Archive for the 'Fantasy' Category

Caliban and His Mirror: a Guest Post by James Enge

Kate Elliott November 11th, 2008

Commenter James Enge posted a rumination on fantasy and politics on his own blog, and I received his permission to repost it here for your reading pleasure (or for you to take issue with–we’re equal opportunity).

Herewith:

Caliban and His Mirror: Fantasy and Politics (or not):

by James Enge
Deep Genre has had a couple of interesting posts lately about political values in epic fantasy–specifically the old “SF Diplomat” question of whether fantasy is inherently reactionary. The first was (by Kate Elliott, and the next by Lois Tilton; both have provoked interesting comment threads, and with luck there may be more posts to come.)

In the comments to Kate Elliot’s piece, Mark Tiedemann (a sometime Black Gate writer, among other perhaps more notable things) suggested that fantasy was not necessarily interested in politics–he described it as an “added benefit” for fantasy but not essential. “Fantasy is not about systems but about the essentials of self, and the problems of the given story are designed to reveal those qualities of character which are outside of or beyond ‘politics.’”

I was going to just comment with something like “Word!” or “True dat!” but my experts tell me that no one says that stuff anymore, and they also refused to tell me what people do say. (”For your own safety,” they keep insisting, as if that arrest for misuse of “groovadelic” in mixed company hadn’t been expunged from my record years ago.)

So instead I wrote

Great post and fascinating comments. I especially like Mark Tiedemann’s point. Matters of governance in a fantasy novel are rarely about politics; they’re identity symbols. This can be bad (in an Iron Dream sort of way) or good, but it’s not necessarily advocating reactionary political values. It has more to do with the Freudian “family romance.”

Kate Elliott wondered, in a very civil way, what the hell we were talking about. I can’t speak for Mark Tiedemann, but here’s what I was talking about.
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In the wake of the USA presidential election, Deep Genre is thinking about politics, class, and fantasy and science fiction.

Kate Elliott November 7th, 2008

Lois McMaster Bujold, at her Denvention Guest of Honor speech, talks about science fiction and fantasy as “fantasies of political agency.”  She remarks that “Even the world-building itself is often a political argument. And, oh boy, are the political aspects of the fiction ever valorized in the reviews.”

And is she ever right!

Now and again I read what strike me, as a writer of fantasy, as some rather puzzling claims about fantasy.

Is fantasy an inherently conservative genre?  Does it look back to an “idealized past” or represent a fetishization of, say, feudalism and aristocracy?  If you write about monarchy, are you authoritarian in your heart of hearts?  Are all “traditional” fantasies, or “epic” fantasies, or “heroic” fantasies, about restoring the hierarchical status quo and/or wrapped around a monolithic and absolutist vision of good vs. evil?  What is up with these modern day fantasy writers who write novels set in reactionary monarchies and don’t write a story about overthrowing the monarchy and establishing a democratic government like the one they are fortunate enough to live in?  Is there something *wrong* with them?  Or are they just pandering to the audience that reads this reactionary pap and dreams of that happy day when they were the lost prince seeking to reclaim his stolen throne?

All the statements in the above paragraph are paraphrases of statements or reflections I have read online–nor did I have to look too hard to find them.

I’m perfectly happy to agree that on an individual case by case basis we can find examples of all the statements above within published fantasy novels.  Indeed, I basically agree with China Mieville’s statement in an Autumn 2000 interview that

“If you look at stereotypical ‘epic’ or ‘high’ fantasy, you’re talking about a genre set in magical worlds with some pretty vile ideas. They tend to be based on feudalism lite: the idea, for example, that if there’s a problem with the ruler of the kingdom it’s because he’s a bad king, as opposed to a king. If the peasants are visible, they’re likely to be good simple folk rather than downtrodden wretches (except if it’s a bad kingdom…). Strong men protect curvaceous women. Superheroic protagonists stamp their will on history like characters in Nietzschean wet dreams, but at the same time things are determined by fate rather than social agency. Social threats are pathological, invading from outside rather than being born from within. Morality is absolute, with characters–and often whole races–lining up to fall into pigeonholes with ‘good’ and ‘evil’ written on them.”

Mieville rightly goes on to point out that there is plenty of fantasy that does not fit this stereotype.

I tend to think that many of these elements, where they do appear, come about as a result of lazy world-building rather than political agency.  Lazy world-building is an issue of craft, not politics.

I would also suggest that Mieville’s neat encapsulation above has more to do with the mythology of American exceptionalism (or perhaps with the fading dream of the British Empire) than with any real understanding or unreflective adoration on the part of writers of “cod-epic fantasy” of manorialism and feudalism, chieftain level societies, the early development of states, the rise of absolute monarchy, or any of the permutations in between and beyond or outside.  Bad rulers vs. good rulers?  Good simple folk?  Pathological social threats?  Moral absolutism?  If you were paying attention to the recent USA election, this should all sound familiar.

And I would go further and suggest that some people make assumptions about fantasies, especially those they have not read, which may on the surface seem to fall into “stereotypical” categories but which do not fit so easily into that stereotype if they are read with a clear gaze.

The past is a foreign country, as L.P. Hartley famously wrote (although I admit I know not one other thing about him).  Writers may choose to write books set in different cultural historical political and social settings for a variety of reasons.  Writers may not necessarily choose to use sledgehammer and red flags to signal their themes, but that does not therefore mean they are writing epic or traditional settings  out of an unthinking embrace of an idealized past that never existed.  Many of us have much more complex motivations regarding our desire to explore the history and tapestry of the human condition.

Forthcoming Vampire Films - London Times

Constance Ash August 17th, 2008

This article deals with vampires in the movie versions only, even if the movies mentioned were adapted from original novels.  It includes a brief chronology of vampires on film which can be a quickie refresher for those who have read any or all of the books published on this subject, and watched all the films.  Oddly, Buffy’s not mentioned.

This forthcoming film sounds interesting, so I’ll be watching out for it:

Meanwhile, although the vampire in Let the Right One In is altogether more dangerous, she symbolises as much the dark side of the human psyche as an external threat. “I was thinking about these two characters as though they are mirrors,” Alfredson, the director, says. “She is everything that he is not. She is awake when he is asleep: he is very afraid, she is very brave; she is strong, he is weak; she’s dark, he is blond. She is everything that he would need to be to survive. They are two sides of the same coin.”

The vampire craze shows no signs of abating. An English language remake of Let the Right One In has been announced. With three remaining books in the Twilight saga, there is potential for a vampire franchise. And although the Twilight books series is complete, Nash reveals that “Stephenie does have the bare bones of a chapter of a book provisionally titled Midnight Sun, which is the Twilight story but from the point of view of the vampire not the human girl”.

  Love, C.

Comicon International 2008 — Dr. Horrible, The Dark Knight, and me

Kevin Andrew Murphy July 30th, 2008

Back from Comicon. Also back from Westercon. Thoughts….

First off…wow. Comicon was amazing. In over twenty years of attending, Comicon’s managed to outdo itself again, mostly by dint of those who came, both industry types and fans. I don’t know how many, but numbers of over 200,000 were rumored and probably underestimated.

Second thought, what’s up with the art shows at all the cons? At Comicon, I saw more winged kittens in the art show than superheroes, or for that matter, any comic book characters. Yes, I understand the cottage industry of marketing to dragon and cat fetishists, but seeing the same dracokitty art recycled from Westercon to Comicon was surreal given the difference of the rest of the convention.

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Grandson of Edgar Rice Burroughs Dies

Constance Ash May 16th, 2008

Danton Burroughs, the grandson of Edgar Rice Burroughs, just died, in Tarzana. 

[  Burroughs, who had been battling Parkinson's disease, died of heart failure a day after a fire at his home destroyed a room filled with family memorabilia.   ]

Here’s the Burroughs website.

From what I’d heard elsewhere, he’d been working on selling the Mars books as a series for a television network like GRRM did ASOIAF to HBO, or a movie franchise, like Indiana Jones.

I’d quite like to see a good HBO series of the Mars books, done in the style of the period in which they were written.  If done well, needless to say.

Love C.

Dance The Knife Cutting Through Worlds

Constance Ash January 14th, 2008

Pullman’s His Subtle Knife

Choreographed by Merce Cunningham;

Danced by the Cunningham Company

Alternate Worlds Moving on Two Stages, Performing for One Audience

I’ve been attending the revelatory Merce Cunningham ‘events’ all my adult life — on occasion the spouse has been honored as a composer for an edition of these events, so famous, for so long, in the world of art and dance. These were informal gatherings of audience and company in the Cunningham studio, devised for choreographer, dancers, composer and audience to exchange energies via the matrix of Cunningham at play, with his constant playmates, time and space.

This weekend the Cunningham Company held an ‘event’ at the glorious Dia Art Foundation - museum, which is located outside of Beacon, NY. I can personally testify that the land upon which the beautiful building is sited, provides a canvas of seasonal light and shadow display that is breathtaking, no matter the weather or the time of year. This weekend’s event at Dia included choreography inspired by Pullman’s The Subtle Knife. The NY Times dance critic describes the event thus:

[ To watch his company on Saturday afternoon in the first of two Cunningham Events last weekend at Dia:Beacon was to see a poetically compelling exposition of parallel-universe theory. Before at Dia:Beacon, Mr. Cunningham has staged events on two or more stages at the same time. In 2004, working on three stages at the Tate Modern in London, he employed a barrier that prevented audiences from seeing all three at once unless they looked up to the lofty mirrored ceiling in Turbine Hall (where the full action was visible, though very distant).

On Saturday at Dia:Beacon he placed his two stages adjacent but on either side of a square doorway. Wherever you were sitting, you could see only part, never all, of the stage on the opposite side. That door, leading from one world to a parallel stage, evoked the controlling image of The Subtle Knife, the second novel of Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials. In it the young hero can cut his way "slicing a square aperture in the air" from this Oxford into different worlds, at least one of which contains an alternative Oxford.

As the event began, the stage farthest from me looked breathtakingly like a mirror of the one closer to me. One group of dancers was moving in slow, controlled adagio, stepping, arching and bending with precision, while another, dressed identically, was doing the same but facing the other way.

Then, more than a minute into the dance, the denizens of the through-the-looking-glass world started to move in other steps and in a different tempo, whereupon the dichotomy between these two now dissimilar stages became both frustrating and entrancing. Here the dancers were balancing, fixed, waiting; there they were leaping fast across the space, caught up in some rush of which we could see only a fraction. And, like characters in the Pullman novels, dancers moved from one world, or stage, to another and back again. ]

Watching a Cunningham choreography, whether from early in his career (he’s now 91), or one just recently created, one feels she has left this world and re-entered another that has been lost, a world in which the sacred exists, as both sublime and far beyond any rigid and short-sighted religion, to a world that has existed long before this one, and which will survive hard and passionate once we have departed. It’s a privilege that everyone should be entitled to experience.

So it’s natural that this man would be drawn to a book by a YA author that speaks to slicing open gates into parallel worlds.

Love, C.

What’s Wrong with “The Golden Compass”?

Kevin Andrew Murphy December 10th, 2007

I just went to see The Golden Compass, along with a couple other friends, who all decided to see it despite being advised by one friend that the movie made no sense and by another that he didn’t want to see it because he hadn’t liked the book.

I have the book, but on the “I’ll read it when I get around to it” shelf. But it was a nice outing with friends and I wanted to see airships and Nicole Kidman in a series of improbably lovely costumes. And going in with such low expectations, I was not disappointed, except by everything else.

First off, well, my biggest criticism is what I said after the movie was over: “I suppose it will all make more sense after we read the book and watch the expanded version on DVD.” This was after watching a nearly two and a half hour movie, mind you. I’m not certain whether to blame the screenwriter, the film editor or both, but there seemed to be a concentrated effort to shoehorn in every significant scene in the book, regardless of the exposition or transition or set-up for character motivation.

As it stands, the movie has the worst case of “beloved child” syndrome I’ve ever seen. The protagonist, Lyra (and I’m probably wrong on the spelling), wanders around and simply bumps into people who decide to fight and die for her “Just because.” I can understand it with the head witch, since she’s at least got a prophecy to go on, but she’s still canny enough to check out whether the kid can read the Golden Compass. But Sky Captain Wild Bill? I’m blanking on the name of character, but if you took an old American character actor, had him play Wild Bill as conceived of by someone who’d only seen British Wild West shows, gave him a jackrabbit familiar (voiced by Cathy Bates) and then made him an airship captain…well, that’s who we’ve got, who not only immediately takes a liking to this random kid, but offers to take her along in his airship, and also tips her off to the location of an alcoholic talking bear, who is less entertaining than he sounds. The bear decides to follow the kid because she finds his armor, but the only reason they aren’t immediately blown away by the Cossack police is because the sea gypsies keep randomly appearing whenever the cavalry is needed. Even in the middle of the frozen glacial wastes.

Then there’s the Magisterium. I understand it’s supposed to be the unholy spawn of the Catholic church and Big Brother, but if you’re going to spirit away kids to do insane arcane medical experiments on them, there must be a more convenient place than an ice sheet in the middle of the Norway analogue. But more than that, why steal children when you can just buy them? Or get parents to give them to you for free? There must be a few parents who’ve already drunk enough of the Kool-aid that they’d hand over their children no questions asked, rather than steal the child of the well connected sea gypsy matron? Or the kitchen boy from the university where there are loads of nosy people just looking for a mystery to crack?

Of course, the number of brain dead people is pretty amazing. There’s horror movie stupid. Then there’s opera stupid. Then there’s this. One really wonders what the scholars are thinking to let their child of prophecy go running around rooftops with the cast of Oliver at the beginning of the movie. One also sort of wonders whether a world with all sorts of arcane science wouldn’t be able to figure out who poisoned a wine decanter if just by taking fingerprints. And the uspurping Bear King? Does he know that “gullible” is not in the dictionary?

Then there’s the trouble of giving your protagonist an amazingly useful power and forgetting to use it. Lyra gets a Golden Compass, which once she figures it out is basically a deluxe Magic 8 Ball that can answer any question, no problem. So when later in the movie, the wicked Mrs. Coulter says “Lyra, I’m your mother!” wouldn’t it be prudent or least sensible to twiddle with your Golden Compass and ask “Is that psycho really my mommy?” Of course this scene may have been left on the cutting room floor, so it’s not possibly quite at the level of the recent Heroes finale where Peter forgets he can walk through walls if he wants to and instead dramatically uses his telekinesis to rip the door off a bank vault, getting a nosebleed in the process. But still….

I should probably not get into the other troubles but the line “Tell the children to get their warmest coats!” is going to stick with me for a while. You get a bunch of kids who were spirited away to an icy wasteland via airship and you expect them to walk to safety? Of course an electrocuted traumatized child was able to walk all the way to the next valley and hole up in an unheated trapper’s cabin without freezing to death, so I suppose anything is possible, but….

Yargh.

I Love the End of the World

Madeleine Robins October 30th, 2007

Over in my LiveJournal someone kindly mentioned her enjoyment of The Stone War and noted that “I love a good post-apocalypse.” My first thought was: gee, so do I. ‘Kay, not certain what, if anything, that says about me personally. But as a writer I can think of several reasons to love the end of the world.

First: you get to have your cake and consume it as well, setting-wise. You can set your story in a real world, trash a couple of well known local landmarks (how often has the Statue of Liberty shown up in destroyed-New-York movies?), and use that as a base for your invention. Depending on the sort of work you’re writing, you can get as interesting as you like: when I wrote Stone War I was deliberately going for weird, which meant that I could knock a whole city block of brownstones askew, or have the West Side Highway tie itself into knots. But you can also be hard-headedly logical about what would survive and what would not, depending upon the mechanism of the apocalypse and the time elapsed since the event.

Second: There’s the memento mori factor. Seeing the world brought low is a metaphor for dealing with our own inevitable deaths–and seeing something grow out of that. Who knows what part of our lives will be remembered in fifty years or a hundred or a thousand? Shelley’s Ozymandias tells us to look upon his works and despair, but the works are gone and nothing but the warning itself remains: “Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Post-apocalyptic fiction trades in what is left behind and what meaning it has (remember that a shopping list is a sacred text in Canticle for Liebowitz).

Third: There’s the opportunity to see what an individual can do after the end of the world. Humans have at least as much interest in creating order out of chaos as they do talent for creating chaos in the first place. This can lead to Lord of the Flies scenarios, but it also lends itself to your plucky protagonist or band of protagoni going up against the Bad Tribe. A post-apocalyptic setting adds a frisson of extra meaning, with our knowledge of the past a palimpsest, the action and reality of now overwritten on everything we know about the past. In near-event post-apocalyptic settings, your characters are dealing with the disaster itself, and their own survival. Just as intriguingly, in a long-past post-apocalyptic setting, the characters deal as much with the meaning of the old world and its demise, and that can make for really interesting fiction.

Sure, I love the End of the World: what’s not to love?

Robert Jordan

Kate Elliott September 17th, 2007

News has spread quickly that James Rigney, aka Robert Jordan, best known as author of the massively successful The Wheel of Time series, has passed away after a struggle with a rare and difficult disease.

I am so very sorry to hear of his death.

I never met him, so his death does not touch me on a personal level in terms of friendship. But I do mark certain kinships with him:

He was a writer.

He wrote, among other things, fat fantasy novels (a term I use with affection, not disdain) published as installments in a long series. Indeed, one might argue that his monumental success with The Eye of the World and the volumes that followed made my career (and that of others) possible, much as - to use that well-worn phrase - a rising tide lifts all boats. Some years ago there was even a notable New York Times Book Review article by Edward Rothstein calling him the American Tolkien comparing his work to Tolkien’s, in terms both of his influence on the market and his use of specifically American tropes and sensibilities in his writing.

Update: The article can be found here.

I read part (not all) of the first novel, and while I did not go on to read any more of the series, my gut instinct from reading what I did of his work was that it mattered deeply to him, as the work of writers does matter so very deeply to all of us. It’s part of us. It’s inseparable from us, from who we are, from how we live in the world.

Obviously it is a truism that we none of us know how long we have. And while some live a long life and come to its end feeling that they’ve accomplished everything they’ve wished for and are content with how things stand, many more go out with unfinished business or goals left unmet.

So I am saddened to hear of his passing. I am sorry about the bereavement of his loved ones and friends. I am sad that so many readers who got such pleasure from his work will not be able to follow the tale to the conclusion that only he could have written (I am sure that the story will be completed as faithfully as possible by another hand, but it can’t be the same).

But I tell you. As a fellow writer, it really hurts to know that this man who surely invested so much of himself, his passion, his skills, and his life into this series did not get to finish it, as he must have wished to do.

RIP, Robert Jordan, the writer, and James Rigney, the man

Down the Pub With Tolkien and C. S. Lewis

Constance Ash September 16th, 2007

The following is from an article in the current Times Literary Supplement around a new book about the Inklings, by Diana Pavlac Glyer, The Company They Keep.

[ There is magic in the last line of The Lord of the Rings. To recap: the stolidly courageous Sam Gamgee, having watched his best friend, Frodo Baggins, sail towards the Grey Havens and into a kind of death, is left to walk back to the Shire where he finds his wife and children waiting with the promise of a quiet life far from the slaughter of the War of the Ring. J. R. R. Tolkien finishes with the sentence: “‘Well, I’m back,’ he said”. It is a touchingly understated conclusion which returns the prose to the homely simplicity of the inaugural chapters after the archaic epic mode of The Return of the King.

However, as Diana Pavlac Glyer tells us in her scholarly and perceptive study The Company They Keep, this is not how Tolkien originally intended to finish his trilogy. He had in mind a further epilogue, set sixteen years after the events of the rest of the book, which would have provided another, superfluous glimpse into Gamgee’s domesticity. In this ultimately excised version, a grey-haired Sam reads stories of his adventures to his children, spinning them tales of wizards and orcs and walking trees. There is even the faint suggestion that Sam has been narrating the story of The Lord of the Rings itself, before, at last, we depart the Shire for good, leaving Sam and Rose in a state of connubial bliss, tale-telling by the fireside.
What stopped Tolkien from publishing this ending was his membership of the Inklings – that renowned circle of Oxford writers and academics who met for seventeen years from 1932 and which counted C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams and E. R. Edison, the author of The Worm Ouroboros, among their number. It was they who pointed out the glutinous sentimentality of the scene, marshalling their forces to argue that it added nothing of substance to a narrative which had already swollen far beyond the “second Hobbit” requested by his publishers. Glyer suggests that this incident typifies the way in which the Inklings affected one another’s work, despite the fact that in later years its members were frequently to insist that their meetings acted more as a social club than a writers’ circle, brushing aside any suggestion of real influence. ]

That the TLS article begins with the pub, reminds me of last week’s discussion on the LJ BlackGate fantasy magazine site, bg_editor, re taverns and Fantasy and Sword & Sorcery.

Love, C. 

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