Welcome to Fantasy Friday! Every week, you are invited to write and post anything having to do with fantasy, science fiction, etc., right here in the comments: a passionate rant about Pushing Daisies, a bit of a story you’re trying to write, a review of Matthew Jarpe’s groovy novel or Kim Newman’s groovy waistcoat. At 5 p.m. today, if we’ve got at least ten participants, we’ll choose the day’s most entertaining writer and PayPal them $10 on the spot. Go start your weekend off with a cold one on us! (Minors, make it a root beer.)
“Fantastic” Literature vs “Realist” Literature
I’m a genre-denier. Or at least, I deny the kind of genre “outlook” that equates to taxonomy. I prefer to think about “kinds” of texts through modality, which I think was best defined by John Frow, who describes modes as extensions of certain structures beyond time-bound formal structures to a broader specification of “tone”. I think talking about modes is more precisely illustrative of how fiction works and hence how best to classify it…if you wish to classify it beyond “fiction,” that is.
People are welcome to further classifying fiction if they want, but fiction to me is fiction (even though I acknowledge that fiction is indeed a generic delineation, however broad).
Nevertheless, I would characterise “fantastic fiction” as “fiction that is very aware that it is fiction.”
What I mean by this is that it makes no claims to project an unbroken literary line of narrative realism. Realism, on the other hand, is a technique that attempts to get as close to a realistic picture of the world as it can. However, it is doomed to fail from the beginning. The “real” in realism can only ever be attempted, never achieved, since, however powerfully it may employ mimetic techniques, those techniques are in service to fiction…something that is never real! It has always seemed paradoxical to me.
“Fiction that acknowledges its fictiveness” also acknowledges that it cannot possibly approach perfect verisimilitude. Instead of attempting to adhere to narrative realism, fantastic fiction prefers to dispense with the attempt at imitating reality, because it knows it cannot do it. This is not to say that it does not take its queues from reality sometimes, of course, as a particular novel may otherwise resemble a realist novel except for one “fantastic” or improbable thing occuring (magic realist novels, for instance). Realist fiction attempts to deny its fictiveness, fantastic fiction does not.
The recognition that genre no longer has to be a dirty word (indeed, that it need not be a word AT ALL!) is at least a contributing factor to the melding between literary fiction and SF that many seem to think is going on. But I wouldn’t go searching for a name for this phenomenon. That the generic “boundaries,” however suspect, are in flux is a good thing. There is much more freedom for us writerly types. We need not be fooled into having to adhere to rigid rules and structures.
My argument however, is that genre (if we must call it that) is always in flux. The awareness that it is is probably what is going on with all this irrealist, slipstream, interstitial, magic realism, new weird etc etc. All these terms are attempts to tie down the textual fluctuations with a generic description. Old habits die hard I suppose.
So I’ve been spending my spare time trying to hook up the internet to the afterlife. Why would I want to do that, you might ask? Because it’s going to make me rich. Here’s how:
The afterlife is just one big gray mess. Remember that part in the Odyssey where Odysseus visits the underworld, and everyone wants to talk to him? It’s exactly like that. A bunch of bored dead people with absolutely nothing to do but wail about how bored they are and bicker with one another. Basically, the dead are exactly like teenagers before they get their drivers licenses.
Giving the afterlife internet will probably hurt things at first, I will admit. At first, we’re looking at a flood of computer idiots that make the early days of AOL joining the web look like nothing in comparison. Lots of angry, whiny posts. Blogger and Livejournal servers will probably go down from all the new account sign-ups. Inevitably, the dead will discover porn, which means they’ll need to earn money to pay for the porn sites, which means they’ll turn to spam.
Your inbox will fill up with offers to put you in touch with your lost loved ones, secret hypnotic techniques of the ancient Egyptians… that kind of thing. Your spam filters will need some training, but eventually things will calm down.
So how’s this going to make me rich? Well, I’m a web designer. There are going to be certain ex-famous members of the dead who are going to want to set the record straight. It’s assholes and opinions; everyone has one. Although I guess the dead don’t have assholes anymore.
So I’m going to build websites for the wronged dead. I’m thinking, I’ll start with former politicians and pirates. Why? Buried treasure. In exchange for giving them a voice on the web, they’re going to tell me where they hid the loot.
I’m telling you, this plan is foolproof. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go ping Hades. I think I’ve almost managed to get TCP/IP to pierce the Veil.
Matthew – what about fantastic fiction that isn’t aware (or doesn’t advertise) that it’s fiction? It seems to me there is a flavor of fantasy — Weis/Hickman novels, Nora Roberts’ paranormal romances, etc. that is very straightforward escapism, and therefore has a vested interest in not making the reader aware of its fictive nature.
Cat-
Do you suppose that approach is being taken consciously by the author and/or their publisher, in hopes of avoiding any perceived “genre stigma” in the interest of more robust sales?
Popular attitudes don’t change for the better swiftly – it’s a slow grind to gain acceptance, aided by such juggernauts as Jackson’s bringing “Lord of the Rings” to the masses, to be certain, but John & Jane Q. Public are probably still reticent about striding brazenly into the Fantasy & Sci-Fi section of their local bookseller’s shop for fear of gaining the taint of dorkdom, faint though it may be.
You could argue that you gain a “taint of dorkdom” just by walking into a bookseller ‘s shop at all these days.
Also: Taint of Dorkdom would be an awesome band name.
My problem with Friday is that I know it’s a weekday, but it sure as hell feels like the weekend’s already here. When does the weekend actually begin? If you’re the corporate type it starts with the first martini at lunch and an afternoon of probably getting nothing done. But I’m not the corporate type. I’m sitting at home at the P.C. now with a mouse in one hand and beer in the other. And even something a bit more imaginative than the latter. Put that in your pipe an smoke it. My weekend has already begun!
A scrap of story for your (I hope) amusement. This came to me all of sudden when I was working on something else, so I dutifully scribbled it down. I will probably do something with it someday, though I don’t know where it’s going:
Once there was a woman who sold her floor. She gathered it up, every board of wood, every lump of glue, and carried it to a pawn shop. “It’s fine oak,” she told the man behind the counter. “Very old.”
He examined it with a monocle, running the frame-and-glass over it like a metal detector. His empty eye sockets revealed no reaction.
“It’s going to be difficult to sell,” he said several minutes later. “It’s a very… difficult floor, isn’t it?”
Several profanities sprang to mind, but the woman repressed them all in favour of a sigh. She had hoped, just a little, that he wouldn’t be able to tell. “Only last week I caught its corner in an indecent act with the wardrobe. And last month, when I bought a beautiful rug to sit in the middle of the room, it harassed it over and over — called it a cheap floozy, called it shallow, said it looked about as attractive as a student’s stained chipboard desk — until the rug killed itself. I found it reduced to threads, irreparable. It left a note saying that it couldn’t bear to live.”
“Not many people will want such a difficult floor,” the man said, resetting the monocle in his left socket.
“Surely there’s someone who’ll want it. Someone with a quirk for the strange. Someone bored with their floor.” She could have gone on, but a wave of the man’s hand stopped her.
“I may have to wait many years for such a person. Thirty pounds is all I can offer you.”
“Oh.”
The floor squirmed as she ran her hand over it for the last time. It offered no apology.
“I suppose I’ll have to accept that.”
I think that most entrants in the Bulwer-Lytton contest have better opening sentences than the average manuscript in a slushpile. Choosing to write badly — and crafting that sentence to be as perfectly bad as possible — produces better work than tossing random words on the page and hoping for the best.
Also, when I write my porn novel about nudist college students, I’m going to begin with, “It was a stark and dormy night.”
You want a passionate rant? Here’s one for you: I have a small problem with a certain type of contemporary fantasy novel that’s being written nowadays, and I want to share it with y’all. In a sentence: the part of fantasy in urban and paranormal fantasy that people (writers and readers alike) insist is fantasy is NOT, and the part that they insist is “normal” is really the most fantastic and unrealistic part of all.
Let me put it to you another way. I’m sitting in my vomit-brown cubicle right now, in the center of the fifth floor of a very typical East Coast office building. Everything is illuminated by the harsh white of florescent lighting, and people are rushing back and forth, holding papers, talking into cell phones – it’s business as usual. Very corporate, very urban. If someone came up to me right now, tapped me on the shoulder, and asked me to give a contracts folder to my boss, I wouldn’t bat an eyelash. And I wouldn’t blink or do an *ABBIDY-ABBIDY* double-take if this co-worker happened to have a horn-like growth or two protruding out of their forehead, or a rather shiny red scaly exterior, or way too much hair all over their body, or extra long sharp teeth poking out of their mouth. This is New Jersey, people – you think _that’s_ anything to stare at? Go down to the waterfront sometime…
But if a 5’7″ woman with long lustrous chestnut hair that seems to move of its own accord, with supermodel legs that go all the way up to THERE in supple form-fitting jeans, and dressed in a tight top (under a buttery black leather jacket) that showed off all the “right” curves and a peek of a very interesting and slightly occultish tattoo in that SPECIAL PLACE came up to me and told me she couldn’t get the paperwork to me on time because her part-time moonlighting job as a private investigator of unusual and possibly paranormal activities was taking up too much of her time, then I’d laugh. And then spend the rest of the day fearfully thinking of ways to kill her. Because: honestly, people. No one that good looking and talented can possibly be normal or natural, or even human. No one with three PhD’s and martial arts skills up the wing-wang and the ability to stop bullets by chanting a spell and stepping outside of time should exist in normal space and time with something as mundane as a dude who happens to like a little blood for dinner, or who happens to get wild and funky when the moon is full – or someone as mundane and pudgy as, er, me. The WOMAN is the most fantastic part of the urban fantasy, people! She looks like a teenage Brook Shields, she casts lightning out of her manicured fingers, and she fights crime? IT’S INSANE!! It’s like she’s some kind of… I don’t know, some made-up dream of what every woman should want to be, a non-real image of a sort of unattainable perfection… a – oh, what’s the word for it?
Ummm…
FANTASY. She is FANTASY. The female protagonist IS THE FANTASY. All the rest could totally happen. I’m pretty sure, anyway. Except maybe for the giant designer-decorated condominium loft she probably lives in – but don’t get me started on my issues with how real estate is depicted in contemporary fantasy. Even Rosemary knew she had to sell her baby’s soul to get an apartment at the Dakota…. Now _that’s_ real.
Vylar, that line is beautiful and terrible all at once. I am crying… and recoiling.
I have met your readership, and she is adorable.
I’ve been in this office for nearly 14 years. My co-workers are scientists. Nearly all of them used to read SF, but they don’t any more. They’re too busy for reading, they have kids and mortgages and their work lives are all-consuming. I’ve tried to get them to read again — I’ve tempted them with Vernor Vinge and Peter Watts, I’ve dangled books in front of them, but I’ve rarely seen them bite.
For 14 years I’ve been wondering where all the readers went. And then this summer I met her. She walked in the door and now she’s sitting at reception. She’s young (only 25! She could be the daughter I’ll never have!) and she’s absolutely passionate about SF, horror and fantasy.
She’s fresh and sunny as the dawn, but loves dark stuff — the darker the better. She loves deep emotional detail, and she likes to see characters suffer. She likes sexual and gender ambiguity. She knows the world is painted in shades of grey, but she likes to see those shades glazed with light. She wants you to tell her things about the world, about truth and pain, about love and death.
She’s right here, just waiting for you.
‘Taint of Dorkdom’ also sounds like something there should be a cleaning product for.
Gets out troublesome blood and grass stains and removes all traces of that pesky ‘Taint of Dorkdom’!
Maybe Tide or Shout could come up with a whole ad campaign around it!
Alternatively, ToD can be chosen as a character flaw to offset an unnaturally high Charisma, imbuing the player/character with a tendency to say exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time, or otherwise making other party members vaguely embarrassed or uncomfortable.
But, really – with the widespread acceptance of what was once considered to be geek culture, an appreciation of what, to many folks, is the “high art” of the realm – it’s amazing how reticent folks who aren’t the least bit squeamish to say “I’m a geek” can be to pick up something with elves or spaceships on the cover.
Um… is there a rule that prevents these comments from being cross-posted? If there is, feel free to disqualify the following
MUSE-A-HOLICS ANONYMOUS:
Most artists, I believe, begin their careers at the whim of the Muse. Inspiration strikes, they feel compelled to create, and something beautiful and wondrous enters the world. My earliest stories were all born this way. They were written in breathless, rushing burst of inspiration. I loved them like children.
But creating art and trying to make a career out of artwork are two different things. Somewhere during the past four years, I stopped waiting for the Muse to whisper in my ear and started stealing her diary instead.
And it’s funny; I may not feel as passionate about my stories as I used to, but when I go back and read them, I can’t tell the difference between the ones I wrote when I was ‘on fire’ and the ones I hammered out when my well of creativity felt dry. The end products were indistinguishable.
You know what else? I bet Michelangelo didn’t always feel like going in to work on the Sistine Chapel.
I bet there were mornings when his back was sore, and his arms were sore, and he had this idea for a totally cool sculpture that would have been more fun to work on. But I bet he went to work anyway, because he’d learned to let the Muse provide the first, breathtaking vision of what that Chapel was going to be about and then muck his way through the rest of it on his own.
Now, everyone, repeat after me. “I am not dependent on my Muse. I am a qualified, brilliant, artistic person. I can write without one.”
The following is not a work of fiction.
“A Library in the Wilderness”
It is the last day of a week-long Bordewieck family reunion. The illusion of our own little utopian commune is fading. Everyone is packing up reluctantly to head back to the real world.
I propose a last distraction: an afternoon hike into the hills. Lisi and Sara and I walk in the lead, my father and Udi behind, everyone else straggling along at their own pace. It’s hot; fern and blueberry bake in the sun along the trail, filling the air with heavy, tangy sweetness. The light washes out colors; pupils narrow down to pinpricks. Lisi’s curls gleam like a halo. My walking stick is slick with moisture from my palms.
After a mile, slabs of red-brown standstone begin to emerge from the brush of the hillside. I point out whitish scorings in the faces of the slabs: lines and circles of unknown meaning, appearing more and more frequently as we progress. “Petroglyphs.”
We turn left onto a side trail, ascending steeply now. Beads of sweat roll down my temples. Lisi and I pause to debate the nature of a peculiar set of glyphs; I recognize them as recent forgeries: four English words inscribed in a tall, narrow mirror script. I have walked this way before; a vague memory of the astonishing profundities that lie ahead is only beginning to arise in my thoughts–yet I know implicitly, the moment I set eyes on this particular stone, that the strange array of inscriptions to be found in these woods is representative of a phenomenon unheard-of anywhere else upon this continent–a seat of ancient North American learning and culture continuously occupied since before the era of the conquerors. Lisi is understandably incredulous. But a gasp and an exclamation from Udi and Sara interrupt our argument.
On the trail ahead of us is a hulking, weedgrown structure of adobe and standstone, like an Anasazi ruin lifted from the deserts of the southwest. Awed, disbelieving, yet half-remembering, I lead the way forward, through a long, arched corridor, open on one side to shadowed woods scattered with boulders.
A doorway opens in the left wall. Beyond it, a stairway leads steeply down into a dim, high-ceilinged room like the nave of a Spanish missionary church. At the foot of the stairs, the room is a ruin; the stone walls are bare; drifts of dead leaves cover the floor. But the sounds of muffled, distant conversation pull my attention to the right. Through another entryway I can see into a larger room, furnished in thick persian rugs and woven tapestries, where craggy-faced, raven-haired gentlemen in comfortable clothing lounge in upholstered armchairs, discussing esoterica in muted tones. Parchment-colored light filters down through lofty windows. And beyond this quiet study, I can glimpse a room wider and brighter still–a room dominated by books.
I turn to my family, who stand dumbstruck around me. “This,” I tell them, “is the Library of the Wampanoags”.
Like a tour guide, I show them single-file through the study and into the stacks. Wonderful, ancient, moth-nibbled books overflow the three-story shelving, drifting into immense heaps across tables, bins and floor. Every book is bound in cloth or leather, yellows, browns and muted reds–there is not a single work here less than twenty years old. The aisles and tables are fairly crowded with the strangest array of researchers; dusty miners, trappers, native men and women of clear eyes and inscrutable expressions. The air is full of the soft buzz of whispers, pages turning, pens and pencils scratching paper. We receive strange looks, some curious, some hostile.
I realize our time here is limited; I lose interest in the tour, let the others wander off to browse. There was a book I found, the last time I was here–a book no other library I’ve ever found has carried. I had never expected to see this place again. I had nearly forgotten it. And that book–well, if I could only have ten minutes to skim through its pages…
Alas, I am allowed no such chance. A frontiersman beside me snarls and grabs my arm; he draws a revolver. My gaze tracks frantically across the shelves, but already they are falling away, fading, washing out with light.
I awake.
I have nothing valuable to contribute, but I figure if I post it means someone else has more chance of getting a beer tonight, and I’m in a giving mood.
16. Wood said, “I’m in a giving mood.”
Can I have some of your stuff?
How about a draft of a poem I’m working on?
Footsure
It’s too late to bind my feet and unbound
They’ll never slide
Into those glass slippers you hold
So hopefully
No and it’s just as well
My toenail is ingrown enough already from
The usual sorts of confinements and my stride
Which is slightly turned duck-footed
No mincing sway-hipped walker I
Step out swinging till the nail grows in
And in and carves my flesh like walking
On knives sharp pain in every step.
You pocket the slippers with a sly smile
Saying not the little cinder girl then but
The other sort
A little mermaid fish out of water
Paying the price for her legs.
No there’s almost nothing little about me and besides
There’s a surgery for my toe but for a tail?
Only sorcery and the sea hag’s bargain a trade
Of diminishment for love – of God I guess
Or else a man who won’t love
You back a soul is much more useful but
What a choice! I think it better to keep
What’s mine my voice.
Is that a flash of crimson
I see in your coat pocket? What
Will you offer me next?
Let me guess – dancing shoes red
Silk or leather or red-hot iron?
Leave them there you wolf you
Jackal you charmer I
Don’t want any part of it.
Really you should quit these hobbling tricks and stay
Away from my feet entirely
Didn’t anyone warn you?
I kick.
That’s all she wrote, folks!
Wow, tough call. DeLuca’s dream. Kelly Robson’s vision of the future (which we share). Taint of Dorkdom.
But it’s gotta be someone, and this week’s winner is: Livia Llewellyn, for building a bridge between the genre definition of “fantasy” and the rest of the world’s definition of “fantasy.” And for making us laugh, even while making a serious point. Livia, we raise our glass to you — and soon you can raise yours back! Check your email.
Congrats, Livia!
Now what am I going to do to kill time?
When I was a kid, Scholastic would distribute an order form every month, through school, for its latest books. I would pore over that thing for hours, trying to prioritize, to winnow the Want list down to whatever amount of cash I thought I could realistically wheedle out of my parents atop my weekly fifty-cent allowance. There was no set budget; everything depended on unpredictable adult moods, and guessing how many books I might get in a given month was more like forecasting the weather than, say, doing addition.
I still have a few of those books, among them THE CASE OF THE MARBLE MONSTER AND OTHER STORIES, by I.G. Edmonds, which was about a samurai named Ooka Tadasuke, a Japanese magistrate of Edo who was so incredibly wise that he now has his own Wikipedia entry. Ooka was a trickster judge of the “rip the baby in half” variety, and I loved him. He was witty, he was smart, and he was kind. I read that book a hundred times. It’s survived every move and every book cull since.
One of the stories is “Ooka and the Honest Thief,” and begins thus:
Supposing a random adult had told me, at that age: “Hey, small person–if you attempt to complete just a tiny bit of a big task every day, it’ll get done!” Odds are good that this simply wouldn’t have sunk in. But, wow. It says so in the Ooka book, and is therefore unquestionably true? Slow and steady actually does win the race? Dogged persistence can take down a frickin’ mountain? Coooool!
I believed; in a small way, on that day, fiction changed my brain.
This has been on my mind lately because there’s a number of things I’m trying to accomplish this way, a bit at a time, every day: music to learn, CDs to rip for my iPod, photos to sort and label. Whenever I decide to do something a teeny bit at a time, to chip away rather than power through, I think of that story, and all the other ones in that book. And even though I now know better than to believe everything I read, I still believe, deep down, that I can flatten that mountain.
Anyone else out there remember the books of childhood that shaped your worldview?
YAY! I’m taking that money and putting it towards a degree in Sexy Paranormal Investigation! (that’s code for a six-pack of Magic Hat Jinx Beer
)
You can waste it with some of my stuff.
Anybody want a copy of the annotated Dragonlance chronicles? ‘Cos I sure as hell don’t.
Is this going to be every Friday?
Because I found out about it 9:30 Pacific time.
Lucy — yep, there’ll be a new Fantasy Friday post open for debauchery every week.