back from Boskone
Feb. 21st, 2006 11:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennySome of you deserve congratulations for things that have happened since Wednesday, and some commiseration. Please take both as read.
Boskone was wonderful. I was on intelligent and interesting panels, met lovely people, and had excellent seafood. Also got to go to the New England Aquarium and the Museum of Science. The latter was notable for the three-story tall Van de Graaff generator, the former for the excellent penguin habitat (I especially love the Little Blue Penguins, who are both the smallest and loudest species of penguin) and the Giant Ocean Tank, where![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala got to witness me making an utter fool of myself over the rays. And we still want to know what those horrifying prehistoric quasi-catfish were.
On the "Is Fantasy Necessary?" panel, I found myself talking about genre (again) in a way that turned out to be unexpectedly helpful, at least to me, and so I want to write it down while I still remember it.
We had been talking about the rise of the novel and the concomitant privileging of realism (I'm using the word "realism" in its narrow, rather technical sense, as a genre of writing with its own canons and conventions) and the relationship of that shift to fantasy and science fiction. I was trying to explain about the forms of fiction that came before the novel and I ended up saying something like this: if realism goes with the mainstream novel, and fantasy is allied to romance, then you can get to science fiction via one of two evolutionary paths. The rigorous extrapolation from the present, both scientifically and socially, is the child of the mainstream novel--but that's not the only way to write science fiction. Science fiction can also be romance, as many science fiction novels are not an extrapolation of realism but a dream of science and/or technology. And, of course, some science fiction novels are both.
In some ways, I think the point of fantasy is to abjure realism. Which is to say, I can't see the point to trying to replicate the canons of realism in fantasy. You could do it, but I don't think it would get you anything. (And if someone wants to prove me wrong, I say more power to you.) Which isn't to say fantasy can't and shouldn't strive for verisimilitude. But that realism, in its narrow, technical sense, is the antithesis of the urge or longing that makes us write and read fantasy in the first place. But science fiction can, if it wishes to, play the Hegelian synthesis.
And that's really pretty darn cool.
The page-proofs for The Virtu arrived this morning. It's going to be another pretty book.
Boskone was wonderful. I was on intelligent and interesting panels, met lovely people, and had excellent seafood. Also got to go to the New England Aquarium and the Museum of Science. The latter was notable for the three-story tall Van de Graaff generator, the former for the excellent penguin habitat (I especially love the Little Blue Penguins, who are both the smallest and loudest species of penguin) and the Giant Ocean Tank, where
matociquala got to witness me making an utter fool of myself over the rays. And we still want to know what those horrifying prehistoric quasi-catfish were.On the "Is Fantasy Necessary?" panel, I found myself talking about genre (again) in a way that turned out to be unexpectedly helpful, at least to me, and so I want to write it down while I still remember it.
We had been talking about the rise of the novel and the concomitant privileging of realism (I'm using the word "realism" in its narrow, rather technical sense, as a genre of writing with its own canons and conventions) and the relationship of that shift to fantasy and science fiction. I was trying to explain about the forms of fiction that came before the novel and I ended up saying something like this: if realism goes with the mainstream novel, and fantasy is allied to romance, then you can get to science fiction via one of two evolutionary paths. The rigorous extrapolation from the present, both scientifically and socially, is the child of the mainstream novel--but that's not the only way to write science fiction. Science fiction can also be romance, as many science fiction novels are not an extrapolation of realism but a dream of science and/or technology. And, of course, some science fiction novels are both.
In some ways, I think the point of fantasy is to abjure realism. Which is to say, I can't see the point to trying to replicate the canons of realism in fantasy. You could do it, but I don't think it would get you anything. (And if someone wants to prove me wrong, I say more power to you.) Which isn't to say fantasy can't and shouldn't strive for verisimilitude. But that realism, in its narrow, technical sense, is the antithesis of the urge or longing that makes us write and read fantasy in the first place. But science fiction can, if it wishes to, play the Hegelian synthesis.
And that's really pretty darn cool.
The page-proofs for The Virtu arrived this morning. It's going to be another pretty book.
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no subject
Date: 2006-02-21 06:37 pm (UTC)Which is to say, I can't see the point to trying to replicate the canons of realism in fantasy.
Can you elaborate on what you see as the canons of realism?
no subject
Date: 2006-02-21 06:44 pm (UTC)I suppose I can try.
When I say "realism," I'm thinking of novels like Madame Bovary or The House of Mirth--novels which set out to prove that there is no magic in the world.
Actually, come to think of it, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast (which, on the setting panel, I described as "the endless Sunday afternoon of despair") is the type-specimen of realism in fantasy.
This is an idiosyncratic definition, trying to describe an agenda with which I have no sympathy. So it's biased and distorted.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-21 07:08 pm (UTC)ha ha! I have to agree about Peake, although I really enjoy his Gormenghast series. what you say makes a lot of sense, and it's the trouble I find with writing programs that equate "realism" with "literary", despite all the great works of literature to the contrary. I read fantasy for it's own sake, and some of my favorite stories use the fantastical as symbolism and metaphor for reality. I'm not sure where that kind of fantasy-based-in-reality or reality on steroids would fit in this theory--I see those works as the opposite of proving no magic in the world.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-22 12:04 am (UTC)Also anything by M John Harrison, presumably ...
no subject
Date: 2006-02-21 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-22 02:42 pm (UTC)I can manage books without elves, now and again, but books without delight are like potatoes without salt.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-21 07:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-22 04:27 pm (UTC)