station in light of my analysis of metal. The book is supremely metal in its style (speed, strength, swagger, virtuosity…), but anti-metal in its soul, since it pretty much denies the efficacy of personal heroism and exposes it as a myth. True power resides in systems, and always has. (If I’m reading it right.)

Despite that lineage, I’d be wary of applying “metal” as a description simply because it’s such a conservative genre. John Peel once compared metal to country and western since they were both popular with people living outside cities and both forms of music assume that nothing ever changes. Punk had the same energy but–for a time–was a lot more open and experimental, Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle were ostensibly punk to begin with yet had nothing to do with rock. (They were both inspired by William Burroughs as well.) Energy and breaking the rules: however you label it, we can always use more of that.

Coolness, excitement, to a real extent, punk and rock’n'roll in all forms is in the performance. And I do think that writers should do more performances, or as we call them, readings. But that leads to another question, namely:

Why are so many readings so goddamn boring?

And, hey, MattD, that was exactly what I was going for and wanting in “Rats,” so reading you spontaneously bringing it up made my damn day.

Cat’s reference to Perdido Street Station caught me, because, for me, that reading experience was closest to listening to metal. Not, though, because of anger, or frustration, but because of the sense of urgency, the mad dash of text across the page, the level with which it insisted its own existence into my headspace. In many ways Perdido is a mess of a novel, it’s certainly one of Mieville’s loosest structurally, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s SO GODDAMN METAL. Metal is a mess. You can’t release like that without it getting messy. The trick is to make the mess part of the art. The mess is, as Cat says, often the result of careful planning.

Writing should be like metal because metal is insistent, it refuses to be ignored. Love it or loathe it Perdido and its effect on the fantasy landscape can’t be ignored. After all the sweat and blood, who wants their writing ignored?

While Helloween is most assuredly not my idea of a good time, they are indeed correct that Heavy Metal Is The Law–or so I subscribed in High School, and to some extent today. Rather than Anger, I would argue that Excitement is one of the key characteristics of most Metal, and good Fantasy is rarely unexciting. By which I’m speaking of Metal the abstract and Fantasy the genre. Muddled though my thoughts clearly are on this, I firmly believe that the specter of Robert E. Howard would get down to some Dio.

Drat, and we were all having so much fun trying to come up with correspondences!

I think arete in fantasy can be tough because so much fantasy uses symbols that have existed for so long. Often I’ll read a fantasy book and it’ll be…okay…but I’ll have the nagging feeling that the book could have done more because it used symbols that I’ve seen more/different/better things done with. The most “metal” fantasy for me tends to come from authors who are willing to create their own symbols, use lesser known symbols as their own, or remake known symbols as something new.

This is also why I think the personal is so important in fantasy: the more personal a fantasy is, the more it need only represent the individual author’s sense of the world in a way that feels true and fulfilling to the reader. Fantasy written without a great deal of personality feels to me as though it must live up to the potential of fantasy in general, as a collective body of work, which is too much for most books to even sniff at.