UBC #15: Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee

UBC #15
Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee. [Dee Goong An or Ti-kung-an, depending on which transliteration system Van Gulik is using]. Transl., introd., notes Robert Van Gulik. 1949. New York: Dover Publications, 1976.

Apparently, what I have come away with from this book is irritation at Van Gulik for dumbing down the transliteration of Chinese names in the text. His note at the end uses the Giles system--I know absolutely nothing about Romanization of Chinese characters, but I gather from context that this was the standard system in 1949--but the text itself prefers the Chinese For Dummies method, with the result that all the names look vaguely like they belong in a children's Saturday morning cartoon.

I am theorizing that my reaction is based on the doubled vowels. Judge Dee, Ma Joong, Bee Hsun (and especially his mother, Mrs. Bee), Candidate Hoo--I think my subconscious spent the entire book looking around for Winnie-the-Pooh, Eeyore, and Roo. But in the Translator's Note, these personages appear as, for example, Judge Ti and Pi Hsün. I actually find this much less distracting, even if more "difficult"--but probably Van Gulik's intended audience was not science fiction fans.

(I hope this also makes it clear that it isn't Chinese itself that is getting the reaction; it's the deliberate choice on the translator's part, without quite enough consideration of English's own patterns of usage, to use a naïve transcription system.)

The text itself is an interesting anthropological artifact, both of 18th century China and of mid-20th century Western attitudes toward same. And also entertaining.

Hard Fantasy: Or, Illegitimate SF

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
--H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

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Lovecraft is right, of course, the irony being that the correlation of seemingly unrelated ideas is how creativity works. Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town talks about this very helpfully in relation to poetry, as he describes the way a poem can be moved from its apparent subject to its real subject. And it's the thing that I found addictive about my college education: taking six different subjects at once resulted in some remarkable cross-pollinations.

It is also, of course, why fiction writers need to read nonfiction. Because we need those moments of brilliant cross-connect to generate stories.

It's also why elisem's Artist's Challenges work; the yoking of words to metal forces exactly the kind of cascade-effect I'm talking about.

It is a drug, make no mistake. And that's why Lovecraft is right.

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I had one of those blinding cross-connects this morning, thanks to matociquala sending me the link to Ursula K. Le Guin's review of Jan Morris' Hav. (Which sounds like an awesomely cool book, and, yes, the review does leave me panting to find a copy.) Le Guin says:

This lack of plot and characters is common in the conventional Utopia, and I expect academics and other pigeonholers may stick Hav in with Thomas More and co. That is a respectable slot, but not where the book belongs. Probably Morris, certainly her publisher, will not thank me for saying that Hav is in fact science fiction, of a perfectly recognisable type and superb quality. The "sciences" or areas of expertise involved are social - ethnology, sociology, political science, and above all, history. ... Serious science fiction is a mode of realism, not of fantasy; and Hav is a splendid example of the uses of an alternate geography.

Whereas I, reading Le Guin's description of Hav--and noting her reference to her own Orsinian Tales--would describe it as fantasy.

But fantasy of a certain kind. And here's where the cross-connect happened, because yesterday, Bear and I were talking about the world-building in A Companion to Wolves (otherwise known as our wolf-smut book), and I fell over a distinction, like falling over a tree root, between "fantasy" and "hard fantasy." Which, as a back-formation from "hard science fiction," surely does look like a contradiction in terms, but bear with me for a minute.

Hard science fiction is science fiction grounded strongly in the "hard" sciences: physics, astronomy, chemistry, etc. It is also traditionally science fiction that has little or no interest in characterization or anything other than the Really Cool Shit (that being the technical term) its author has come up with. It is the science fiction that glorifies the sensawunda (sense of wonder) and believes this to be the genre's ultimate goal. It is also traditionally the preserve of male writers and readers, and the brouhaha starts up again periodically about whether women can or should be allowed to play with this particular set of tinker-toys.

You may suspect I am not in sympathy with hard sf; you would be right. However, my lack of sympathy is partly due to my own scientific ignoramity (I don't get a sensawunda charge off hard sf because I find the mental calisthenics distracting) and partly due to gender politics--not due to any feeling that wonder is out of bounds or childish or not worthwhile. In fact, my most recent encounter with a good sensawunda charge is The Lies of Locke Lamora, which I started yesterday. Wonder is not generated by science alone.

Hard fantasy, in my newly-minted definition, is fantasy that takes its world-building seriously, not as window-dressing or stage scenery, but as a necessary and important part of the story. And there are fantasies that do this, that are intent on working out the details, on having internal consistency of the slightly inconsistent kind that mirrors history most accurately, making their invented societies viable, making the imaginary world real and therefore, inevitably, a commentary on our own world.

... exactly what Le Guin says Morris is doing in Hav.

To-may-to, to-mah-to.

I've argued before that fantasy and science fiction have fundamental differences. Now I'm arguing that they don't. Or, rather, I'm arguing that while there are fantasies that have no truck with science fiction, and vice versa, there's also an area of convergence, where hard fantasy blends into illegitimate sf. Both of these are my own terms: fantasy that thinks about world-building in an sfnal way; sf that approaches its subject matter with a fantasist's sensibility.

Construct a theoretical model. Watch it spin. Take it down. Build another. Spin it around and see how it flies. Watch for the cross-connects that light up the internal landscape. I'm not saying this is how things are; I'm saying it's how they might be.