Technical Difficulties

Eleven things I will serve my best never to put in a fantasy novel unless I am trying to undermine them, and in fact could do without entirely from now on, thanks

1. The word "orb." Unless we're talking about orb-weaver spiders, in which case, rock on.

2. Beauty correlating with goodness.

3. Quests.

4. Protagonists who are protagonists by virtue of being Special, particularly if their Specialness correlates with #2.

5. Telepathic companion animals.

6. Young women who live in a cod-medieval society and yet, somehow, are athletic, assertive, bad at sewing, and generally dressed in trousers. See also #4.

7. Social predators (thieves, assassins, etc.) with whom the reader is supposed to sympathize. Particularly if we're supposed to sympathize because of #4.

8. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL.

9. Heteronormativity. Likewise sexism, Default Fantasy Caucasianism, and the unquestioned assumption of middle-class values.

10. What Edward Gorey called P.R.O.s (Priceless Ritual Objects). See also #1, #3.

11. Saving The World. See also #8.

This is me, avoiding my book which is due in a month.

Cleverly, I have found an occupation that feels just like grad school only without the part where I ever have to leave the house.

---

But I've been thinking. This is what happens: I make a post, people respond, I think, I make another post. Lather, rinse, repeat.

And I've decided that the concept I want to hang "hard fantasy" on is rigor.

This is, in some serpentine fashion, where "hard sf" gets the moniker from, too. The "hard sciences" are the ones with (self-proclaimed) rigor (i.e., mathematics); hence the anxiety in the "soft sciences" (I'm going to have to send the cabana boys out for more quotation marks here in a minute) about designing studies to achieve greater and greater mathematicality, and the hand-wringing and despair in the humanities that they can't be reduced to mathematics at all.

Hopefully, some of these attitudes are outdated, but they were definitely alive and well at my undergraduate institution (Case Western), where the superiority of the engineering side of campus to the liberal arts side of campus was proclaimed on one side and contested on the other, but always there.

We will notice also that you get points for abstractness. The myriad impenetrabilities of certain French literary theorists and the Anglophone writers who imitate them may be seen as a kind of Azaz's Revenge: "We can be just as incomprehensible as you!"

So, anyway. Rigor.

I'm going to define rigor as thinking things through. Notice that things is not specified in this definition. It can be your scientific whirligig, or your sociological speculation, your system of magic or your proposition about the nature of ghosts. What gives rigor (in my new and shiny model) isn't the premise. It's the treatment of the premise.

"The thing about magic?" Spike says to Willow and Xander at the beginning of Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. "There's always consequences." BtVS had a kind of mixed track record on its own follow through, but it articulated the principle.

There's always consequences.

And so when I say rigor, what I mean is, consequences. There have to be consequences, and they have to be far-reaching, like Asimov's comment about the influence of the invention of the automobile on the sociosexual behavior of American adolescents. Cause-and-effect is a good start, but things are never that simple. Think of V's dominoes in V for Vendetta. My favorite thing about rigorous sff is the moment when, as a reader, you say, "I never would have thought of that. But he's right." That little mental click! of the Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson machine completing its circuit--that's the payoff.

The other thing about rigor, and why it's valuable as an apparatus, is that it cannot coexist with clichés. I think one of the worst things a work of sff can do is think with its genre conventions: to have things happen because "that's what always happens." So you put a Dark Lord in because all fantasies have one, or you let your spaceship captain get the girl, because that's how the story goes. And you lose some fraction of your readers' attention, because they've seen this all a thousand times before. Worse than that, you shut yourself off from whole ranges--positive Himalayas--of possibilities. What if the Dark Lord's dead, and his minions are trying to figure out what to do now? What if instead of the spaceship captain getting the girl, the girl gets the spaceship? And those are just simple examples--a mere foothill, as it were.

I'm indicted in this, as well. One reason I'm avoiding my book that's due in a month is because I have to dismantle and rebuild great tracts of character motivation and interaction that are based, in the current draft, on genre conventions. Not on the characters themselves, but on fitting them into a particular bracket where, as it happens, they don't belong. Their part of this book has been, therefore, trite and wrong, and I'm only grateful matociquala called me on it.

Now, obviously, the last couple of paragraphs have gotten very prescriptive, rather than simply descriptive, as my theorizing elides into my practice. So, no, of course not everyone agrees with me, and of course there are very enjoyable books that don't set so much as a toe outside of the wading pool of convention and trope. (Even some very good books: I can't deny my love for Georgette Heyer, or that she was brilliant at what she chose to do. But, then, she wasn't writing sff. Romance is a different genre; its engine runs on different fuel.) But this is what I think about the genre I love.

"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

---

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.

---

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.

[This originated as a comment in coffeeandink's blog, responding to her citation of Mary Papke quoting David Ketterer talking about Pamela Zoline's "The Heat Death of the Universe":

David Ketterer, for instance, in his New Worlds for Old, insists that like the work of J.G. Ballard, Zoline's story merely borrows "a science-fictional conception only for its metaphoric appropriateness." While her description of one woman's ennui in relation to universal entropy is perhaps "apocalyptic in a psychedelic or surrealist sense," he argues, "because the reality is grounded in a housewife and her kitchen and because of the lack of plausible scientific rationale connecting the end of the material universe with her state, Zoline's piece cannot legitimately be classified as science fiction."

And I realized that I feel strongly enough about both Ketterer's use of the word "legitimate" and my response to it to want to stick my comment over here where I can find it again.]

Can we take that word "legitimate" out behind the chemical sheds and shoot it, please?

Because it implies that somebody somewhere has the authority to validate a story. YES, you are sfnal. Three cheers! Here is your propeller beanie. NO, you are not sfnal. Go directly to Jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

And, no. It doesn't work like that. The story is a story that works, or a story that doesn't work. Genres are not members-only clubs, and it doesn't actually say anything useful about either genre or story to get into niggling technical debates about whether it's a "legitimate" member of the club or not. The story may work/not work due in part to its relationship to a multiplicity of genres, and it may work/not work for a particular reader based on her relationship to a multiplicity of genres. But it will not be a better story for having the word LEGITIMATE stamped on its forehead.

And if you're not writing "legitimate sf," what are you writing? Illegitimate sf?

Actually, I'm quite sure that's what I'm writing. But that doesn't mean I'm not writing sf.

A 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.

( This got long and passionate. )
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.