Louder and weirder.
Mar. 21st, 2006 09:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyA couple of things came into conjunction today, like planets in the astronomy of my own personal heavens. One was the arrival of the SFBC catalogue and the other was an extremely unwelcome epiphany about two unfinished stories of mine, which my backbrain now insists go together. They don't. Trust me on this. But the backbrain says they do.
Now, mostly these two things wouldn't have anything to do with each other, but the SFBC catalogue brought into sharp relief one of the reasons I didn't want this epiphany.
Brace yourselves. I'm about to start talking about genre1 again.
In any genre, there are works that are conventional and works that aren't. That is, there are works that are staying in the box, coloring inside the lines, and then there are the works that say, "Well, what happens to the box if I do this?" Both approaches to genre convention can produce the brilliant, the mediocre, and the truly dreadful.2 It's just a question of how you approach your work on the meta level, if you approach it there at all. One way you get Emma Lathen; the other way you get Josephine Tey.3 I don't want to do without either of them.
I don't think it's surprising or offensive to say that mostly, the SFBC deals in conventional sf & f. (Remember, "conventional" isn't a derogatory term here: descriptive, not prescriptive.) But reading the blurbs for the various books--none of which I know anything more about because I am so far behind in my reading I'd just sit down and cry if I wasn't too busy--does tend to devolve into much of a muchness, because all the blurbs can give you are the tropes. They can't really tell you much of how the author engages with the tropes, which is the joy of even the most staidly conventional of works (Georgette Heyer, who may have invented the Regency, but who never once colored outside her own chosen lines). They can just give you a sort of checklist. Farmboy hero, check. Wizards, check. World in peril, check. Scheming viziers, check. Prophecies, check. 4,981 irradiated haggis, check.
And therefore they show you just how much of the genre of secondary-world fantasy is based on the same rather small set of tropes.
Now, in the opposite corner, we have a pair of stories I've been variously working on and stuck on for, oh, a while now. One of them (I thought) was secondary world fantasy in a sort of Delany-esque line with the fabulous decadent city and all the rest of it, and the other (I thought) was a story about American pioneer women and magic. And then my backbrain piped up and said, These two things go together.
They do not! I said.
Yes, they do. Shut up and look. Here and here and here.
Oh fuck me, quoth I. They do go together.
Now, the reason that this epiphany was so unwelcome is not that I object to these stories combining themselves. It means they're one unfinished story now instead of two, and I'm cool with that. No, the reason it was unwelcome is that telling the story has now become about thirteen times as hard. Because--and here's where we link up with what I was saying up above--it means the genre conventions of secondary-world fantasy have just neatly dumped themselves in a no-fly zone.
Later, I realized that one of the reasons I'd been having trouble with the secondary-world story was in fact that I'd been thinking with my genre conventions instead of listening to what the story was trying to tell me. I've done4 my go-round with the fantasy trope of the assassin; if I'm going to go near it again, I'd better be sure I have something new to say. Because otherwise, it means I'm coasting, relying on the tropes of fantasy to do my work for me.
And that's easy to do, but for me as a writer (as opposed to me as a reader or any of the other hats I might conceivably be wearing), it's the primrose path. Because if I'm doing that, it means I'm being lazy and sloppy, and it also means, as sure as anything, that I'm going to get bored.
Brain the size of a planet, and what do they have me doing?
And I think, as much as I love them, that there is something pernicious about the tropes of secondary-world fantasy. I think it's very easy for them to become a Procrustean box, to become the despots of the kingdoms of our imaginations, so that we find ourselves saying, Oh, I can't write that. It's too weird.
I beg your pardon, but what the fuck?
Fantasy should--and notice please, that I've moved out of the placid descriptive waters of genre theory and into the tempestuous teapot of manifestos and over-opinionated statements--fantasy should be a genre where weirdness is not just accepted, but encouraged, sought out, loved and cherished and promulgated. There should be room in fantasy for damn near everything ... and just because a story is set in an imaginary world should not mean that it can't be weird too.
That's the problem, of course. It's not that fantasy doesn't embrace the weird. Fantasy embraces the weird with gung-ho delight. But it's all fantasy of the here and now. "The Metamorphosis" is for some reason springing to mind, but there are dozens upon dozens of other examples; magic realism is all about unapologetic weirdness.
But it's as if we've made some sort of bargain. You may do one weird thing, but not two. You may have magic realism or science fiction. You may not have both. If your character lives in a city that cannot be found in an atlas, she may live a block down from an alchemist's, but not from an ice-cream parlor.
And I guess, fundamentally, I'm not convinced that that has to be true.
There are these implicit rules about building a secondary-world. It will either be (a.) cod-medieval European or (b.) based upon blindingly good research into one non-medieval European culture (or, in the case of Lois McMaster Bujold's Chalion books, one medieval European culture). America does not exist in Fantasyland. Because there is no cod-medieval America. We have ice-cream parlors, but not alchemists. And it seems to me that abiding by that particular set of rules--and I don't know where we get them from, either. It's easy to blame Tolkien for everything, but I don't think the prevalence of the cod-medieval in the modern imagination is his fault. But it seems to me that we're short-changing ourselves--limiting ourselves unnecessarily in the kinds of worlds and characters and stories we can tell.
Or perhaps it's just that, like my cats, I do not enjoy being confined in a box.
The truest thing in the world about genre theory is that it believes the rules are only there in order to be broken. And I guess what has hit me today from several different angles is that there are rules in this genre that are masquerading as givens. The givens are the page, the words, the blood and breath and bone with which you tell the story. Everything else that tries to tell you it goes without saying should be smacked upside the head and forced to say it anyway.
Because we might all find out that it's wrong.
---
1Quickly, because I don't want to get tangled in this discussion for the umpteen hundredth time: when I say "genre," I do not mean "marketing category." Also, when I say "genre," I'm talking about a DESCRIPTIVE rather than a PRESCRIPTIVE system. Genre theory, in its best moods, is not about saying "This is how things should be." It just says, "This is how things are. And aren't they cool?" Okay? Okay.
2Say it with me: 90% of everything is crap.
3And Hegelian synthesis gives you Dorothy Sayers.
4Well, I'm in the middle of.
Now, mostly these two things wouldn't have anything to do with each other, but the SFBC catalogue brought into sharp relief one of the reasons I didn't want this epiphany.
Brace yourselves. I'm about to start talking about genre1 again.
In any genre, there are works that are conventional and works that aren't. That is, there are works that are staying in the box, coloring inside the lines, and then there are the works that say, "Well, what happens to the box if I do this?" Both approaches to genre convention can produce the brilliant, the mediocre, and the truly dreadful.2 It's just a question of how you approach your work on the meta level, if you approach it there at all. One way you get Emma Lathen; the other way you get Josephine Tey.3 I don't want to do without either of them.
I don't think it's surprising or offensive to say that mostly, the SFBC deals in conventional sf & f. (Remember, "conventional" isn't a derogatory term here: descriptive, not prescriptive.) But reading the blurbs for the various books--none of which I know anything more about because I am so far behind in my reading I'd just sit down and cry if I wasn't too busy--does tend to devolve into much of a muchness, because all the blurbs can give you are the tropes. They can't really tell you much of how the author engages with the tropes, which is the joy of even the most staidly conventional of works (Georgette Heyer, who may have invented the Regency, but who never once colored outside her own chosen lines). They can just give you a sort of checklist. Farmboy hero, check. Wizards, check. World in peril, check. Scheming viziers, check. Prophecies, check. 4,981 irradiated haggis, check.
And therefore they show you just how much of the genre of secondary-world fantasy is based on the same rather small set of tropes.
Now, in the opposite corner, we have a pair of stories I've been variously working on and stuck on for, oh, a while now. One of them (I thought) was secondary world fantasy in a sort of Delany-esque line with the fabulous decadent city and all the rest of it, and the other (I thought) was a story about American pioneer women and magic. And then my backbrain piped up and said, These two things go together.
They do not! I said.
Yes, they do. Shut up and look. Here and here and here.
Oh fuck me, quoth I. They do go together.
Now, the reason that this epiphany was so unwelcome is not that I object to these stories combining themselves. It means they're one unfinished story now instead of two, and I'm cool with that. No, the reason it was unwelcome is that telling the story has now become about thirteen times as hard. Because--and here's where we link up with what I was saying up above--it means the genre conventions of secondary-world fantasy have just neatly dumped themselves in a no-fly zone.
Later, I realized that one of the reasons I'd been having trouble with the secondary-world story was in fact that I'd been thinking with my genre conventions instead of listening to what the story was trying to tell me. I've done4 my go-round with the fantasy trope of the assassin; if I'm going to go near it again, I'd better be sure I have something new to say. Because otherwise, it means I'm coasting, relying on the tropes of fantasy to do my work for me.
And that's easy to do, but for me as a writer (as opposed to me as a reader or any of the other hats I might conceivably be wearing), it's the primrose path. Because if I'm doing that, it means I'm being lazy and sloppy, and it also means, as sure as anything, that I'm going to get bored.
Brain the size of a planet, and what do they have me doing?
And I think, as much as I love them, that there is something pernicious about the tropes of secondary-world fantasy. I think it's very easy for them to become a Procrustean box, to become the despots of the kingdoms of our imaginations, so that we find ourselves saying, Oh, I can't write that. It's too weird.
I beg your pardon, but what the fuck?
Fantasy should--and notice please, that I've moved out of the placid descriptive waters of genre theory and into the tempestuous teapot of manifestos and over-opinionated statements--fantasy should be a genre where weirdness is not just accepted, but encouraged, sought out, loved and cherished and promulgated. There should be room in fantasy for damn near everything ... and just because a story is set in an imaginary world should not mean that it can't be weird too.
That's the problem, of course. It's not that fantasy doesn't embrace the weird. Fantasy embraces the weird with gung-ho delight. But it's all fantasy of the here and now. "The Metamorphosis" is for some reason springing to mind, but there are dozens upon dozens of other examples; magic realism is all about unapologetic weirdness.
But it's as if we've made some sort of bargain. You may do one weird thing, but not two. You may have magic realism or science fiction. You may not have both. If your character lives in a city that cannot be found in an atlas, she may live a block down from an alchemist's, but not from an ice-cream parlor.
And I guess, fundamentally, I'm not convinced that that has to be true.
There are these implicit rules about building a secondary-world. It will either be (a.) cod-medieval European or (b.) based upon blindingly good research into one non-medieval European culture (or, in the case of Lois McMaster Bujold's Chalion books, one medieval European culture). America does not exist in Fantasyland. Because there is no cod-medieval America. We have ice-cream parlors, but not alchemists. And it seems to me that abiding by that particular set of rules--and I don't know where we get them from, either. It's easy to blame Tolkien for everything, but I don't think the prevalence of the cod-medieval in the modern imagination is his fault. But it seems to me that we're short-changing ourselves--limiting ourselves unnecessarily in the kinds of worlds and characters and stories we can tell.
Or perhaps it's just that, like my cats, I do not enjoy being confined in a box.
The truest thing in the world about genre theory is that it believes the rules are only there in order to be broken. And I guess what has hit me today from several different angles is that there are rules in this genre that are masquerading as givens. The givens are the page, the words, the blood and breath and bone with which you tell the story. Everything else that tries to tell you it goes without saying should be smacked upside the head and forced to say it anyway.
Because we might all find out that it's wrong.
---
1Quickly, because I don't want to get tangled in this discussion for the umpteen hundredth time: when I say "genre," I do not mean "marketing category." Also, when I say "genre," I'm talking about a DESCRIPTIVE rather than a PRESCRIPTIVE system. Genre theory, in its best moods, is not about saying "This is how things should be." It just says, "This is how things are. And aren't they cool?" Okay? Okay.
2Say it with me: 90% of everything is crap.
3And Hegelian synthesis gives you Dorothy Sayers.
4Well, I'm in the middle of.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-22 06:35 pm (UTC)Oh, that's what my kiss-ass warrior woman fantasy in progress is missing. *smacks forehead*
Seriously, this post helped clarify something I've been mulling about Elizabethan sonneteers. Thankee.
And Hegelian synthesis gives you Dorothy Sayers.
o_0
0_o
---L.