Babel Clash

So, I’m in the middle of this five-week book tour—actually typing this in a Starbucks in Murrietta CA before heading back to Los Angeles—and one thing I’ve been talking about at the readings is the relationship between fantasy and reality.

Like, there is one. Like, it’s often autobiographical. And much of the time, reviewers and readers seem to pass over that element. Sometimes it’s so obvious you can’t help but remark on it–see Glen Cook’s Black Company series, which is clearly based on Vietnam experiences. And, on a panel at World Fantasy last week, David Drake talked about how his fiction was actually therapy for his war-time experiences, on one level.

Most of the time it’s not that clear-cut, though. China Mieville might express Marxist philosophy in his novels, but autobiography? Hard to tell.

But the subject resonates with me for a few reasons. First, I don’t think fantasy unconnected to the real world, and thus real people to some degree, is worth a darn. It becomes insular, self-referential, and dead on the page.

Second, when I wrote City of Saints and Madmen, I used a lot of details about the real world that were repurposed, from events in Byzantine history. What I found is that readers tended to think the real stuff was made up–proving, to some degree, that the real world is as absurd and fantastical in its way as anything we writers can dream up.

Third, my last two novels, including now Finch, have been pretty autobiographical. Shriek: An Afterword, my bold foray into territory most core genre readers looked at with a kind of “WTF” gaze, used events from my life and my family’s life as the catalyst for a story rife with unreliable narrators and harbingers of coming apocalyptic mushroom doom.

Finch, on the other hand, re-imagines my city of Ambergris as half Paris during the Nazi occupation and part Iraq under our own. It allows me to express some depth of emotion or feeling about events in the real world. At the same time, it includes autobiography: a scene in which the detective John Finch must crawl through the passageways of many lashed together boats is evocative of a similar thing that happened to me while on tour in Romania.

Does it matter if the reader sees that? No. But it’s because it’s taken from the real world, has the texture of the real world, that the scene has some deeper resonance.

I think reclaiming autobiography and real world events for fantasy is important, because it puts the lie to the claims of naysayers who think of fantasy as something frivolous, something purely whimsical–the make-believe of children who haven’t grown up. Well, sometimes that make-believe comes with SCUD missiles and a war-torn city. Sometimes it comes with deep human connection and mis-connection. Sometimes it’s coming at you from right around the corner.

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