Ambrose & Elsewhere

Deep Genre has had a couple of interesting posts lately about political values in epic fantasy–specifically the old “SF Diplomat” question of whether fantasy is inherently reactionary. The first was (by Kate Elliott, and the next by Lois Tilton; both have provoked interesting comment threads, and with luck there may be more posts to come.)

In the comments to Kate Elliot’s piece, Mark Tiedemann (a sometime Black Gate writer, among other perhaps more notable things) suggested that fantasy was not necessarily interested in politics–he described it as an “added benefit” for fantasy but not essential. “Fantasy is not about systems but about the essentials of self, and the problems of the given story are designed to reveal those qualities of character which are outside of or beyond ‘politics.'”

I was going to just comment with something like “Word!” or “True dat!” but my experts tell me that no one says that stuff anymore, and they also refused to tell me what people do say. (“For your own safety,” they keep insisting, as if that arrest for misuse of “groovadelic” in mixed company hadn’t been expunged from my record years ago.)

So instead I wrote

Great post and fascinating comments. I especially like Mark Tiedemann’s point. Matters of governance in a fantasy novel are rarely about politics; they’re identity symbols. This can be bad (in an Iron Dream sort of way) or good, but it’s not necessarily advocating reactionary political values. It has more to do with the Freudian “family romance.”

Kate Elliott wondered, in a very civil way, what the hell we were talking about. I can’t speak for Mark Tiedemann, but here’s what I was talking about.

Fantasy is most effective when it acts through symbols that rest pretty deep in the awareness (or beneath the awareness, if you buy into the whole subconscious thing). At the center of every adult’s emotional life is a struggle for autonomy that occurs in adolescence. One may be struggling against well-meaning (or not so well-meaning) caregivers who are reluctant to surrender their authority. One may be raised in perfect environment that encourages autonomy and self-responsibility, but one still has to go out and face the world, make one’s place in it. Somehow, this is part of everyone’s story.

Why do so many fantasies involve young sons of widows who grow up to kill the monster, defeat the king, marry the princess and rule the kingdom happily ever after? Some point out that these stories are very old; this is true, but it’s just begging the question. A story appeals to audiences because it speaks to them emotionally. Why does this story appeal to modern audiences or ancient ones?

It appeals to them because it’s a symbolic representation of the struggle for autonomy that everybody engages in. The kingdom isn’t necessarily a kingdom; it’s just a life where you get to decide what happens. The princess isn’t a princess; she’s the hot checkout lady at the grocery store or maybe the likeable mechanic at the gas station, depending on how you roll. In fact, the hero may be a daughter, more like Atalanta or Camilla, nowadays: the dynamic of the story is essentially unchanged. The story has a wide appeal because its symbols are wired into emotional hot-buttons that are part of everybody’s life.

Everybody struggles for autonomy–and everybody fails. Your princess or prince will have their own ideas how the shared kingdom should be run… and if they don’t, life may seem a little empty. Your princess or prince may not follow the script and will perversely prefer someone else. You may not escape from your abusive or well-meaning caregivers, and if you do you may find you’ve become one yourself, trapped by a self-image you despise. When you challenged the monster, he may have won the fight.

All these frustrations give new impact to the symbolic paradigm of how things should be, but also open up an appetite for stories that break the paradigm somehow, mixing fantasies of fulfillment with the grittier realities of unfulfillment. (The 21st century love of fantasy is the longing of Caliban to not see his face in the mirror. The 21st century dislike of fantasy is the longing of Caliban to see his face in the mirror. I should write these things down somewhere.)

Some people might say that science fiction does these things, too. Anyway, I would. Take classic old guard sf like Heinlein’s Puppet Masters: it’s all about the struggle for autonomy, against figures who are beneficient (like the Old Man who orders the hero around) and malefic (like the invading “slugs”) Spoiler behind the cut! Do NOT press the red button!

…here are my thoughts on the US election.

1. The Civil War is finally over. Not only has a black man been elected president by a dramatic margin in a turnout of historic proportions, but he carried at least two, possibly three, states that once belonged to the Confederacy, including Virginia. That’s huge. I think the Nixonian “southern strategy” yields at last to Howard Dean’s “50 state strategy.” If you go to people and talk to them like people, who knows, they might just vote for you.

2. This was my son’s first time voting in a general election. So I hold him personally responsible. Also my daughter, who did great volunteer work though she’s too young to vote. With irresponsible young people like these among the rising generation, what lies in store for our nation and our world? Can’t wait to see, personally.

3. Both candidates gave good speeches last night. I felt sorry for McCain at several points during his: he looked like Victor Frankenstein confronting the monster he’d made and realizing maybe it wasn’t so pretty after all. Indeed, Obama’s best argument has always been the people who were vociferously against him. (Someone on my flist was seriously asserting this morning that Obama voters would be punished by God, in this life or the next. But I’m pretty sure God does not hire out as a legbreaker for any political party.) McCain himself tried his hardest to do the right thing at the end, though, and it was impossible not to respect him for it.

Obama’s speech was superb on every level. The meaningful, important parts of his speech will be analyzed and cherished by others. Because no one else cares, I feel compelled to note the calm, overwhelming crescendo of the anaphora, and the crypto-Latin he kept sneaking in (e pluribus unum; dum spiro, spero etc.). (Omnia meliora Latine.)

4. The sun still rises, no matter who or what won or lost. Life goes on.

V. VI VERI VNIVERSVM VIVVS VICI.

[edited to add the quasi-Fawkesian bit.]

I don’t usually post progress reports on my work, because it tends to be too depressing. (Dear LiveJournal: I was going to write tonight, but then “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” came on and I forgot. Will do better tomorrow, since I always feel more writery on Tuesdays. Sincerely, A Damn Liar.)

But today I passed the 92K mark on the sequel to Blood of Ambrose. Even if not all those words are keepers, I’m starting to feel more confident about making my deadline, in spite of holidays and sweeps weeks and people being wrong on the internet (some of them me) and grading storms and real life and all the other deadly gleaming protuberances along the way.

The Sophomore Shakes (which sounds like a campus malt shop, or maybe a cover group for the Folksmen, but is really anxiety about something even less amusing) have struck me occasionally. A couple times I got out of them by muttering lines from the White Stripes’ “Little Room,” so I offer it here in the hopes that it might help fellow sufferers feeling a little lost in the bigger room. Anyway, it’s bound to be more entertaining than my word-count.

I’ve been feeling kind of semi-literate in my chosen field lately. So, instead of rereading heroic fantasy I’ve already read (which is one of my big occupations: I strongly believe in rereading), in the last year or so I’ve been having a run at stuff I’m less familiar with.

My discoveries won’t be discoveries to most people–Glen Cook, for instance (whose early work is being reprinted by Tor and Night Shade). Or Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy: these books have made a huge splash in the UK and here and don’t need any kind words from me, nor do Sherwood Smith’s fine epic fantasies (the classic YA Crown Duel or her newer series beginning with Inda).

Not all my ventures have been successes: I still haven’t read a significant amount of Karl Edward Wagner’s work; the astronomical prices for used copies of the Night Shade collections sort of chilled my enthusiasm. I’ve tried several times to read Shea’s well-received Nifft the Lean but the layers of embedding around the story keep putting me off. (Also, I wasn’t crazy about his Dying Earth pastiche, A Quest for Simbilis and I may be harboring a slight prejudice.) I also reacquainted myself with Samuel R. Delany’s Neveryon stories, at least to the extent of remembering why I disliked them so intensely. (That may be worth writing about, when I get my thoughts in order.)

One of the most interesting things I read lately was Joanna Russ’ Adventures of Alyx, a collection of loosely related stories that the feminist stalwart published between 1967 and 1970.

What I thought it would be was something like the episodic novels Leiber was cobbling together at the same time from his long-running Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series, or the ones Sprague De Camp was assembling from REH’s Conan stories (pastiching over the rather sizeable gaps), or the ones Michael Moorcock would construct from his Elric stories.

But Adventures of Alyx is not an episodic novel at all, and that’s not just because Russ didn’t write bridge passages to connect the stories into a single narrative. No one could. The main character Alyx is more or less the same in all the stories (except the last story in the volume, where she isn’t very obviously a character at all), but her backstory shifts quite dramatically from one tale to another. And in the first three stories (“Bluestocking,” “I Thought She Was Afeard Until She Stroked My Beard,” and “The Barbarian”) Alyx lives in a Bronze Age neverneverland dominated by the Lankhmar-like city of Ourdh. In “Picnic on Paradise” (the only one of these stories I’d read before) she is in the far future, recruited at the point of death by the TransTemporal Agency, and the world of her backstory has become a somewhat more historical ancient Mediterranean. She does not seem to appear in the final story at all, which involves an internal struggle of the TransTemporal Agency, the scene of the conflict being an American home in the 1920s.

If the reader is thinking, “Fafhrd meets the Change War!” I think that’s fair. Russ is pretty frank about her Leiberian influences. In “Bluestocking” (originally published as “The Adventuress” in Damon Knight’s Orbit 2), Alyx even recalls an encounter with a red-haired barbarian: “Fafnir–no, Fafh–well, something ridiculous”. Leiber returned the compliment by including Alyx the Picklock in a catalogue of thieves in “The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar”. (She also appears in a dreamlike sequence in a later story, “Under the Thumbs of the Gods”, and intones, “All men are enemies!” Which may be a ham-handed reference to Russ’ intensifying feminism in the 70s.)

But Alyx (Russ’ Alyx) is not just an s&s hero with a vagina slapped on as an afterthought. She’s a genuine, quite plausible female character who just happens to be an action hero. (Her sword is engraved with the motto, “Good Manners Are Not Enough.”) Also, she doesn’t exactly inhabit a fantasy universe: the magic in her world turns out to be advanced science, or maybe I should say a sufficiently advanced technology. Further, it’s an oversimplification to say that Alyx inhabits a universe.

Each one of these stories pretends to be part of a larger saga and each one of them makes it impossible to build a consistent world for the series. So really, each one stands alone. But not really. It’s a little maddening, but in an interesting way. I kept thinking about retcon, that Change Wind of comic book universes, which can sweep though storylines, changing everything… and somehow the audience adjusts. It was as if each story was set in a slightly (or more than slightly) retconned world. Each one is written with vivid, gemlike clarity; each one is imperfect, suggesting other pieces of the story that will never be told; each one contradicts the one which went before and the one that follows. I wouldn’t want a library of books like this, but it is certainly a book worth reading and rereading.

Russ has fallen silent, hardly publishing any fiction in the last 20 years or so. That’s a loss, I think.

Last night I had an election year nightmare–hopefully not the first of a series. It was the Thursday after the US election and I was glumly watching the news about the ongoing recounts. On the little electoral maps that the networks all have, every state was purple–too close to call.

In Morlock-related news, John O’Neill of (Black Gate fame) wrote me a while ago to tell me that he was taking two more Morlock stories (“Traveller’s Dream” and “Where Nurgnatz Dwells”, the latter featuring my favorite villain ever, but don’t let that bias you). Although they’re from roughly the same timeline (time horizon?) as most of the Black Gate Morlock stories (i.e. after Blood of Ambrose), they’re essentially standalones–not bad entry-points into the series for people who haven’t read any of the stories.

Also, there’s now an Amazon page for Blood of Ambrose. It’s a little bare at the moment, but I’m going to try syndicating my LiveJournal there to give the page a more lived-in look, and more stuff will be showing up bit-by-bit.

It looks like Sam Raimi et al. are going to do for Roman history what they did for world mythology. (I was going to write “Greek mythology” but Xena & Herc. roamed around a lot in later seasons–and for that matter, she passed directly from the Trojan War to the First Triumvirate early in her career, so they’ve had a few stabs at Roman history already.)

I guess I should be panicking, but I actually thought Xena was kind of amusing. (Raimi’s Herc not so much: the main character was taken too seriously.) So the new Spartacus might be worth checking out–probably more fun than the USA version of a few years ago which was (like lots of USA’s classical offerings from that period) earnest, dull and inept.

The one bad sign is some generational hubris. They say they’re going to “have a little more depth to it than the 1960s film.” More depth than the film that brought us the “Love Theme from Spartacus”? Doubtful.

Farhad Manjoo has a pretty good column up at Slate.com on the advantages and disadvantages of Ubuntu, probably the most user-friendly flavor of the Open Source operating system Linux.

My little Eee PC has Ubuntu installed on it; this was my primary computer for the seven or so weeks I was in Italy last summer. On balance, I’d say it was a good experience, and whenever I have occasion to use the little notebook these days (usually when I’m giving a slideshow to one of my classes), it’s with a certain nostalgia and affection.

Hey! I feel like saying. Do you remember that time I was updating your software on battery power, and your power ran out, and your OpenOffice was more-or-less borked, but I figured out how to fix it by going in and removing the damaged files with the command line? Good times, eh? Remember that?

It doesn’t; it’s not a sentimental machine. But I remember, and I think it illustrates the best and worst things about Ubuntu. The Mac OS or Windows (in any iteration) may have various disdvantages, but they’re not very breakable. Linux is different. An unskilled user can easily destroy or damage essential parts of the software. In fact, this is rather likely, as Linux requires more tinkering by the user than proprietary operating systems.

On the other hand, there’s a huge community of extremely helpful Linux users online; pretty much every question you might have has been asked and answered on some Ubuntu forum somewhere. If not, you can ask it, with confidence that you’ll get some sort of civil and helpful answer. I never would have figured out how to repair the damage I’d done to my computer without the help of the Ubuntu forums. The patience, dedication and knowledge of the Open Source community is a tremendous resource.

And, if you go Open Source, you’ll need that resource. That’s the bottom line: most Open Source software just isn’t as user-friendly as its proprietary equivalent. It’s for people who like to pop the hood and tinker with the engine. That’s not usually me nor, I suspect, most computer-users, so I don’t expect any version of Linux to hit the big time especially soon.

1. I’m completely against the anathematizing of specific words or word-types. Except. You know. Sometimes.

Does anyone except a geologist ever really need to say “epicenter”? And “virtually”: there’s virtually never a reason to use it. Those are old complaints. The thing that’s bugging me lately is “basically”: what does it tell the listener except that they can’t trust what you’re saying? But “basically” is the new “virtually”–people are using it all over the place, sometimes several times in a sentence and–this is the main thing–they should not. It makes the angels cry. And I believe this strongly and sincerely, but I heard myself using “basically” this morning, so maybe there’s nothing that can be done about it.

2. It has been perfect biking weather lately–cool and clear, with the color changes in the leaves well under way. But time pressures of various sorts have kept me off the bike-trail. I’ve been trying to keep up on the exercise thing by using the old rowing machine we’ve had around the house, eh, basically forever.

The thing is, this practice causes one of our cats very deep concern. Clark is an older kitten, maybe five or six months now, and he evidently considers me his second-string human, worth paying attention to when my daughter isn’t around. When I sit down on the rowing machine, he usually comes from wherever he is in the house and perches in a window nearby, staring bemusedly at me as I work the machine or vice versa. He clearly thinks the rowing stuff is puzzling and stupid.

Once, though, as I started to row, it happened to start raining. Clark whipped his head around to stare out at the drops falling on him through the screen, then whipped his head back to stare at me accusingly: What did you do?

“Post hoc, propter hoc,” I said to him, but he was already out of there. It probably wouldn’t have made much of a difference if he’d stayed to listen; kittens are surprisingly unresponsive to Latin or logic.

The SF Signal guys have a new Mind Meld feature up, asking a bunch of writers, “Which Authors and Books Have Most Influenced Your Writing?”… and for some reason they asked me. Odd to see my byline in there with Lois Bujold, Joe Haldeman and others.