Actually, this touches on something that annoys me a lot when hearing people criticise fantasy. It's this whole 'realism' idea that I loathe.

Quite often, when you hear the term 'realistic' used as a qualifier for fantasy stories, it refers in no sense to a relation to reality, but rather to an inclination for darkness, grit, and cynicism. The extreme of this reasoning would probably lead us to 'in the grim darkness of the forty-first millennium, there is only realism!'

Anyway, as far as I can see, 'realism' could refer to internal consistency - if the world follows its own rules, then it could be a reality that obeys those rules instead of our own, and if it isn't coherent, then it isn't 'realistic' because any attempt to apply such a concept would collapse due to it's inability to sustain itself. But that's not the definition used, because a lot of the books people call 'unrealistic' fall into this category.

And the other definition of realistic that could be employed is likeness to reality as we understand it. That would mean that you could read this 'realistic' fantasy novel and it would read similar to your morning newspaper, I imagine. But that would be boring. Even the interesting things that do happen, the famous people or events, are of interest because they deviate from what we accept as standard, because they seem unrealistic in the real world.

It really annoys me that people use 'realism' as a term to describe something that is in no way connected to reality, but rather simply to the mood of the stories and the critic's perspective of what it should be. It's completely self-centred. This isn't about an actual flaw in writing, it's the critic deciding that his stylistic choice of preference is the only valid stylistic choice and that using any other makes the work inferior.

It's like saying that first or third person point-of-view telling of the story is more 'realistic' than omniscient narrator... but when I'm reading an account of the conquest of China by Mao Zedong in that perspective, I dare say it has a far greater connection to reality than, say, The Prince of Nothing.

This seems to be the same, Adam Roberts feels that the story needs explicit descriptions of sex, if he had written it he would have included explicit descriptions of sex, the book doesn't contain explicit descriptions of sex, therefore it is badly written.

Incidentally, I find it hilarious that Larry mentioned The Wheel of Time as appealing to the lowest common denominator, while at the same time one of the frequent criticisms I read about it is 'lack of sex'. Yes, sex doesn't sell, apparently?