Ambrose & Elsewhere

nihilistic_kid has a post on writing fantasy, distinguishing it from some thing(s) he calls “fantatwee.” By this he means “second order fantasy” or fantasy which derives from other people’s fantasies. He links to a story by Theodora Goss here, and people whose opinion I take seriously have spoken of Mamatas’ post and Goss’ story with respect.

I mean no disrespect to Goss, anyway, but the story didn’t have much impact for me. This suggests I’m not the ideal reader for Goss, Clarkesworld or Mamatas, which I had already discovered, but the experience did provoke some thoughts that may be worth setting down.

To my ear and eye, Goss’ story is full of borrowed experience and imagery. It reminded me of some other fiction which uses the political upheavals of Europe as a background and a metaphor (e.g. The Unbearable Lightness of Being or the prologue to The Name of the Rose) and also of the urban fantasies of Italo Calvino (especially Invisible Cities; I’m pretty sure there’s a shout-out to Calvino in Goss’ text). None of this is necessarily a bad thing, but it does make the story feel more like the second-order work that Mamatas scorns. More problematic, but harder to express, is my reaction to the story’s style. It reads with what seems to me a somber singsong tone, affected and precious. This kept me apart from the story, muting and distorting its effect.

If twee is anything other than a term of mere abuse, it must refer to this very quality of preciousness and affectation which alienates the reader. So (for me, maybe for others) Goss’ story is as twee or twee-er than the stories Mamatas scorns–a different flavor, perhaps, a sort of sovietwee, but still twee.

Any story is a set of symbols which invites the reader’s emotional participation, and no set of symbols (and hence no story) will appeal to every reader. If the cry of “twee!” represents a reader’s rejection of a story’s invitation, the reader shares some of the responsibility for the tweeness–it’s an event, a reaction in the reader’s awareness, after all.

So I’m starting to think that terms like “second order fantasy” are (or can be) an evasion of the reader’s responsibility to make his or her case for or against a story. Every story contains elements that are first-order (“I saw this myself”) and second-order (“I read/heard about this somewhere”). A reader who honestly confronts the elements in a story he/she finds alienating may learn useful things about the story and him/her self. I’m not suggesting that every story, even every good story, is always worth this kind of effort. (“Had we world enough and time” etc.) But it may sometimes prove a useful exercise.

Remember the old G.B. Shaw gag that ghoti is an alternate spelling of fish? Apparently it’s not Shaw’s at all, but comes out of the “reformed spelling” movement of the 19th C. Language Log has the details, including yet more orthographical witticisms from reformist gallus-snappers.

As a big Leigh Brackett fan I’ve naturally been snapping up the Haffner omnibuses that promise to collect all the “planetary romances” (i.e. space operas, not kissing-in-space, although there is some of that) by the greatest practitioner of that form. (The Haffner website may not inspire confidence, but they produce beautiful, carefully made, carefully edited books.) The first of these was the fascinating but somewhat uneven volume Martian Quest: The Early Brackett, collecting her first three years of sf-ish stories. The second book in the series was really a half-book, assembling Brackett’s stories about Eric John Stark along with her spouse Edmond Hamilton’s Star King novels. The reason for the joint collection was that they wrote a collaboration which put Brackett’s Stark into the future of Hamilton’s Star Kings (originally for Harlan Ellison’s legendary if not absolutely mythical anthology, The Last Dangerous Visions). The latest (but not the last) Haffner omnibus is Lorelei of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances.

More words lurk beyond in the Red Mist…

Someone at APoD has a Leigh Brackett-like sensibility. (Higher praise it would be difficult to bestow.) The title of yesterday’s picture was “Doomed Moon of Mars”–which sounds like something from the ToC of Planet Stories circa 1948.

A recent entry in peadarog‘s blog has got me thinking about realism and grit in fantasy.

My favorite definition of sword-and-sorcery is Joseph McCullough’s: “Fantasy with dirt.” In high fantasy, Aragorn grapples with Sauron over the rule of Middle Earth. In sword-and-sorcery, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are living on the street and complain about the smog (“The Cloud of Hate”). The scale is different, certainly, but more significantly the setting is different–grubbier and more threadbare. And any acts of heroism in Lankhmar appear on stage against a background of darker and more mercenary motives. That’s what I mean when I talk about grit in fantasy (and I like both gritty and relatively grit-free stuff, by the way; it’s all a matter of how well it’s done).

Realism and grit are always relative. One of the cool things about the spaceships in 2001 was that they were these immaculate shining instruments of human aspiration. And one of the cool things about the spaceships in Star Wars was that they were dirty, beat-up things that had to be kicked every now and then to make them work. Neither really has a claim to reality, but each has its own type of realism, one grittier than the other.

C.S. Lewis famously distinguished between the realism of presentation and the realism of content. Most questions of realism in sf/f hinge on realism of presentation: with what plausible concrete details these imaginary events are embodied? One of Lewis’ examples is “the dragon ‘sniffing along the stones’ in Beowulf“, and his own greatest strength as a fantasist was his ability to vividly embody the fantastic (sometimes at the cost of making it seem less marvellous).

But I think any claims a genre work has to realism of content should be treated with extreme suspicion. Fantasy and science fiction in particular, and fiction in general, are defined by their unreal content. Storytellers who start to preen about the realistic content of their stories are either trying to put one over on their audience, or they fundamentally misunderstand the cultural game of storytelling–in which case they are unlikely to do it well. That was my problem with the briefly fabled anti-fabulist “Mundane SF” movement.

Today I am host to the blog tour supporting The Return of the Sword from Flashing Swords Press (also available from Amazon). Modesty forbids me from telling you what a great book it is, since I’m in it, but it doesn’t forbid Jason Waltz, the editor: here are some of his comments from the blurb:

Return of the Sword is a brand new anthology of blood-pounding, spine-tingling stories by some of fantasy’s most critically acclaimed Sword and Sorcery authors.

Stacey Berg, Bill Ward, Phil Emery, Jeff Draper, Nicholas Ian Hawkins, David Pitchford, Ty Johnston, Jeff Stewart, Angeline Hawkes, Robert Rhodes, E.E. Knight, James Enge, Michael Ehart, Thomas M. MacKay, Christopher Heath, Nathan Meyer, S.C. Bryce, Allen B. Lloyd, William Clunie, Steve Goble, Bruce Durham, and Harold Lamb present you with enough fast paced adventure to keep you reading for hours.

A hand painted, wrap around cover by fantasy artist Johnney Perkins ensures that Return of the Sword will not only be enjoyable to read, but also look good on your coffee table or bookshelf.

Here’s an excerpt from Bill Ward’s story in the anthology. Bill’s website is here and he has a good story in the current issue of Flashing Swords here.

His story in Return of the Sword is “The Wyrd of War.” It’s bleak, action-filled and evocative. Here’s the opener:

It was the autumn of the world. On the hard earth of Toth, where the bones of twice ten thousand lay broken and scattered upon the plain, great hosts marched to war. From the north came proud armies beneath banners of rust red and red-gold and the stark white of wasteland snow. Assembled from fenland and mountain dale, city, town, and freehold, the able few of all tribes and nations stood within its ranks. They were the last of their kind upon the lands, the last to stand against the Animus – the living shadow at world’s end.

It had waxed strong, this unseen power, sweeping armies from the field and devouring whole kingdoms in its wars. It had spread across the lands, a blight, enslaving those it did not destroy. Now on this, the last day, the Animus brought forth its force of beasts and bestial men upon the parched earth of the ancient battle-plain, and there made war for the fate of all.

At the northern army’s leftmost point stood Vendic and his fate-bound brothers, eying the vile host that surged across the plain – a patchwork mass uncountable and chaotic, as inconsistent in its component parts as the hordings of a madman. It held no common step, no order of march, no signal banner. Among its many files and divisions jungle savages cavorted before the stately remnants of baronial armies, somber steppe horsemen canted side-by-side with stave-ribbed wolves, and baboons in leathern armor ambled soberly amongst mobs of blood-mad berserkers. Still stranger things moved within this vast and many-headed shadow, half-men and unmen, unnatural fusions of man, beast, and other, creatures warped and debased by the energies of the Animus.

The sky above the horde was filled with raucous birds, a million bits of dirty rag caught swirling in a maelstrom.

Perhaps it was the dark sorceries that now dominated Vendic and his comrades that allowed him to view the approaching host without fear. Or perhaps it was a still larger fate than that demanded by the necromantic charms he wore beneath his skin, a world-fate of supreme indifference, that provided the anchor for his own fatalism. No matter.

As if seized by a single impulse Vendic and his battle-brothers, the forty-nine men of the Wyrdkin, strode forward, leaving behind the defending line of spearmen and archers of the left flank. They would be the first to meet the enemy, the first to die. The first to test fate – to find their wyrd.

Unaccompanied by the bray of horn or the pounding of drums the onrushing horde charged.

**********

After that it gets a little dark. Good stuff, good stuff.

It seems the efficiency of the US private health care system leads us to spend more on health care than comparable nations. Victory is ours again!

(From the US Dept. of Health and Humans Services, seen at Paul Krugman’s blog.)

Apparently last fall Weird Tales was asking for suggestions about the greatest “weird storytellers” of the last 85 years as a kind of anniversary promotion. They posted their list this past week (I saw it first at davidcapeguy‘s LJ) and it makes for strange reading. The five writers I personally consider to be the greatest fantasists of the 20th Century (Tolkien, Le Guin, Vance, Zelazny and Leiber) are conspicuous by their absence. The somewhat affected way “weird” is used nowadays might exclude some of these writers, but certainly not Leiber. The author of “Catch That Zeppelin!”, “Gonna Roll the Bones”, “Smoke Ghost”, “Ill Met in Lankhmar”, Conjure Wife, “The Secret Songs”, “Mysterious Doings at the Metropolitan Museum” and countless others is certainly weird enough to stand out in any company. It’s odd that Sturgeon isn’t listed either.

But that’s just the kind of grumbling you hear when any “best of” list is posted. (“What about Binky ‘Bosco’ Sorenson? He wrote a story in 1937 that blew my tiny little mind. Can’t rightly remember what it was called, but still. ‘S a goldurned outrage!”) No, the real problem here is not who they excluded but who they included: lots of music-makers (Björk, Nick Cave, Roger Waters, Tom Waits etc.), film-makers (David Cronenberg, the Coen brothers etc.), cartoonists (Charles Addams, Gary Larson etc.), luminaries of the American musical theater (yes, Sondheim is a “weird writer” it seems). The list gave me a sinking feeling as I read it–a sort of sad yet contemptuous feeling.

Why? I wondered. Okay: shoot me; I have no particular opinion about Björk and Nick Cave. But the others I’ve named (and others I could have named who seem equally out of place on the list) are creators whose work I respect and enjoy very much. Why should seeing their names on this list make me think less of the list and the magazine associated with it?

I finally pinned down the feeling. Maybe you remember the scene in Play It Again Sam where Woody Allen’s character, Allan Felix, prepares for a blind date by running around his apartment, scattering objects he thinks will enhance his cool: magazines, books, a track medal even. (“A few carefully-placed objects create the proper impression.”) Then there’s the music:

ALLAN: I’ve got a big decision to make. Do I go with Oscar Peterson or the Bartok String Quartet No. 5?

LINDA: Play the Oscar Peterson and leave the Bartok out so everybody can see it.

ALLAN: That’s a good idea.

It isn’t, of course: the date that follows is one of the major disasters committed to film, like Interiors, only funny-on-purpose.

Allan Felix’s method for impressing his date appears to be the same principle that organizes this list: “a few carefully-placed objects create the proper impression.” It’s a poser’s list, a vain attempt to bask in a little borrowed cool.

So, in honor of this weirdly unweird list of weird storytellers-some-of-whom-aren’t-particularly-known-for-storytelling, here’s Blossom Dearie singing “I’m Hip” to the fresh (if somewhat pixelated) moves of Kakashi, Naruto and co.

I finally subscribed to Talebones.

Is it because of the current current subscription drive? Is it because the new issue features Jim Van Pelt and Paul Melko (among others)–names to conjure with, in my view? Is it because, back when I was submitting to them (a few years ago now) they wrote some of the most agreeable, most encouraging rejection notes I’ve ever received?

No. All those things are true, but they’re not relevant. The real reason is much simpler.

!!!GIANT ONE-EYED ROBOT WITH PINCERS OF DEATH!!!

One of the best cartoons ever:

and one I thought about when I read Robin Hobb’s antiblogging rant.

I did think it ironic that RH wanted to distribute this thing, so she posted in on the internet–essentially, it is a blog post about how bad blog posts are.

On the other hand, as John Scalzi pointed out, she has a kind of point. Writing a blog and writing fiction are categorically different activities that some people may get confused.

On the other other hand, maybe some people are better off venting their spleen in a blog than trying to write fiction. (I don’t mean to sound supercilious: I’m willing to entertain the possibility that I’m in this group.)

On the other other other hand, I’m starting to think that the whole concept of writers having blogs as promotional tools is misguided, or at least should be guided by one’s own temperament. Someone who has a breezy and amusing personality and invests, you know, ten years of breezy and amusing posts in a daily blog, this person may be in a position to use his blog for promotional purposes. That’s not most people, whether they’re good writers or not.

But what’s the harm, anyway? Even if the average blog is a less-than-powerful promotional tool, at least it’s not going to hurt, right? In short, isn’t it time for the other other other other hand to appear?

Not really: this is the point I was setting out to make. For many writers, an internet platform (whether it’s a blog or something else) may well do more harm than good (strictly in a career sense). This occurred to me most recently when reading a post by a fellow-Black Gate writer, whose blog is emphatically worth reading for its wit, effervescence and thoughtfulness, which made me think of two writers I don’t read anymore, largely because of their online presence.

I’ve never restricted my reading to authors who agree with me on every issue. Neither Le Guin nor Heinlein, to cite two genre examples, take the trouble to reaffirm my personal worldview in everything they write, but I can forgive them this serious offense if they don’t waste my time as a reader (as Le Guin never has, and Heinlein never did until I Will Fear No Evil and its increasingly bloated and pointless successors).

But in the case of the two they-shall-be-nameless writers I’m talking about, their online presence frosted me to their offline work because of the intensity of hatred they displayed and their strange lack of intellectual honesty. As an academic, I’m prepared to debate the merits of almost any proposition and, as a perennial snarkmonger, I like a good fight. I don’t like being doused with internet venom and set on fire because I disagree with someone’s position on some foreign policy issue, or their definition of fantasy, or some other matter about which reasonable people could disagree, and even unreasonable people could talk about without screaming if, you know, they had something that might pass in a dim light for human decency.

Even reasonable people can be caught by this trap, because no one is reasonable all the time. Charles Stross, who may be the best of the newer writers of SF, posted a piece last summer that struck me as almost ridiculously narrow-minded. (It’s here, under the title “Pernicious Reporting.” I am not, by the way, a Tibetan monk and I don’t believe in reincarnation. I just think that people–even people I disagree with–have certain rights which, unfortunately, are far from inalienable.)

I fumed about it for a day or so, meditating various responses, until I realized that it was coloring my attitude toward his work. I decided what was more important to me, deleted his blog from my RSS feed, and by parting company with Stross-the-blogger I have maintained undiminished my enthusiasm for Stross-the-author.

They used to say that you should never try to meet your favorite author; it was bound to be a disappointment. Nowadays you hardly have to try; one Google-search and you’re likely to land in the thorniest part of any given author’s crotchet-patch. However this plays out for the reader, it really may not work in the writer’s favor. So maybe Hobb was even righter than she knew with antiblog rant.

In which case, you know, burn this blog before reading.