Babel Clash

Bill’s and Matt’s posts about reading really struck home for me. I like to think of stories (anyone’s stories) as a script for a performance. And I’ve learned the most about storytelling by telling stories (without any script) to live audiences, starting with my kids.

A live audience has a lot of power over the story that gets told them. They can demand a specific one, for instance. “The one about the monster!” was a regular demand of my then-preschool-age kids. The first time I heard them say this I was confused: I’d told them lots of stories about monsters. It turned out that the story they wanted was one I’d improvised about a monster eating our car. This became their favorite story and I must have told it hundreds of times before they grew out of it and we started reading storybooks at bed-time. (That seems like a long time ago now… because it was, I guess. I just asked my kids about Super Walrus, and they only vaguely remembered him. All stories are mortal, and Super Walrus was a story, therefore…)

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Hey Matt: I agree about the explosion in pop culture at the moment, and it is a blast. I worry that it might be more of a Silver Age than a Golden Age, though–that it might be more allusive (and re-use-ive) than creative.

I felt that way a few years ago when all of a sudden sf/f seemed to be one of the genres acceptable on prime time TV—-but almost everything networks were putting on were remakes, retakes and pastiches. Remember when NBC (a network with notoriously poor judgement) thought the world needed a remake of The Bionic Woman (but darker! edgier! more somber!). Even something like Heroes, though not explicitly a remake, was openly borrowing from generations of comic books. Not that this was bad; it was one of the good things about the show… until they lost their way around the middle of the first season and apparently never found it again. (I stopped watching years ago, so maybe the show is golden now. But I guess I’ll never know.)

There was a burst of shows like this on US TV a few years ago, which have mostly dribbled out. The biggest successes have been remakes (Battlestar Galactica) and sequels (e.g. the Stargate series–now on its third title, I think)–and, of course, the British shows. Which are mostly remakes and sequels (e.g. Dr. Who and its spinoffs).

I could never bring myself to watch Battlestar; the original show wasn’t one of the happy memories of my childhood. I’ve seen a couple episodes of Stargate, Who and Torchwood and generally liked them. But I’m missing the newness that used to be the hallmark of genre—-or maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place.

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Burne-Jones, "Beguiling of Merlin"

Hey Matt: I had some ideas about this mainstream/genre thing, which will hopefully show up on SF Signal next week when they unveil Part Two of this Mind Meld. (I raved about the same subject here, too.) But, like you, I have sometimes wondered why we keep asking ourselves this question. Also, I wonder who the “they” is that we’re sure is scorning us.

For one thing, academia doesn’t really canonize literary works anymore. For good or for evil, postmodernism changed all that. Now in academia anything can be studied (from Madonna’s costume over the years to the underwear of Homeric heroes) but nothing may be revered. In a way that’s certainly good: working at a university doesn’t give anyone the power of infallibility (literary or otherwise). In a way it’s bad: if profs can’t articulate the stuff in a work that makes it worthwhile, interesting to read not just study like a dead bug, they may find students drifting away from them and their subjects (which I think is sometimes certainly the case). I know little about the more rarified heights of nonacademic literary criticism, but I would be surprised if the same thing weren’t true: apparently it’s not easy to find an audience for new booklength literary fiction.

Another question is: what is the mainstream?

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Hey Matt: It is interesting how much fantasists have to think about what’s real and how to make use of it for our unreal worlds—-more than many writers of realistic fiction, I bet. Actually, I like C.S. Lewis on realism. He says there’s a difference between “realism of content” (a story that somehow expresses truths about the real world, e.g. This novel tells the unvarnished brutal tale of a man’s struggle to clip his toenails, the women who loved him, and the dog who despised him!) and “realism of presentation” (the nubbly details that embody experience—-”the touches that make for life” as Zelazny puts it). I think both of these matter for fantasy, though maybe the distance between them is greater than it is for mainstream fiction.

For instance, from LotR there’s Frodo’s gruesome encounter with Bilbo in Rivendell, after Bilbo asks to see the Ring: “[Frodo] found himself eyeing a little wrinkled creature with a hungry face and bony groping hands. He felt a desire to strike him.” It’s the physical details that carry the emotional weight, here (realism of presentation), but the idea that Frodo is gradually becoming subject to desire for the Ring and its power, overriding his natural affection, strikes me as very plausible—-realism of content: I’m sure someone might react that way. The trick is, of course, there is no ring of power; there never was. Yet this is exactly how someone would react to it if it did exist. Any fiction writer has to be realistic about things that never happened; fantasists have to be realistic about things that never could have happened.

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Jack Vance "The Genre Artist" (NYT)

My apologies to people of A Certain Age for that earworm. But Matt’s essay on politics and Heinlein got me thinking about another writer I’m fond of, apart from or even in spite of politics.

2009 was the year when lots of people stood up to say, “Jack Vance is a great writer, but Nobody Knows About Him! Why is he not as famous as these famous writers here in the House of Fame?” This simultaneously pleased and irritated those of us who already knew about him. Pleased, obviously, because Vance is one of the greatest fantasists of the past hundred years (a period rich in great fantasists) and it’s past time for People (whoever they are exactly) to acknowledge this. Annoyed, obviously, because of the inevitable, “Am I Nobody? I knew about Vance. Am I, then, chopped liver? Grrrr.”

We are not chopped liver, we longstanding Vance fans. But, to some of us, it’s obvious why Vance is not as famous as, say, the magical realists or George Orwell. Vance is not generally interested in writing near-future sf or blink-and-you’ll-miss-the-magic fantasy. His sf stories are generally starhopping visions of the far future, or sneaky trips into parallel universes. His fantasies range from the epic fantasy of Lyonesse to the sword-and-sorcery of the Cugel tales. He does not produce the stale breadcrumbs of genre-lite that some would use to lure Serious people into reconsidering the Seriousness (or stale-breadcrumbiness) of science fiction and fantasy. Vance writes the opposite of genre-lite: “deep genre” (in the deathless phrase coined by Judith Berman).

Vance also generally doesn’t write satire. You can’t use reality as a convenient map to navigate through his stories. (Ah, yes–the Silverearthers represent pre-Goldwater Republicans; their ‘King Ike’ is an obvious analogue for Eisenhower. The Bleeding Kidneys represent liberalism. Is the Dangerous Creeper a personification of terrorism, or does it represent the author’s longing to sleep with his own elbow? I’ll check the answers in the back of the book!) In Vance stories, people says things like, “I’d volith to send the raudlebogs skirkling home!” If you don’t know what a raudlebog is, Vance will have a convenient footnote to explain that to you. But he won’t tell you what the story means. He’s a fabulist: what the story is about is generally the story that he’s telling.

But Vance isn’t a man without detectable opinions. In fact, he’s got definite, fairly extreme leanings toward conservative libertarianism. That should irritate me: I lean pretty hard in the other direction, and when one of (say) Poul Anderson’s books break out in a rash of anti-statist hysteria, I usually groan, curse a bit and flip on a few pages. I’m not much more sympathetic to political maundering I happen to agree with. If writers have agreed to tell me a story, I dislike it when they suddenly turn into the Duchess from Alice in Wonderland and start poking me with “and-the-moral-of-that-is”-isms.

How does Vance get away with it, then?

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Hey Matt: I know what you mean about mash-ups, but I guess I’d draw a distinction between something like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (and similar projects, including unfortunately “Wyatt Earp Vs. Godzilla”) and genre-mixing in general. Mash-ups are gags that can quickly wear out their welcome, but genre-mixing is a longstanding tradition in sf that has produced some very good work.

The first sf book I ever read was Asimov’s Mysteries, and he makes a point in the introduction of that book of showing how sf can be crossed with anything–mysteries, romances, westerns, adventure stories (etc). He took this as a sign of sf’s versatility, but I take it as a sign of how fluid genre can be. Is Alien a monster movie or a science fiction movie? Clearly both, I’d say.

Steampunk is another crossbred genre–at least it mixes science fiction and historical fiction, and it shows signs of merging across all sorts of genre lines. I’m not sure how much steam is left in the punk anymore, but personally I’m enjoying it while it lasts, and am very much looking forward to reading Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker and George Mann’s work.

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Schoenherr, cover for Ace edition of Herbert's "Dune"

Matt, I liked your piece on Dune and avoiding labels. When I first read the book I hadn’t formed a definite impression of what sf was yet, so Dune became part of my definition. It said “science fiction” right on the cover, but on the back was a quote from Arthur C. Clarke comparing it to Lord of the Rings. The label could not be wrong, but could Arthur C. Clarke be wrong? So I put it somewhere near Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy and Tolkien’s books.

I think that’s how genre works–it’s an intuitive sorting process. Book A has cowboys in it, and so does book B, so they get stacked together. Book C has spaceships in it, and so does Book D, so they get stacked together. Book E has a murder in it, and so does Book F; they get stacked together.

If Book G involves the murder of a futuristic cowboy on a spaceship, some people will put it on the first stack, some on the second, some the third (depending on which feature they think is most significant), and others just run from the room weeping and go into another line of work. It’s a judgement call, and (by definition, I think) those aren’t rule-governed.

Getting stuck on genre-definitions, anyway, is definitely a mistake. I can tell, because I’m about to make it.

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Hey, Matt, I was fascinated by Earthsea, too. Still am, in fact. The original trilogy,

Le Guin-Lavinia

especially the first two books, still rank among my all-time favorite fantasy novels: I love Ged’s confrontation with the gebbeth, and the conjuring scene, and the conversation with the dragon, and the final resolution of the shadow’s mystery–these little books are full of great moments, and the style is so clean, elegant and powerful. Her recent Lavinia shows that she’s as good as she ever was, too. I would like to say that Le Guin influenced me, but I don’t know that I have the chops to pull off some of the stuff she does.

Another big anti-influence on my work was Andre Norton. I was and am a huge fan of her early Witch World novels, and I read a heap of other stuff by her as well. And she has this dry, clear, absolutely authoritative way of putting things. It makes every event or object, no matter how improbable, seem convincing and real. I thought it was the perfect way to write fantasy and it is–for her. For me it was a disaster. I couldn’t write with that plain authority no matter how I tried; the sentences were just pointlessly dull. I lost years trying to copy that until I finally gave up and moved on.

Borgman, cover for Norton's "Three Against the Witch World"

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Every writer begins as a reader, so it makes sense to start this conversation about writing by talking about our influences.

My first brush with fantasy (like that of lots of people) came with Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings was a big book on campuses at the time and some of my parents’ hip young friends had given them a copies to get them up to speed. I don’t know if they ever read it, but I was fascinated by the weird covers and the alien runes decorating the splash pages.

Reynolds, cover for "Fellowship of the Ring"

Everyone in the world seemed to have given it a good review, including people I’d never heard of like C.S. Lewis and W.H. Auden. So I read it and instantly became obsessed with it. I took all-too-seriously Tolkien’s gravely flip remark that “the book is too short” and, after I ‘d read LotR and The Hobbit a couple times, I launched on my own multi-volume fantasy epic. This one was going to be five volumes long–I didn’t want to repeat the one mistake Tolkien himself admitted making. I wasn’t very far into it before I gave up, but I did, of course make a map. I don’t remember much about it, but there was a mountain range that ran west-to-east and it had a dangerous pass through it called the “Kirach Kung”. There was a scary Mirkwoody sort of forest in it, but I’m not sure if I was already calling it Tychar (the winterwood, at whose verge readers first encountered Morlock a few years ago in “Turn Up This Crooked Way”).

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