by GGK on Jun.30, 2010, under Guy Gavriel Kay
The China tour ended with visits on the last day to the Lama Temple (Buddhist) and the nearby Confucian Temple in Beijing. Last photo was of the statue of Confucius: I’d try not to be that clichéd in a book, but it was a good last shot (photo of a woman photographing it).
A bit punchy this morning, and awake before 5, with the 12 hour time difference. If it really does take a day an hour to adjust, I’m in trouble.
Here’s a thought, though, about using the fantastic. I’ve often told the story of meeting a Polish magazine editor late one night at Worldcon in The Hague, many years ago. Many of us were drinking vodka in the hotel lobby after hours, when he began lamenting how he was going to lose writers and readers in the next year or two. The reason was that under Communist control writers had used sf or fantasy to screen their political and social commentary, and readers knew this was what was happening, they decoded it effortlessly. With censorship vanishing, his view was that many writers would stop using the screens and write ‘mainstream’ fictions. There are a lot of elements to this, and it can be discussed in many different ways, but try this, as a parallel.
In the Tang Dynasty of China (and not just then) the literary device or tradition for poets was established that to comment socially or politically on one’s own time and emperor or court, one used the screen of setting the poem in an earlier time (usually the Han Dynasty of many hundred years before). The ‘fantasy’ events and ideas would serve the same function sf and fantasy did in late 20th century Poland.
One of the many things I like about this was how immediately those writers and scholars I spoke with (and journalists too, actually) in China about how I use fantasy to address history … just ‘got it’ based on a similar set of writings in their own ancient (and also recent) tradition.
Remind me, before I finish here next week, that I want to also bring up a core point about real people in fiction. Remind me to make some more jokes, too, soon as jet lag passes a little. (It is sometimes easier to be serious than funny, you know … the famous actors’ line: dying is easy, comedy is hard.)
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