Ambrose & Elsewhere

Steve Wilson has a typically hilarious take on the question of comic books and Homer, an issue that arose on John C. Wright’s LiveJournal.

I don’t think readers will go too far wrong by following John Wright’s prescriptions (Take Homer more seriously than comic books or genre fiction!), but I’m not sure that I can go along with his argument. For instance, I’m quite certain that a couple of genre books by Le Guin (Left Hand of Darkness and A Wizard of Earthsea) are permanent additions to American literature, worthy to take their place on a shelf next to Melville and Twain.

One of the reasons why I don’t think comic book series could attain the level of great art is because of their lack of seriousness about death. More blathering behind the cut.

M. John Harrison asserts that “Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.”

Which is a bit like saying that every use of the hand represents the triumph of the body over the thumb. Rhymes conveniently with “dumb.”

He may mean that telling a story is an activity distinct from worldbuilding, and often at odds with the exposition of information about the invented world, a truism I expect is understood by everyone who’s had a stab at writing sf/f. Or he may be expressing hostility to the kind of fiction that requires significant world-building, as opposed to stories which occur in already furnished worlds: that’s what the rest of his entry suggests. (“Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent.” etc.)

He ends by associating world-building with the Bush administration, a rather timid and dishonest rhetorical move. This suggests a new corollary of Godwin’s Law: The more desperate someone becomes in their criticism of a target the more likely they are to associate the target with the Bush administration. In any case, even if the association were valid, it wouldn’t necessarily be relevant. Officials in the Bush administration also breathe. (I naturally exclude Cheney from this observation.) But MJH is not going to stop breathing just to differentiate himself from them, nor am I.

[The link to MJH’s blog glommed from James Nicoll.]

[Addendum ( 2/8/07): There is some further discussion of this at the Lotus Lyceum.]

From the AP Science section: “An astronaut drove 900 miles and donned a disguise to confront a woman she believed was her rival for the affections of a space shuttle pilot, police said.”

Add a trip through a wormhole, perhaps a talking squid or two… This could be an sf story before it’s a Law & Order episode. And it tends to confirm my belief that science journalism is where the action is, these days.

I was rereading Euripides’ Crazy Hercules today to prepare for a class when I was poleaxed by a stray line.

ἄλλως δ’ ἀδυνάτων ἔοικ’ ἐρᾶν.

–Euripides, Heracles 318

“But I seem to be pointlessly in love with impossible things.”

It strikes me as a good epitaph for a fantasy-writer. Because every fantasy I write is (in part) a letter of protest against the way things are. I want to put on a coat of feathers and fly around the world. I want to see what’s on the other side of the flat earth. I want to break the door of hell and smash the bolts, and the hosts of the dead will outnumber the living. I want to bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion. I want to send lightnings, that they may go and say unto me, “Here we are.” I want to do any number of things whose realization seems to be, to put it mildly, unlikely.

Fantasy (in the literary sense) probably serves a lot of different functions. But it is, at least, a coping device for minds afflicted by the many pleasing impossibilities that can never be executed.

Because you get to write phrases like “Shadow of a Martian Robot”, which sounds like a lost collaboration of Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury.

Another glimpse into the breakup of Pitch-Black.

It strikes me that there might be a good mainstream novel (or at least a Law and Order episode) in the ups and downs of running a small press.

Robert J. Sawyer, the sf writer, has a rather tiresome post insisting that science fiction is rational, whereas fantasy is not. He actually argues that the only reason for any market overlap is due to Ace Books pirating publishing Lord of the Rings in their sf line. That sf and fantasy were mingling in fiction magazines (and elsewhere) for a generation or more before this epochal event is a fact that passes under Sawyer’s radar: not a powerful instrument, it seems.

Preferring sf to f is a point of view (though not mine: I like both) and there are certain distinctive features to each genre: robots in sf, golems in fantasy, etc. But rationality is not exclusively or particularly a feature of sf; it is essential to fantasy, as Tolkien pointed out a decade or so before he set out on his mission to destroy Americo-Canadian science fiction.

Sawyer’s point rests on his assertion that fantasy deals in things which cannot happen, whereas sf deals with things which can happen; that’s why sf is rational and fantasy is not. Putting aside all the impossible things that sf routinely proffers us with a straight face (like the dimension-hopping highly intelligent Neanderthals RJS writes about), let’s consider the premise that it is rational to consider only those things which one knows to be possible.

This might be a reasonable proposition if we knew absolutely everything which is possible and everything which is impossible. But we don’t. Arguably, we can’t, but in practical terms we never will. To be rational in the real world is to acknowledge the limits of one’s knowledge, to entertain the possibility that everything you know is wrong, or at least some of what you know is wrong. The inability to confront this existential reality is not a sign of rationality; it is a symptom of dogmatism.

“Counterfactual thinking” is another way of describing the feature of fantasy which RJS erroneously calls irrational. Counterfactuals are essential to human psychology. They have an important place in philosophy and science and history. Someone who could not engage in them would be utterly shut off from the unknown possibilities that life offers.

[Edit: fixed a bad link. Bad Link! No ocarina for you!]

[I copped the link to RJS’s blog from Paul Jessup.]

[Another theft from Paul Jessup: There’s a fell-off-my-chair-funny web-comic about the Sawyer kerflufflet at Steve Wilson’s My Elves Are Different. I mention this somewhere in the comments, but after sagely considering the question for roughly 5 milliseconds I decided that My Elves Are Different needs to be exalted to the skies. And lifting the link up from the comments was as close as I could get.]

The unspeakably great Molly Ivins has died of breast cancer.

Daniel Blackston has announced that Pitch-Black LLC is closing its doors. Flashing Swords will stay up, but will be dormant; no new issues, it seems.

I love fantasy (including its subgenre, science fiction), I take it very seriously, especially when I’m trying to write some or read some or when I should be doing something else or when I’m breathing. I want other people to take it seriously. Nonetheless, I think some people take it too seriously.

An example is the recent discussion at Lotus Lyceum about art and the marketplace. Not all of the positions that emerged in the comments were incompatible, just because they were different, but I became impatient with the dichotomy I saw developing between Art (We are artists here, dammit!) and the Marketplace (i.e. brothel). Plus, someone ventured to use the word “pulp” as if it were self-evidently a term of dispraise, and I love the glorious schlock-spangled tradition of American fantasy because of what it is, not because it is some sterile Parnassus where literary priests can conduct their mystagogic rites (which it is, in part).

I’m totally in sympathy with the writer who wants to blow her reader’s mind so hard that the top of his head comes off, and I read high literature (for pleasure, not as a sort of cultural vitamin) as well as popular literature. But to force an Art-or-Market dichotomy on American fantasy is to miss something important about why it thrived in the 20th C.

Le Guin, of course, had the words I was groping for in the face of this rampant dichotomizationifyificationizingism. So I stole them.

“I totally oppose the notion that you can put Art over here on a pedestal, and Entertainment down here in a clown suit. Art and Entertainment and the same thing, in that the more deeply and genuinely entertaining a work it is, the better art it is. … Every artist is deeply serious and passionate about his work, and every artist also wears a clown suit and capers in public for pennies. The fellows who put on the clown suit and the painted grin, but don’t care about performing well, are neither entertainers nor artists; they’re fakes.”
–Le Guin, The Language of the Night, p. 232

There’s more, but that gets at the core of my discontent with the high-road-or-the-no-road types. Their error is that they mistake the style of the clown-paint for the quality of the performance. A capable clown in vulgar paint will deliver capers worth watching. A mime too dignified to move is a fraud. If I prefer the work of Fritz Leiber to the fiction of his younger contemporary Susan Sontag (and I do) it is not because I read nothing but genre paperbacks. It’s because, in fiction, Sontag is a less honest or less capable clown. (If the field in question were essays rather than stories, it would be a different story.) Pulpiness is neither here nor there in evaluating fiction, in short.

“So what?” I hear you scream ask. “Let people have their motionless mime and call it what they want.”

Well, I do (there being nothing I can do to stop it), but I think (there being nothing I can do to stop that, either) there’s a limit to which a popular art can be refined without killing it. Jazz is the example I usually use: it was not only more popular when it was the normative mode of American popular music, it was better. That’s because popular music demands swing (later specialized as bop, rock etc.) and “serious” music does not. (It need not even be music: I cite John Cage.) When jazz became serious music it became “free” to not swing (i.e. free to suck). Audiences stayed away in droves and if jazz is not dead, it is not at all well. And it would be a bad thing if that near-death-by-respectability happened to sf/f.

Because then no one would be left to buy my self-published opus, Someone Who Looks Like Me Saves the Universe with His Big Protuberant Ray-Gun.