Babel Clash

First, I’d like to thank Mark & Justina for an excellent run on Babel Clash.  You were both exceptionally thought-provoking and engaging.  It was an amazing conversation!

Now, I’d like to welcome our next Babel Clash guests . . . Jocelynn Drake & Jeaniene Frost.

Jocelynn is the author of the Dark Days series which chronicles the story of nightwalker Mira and her best enemy/friend, the vampire slayer Danaus.  The newest book in the series, Wait for Dusk, is available 7/27. 

Eternal Kiss of Darkness, also available 7/27, is the second book in Jeaniene’s Night Huntress World series.  It takes place in the exciting world of vampires, half-vampires, and bounty hunters we were first introduced to in Halfway to the Grave.

Jocelynn and Jeaniene have some excellent topics lined up for discussion over the next couple of weeks.  Welcome, ladies!

I didn’t see BSG yet so I can’t comment but it seems like there’s a theme here of these big series trying to address the big issues of life. Whether they’re succeeding or failing they are at least trying, and trying to do it in a relatively sophisticated way. It’s not easy to deploy symbolism and allegory in the same storylines as gritty realism and contemporary psychology, they tend to trip each other up because they don’t exist in the same metareality.

Now that we’re all sophisticated post-SF consumers we’re supposed to be able to grok this without flinching but it takes a really light touch to make it work. Buffy was a good example of it working, for me. Lost not so much, mostly because, as several people point out, the religious aspect clogged up the works. I think this fact alone is perfectly expressive of the extreme anxiety of the moment concerning religion and its most slavish adherents - our fear of their reactions holds us hostage. The story wants to blow the religious things sky high - the main tension in it is a tension about daring to stand against the old orders of the past - but at the same time the writers aren’t prepared to move away from religious symbolism to spiritual symbolism that doesn’t rely on specific religious markers to do its work. So you get the queasily non denominational church instead of a true modern symbol such as an airport.

There’s no reason airports can’t be sacred places, anywhere could be. Anything can be made into a spiritual symbol in a story and discarding the religious baggage would have made for a much more inclusive finale feeling rather than trying to reference it en masse. Also, it would have permitted non religious people to join in without trouble. This notion of unity in spirit seems to be what a lot of narratives of the moment are trying to achieve as the happy ending scenario (whether or not that scenario plays out or is refuted in individual stories).

My own present position with regard to SF is both under informed and a source of some consternation to me.  I think that there is a lot of interesting writing going on, although it is not addressing these largest zeitgeist issues directly insofar as I can tell.  But there is no reason to think that it couldn’t.  SF as a medium is no worse suited to the transmission of sincere and meaningful contemplation of the human situation than any narrative form, in fact Philip K Dick is, to my mind, a master of using it to that end.  There’s certainly nothing intrinsic to it that demands it be a certain way.  It is easy to get stuck in thinking of it as a canonical set of texts with a litany and a credo that must be followed just because, as you remark, it has such a vocal and devoted fandom who prefer a particular aspect of it.  But they don’t own it any more than I do. 

My personal lack of connection to SF at the present is only because I don’t feel any pull to write about technologies or science in ways I haven’t before.  It could simply be that I’m not exposed to as much information of that sort as I used to be.  But that is a reaction to feeling stressed by my exposure to so much of it, and feeling that it deserves a response but not actually having a response in me worthy of an entire novel.  I remember that I used to write with a strong feeling that issues must be aired and, if they were, then there would come a resolution that was timely and appropriate.  Having written those books I have been forced to conclude from the unwrapping of the storylines that this idea of cause, effect, learning and progress is only an illusion.  I feel that the SF I wrote has whittled away my faith in the scientific method as a manner of approaching the world from the perspective of the small and timelocked creature that I am.  It isn’t that it doesn’t give results, it’s only that the results are open to interpretation and the creation of the interpretation is really where my interest lies now.  There’s a really big jolt in the present moment, as science meets magical thinking and each attempts to address the other.  Whether you see yourself as psychic or supremely good at unconsciously processing vast amounts of input of which you are unaware, is a decision that seems to me to be the decision Fantasy or SF.  But it goes alongside the decision Materialism or Spiritual/Religion.  I think they are not either or choices.  They are just perspectives on the same thing.  I would argue that the first - materialism - is a much weaker and more difficult method to handle and leaves you far less equipped for life’s journey as a human being, which is a very very odd thing to be.

Thanks to Borders and to Mark also, for letting me have this space to talk and for providing so much food for thought.  It’s been very rewarding for me and I hope interesting for a few others.  Until later - live, love and read what floats your boats!

While reading your last entry, Justina, I was reminded of Stephen King’s comment that creating a story was a kind of archaeology, in that he always had an eerie notion that the tale pre-existed in some form and he was simply digging it out. I’ve felt it myself, and I know a lot of other writers have too. It’s a spooky feeling, a sense that you’re tapping into something bigger than you. Weird resonances you can’t imagine making yourself, odd notes in characters, images that come with searing clarity. Yet the question that was really drawn into relief by your piece was, why do particular narratives resonate at different times? Why that story, why now?

When you mentioned Lost and the profoundly moving nature of stories Adam Roberts’ identified in his excellent analysis of the series, I was left thinking about the kind of tales that appear to be in the zeitgeist now - and, indeed, the very nature of the zeitgeist. I was struck how the ending of Lost was so close to the ending of another TV series which aired in the UK at the same time (Ashes to Ashes, the sequel to Life on Mars). They were created six thousand miles apart, yet the writers might as well have been sitting in the same room.

A lot of critical responses got all bogged down in matters of God and religion (as with the finale of BSG a little earlier) in an oddly literal reading - with literalism being the curse of the modern world - when it was the symbolic aspect that was much more important. All three of these series were, in the end, about a quest for meaning. Is life just about survival? Is it about connections with other human beings, and love, so easily and lazily dismissed by the cynical (although it’s the most potent driver in the human race)? Is it about something more?

Whenever anyone talks about meaning, there’s always a reflexive outpouring from some quarters that it’s a coded message pre-empting a sudden lurch into religiosity. But the search for meaning is a fundamental of the human condition, as vital for the secular as it is for the spiritual. We all need to know what we’re doing, where we’re going, what the point is of getting up in the morning.

That need to question and understand is even more acute during the kind of deep, societal change we’re going through at the moment. Are we on the right track as a race? Am I, as an individual? Are we losing sight of valuable things while we’re caught in the torrent? I felt that mood of intense reflection colouring your deeply affecting entry yesterday, Justina, in the same way I see it entwined in the stories currently emerging into popular culture.

Those kinds of questions are effortlessly asked in fantasy, less so in SF, I feel, and maybe that explains both the competing sales figures of SF and F and your own personal pull towards the kind of fiction that’s working for you at the moment, Justina. The search for some kind of meaning is embedded in the oldest story form on which most fantasy is based - the quest, with the hero’s journey representing the path through life. Arthur’s knights hunting for the Grail, Frodo taking the ring to Mount Doom, even Harry Potter searching for his place in the world while trying to make it out of school alive. The myths of ancient civilisations were devised for teaching, and to help people find a way to answer these big questions for themselves, and our modern myths are too.

I feel we’re entering something of a golden age for fantasy. It’s a genre rooted in emotion and searching and struggle and with its symbolic approach so very right for the questions we need to ask now. The “sub-Tolkien dross” of the lazy critics has been supplanted by a huge imaginative range - from Brent Weeks and Joe Abercrombie to China Mieville and Neil Gaiman, Patrick Rothfuss and Peter V. Brett to many new and upcoming writers who find the fantastic in the world around us, or the past, or the other side of death. Big questions, big issues, but not forgetting the fun and excitement. It’s a joy to be here as a writer, and a reader.

And, finally, on a personal note as this will be my last contribution to the current Babel Clash, I want to thank Borders for giving me the opportunity to sound off, and Justina for being such a wise, reflective and generous debater. I’ve had a lot of fun.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what you wrote, Mark, and one thing you’ve said that is so important and often overlooked is the fact that stories operate as whole things and part of the thing that they are is not only who the writer was and what they made but who we are when we read them, and how we read them, and why and who with. So much of the industry surrounding narratives treats them as isolated objects that have causes and effects that are amenable to analysis. But as you demonstrate so beautifully, they are inseparable from the much greater narrative of our lives, individually or at larger scales. A book is just a thing, a story is words, but once they’ve been read they’re part of us and our experiences.

I lost my father, incidentally, many years ago now when I was a child and what I most remember about him is our shared love of books and the same stories of which, no surprise, Lord of The Rings is at the fore. I can’t see or read LOTR without being with my father or without feeling happy. The phrases, the words, the characters, the images, they’re tied up with my relationship with him, that time and place we read together, how it felt to share the love of the story and everything about it. I wouldn’t even be a writer at all if I wasn’t yearning all the time to find that feeling again, with someone, anyone, one moment of sharing the Ooh and the Aah and the Oh No! and the Yay! and…the whole thing.

I haven’t understood that that was what I was doing for the longest time, but I think that the best thing you can know as a writer is why you are writing and who it is for. I write to connect with people because since my Dad died I have been lonely in a particular way and disconnected in a way. Only Fantasy and Science Fiction stories can fill up the leaky gaps in me. Nothing else can touch them. I couldn’t say exactly why and it isn’t because of the connection with my father, it was the cause of that connection in the first place. When I get a note, as I very occasionally do, from someone that says ‘I so loved your book!’ I feel that my life hasn’t actually been wasted. Yes, there are other relationships in it, loves and important things, but I feel that these little points of connection, like waving across wide oceans to distant fellow travellers, are of vital importance.  I like it when I read books that feel like someone is waving at me too.  But darned if I could categorise what that feeling is made up of.

Another article I read today which has a lot of resonance with what we are discussing is Adam Roberts’ review of LOST (http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2010/07/the_woo_of_lost.shtml)

Don’t read this if you don’t want to know what happens in LOST and plan to find out the long way. 

One thing it says very honestly is that stories exist which are intriguing and irresistible and profoundly affecting, even if, taken in an analytical way, it is clear they are a completely daft load of old hokey from top to bottom.  Even if the author/s become horribly aware that it is hokey and grow conscious of their themes, and their audience, and all the theories of literature and psychology which tell them how it’s all supposed to work the story can survive and do its job, which is to captivate, enthrall and to wave at you, sometimes from a great distance.  It makes you wonder, expands your horizon, shrinks your troubles for a while and, in the best cases, does transform you for the experience although the how and the when of that are uniquely personal.

Does this go any way to explain the decline of SF sales and the rejection of SF and scientific explanations in general?  The more I reread your last paragraph the more I felt that SF was indeed becoming a kind of closed ghetto just for the time being.  As you say, Mark, it isn’t an age issue, but an ideological one.  Meanwhile SF and its tropes have leaked out everywhere.  I’m pretty sure this is a brief hiatus before SF reinvents itself to a degree and we’ll find the most interesting things temporarily outside the genre itself before they get sucked in again.  I’m only guessing mind you because, shamed as I am to admit it, apart from a couple of exceptions I’m not reading it either right now.  I really can’t get interested and I have no idea why.  It’s no coincidence that I’m struggling to find SF that I want to write at the same time.  All I can think of are fantasy stories left, right and centre..except one, but that’s the exception proving the rule right now.  I feel this is not an accident, but I don’t know what it means either.  It’s as if the SF voice that used to tell stories for me has gone to sleep.  Other people are still writing it but I can’t exactly.  It’s almost as if I don’t believe in it any more, as if it were a question of faith.

We started off talking about bringing fantasy into reality in story terms, and now we’ve moved on to talking about how we bring fantasy into our own day-to-day reality. Justina, you mention the powerful effect of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books on teenage girls, which highlights just how stories carve something bright into our lives and take root in the space they create. Too often we lose sight of that, especially in the enterprise of writing, where we’re caught up with deadlines and others are caught up in reviewing and commenting and seeing the story as an artefact.

And, of course, stories are much more than that, more important in our day-to-day, work, eat, sleep drag. The whole business of measuring them with various critical yardsticks is really an exercise in diminishing and containing and reducing them to words upon a page, when really their effect on our lives is astonishingly profound.

Tomorrow I’m attending a funeral, and along with the sadness comes a wave of memories of all the other funerals over the years. There’s the usual cliche that real life’s hardships and tragedies put other things into perspective, but that pulling back has allowed me to see aspects of our conversation here in a different light. My mother died eighteen years ago after a short illness. My father died four years ago. I miss them both more than I can say, even now. And then I flash back to a bright, wet day in Oban in the west of Scotland when I was eleven and on holiday. In a bookshop, my parents thrust a copy of The Lord of the Rings into my hand and changed my reading habits, and my life, in a profound way. They loved fantasy, even my seemingly pragmatic, down-to-earth father. It was surprising, but I learnt more about them through Tolkien’s work, and more about myself.

LotR, and the books I read after, made me a better person, I think. Maybe that was their intention. Maybe there was no intention and it was all about sharing the love of the story, which in itself is a bigger issue than the words suggest. Whatever, that moment, that book and my parents are forever intertwined in my mind. I look at it on the shelf and I remember them, not in a simply nostalgic way, but I know who they are and what went on in their heads and the ways in which their own lives were changed. And every time I read The Lord of the Rings now, it has another quality far beyond the words on the page. How can you measure that?

But that complex effect also places obligations on us as writers, and on commentators and editors and all the people tied up in presenting stories to the world. It’s never just a book. In the same way that it’s never just a song or a movie or the few other things that have the power to shape aspects of our existence.

I wasn’t talking about age when I mentioned the people holding back SF and fantasy, Justina, but people trapped in a reductive way of thinking. I enjoy the shock of the new, certainly, but really affecting books need to be coloured with wisdom. That, of course, doesn’t always come with age, and sometimes it can come young. It does, usually, come with the weight of hardship and grief - one of the reasons why all of the characters in my Age of Misrule books needed to be touched by personal bereavement.

But there is a feeling that some writers lose sight of the ones they’re writing for. Fandom is hugely developed nowadays, a way of life with everyone linked by the net and navel-gazing, dissection and comment taken to the ultimate degree. It’s easy to get enveloped by the bubble and write books for all those people rather than the readers who exist beyond that glaring scrutiny. Fans are few and readers many and their tastes and instincts don’t always intersect. It can become a habit to feed increasingly rarified and jaded tastes and drag the stories out of the reference frame of many people’s lives.

I have an instinctive feeling that may lie behind SF’s sales decline, but it’s not “my” genre so I’ll leave it to more knowledgable people to consider.

Mark, I do agree with your perceptions about what is happening in the culture and the anxieties that you identify.

The first is the incomprehensibility of the present to those of us swimming along in it. The second is the obsolete nature of existing situations in addressing that change - which is really our individual resistance to change writ large in our various groupings.  These seem like constants in the human world, although the acceleration provided by present technologies and their ability to allow people to socialise in new ways does add unknown factors to the mix. 

I’m already well aware that at the grand old age of 42 I’m well out of touch with several generations below me, both in terms of how I like to arrange my communications and networks, but also how I behave.  I’m rather pleased to see the emo kids with their windtunnel hairdos and huggy, hoody ways for example - the ones I meet are so pleasant compared to my own memories of teenage years -  but I don’t have a place in their world.  I’m sure the fiction they’ll be writing will be a much better reflection of the present than what I do.  I’m already almost saurian in my approach and the struggles I experience with it aren’t even an issue for them.  Of course they’ll have other issues but they’ll manage.  I doubt they will have my issue with modern technologies of communication, which is basically the fear of coming under the control of other people through levels of manipulation that I am powerless to resist.  I hope they are like fish in that new sea, and immune to most of its contagions, protected by cynicism and innocence in equal doses.  I don’t know for sure though.  I do know that whatever the difference in the details, as you say, we are all human and the same on the inside.   The transhuman is still a long way off.

At the end of your post you corrected me and say you feel that there is an old guard holding back SF and Fantasy from being all it ought to be and claiming its place at the forefront of the revolution - or so I interpret it.  I wonder if this is really any more than the grumbling of old gits.  I’m strongly tempted myself to grumble horribly as I slide into entropy’s embrace.  However, to do so would be to fall prey to the notion that only the new and the young are able to provide insights of value into the cutting edge of reality and only the new and the young can break the old paradigms and generate fresh ways of thinking/writing/reading and communicating.

I think that this fetish of youth and innovation is endemic and quite corrosive.  Not just because I’m headed into old fartdom but because to me it feels like every new wave is heralded with so much hope and expectations - at last, here they are to save us!  And then, ten years down the line, when the expectations aren’t met and the dreams fade we react with spiteful disappointment.  Yep here is SF and Fantasy pretty much the same as ten years ago.  Yes, here is processed bread, pretty much the same as ten years ago.  Here are those flatfaced celebrities, pretty much the same as ….you get the idea.  I’ve done the same thing to myself. 

It’s about ten years since I was first published.   Now I’m not even sure exactly what it is that I want to write next or in what mode to try it.  I’m not really panicking however because as a species we have a universality to us that outweighs our contemporary situation and there will always be stories as long as we’re around.  Whatever the delivery system for those stories might be, their concerns will remain the same, because we have been the same for the length of modern civilisation (by this I mean cognitively and psychologically, as well as physically).  Advances in knowledge are not the same thing as advances in insight, which occur at an individual level only, alas.  Wisdom comes from living and living takes time.  Therefore, in a long and winding way, I’ve come to think that new and innovative is fine, if it does the job, but old and canny is much more reliable and rewarding.  Of course I kind of have to think that or I’d give up but I actually feel that if there is anywhere to go in the sense of forward progress it has to come as much from the old guard as the new turks.  The only thing that prevents us really being fresh or doing what we would like to do, is ourselves. 

However, there is a large deadweight drag that can’t be underestimated here and that’s the edifice not only of the publishing industry itself and its panicking slither into what might be a post-book age, or at least an age in which there was money to be made out of carting large quantities of print around the countryside, and the edifice of the academic and critical industry which circles it.  Since they both create most of the opinions of inside-industry buyers they have a massive influence on what gets disseminated and approved of and what gets discarded and ignored.  As writers we are well aware of how this goes and that it can often feel like a millstone, especially for those of us struggling to survive financially.  It’s difficult to be free and creative and a genius when you’re worried about paying your tax bill and how the kids are going to manage.  It’s also difficult if you feel there is a collective glare of disapproval coming over your shoulder from the (usually self appointed) ‘guardians’ of your genre or that the world at large doesn’t give two damns about your work when it could be reading Twilight instead. 

(Incidentally there’s no accident in the popularity of Twilight.  It’s a story that tells girls (via identification with Bella) that they have an intrinsic and essential high value so enormous that the fittest blokes in existence, actual superhumans, will fight to the genocidal death over them.  Hard to beat a primal story like that one, even with all the arsenals of contemporary political hysteria at your disposal.  Helen of Troy, anybody?)

Sorry for that digression.  Basically I concur yet again.  When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout, and then sit down by the fire with a copy of the new Mark Chadbourn and you’ll soon feel a bit better.   I’m sure Meyer’s books already made a lot of people feel better even if they don’t know why.  It doesn’t matter why.  Feeling better and having fun is the point of reading anything surely?  And sneering at what other people like says a lot more about the sneerer than the sneer-ee.

Didja see how I carved us that moral high ground there?

Well, that was fun. And now that everyone’s paying attention, we can probably move on from the mischief-making. A little. In your post, Justina, (for which you deserve some kind of award for diplomacy from the United Nations of Genre) you talk about modes of narrative and ways of seeing, and that’s exactly the point I hoped we’d be at right now.

It’s hard to get away from the feeling that a significant amount of modern literature is failing people. Or rather The People, cap T, cap P. It’s still locked in a 20th century mindset and simply isn’t capturing the whirl of fear, incomprehension, inchoate rage and hope surging through all levels of society in what is turning out to be the most turbulent period in human history. It doesn’t matter if you’re a believer in the Vingeian singularity or not - every marker shows the rate of change throughout civilisation is accelerating exponentially. If you’re writing about the world outside your window, and if you’re reflecting upon the society you’ve grown up with, you’re already out of date.

And you’re not doing the most important job of literature - to make sense of the human condition, here, now.

As a civilisation, we have moved beyond ‘cyclical’. We’ve never been in this position before. Most commentators focus on delivery systems - the technology itself - but not how that technology is actively changing people, our very psychology, the way we organise in society, who we are inside at a fundamental level.

In my other lives, in the media and in politics, there’s a widespread feeling that Rome is burning. People are no longer acting like people should.

They don’t listen to authority any more. They seek out information and guidance from peers. Political parties across the western world are in a state of post-catastrophe incomprehension that they no longer control and direct. That they no longer represent or reflect the way most people think.

There is no mainstream. People are splitting up into self-selecting micro-tribes, eschewing geographically-based communities for ones that are ideological or taste-driven and scattered globally. World-views are refined, focused. The whole of our media and the majority of our commerce is based upon mass consumption and mainstream tastes. Those two things are being eroded by the minute. The representatives of mass-media and mass-business know they’re in a state of terminal collapse. They’re wandering around in the wreckage in a daze, trying to comprehend why people aren’t doing what they’ve
always done.

And in the middle of this, people are reeling. They know the architecture of their lives is being torn away. They know they’re being given the freedom to act in different ways, to be different people. The majority just don’t understand what it all means.

Where is the fiction that maps this unprecedented change?

Where are the modes of narrative and ways of seeing that shine a light for everyone? Misery memoirs? Chick lit? The donnish noodlings of corduroy-jacketed thinkers whose frame of reference is so very, very 20th century - which might as well be hundreds of years ago on previous standards compared to how much things have changed?

The only way of making sense of the state we’re in is a fiction form (or forms) that is ahead of the curve and outside of the system.

This is the job that SF and fantasy was created for.

Over the last few years there’s been a lot of japery about “the geeks inheriting the earth”. We got so caught up in the glee that our guilty pleasures are suddenly widely-accepted, we didn’t stop to think why. There is a need out there for a fiction form that offers both understanding and meaning. And it has to be a way of seeing that has mythological scope, that pulls out of the madness and confusion of day-to-day interactions and reveals the vast arc of everything.

But to do that job effectively, you need the two aspects of imaginative fiction to be in lock-step, and each to realise that the other has an important job to do - and exactly what the other partner does.

A secondary world fantasy is not “a warm feather-bed of social conservatism” as Charlie Stross says. It’s a way of plucking the human experience out of the white-water and the mad spinning back and forth where everything is about survival, sitting it calmly on the bank and re-discovering what it is and who we are at our deepest level. It’s about reflection through isolation. The core human experience, the emotion, the psychology, the inexplicable mystical yearning, the search for meaning, all examined in a place where it’s not warped or corrupted by 21st century external factors.

At times of chronic upheaval, people need to be taken on that long journey within and sat around the campfire for a period of internal reflection just as much as they need to be shown their place in the brave new world.

When I snark at a bunch of SF elitists sneering at their fellow travellers, it’s not because I’m being resentful in the way that you mention, Justina. It’s frustration that people who should get it just don’t. There’s an unfortunate inward-looking, comfort-zone loving, ironically retrograde aspect to some in the SF community that is preventing the imaginative genres becoming the literature of now that I feel a lot of people in the wider world actively need.

SF and fantasy are complementary genres, and they are both vitally important and hugely relevant to these times.
(And apologies for the long post…)

*Gets off remains of fence. Jumps on fence until it is no more than sticks. Jumps on sticks until they are matchwood. Lights matchwoood. Stands back and enjoys the blaze.*

Oh, Mark, you’ve gone and opened up the Pandora Box again!

I think that, as David points in his comments, the real division of pain here is inside SF and its subcategories. But let’s take the points one sharp at a time.

It seems clear to me that the divisions of the genres are a convention which has arisen relatively organically to allow readers to find books of a sort they like quickly and efficiently. It’s marketing. In addition to that a whole critical and theoretical understructure has sprung up that reinforces the boundaries in places and breaks them in others. You can make all kinds of rules for the sets that SF and Fantasy might occupy, but you can always find examples of books that break those rules. Ultimately no set of definitions can satisfy everyone because, by necessity, they’re all failures.

Personally I’m fed up to the back teeth of everyone gnawing away on these sets and their rules (shall we have another round of What is Science Fiction anyone, or do you have lives to be getting on with?)  because what this boils down to is solipsism in the end; each of us states what we like and don’t like…except for this exception here…    The basic divisions as they exist are quite good enough for their purpose - to funnel products towards the people who want them.  No doubt in the near future when virtual agents start to have some intelligence then we can have personal agents hunting out what suits our tastes the best. I’m sure you can engineer them to also give you a ‘wild card’ every month to keep you on your toes or else make sure they never give you anything that might make you feel the squick of uncertainty or the panacea of soppy comfort ever again.  You go, you determined brutal coalface-of-reality miners!  And you, you soft hearted little hobbitsy bears!  There is room enough at this party for EVERYONE. 

What really interests me about your post, Mark,  is the resentment I feel. It comes out of your statements about how certain SF people have slighted fantasy, and also it’s in some of our reader comments too. I’ve been around long enough to have come across this a great deal.  I’ve ranted about its unfairness myself and I’ve also dished it out myself in moments of cathartic self destruction, so I know it is a widespread feature of the SF end of fandom and in SF readership at large, not to mention the wider world of Contemporary Fiction (Literature).

What’s so intriguing is the dual aspect of the contempt here. Fantasy gets it from Literature which is seeking to run far away from SFF for marketing reasons of its own (don’t tar us with your brush of Childish Unreality!  we are sophisticated movers and shakers of the real world, innit), and then it gets it in the neck from the harder end of the SF crowd who want to run away for reasons that are partly marketing but mostly ideological (you people are softminded, foolish, evil and wrong!  Get away from us!) 

They both use the same brush to do the job of the whitewash because both of them perceive themselves as part of a common worldview: realism.  That’s an identity crisis, that is.  *points at identity crisis*  Fuelled by a lot of insecurity.  Sneering is insecurity’s ugly little hallmark.  Until the insecurity goes away the crisis remains. 

I don’t blame fantasy writers for wanting to get out of town at this point.  They’re everyone’s scapegoat.  I don’t have much sympathy for anyone else though and none at all for the stated causes of the hostility.  If you don’t like something, then leave it alone.  Of course, people who can’t leave it alone feel that the structure of the world itself is in some way at stake, hence all the moralising they throw out about Fantasy being pappy comfort food for poor little popsyminded fools who can’t face up to ‘reality’.  Just count the number of assumptions in that.  Plus, it’s clear they never read any of it.  And also clear is the fact of how howlingly angry and disappointed they are.  I just wish they’d realise that it isn’t Fantasy that did this to them.

For the record I see realism as the poorer little country cousin of Fantasy. In my view realism is a particular subset of fantasy and not the other way around. Fantasy on the other hand is, as you say Mark, not to be analysed or atomised away. It is a mode of thought that operates intuitively and with great psychological richness and reward. 

This is true of all creative narratives though, not just fantasy novels.  These features of it however, do make it unpalatable to people who prefer their universe served up as realism (ie under the illusion that no narrative creation is going on). We would all get along much better if this was acknowledged and everyone was left to get on with their own things in peace. There is no point in poking each other and whining. It can’t go anywhere because the conflict is at the personal level, where people feel threatened and insulted by one another. It doesn’t exist in the books or their genres. They’re just modes of narrative and ways of seeing. They can complement or they can clash.

I find the clash fascinating personally and I don’t find any of the modes alienating.  I used to.  Nowadays I find I am more interested in the emotional impact of stories and characters, their journeys and discoveries.  I don’t give a rat’s ass about the setting or the props any more.   Fine if it’s all about the development of space exploration.  Fine if its a bunch of goblins squabbling over how to divide a roast pig.  Really, really I don’t care.  Just be interesting.  Be REAL (as in true).

So I vote NO to divisions.  That’s just giving in to bullying.

I’m interested in the dividing line - or lines - between fantasy and SF that you touch upon, Justina.  We’re both reaching for the same numinous area, I feel, but you do it from a rational, science-based approach, and I don’t.

I’m not interested in whether magic is real or not.  What I find important is what it represents for the characters, or what any seemingly inexplicable event means.  For me, fantasy utilises the secret language, the true, ur-language, of the unconscious mind.  It’s all symbols and metaphors and Jungian archetypes.  The myths and legends that we’ve clung to for thousands of years all speak in that same way.  They’re not meant to be explained because they’re not designed to be taken literally.  Those kinds of stories shine a light into our inner landscape, a place which defies all measurement - and as such, I suppose, is anti-science in the way that we currently accept it.

Maybe this is why many SF authors - and an increasing number, I feel - hold fantasy in something near contempt.  There’s a degree of cognitive dissonance, certainly.  Fantasy jars with their world-view.  In this piece, Charlie Stross talks about writing “a big fat fantasy piece” as a career move at his agent’s suggestion, while at the same time disparaging a big chunk of the genre and admitting “I don’t much like it”.  He goes on to describe SF as the literature of disruption - change - and fantasy as the literature of consolation: “a warm feather-bed of social conservativism”.

Which is about as narrow a reading of fantasy as I’ve ever come across (and I know he admits he’s speaking in general terms).  Much of fantasy is actually transgressional, but that’s for another time.

It makes me wonder, though, if it’s time for fantasy and SF to dissolve the marriage of convenience.  They came together in an age when there was a limited number of speculative fiction books on the shelves and the two genres huddled together for support.  But as Charlie Stross points out, they’re very different in outlook - one stares out to the world, one peers into the unconscious.

When a good number of authors and readers of one genre openly sneer at the other genre, that’s probably a good time to disentangle them at the level of marketing, conventions, societies and the rest.  Fantasy has more in common with horror, and urban fantasy which straddles the two.  And that would leave SF to be “pure” which a lot of its supporters seem to want.

Of course, members of the SF community who speak openly about that kind of thing might find it a double-edged sword.  Fantasy thrives in sales terms, and those big secondary world epics that Charlie Stross mocks give a lot of bookstore cover to what may be perceived as the more challenging of the SF fare - especially at a time when three senior editors (two in the US, one in the UK) tell me they’re no longer really in the market for SF for sales reasons.

Though it seems to me, Justina, that your series captures both the logos and the mythos, mapping the outer world of SF and the inner world of fantasy, and so is one of the few that straddles the storytelling dividing line.  That’s an intriguing place to be.

Hello Mark, and everyone.

I don’t believe fantasy is about escaping reality either. I see it as a meta language, one suited to the great complexity and sweep of the subconscious where all the information we perceive about the world gets processed into our own personal meaning. It’s the language of the psyche and of intuition. It is the realm of the truth, as distinct from the uninformative world of the facts.

Reality is only _presented_ in realistic fiction, like an empty picture frame bordering some bit of it that the writer wants us to observe. It retains all the characteristics of the way that we habitually understand the world in our present day culture, preprocessed and selected by the mind of the author. There’s no shift of scale there. Fantastic literatures are dealing with the same material - the desire to understand, to see, to experiment, to find meaning - but through a different medium, the natural medium of the imagination and all its hprtxt shrtcts and systems thinking.  For me the realstic view of the present day is akin to an analytical, sicentific viewpoint and the fantastic, by contrast is a kind of systems thinking.   (For a lovely explanation of systems thinking see this nice 3 part clip on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJxWoZJAD8k&feature=player_embedded )  Apologies for bad link, I couldn’t get the link menu to operate.

I was really interested in what you had to say about fantasy and history, fantasy and understanding other mindsets, Mark. It resonates with something that Guy Gavriel Kay mentions in his stint here on Babel - that to really have an insight into an historic culture the best way of writing about it is to write as if everything that they believed to be real, was real. I never thought of this before until yesterday and suddenly I realised why the ancient myths are so compelling, even though some of them are so old and strange that the realities they were dealing with are long gone. They are archaeological records of old minds and finding and reusing them in stories again is like getting a key to a door that leads into an unknown fragment of the past. It’s Tomb Raider, but with ideas! The beauty of those archetypes is that they retain a huge amount of information and it is accessible in an intuitive way. Of course this is not amenable to any kind of scientific analysis, because the intuition is a subjective beast, but nonetheless they are our best records.

Meanwhile my own work tends much more towards SF. Even the series I am writing now, Quantum Gravity, has as its premise that the world began as the present day, but then some odd quantum event exploded the inside of (possibly just one person’s) mind into the physical universe, suddenly gifting the humans of the 2020s with a bunch of new worlds and dimensions full of the creatures who previously only inhabited their imaginations. I didn’t have too many plans about this at first, although I was aware consciously of my story choice to make this happen because I wanted to write about the difficulty people have in accepting their own intuitive insights and imaginations and integrating those into their experience of their own ‘real’ lives, which are presently considered to be of a different order of reality. I wanted to say -pfaugh! What nonsense! Don’t you think your external reality is as much a construction as any inner world? But this is a difficult conversation to have and I prefer to play with notions rather than lecture (in manner of this blog, ahem) because it’s easier on the mind and causes less misunderstandings. Anyway, there they were, humans, elves, faeries, demons, spirits, machines and elements and the human world had to deal with them or die. Or possibly and die. They are certainly being changed by them in vast and unpredictable ways as the adventures of the protagonists reveal. However, the point I wanted to make here is that for me, putting fantasy and reality together is an SF project.

This started out because I had the notion that as an SF writer the real world (sticking to common usage here) was my base state and all deviations must be explained in a manner appropriate to that base state - scientific rationalism as it is at the moment. So writing about elf rock stars and robot girls was going to be a tough call, but also a perfect opportunity to stretch the ideas that whether an experience comes from within (any narrative we generate) or from without (actions that happen…inasmuch as we ever experience those without generating narratives about them) - they are, in any terms you like, equally real.

So Fantasy and SF writers have the total edge on everyone else because they are plugged into the generator and can use every device they can find.  The difference is that SF will struggle to explain the fantasy’s existence in terms of the external reality, and fantasy just won’t have to bother with all that.  (Smug contemplation ensues). Ooh I’m so excited I have to go and write something!!