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world-building article
Sep. 8th, 2006 02:47 pmMy article on world-building, "The Importance of Maps" is part of September's Broadsheet, at Broad Universe.
It's free. Go read.
It's free. Go read.
And the trouble with sff is that it's a living genre.
Not, mind you, that this is "trouble" in most contexts. It's a joy and a delight--except when you want to talk about it as a genre, and then it's like trying to take still photographs of a rapidly moving object, such as a kitten or a dragonfly.
I'm thinking about this specifically because two people can be talking about "science fiction" or "fantasy" and mean the same general pool of books, and yet be talking about two completely different things.
Let me 'splain. We have (fortuntately or unfortunately) plenty of time.
Most genres talked about by academic genre theorists are genres that are either dead (seventeenth century English revenge tragedy) or have such a tremendous weight of tradition (the sonnet) that there is some common ground, certain things that do in fact characterize the genre.
Now fantasy and science fiction are, in the first place, Frankenstein's monsters. They're hybrid genres, taking things from the gothic, from the modern novel, from the romance, from the avant garde and surrealisme and experimental literary fiction, from the travel narratives and utopias of earlier centuries, from the pulps, from detective novels and film noir ... a smidgen of this, a snippet of that; they beg, borrow, and steal without shame of any kind. Oh, and then they just plain make shit up. And there are no protocols for it. Nothing's off-limits, and, contrariwise, there's nothing that everybody MUST use, or they'll be drummed out of the regiment and their propellor of their propellor beanie ceremonially broken.
But fantasy and science fiction are also, as I write this in the middle of A.D. 2006, genres that have accreted a certain amount of tradition of their own. Certain things that, yes, you can point to and say, "this is characteristic of the genre." But just because they're characteristic, doesn't mean that they're compulsory, either. Because, see above re: hybrids.
And so there are two (at least two) quite different ways that a reader in the sff genre can approach a novel. I'm going to call these two approaches Protean and Procrustean (Proteus being the chap in Greek myth who had no fixed shape and Procrustes being the fellow with the bed where if you were too short, you got the rack, and if you were too tall, you got bits of you lopped off until you fit), because, as I said in an earlier post, as a member of the species Homo sapiens sapiens, I need to name things in order to talk about them. Neither Proteus nor Procrustes was exactly the sort of guy you'd want to be trapped in an elevator with.
The Protean reader is the reader who loves hybridity and fusion and subversion, who's bored by traditional treatments of genre tropes and shouts with joy at particularly clever deconstructions, who seeks out moral ambiguity and difficult protagonists. (True Confession: I am myself a Protean, both as a reader and as a writer.) The Procrustean reader is the reader who prefers conventions to be followed, who isn't interested in experimentation or transgression.
Protean readers tend not to like Procrustean books, and vice versa.
And both readers and writers can be Protean in one respect and Procrustean in another. It's not a tidy binary.
Now the snag is that both Proteans and Procrusteans love sff. But when they want from sff are quite different things, and when they talk about sff, it can get a little like the North-Going Zax and the South-Going Zax: everybody's going the right way and nobody's going to step aside.
Proteans see the glory of a genre that will let you get away with anything you have the cojones to try. Procrusteans see the security of a genre that has a good seventy-year tradition, that has developed certain rubrics about narrative and characterization and world-building. And because these two approaches are as hopelessly entangled as the genres of fantasy and science fiction themselves, there's no way to separate them into camps. (Anybody else remember the old MTV spot with Dennis Leary: "Okay, the shiny people on this side of the bus, and the happy people on this side.")
People are coming to sff, in other words, with widely divergent expectations of what they're going to find.
And as an sff writer that's frustrating. Because, believe me, whether we're Procrusteans or Proteans, we're not setting out deliberately to disappoint people. But the genre has such a wide range of readers, it's like trying to aim a cannon loaded with buckshot at a single dandelion clock.
Of course, this is nothing new. But I've been trying to figure out a way to articulate the muddle, and this is as close as I've gotten. It's the same genre, but there are two sets of (sometimes oppositional) genre expectations at work.
The trouble with poets is still that they talk too much.
Not, mind you, that this is "trouble" in most contexts. It's a joy and a delight--except when you want to talk about it as a genre, and then it's like trying to take still photographs of a rapidly moving object, such as a kitten or a dragonfly.
I'm thinking about this specifically because two people can be talking about "science fiction" or "fantasy" and mean the same general pool of books, and yet be talking about two completely different things.
Let me 'splain. We have (fortuntately or unfortunately) plenty of time.
Most genres talked about by academic genre theorists are genres that are either dead (seventeenth century English revenge tragedy) or have such a tremendous weight of tradition (the sonnet) that there is some common ground, certain things that do in fact characterize the genre.
Now fantasy and science fiction are, in the first place, Frankenstein's monsters. They're hybrid genres, taking things from the gothic, from the modern novel, from the romance, from the avant garde and surrealisme and experimental literary fiction, from the travel narratives and utopias of earlier centuries, from the pulps, from detective novels and film noir ... a smidgen of this, a snippet of that; they beg, borrow, and steal without shame of any kind. Oh, and then they just plain make shit up. And there are no protocols for it. Nothing's off-limits, and, contrariwise, there's nothing that everybody MUST use, or they'll be drummed out of the regiment and their propellor of their propellor beanie ceremonially broken.
But fantasy and science fiction are also, as I write this in the middle of A.D. 2006, genres that have accreted a certain amount of tradition of their own. Certain things that, yes, you can point to and say, "this is characteristic of the genre." But just because they're characteristic, doesn't mean that they're compulsory, either. Because, see above re: hybrids.
And so there are two (at least two) quite different ways that a reader in the sff genre can approach a novel. I'm going to call these two approaches Protean and Procrustean (Proteus being the chap in Greek myth who had no fixed shape and Procrustes being the fellow with the bed where if you were too short, you got the rack, and if you were too tall, you got bits of you lopped off until you fit), because, as I said in an earlier post, as a member of the species Homo sapiens sapiens, I need to name things in order to talk about them. Neither Proteus nor Procrustes was exactly the sort of guy you'd want to be trapped in an elevator with.
The Protean reader is the reader who loves hybridity and fusion and subversion, who's bored by traditional treatments of genre tropes and shouts with joy at particularly clever deconstructions, who seeks out moral ambiguity and difficult protagonists. (True Confession: I am myself a Protean, both as a reader and as a writer.) The Procrustean reader is the reader who prefers conventions to be followed, who isn't interested in experimentation or transgression.
Protean readers tend not to like Procrustean books, and vice versa.
And both readers and writers can be Protean in one respect and Procrustean in another. It's not a tidy binary.
Now the snag is that both Proteans and Procrusteans love sff. But when they want from sff are quite different things, and when they talk about sff, it can get a little like the North-Going Zax and the South-Going Zax: everybody's going the right way and nobody's going to step aside.
Proteans see the glory of a genre that will let you get away with anything you have the cojones to try. Procrusteans see the security of a genre that has a good seventy-year tradition, that has developed certain rubrics about narrative and characterization and world-building. And because these two approaches are as hopelessly entangled as the genres of fantasy and science fiction themselves, there's no way to separate them into camps. (Anybody else remember the old MTV spot with Dennis Leary: "Okay, the shiny people on this side of the bus, and the happy people on this side.")
People are coming to sff, in other words, with widely divergent expectations of what they're going to find.
And as an sff writer that's frustrating. Because, believe me, whether we're Procrusteans or Proteans, we're not setting out deliberately to disappoint people. But the genre has such a wide range of readers, it's like trying to aim a cannon loaded with buckshot at a single dandelion clock.
Of course, this is nothing new. But I've been trying to figure out a way to articulate the muddle, and this is as close as I've gotten. It's the same genre, but there are two sets of (sometimes oppositional) genre expectations at work.
The trouble with poets is still that they talk too much.
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wicked_wish was talking recently about the difference(s) between fantasy, science fiction, and horror, and whether we really need dividing lines or not. And the subject has been niggling at me ever since. Not, of course, that the world particularly needs my opinion, but hey. What is the internet for (besides porn and cat pictures) if not for sharing unsolicited opinions?There are three quite different answers to the question of whether the Siamese triplet genres of fantasy, science fiction, and horror need to be separated:
1. Yes.
2. No.
3. They're just marketing categories.
Let me deal with the three in reverse order.
( 3. They're just marketing categories. )
( 2. No. )
( 1. Yes. )
Caveat Lector Scriptorque
Aug. 2nd, 2006 10:29 amscott_lynch joins in on the tagging of overused fantasy tropes.And along with all the other intelligent and useful things he says, he has a caveat up front that I think I need to re-emphasize over here:
Scott saith:
I still shy away from that sort of bold "never, never!" pronouncement, because as far as I'm concerned execution trumps conception in every instance-- the hoariest cliches known to fiction can be made magical by a writer of sufficient skill and passion, while the most startlingly original ideas can be transmuted to Kentucky Fried Boredom Nuggets by a shitty grasp of writing essentials.
And of course he's right.
I sometimes forget to put the ObDisclaimer in front of my various jeremiads and animadversions, and sometimes this upsets or confuses people, or leads them to think that the first thing they must do in engaging with what I've written is prove me wrong or list exceptions to my "rule."
And sometimes I get tired of the endless hedging and disclaimers that are de rigeur for internet discussion. Sometimes I just want to shout FUCKBUNNIES! at the top of my lungs and let rip. Because I can be an unreasonable bitch just as much as anybody else.
Ergo, let me say this, loud and clear:
It's all situational. It's all subjective.
No matter how stringently I forbid something--the word "somehow" came in for this a few weeks back, because I was pissed off at Angus Fletcher's Allegory--I know that what I say isn't an absolute. How egotistical would I have to be to believe that? Last time I checked, my ego was not large enough to flatten Tokyo, and I'm trying to keep it that way, thanks.
It's a problem for writers--and, I suspect, for artists of other stripes--because we all desperately want to know How It's Done. We want there to be rules. We want there to be a password and a secret knock to get into the clubhouse. Because if there's a password--if there are rules--you can learn them. And when you've learned them, that's it. You're set. You can go swaggering on your way like Scott's Bold Prince Thundernuts, secure in your Heroic Morality Exception and Heroic Battle Death Exception, to kill all the women and rape all the men and be showered with praise and glory for it.
It'd be nice if it worked that way.
It doesn't.
There are no rules. There is no clubhouse. No password. No secret knock. People who tell you there are are either lying or misguided--or their egos flattened Tokyo several years back and are looking for new cities to destroy.
What I say, here or on panels at cons or wherever, is what's true for me. And I'll tell you what's true for me to the best of my ability, as clearly and simply as I can. But it's still only what works for me. My list (with inevitable clarification) could just as easily have been titled Eleven Things I Could Never Write Without Subverting.
This is all my opinions, people. That's all I've got.
So my list of eleven common characteristics of fantasy I can do without has sparked some discussion, particularly of # 7, in the course of which it has become clear to me that I have, once again, failed to say what I mean.
So, because I'm stubborn and a slow learner, I'm going to try again.
What I said was:
What it looks like I'm saying--and I freely admit this interpretation is right there at the front of the line--is that I object to social predators as protagonists. Which I don't.
My objection is to something more subtle, which is probably why I didn't articulate it well. So let's talk about heroes, antiheroes, and protagonists.
"Protagonist" is the fancy litcrit technical term, and means the character in the story who acts. In general, this is also the main character of the story (if your main character isn't your protagonist, your story may well be in trouble--I have historically had more than a little trouble with this) and also your viewpoint character (ObException: The Great Gatsby). These--"protagonist," "main character," "viewpoint character"--are all value-neutral terms, which is why I personally prefer them to the word "hero."
"Hero" has a lot of baggage to schlep around with it; calling a character a hero assumes that he or she (it even assumes the character's a he, hence the word "heroine") is Good, that he does the right thing and wants to do the right thing, that he stands for Truth, Justice, and the American Way, and if in light of what America's been doing recently, you have some questions about how well those three things actually go together ... well, this is where the word "antihero" comes in.
An "antihero" is a protagonist who isn't a hero--aggressively so, even. My all-time favorite example is George MacDonald Fraser's Harry Flashman, who is a coward, a liar, a braggart, a bully, a lech ... and an amazingly engaging narrator.
This is where the word "sympathize" was the wrong word. Because as a reader, you can certainly sympathize with antiheroes. What I was trying to get at was the habit in fantasy novels of treating social predators as if they were unproblematically heroes, rather than highly problematical antiheroes.
I'm actually all in favor of antiheroes and morally ambiguous protagonists, and think fantasy could use more of them--as long as it treats them honestly.
Another way to put it is, I don't think murder should be sexy. Even in fiction.
So, because I'm stubborn and a slow learner, I'm going to try again.
What I said was:
7. Social predators (thieves, assassins, etc.) with whom the reader is supposed to sympathize. Particularly if we're supposed to sympathize because of #4 [the correlation between beauty and goodness].
What it looks like I'm saying--and I freely admit this interpretation is right there at the front of the line--is that I object to social predators as protagonists. Which I don't.
My objection is to something more subtle, which is probably why I didn't articulate it well. So let's talk about heroes, antiheroes, and protagonists.
"Protagonist" is the fancy litcrit technical term, and means the character in the story who acts. In general, this is also the main character of the story (if your main character isn't your protagonist, your story may well be in trouble--I have historically had more than a little trouble with this) and also your viewpoint character (ObException: The Great Gatsby). These--"protagonist," "main character," "viewpoint character"--are all value-neutral terms, which is why I personally prefer them to the word "hero."
"Hero" has a lot of baggage to schlep around with it; calling a character a hero assumes that he or she (it even assumes the character's a he, hence the word "heroine") is Good, that he does the right thing and wants to do the right thing, that he stands for Truth, Justice, and the American Way, and if in light of what America's been doing recently, you have some questions about how well those three things actually go together ... well, this is where the word "antihero" comes in.
An "antihero" is a protagonist who isn't a hero--aggressively so, even. My all-time favorite example is George MacDonald Fraser's Harry Flashman, who is a coward, a liar, a braggart, a bully, a lech ... and an amazingly engaging narrator.
This is where the word "sympathize" was the wrong word. Because as a reader, you can certainly sympathize with antiheroes. What I was trying to get at was the habit in fantasy novels of treating social predators as if they were unproblematically heroes, rather than highly problematical antiheroes.
I'm actually all in favor of antiheroes and morally ambiguous protagonists, and think fantasy could use more of them--as long as it treats them honestly.
Another way to put it is, I don't think murder should be sexy. Even in fiction.
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.
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.
UBC #18: Allegory
Jul. 1st, 2006 09:39 amUBC #18
Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. 1964. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1995.
This book went back and forth between ideas and articulations that I found useful and thought-provoking, and statements so contrary to my understanding of literature that all I could write in the margin was NO.
It suffers from a tendency toward Causabonism: the desire to make one's theory the Grand Unifying Theory of Everything. In Fletcher's case, this involves asserting that mysteries, westerns, and science fiction are allegories without actually wanting to--you know--go slumming to prove it. Which is a pity, because there are ways in which he's right about science fiction, and ways in which a careful consideration of its tropes would actually have informed his argument helpfully.
And I come away from this book with a theoretical question of my own. I don't agree that science fiction and fantasy are allegories in the way Fletcher wants to claim they are, but I think one way to frame fantasy1 is to describe it as an allegorical landscape through which realistic2 characters move. Because there's no denying that the landscape of fantasy has a heavy allegorical charge, but the characters who interact with that landscape are not allegorical daemons, to use Fletcher's term. They're mimetic.
And that makes fantasy a rather odd beast. Like a chimera.
---
1I'm less certain that this applies to science fiction. Or, rather, I think it may apply to some works of science fiction, but not others, and that in turn may depend on whether the work in question is rooted in the novel or the romance. Growing Up Weightless, for example, has a distinctly allegorical landscape.
2"Realistic" is an awful word. I mean, in this case, characters who obey the tenets of realism in literature, i.e., they have psychological consistency.
Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. 1964. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1995.
This book went back and forth between ideas and articulations that I found useful and thought-provoking, and statements so contrary to my understanding of literature that all I could write in the margin was NO.
It suffers from a tendency toward Causabonism: the desire to make one's theory the Grand Unifying Theory of Everything. In Fletcher's case, this involves asserting that mysteries, westerns, and science fiction are allegories without actually wanting to--you know--go slumming to prove it. Which is a pity, because there are ways in which he's right about science fiction, and ways in which a careful consideration of its tropes would actually have informed his argument helpfully.
And I come away from this book with a theoretical question of my own. I don't agree that science fiction and fantasy are allegories in the way Fletcher wants to claim they are, but I think one way to frame fantasy1 is to describe it as an allegorical landscape through which realistic2 characters move. Because there's no denying that the landscape of fantasy has a heavy allegorical charge, but the characters who interact with that landscape are not allegorical daemons, to use Fletcher's term. They're mimetic.
And that makes fantasy a rather odd beast. Like a chimera.
---
1I'm less certain that this applies to science fiction. Or, rather, I think it may apply to some works of science fiction, but not others, and that in turn may depend on whether the work in question is rooted in the novel or the romance. Growing Up Weightless, for example, has a distinctly allegorical landscape.
2"Realistic" is an awful word. I mean, in this case, characters who obey the tenets of realism in literature, i.e., they have psychological consistency.
Define your terms, stupid mole.
Jun. 17th, 2006 11:12 pmtorrilin and pnh have taken me to task for, well, sloppy synechdoche and lousy genre theory.It is the case that there is a corner of the vast and sprawling genre of science fiction that self-identifies as "hard sf" that does, in fact exhibit the characteristics I describe. It is not, however, the ONLY corner that self-identifies as "hard sf," nor (at this time) the most influential of those corners, nor should I have lumped them all cavalierly in together--nor implied that one of that constellation of characteristics inevitably and invariably brings the others along with it.
It is also the case that I, personally, have a somewhat uneasy relationship with hard sf--in the broad sense of science fiction which grounds itself in the hard sciences--due in part to my even more uneasy relationship with the hard sciences themselves. Personal unease and uncertainty lead (as ever) to overgeneralizations, and if I didn't want to unpack what I meant, I shouldn't have gotten in the ring.
("Illegitimate sf" is a piece of personal shorthand--invented here--and I shouldn't have used it without defining it, either.)
Sometimes nothing can save me from myself.
Bad Fathers in X-Men: The Last Stand
Jun. 17th, 2006 05:07 pmYes, mirrorthaw and I spent the afternoon in air-conditioned comfort.
And I came away thoughtful.
( spoilers spoilers spoilers )
mirrorthaw and I spent the afternoon in air-conditioned comfort.And I came away thoughtful.
( spoilers spoilers spoilers )
Hard Fantasy: Or, Illegitimate SF
Jun. 13th, 2006 11:36 am"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 whyelisem'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 tomatociquala 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:
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.
--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.
The Moss-Troll Problem
Apr. 27th, 2006 08:52 amJune 2, 2011: Comments have been turned off because of spam.
Brace yourselves, my lovelies. I'm not sure I can articulate the thing I'm about to try to say.
mrissa was talking yesterday about the thing that I have dubbed, in consequence of her post, the Moss-Troll Problem, which is that moment in your writing when you reach for a description, only to have the horrible realization that you can't use it. You can't say the sea-serpent's eyes are the color of NyQuil in a world that doesn't have NyQuil in it. You have to come up with something that's in your narrative's frame of reference, and that often involves, yes, inventing moss-trolls. With all that that leads to.
I had this problem t'other day, because you can't call it the missionary position in a world without missionaries.
Oops.
But what occurred to me last night--and what I fear I am going to fail to articulate--is the way in which the Moss-Troll Problem is possibly the strangest semiotic knot human beings have ever tied themselves into.
Okay, look. Literature is all about metaphors--analogies. One thing is like another. I've said before that one reason fantasy and science fiction continue to get dissed by the critical establishment is that they come pre-analyzed. SF explicates its own metaphors, generally by making them literal. The Ring isn't just a symbol of Evil. It IS Evil. (Of course, it's also a symbol of Evil, so it's figural and literal both at once, which Mellor says somewhere is characteristic of the Gothic and of women's writing. fwiw.) But a lot of literature works by saying, "This thing is like this other thing." And really great literature works by saying, "This thing is like this other thing, WHICH YOU WOULD NEVER HAVE THOUGHT OF COMPARING IT TO." These comparisons can be overt ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.") or covert, subtextual, subliminal. But it's there. You take a thing--a thing in your imagination--and you compare it to another thing--a thing in the frame of reference you (hopefully) share with your reader. And thus you generate meaning and imagery and all those other things that are what makes literature tick.
Now consider the Moss-Troll Problem and what it says about secondary-world fiction. We've declared one of the fundamental gestures of literature out of bounds. We make this same gesture--this thing is like this other thing--but we have denied ourselves the frame of reference in common with the reader. So when we do this, when we say the sea serpent's eyes are the color of moss-troll ichor, we have to somehow convey both sides of the analogy, rather than relying on one half to explain the other.
I said I wasn't going to be able to articulate this.
So there's a way in which secondary-world fiction (I'm not saying "fantasy" because science fiction set far enough in the future has the same issue, though the terms of the equation are a little different) has taken self-referentiality and made it into a koan, a pondering point. A hallmark of its art. And it's the only genre I can think of that does this, that denies a frame of reference between reader and narrrative.
And this is the place where world-building is trying to get you, where you have a secondary world that's rich enough and deep enough that it can generate its own frame of reference, that you can reinvent the wheel using unobtanium and dragons' bones.
I'm still not saying it right, but the idea is so cool (at least to me) that I'm going to post this anyway and hope that at least some of my meaning manages to claw its way through.
Brace yourselves, my lovelies. I'm not sure I can articulate the thing I'm about to try to say.
mrissa was talking yesterday about the thing that I have dubbed, in consequence of her post, the Moss-Troll Problem, which is that moment in your writing when you reach for a description, only to have the horrible realization that you can't use it. You can't say the sea-serpent's eyes are the color of NyQuil in a world that doesn't have NyQuil in it. You have to come up with something that's in your narrative's frame of reference, and that often involves, yes, inventing moss-trolls. With all that that leads to.I had this problem t'other day, because you can't call it the missionary position in a world without missionaries.
Oops.
But what occurred to me last night--and what I fear I am going to fail to articulate--is the way in which the Moss-Troll Problem is possibly the strangest semiotic knot human beings have ever tied themselves into.
Okay, look. Literature is all about metaphors--analogies. One thing is like another. I've said before that one reason fantasy and science fiction continue to get dissed by the critical establishment is that they come pre-analyzed. SF explicates its own metaphors, generally by making them literal. The Ring isn't just a symbol of Evil. It IS Evil. (Of course, it's also a symbol of Evil, so it's figural and literal both at once, which Mellor says somewhere is characteristic of the Gothic and of women's writing. fwiw.) But a lot of literature works by saying, "This thing is like this other thing." And really great literature works by saying, "This thing is like this other thing, WHICH YOU WOULD NEVER HAVE THOUGHT OF COMPARING IT TO." These comparisons can be overt ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.") or covert, subtextual, subliminal. But it's there. You take a thing--a thing in your imagination--and you compare it to another thing--a thing in the frame of reference you (hopefully) share with your reader. And thus you generate meaning and imagery and all those other things that are what makes literature tick.
Now consider the Moss-Troll Problem and what it says about secondary-world fiction. We've declared one of the fundamental gestures of literature out of bounds. We make this same gesture--this thing is like this other thing--but we have denied ourselves the frame of reference in common with the reader. So when we do this, when we say the sea serpent's eyes are the color of moss-troll ichor, we have to somehow convey both sides of the analogy, rather than relying on one half to explain the other.
I said I wasn't going to be able to articulate this.
So there's a way in which secondary-world fiction (I'm not saying "fantasy" because science fiction set far enough in the future has the same issue, though the terms of the equation are a little different) has taken self-referentiality and made it into a koan, a pondering point. A hallmark of its art. And it's the only genre I can think of that does this, that denies a frame of reference between reader and narrrative.
And this is the place where world-building is trying to get you, where you have a secondary world that's rich enough and deep enough that it can generate its own frame of reference, that you can reinvent the wheel using unobtanium and dragons' bones.
I'm still not saying it right, but the idea is so cool (at least to me) that I'm going to post this anyway and hope that at least some of my meaning manages to claw its way through.
Disambiguation, as Wikipedia says.
Mar. 25th, 2006 09:29 am(I love that word.)
(And, in case you're wondering, I chose the icon to make fun of myself. Not to imply that my Ph.D. gives me any kind of moral authority.)
Part I: secondary world
In the comments to this post, it became clear that "secondary world" was not, as I had hoped and thought it was, a transparent and illuminating phrase.
I freely admit this is my fault. I'd thought I'd gotten it from Tolkien, and when I went and looked at "On Fairy-stories," I found that, yes, he uses the phrase "Secondary World," but he uses it to mean any fictional creation; for him it's all tied up with suspension of disbelief. Philip Sidney's golden and brazen worlds apply here.
And that's not what I mean. But the phrase is still a good one, so with suitable apologies to Professor Tolkien, I'm going to keep using it my way.
"But what is your way?" the peanut gallery wants to know.
Well, that's where things get tricky.
Because this turns out to be part of the shifting generic sands of fantasy--so my definition is partial, has infinite counter-examples, and will be subject to change without notice.
But today, what I mean by "secondary world" is a world (a setting in a novel) which is not an extrapolation from the real world. The War for the Oaks, under this rubric, is not secondary world fantasy, because it takes place in Minneapolis. Witch Week is not secondary world fantasy, because that world is very explicitly extrapolated from ours. The Lord of the Rings is secondary world fantasy; Spindle's End is secondary world fantasy; Howl's Moving Castle is secondary world fantasy, as is Dog Wizard, although both of them involve crossing from the secondary world into the real world. (I keep wanting to put "real" in sarcastic quote-marks, but I'm not up for epistemology on a Saturday morning.)
Looks so simple, doesn't it? But what do I do with books like Neverwhere and Charmed Life? How alternate history does a world have to be before it crosses the line from extrapolation to secondary world?
And here is where we draw the line. I'm not interested in classificatory schemes that pin every last beetle to a bit of pasteboard. The answer is, it depends. You decide on a case by case basis, depending on what the story is doing with the world and how it fits in other regards into the continuum.
But--my clarification of my earlier post--what I was talking about was worlds that are NOT extrapolations from our world and why those worlds are being imagined in such narrow ways.
Part II to follow.
(And, in case you're wondering, I chose the icon to make fun of myself. Not to imply that my Ph.D. gives me any kind of moral authority.)
Part I: secondary world
In the comments to this post, it became clear that "secondary world" was not, as I had hoped and thought it was, a transparent and illuminating phrase.
I freely admit this is my fault. I'd thought I'd gotten it from Tolkien, and when I went and looked at "On Fairy-stories," I found that, yes, he uses the phrase "Secondary World," but he uses it to mean any fictional creation; for him it's all tied up with suspension of disbelief. Philip Sidney's golden and brazen worlds apply here.
And that's not what I mean. But the phrase is still a good one, so with suitable apologies to Professor Tolkien, I'm going to keep using it my way.
"But what is your way?" the peanut gallery wants to know.
Well, that's where things get tricky.
Because this turns out to be part of the shifting generic sands of fantasy--so my definition is partial, has infinite counter-examples, and will be subject to change without notice.
But today, what I mean by "secondary world" is a world (a setting in a novel) which is not an extrapolation from the real world. The War for the Oaks, under this rubric, is not secondary world fantasy, because it takes place in Minneapolis. Witch Week is not secondary world fantasy, because that world is very explicitly extrapolated from ours. The Lord of the Rings is secondary world fantasy; Spindle's End is secondary world fantasy; Howl's Moving Castle is secondary world fantasy, as is Dog Wizard, although both of them involve crossing from the secondary world into the real world. (I keep wanting to put "real" in sarcastic quote-marks, but I'm not up for epistemology on a Saturday morning.)
Looks so simple, doesn't it? But what do I do with books like Neverwhere and Charmed Life? How alternate history does a world have to be before it crosses the line from extrapolation to secondary world?
And here is where we draw the line. I'm not interested in classificatory schemes that pin every last beetle to a bit of pasteboard. The answer is, it depends. You decide on a case by case basis, depending on what the story is doing with the world and how it fits in other regards into the continuum.
But--my clarification of my earlier post--what I was talking about was worlds that are NOT extrapolations from our world and why those worlds are being imagined in such narrow ways.
Part II to follow.
Louder and weirder.
Mar. 21st, 2006 09:30 pmA 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.
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.
What I was trying to talk about in the preceding post (and failing pretty miserably) was the sociology of science fiction reading. What do we read, why do we read it, and what does it have to do with what the genre proclaims is being read? How do critical acclaim and popularity really match up?
This is, of course, a bit of a minefield of a question, since we're all Pavlovianly conditioned to reject "popular" literature as being unimportant. This is not a new problem--sixteenth and seventeenth century English writers get very snotty about plays for exactly the same reasons that academics today get snotty about science fiction. It's the obverse face of the Lowest Common Denominator; we assume that quality and popularity must somehow be inversely proportional, when in fact we need to remember Sturgeon's Law, chant it to ourselves, tape it up on our monitors, or, hell, have it tattooed on our foreheads.
90% of everything is crap.
So, sure, there are lots of plays that were very popular in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I & VI that are total crap, just as there are bucketloads of Victorian novels that were very popular that are total crap, just as, you know, 90% of what's getting published in science fiction today is total crap, wildly popular or otherwise. But, please remember, Sturgeon's Law applies across the board. 90% of the soi-disant "literary" fiction being published today is also crap. The problem is that, somehow, a neat double standard has been enacted, so that literary fiction gets judged by the 10%, while popular fiction gets judged by the 90%. And to talk about the 10% in any popular genre with anyone not already a fan of the genre (as in, The Mainstream), you'd better go in prepared to expend a lot of energy in convincing them to let go of that 90%.
Oof. I sound bitter, and I don't mean to. But I'm as susceptible as anyone else to the urge to shout, But look! Look at what we're doing! Look at how thoughtful and provocative and literary it all is! Because I love my genre, and I don't like people talking trash about it. Sure, I admit, 90% of it is crap, but that's because Sturgeon's Law applies.
A genre of writing gets bonus points with critics and academics for not being popular. Because (I hypothesize wildly) it seems to be endangered. You don't go around clubbing baby harp seals and scaring the pandas out of the mood, and you don't attack the genre of modern poetry. But science fiction is like squirrels. They're all over the place, and they're kind of cute, but they're just rodents, and after all, you know no matter what you do, you will never be able to bring the squirrels down. You don't need to be considerate because they've got numbers on their side. Also, the chewing and the ingenuity and the brass-balled effrontery. The squirrels, you feel, don't need champions.
And people speaking up for squirrels are going to get the same kind of funny looks people get when they speak up for science fiction--outside of thesquirrel science fiction-loving community.
Um. I've digressed pretty thoroughly from whatever it is I thought my point was. Something about whether the various awards are or are not accurate barometers for what's going on in the genre. And, of course, "the genre" has become sprawling and byzantine enough that of course the answer is: Maybe. As a first approximation.
I do wonder what the literary historians of two hundred years from now will be reading. And will those books be the same books that we are now, by giving them awards, trying to flag for posterity's attention?
There. Maybe that was what I meant.
This is, of course, a bit of a minefield of a question, since we're all Pavlovianly conditioned to reject "popular" literature as being unimportant. This is not a new problem--sixteenth and seventeenth century English writers get very snotty about plays for exactly the same reasons that academics today get snotty about science fiction. It's the obverse face of the Lowest Common Denominator; we assume that quality and popularity must somehow be inversely proportional, when in fact we need to remember Sturgeon's Law, chant it to ourselves, tape it up on our monitors, or, hell, have it tattooed on our foreheads.
90% of everything is crap.
So, sure, there are lots of plays that were very popular in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I & VI that are total crap, just as there are bucketloads of Victorian novels that were very popular that are total crap, just as, you know, 90% of what's getting published in science fiction today is total crap, wildly popular or otherwise. But, please remember, Sturgeon's Law applies across the board. 90% of the soi-disant "literary" fiction being published today is also crap. The problem is that, somehow, a neat double standard has been enacted, so that literary fiction gets judged by the 10%, while popular fiction gets judged by the 90%. And to talk about the 10% in any popular genre with anyone not already a fan of the genre (as in, The Mainstream), you'd better go in prepared to expend a lot of energy in convincing them to let go of that 90%.
Oof. I sound bitter, and I don't mean to. But I'm as susceptible as anyone else to the urge to shout, But look! Look at what we're doing! Look at how thoughtful and provocative and literary it all is! Because I love my genre, and I don't like people talking trash about it. Sure, I admit, 90% of it is crap, but that's because Sturgeon's Law applies.
A genre of writing gets bonus points with critics and academics for not being popular. Because (I hypothesize wildly) it seems to be endangered. You don't go around clubbing baby harp seals and scaring the pandas out of the mood, and you don't attack the genre of modern poetry. But science fiction is like squirrels. They're all over the place, and they're kind of cute, but they're just rodents, and after all, you know no matter what you do, you will never be able to bring the squirrels down. You don't need to be considerate because they've got numbers on their side. Also, the chewing and the ingenuity and the brass-balled effrontery. The squirrels, you feel, don't need champions.
And people speaking up for squirrels are going to get the same kind of funny looks people get when they speak up for science fiction--outside of the
Um. I've digressed pretty thoroughly from whatever it is I thought my point was. Something about whether the various awards are or are not accurate barometers for what's going on in the genre. And, of course, "the genre" has become sprawling and byzantine enough that of course the answer is: Maybe. As a first approximation.
I do wonder what the literary historians of two hundred years from now will be reading. And will those books be the same books that we are now, by giving them awards, trying to flag for posterity's attention?
There. Maybe that was what I meant.
sf/f/h awards
Mar. 5th, 2006 09:57 amSo nhw, in a labor of insanity love, has number-crunched the results of everybody who chose to propagate this meme.
As a writer/reader/ardent fan of science fiction and fantasy, I find the results interesting and thought-provoking, and although I am by no means hinting either (a.) that anyone else should inflict this meme upon themselves or (b.) thatnhw should then be obliged to crunch more numbers, I do think that a larger statistical sample would be cool. Because the question about any award is: who is it important to? It's important to the people who win, if only for the sake of their egos, and it's important to the people who confer it, ditto ... but who else? I know, for example, that if a book wins the Tiptree, I will be rewarded immesurably for the effort of reading it, so that particular award has value to me as a reader. And nhw's results suggest that the Hugo and the Nebula are fairly accurate reflections of what people are reading. And I think those kinds of things are worth knowing.
Where's the ambiguity? Over there, in a box. The beast is molting and fluff gets up your nose.
Also, in my own act of insanity, I have recompiled the list of award-winners, this time in alphabetical order by author. Which makes it much more possible to use as a checklist when inspecting either one's own bookshelves or the myriad shy treasures of a bookstore.
( list )
nhw, in a labor of As a writer/reader/ardent fan of science fiction and fantasy, I find the results interesting and thought-provoking, and although I am by no means hinting either (a.) that anyone else should inflict this meme upon themselves or (b.) that
nhw should then be obliged to crunch more numbers, I do think that a larger statistical sample would be cool. Because the question about any award is: who is it important to? It's important to the people who win, if only for the sake of their egos, and it's important to the people who confer it, ditto ... but who else? I know, for example, that if a book wins the Tiptree, I will be rewarded immesurably for the effort of reading it, so that particular award has value to me as a reader. And nhw's results suggest that the Hugo and the Nebula are fairly accurate reflections of what people are reading. And I think those kinds of things are worth knowing.Where's the ambiguity? Over there, in a box. The beast is molting and fluff gets up your nose.
Also, in my own act of insanity, I have recompiled the list of award-winners, this time in alphabetical order by author. Which makes it much more possible to use as a checklist when inspecting either one's own bookshelves or the myriad shy treasures of a bookstore.
( list )
This post is going to have almost as much disclaimer as actual content, but I need to articulate it.
So. Caveats and disclaimers: I know, as my subject line indicates, that "Trouble with Emily" and the other stories in Hospital Station were published in book form in 1962 and should not be excoriated for being a reflection of their times. I know, furthermore, that James White later did that most difficult and beautifully human thing: he changed his mind. Later Sector General stories have female characters, Murchison even gets upgraded from nurse to pathologist, and my favorite Sector General protagonist, Cha Thrat from Code Blue--Emergency, is female. Of course, Cha Thrat is also nonhuman, and we'll get to that down the screen a bit.
But.
The stories in Hospital Station (they've been spackled together into a quasi-novel, but they're connected novellas, really) are about the rejection of bigotry and prejudice. Conway, White's most frequent Sector General protagonist, gets read the riot act not once, but twice, for his disdain for Monitors, and it is perfectly clear that his attitude--the attitude of an uninformed pacifist toward the Federation's fighting force, and an attitude, as Williamson's explanation makes clear, that the Monitor Corps has in fact gone to a good deal of trouble to instill in people of Conway's class background--would be more than enough to get him booted from Sector General if it weren't for the fact that in the course of "Sector General" he learns the error of his ways and straightens up and flies right. Williamson is equally scathing toward the patients being brought into the hospital from fighting an interspecies war. Sector General stories preach tolerance and liberal thinking, and honestly that's one of the reasons they're good comfort reading. They're Utopian problem-solving stories, and I love them.
But.
At the end of "Trouble with Emily," O'Mara (Sector General's Chief Psychologist--and there's a whole 'nother critical essay about how he gets there in "Medic") and Conway are discussing Conway's progress from raw, self-righteous newbie to a valued part of the Sector General staff:
Now, this is the same O'Mara who is described in the previous story as a "latter-day Torquemada" due to his zeal in "guarding against wrong, unhealthy or intolerant thinking" (HS 82). The Spanish Inquisition probably didn't mind a little good woman-hating either. An aversion, even a slight one, to another species is a problem, but hating half your own? Enh, no big. You'd only waste your time "chasing" them anyway.
I sound bitter, don't I? It's because of the sucker-punch. Even in these early Sector General stories, there's very little blatant misogyny (and, as I said, later books adapt and correct their worldview); White's careful building of a world almost embarrassingly rich in species diversity means that most nonhuman characters are referred to as "it"; all Earth-human characters are referred to by last name only (and rank, if they have one). It's easy to miss the fact that there aren't any female doctors, especially if, as I did, you grew up reading science fiction and fantasy that didn't have female characters, and learned to read as if the male pronoun were genuinely the generic gender-neutral object that eighteenth-century grammarians and their followers have tried to make it. You make compromises to get the story. That's how it works.
Misogyny is an allowable neurosis. I read past it the first time I read "Trouble with Emily," and I nearly read past it this time. But something shook me out of the story so that I parsed the sentence, not as a piece of dialogue between O'Mara and Conway, but as something that James White in 1962 thought it was perfectly all right to have a sympathetic, intelligent parental figure say. And then I sat there, staring at the page, feeling winded and a little sick. Because I like James White and I like the world of Sector General and it hurt to discover that Sector General's all-embracing tolerance didn't extend to me.
I exonerate James White of deliberate malice. And it's not like I'm going to go out and burn all my Sector General books, or sell them to the used bookstore, or even stop searching for the ones I don't have. But still, the unthinking bigotry--in a series of stories carefully and obsessively concerned with the refutation of bigotry--says something about science fiction and something about 1962 and shows us why we're glad that people can change.
So. Caveats and disclaimers: I know, as my subject line indicates, that "Trouble with Emily" and the other stories in Hospital Station were published in book form in 1962 and should not be excoriated for being a reflection of their times. I know, furthermore, that James White later did that most difficult and beautifully human thing: he changed his mind. Later Sector General stories have female characters, Murchison even gets upgraded from nurse to pathologist, and my favorite Sector General protagonist, Cha Thrat from Code Blue--Emergency, is female. Of course, Cha Thrat is also nonhuman, and we'll get to that down the screen a bit.
But.
The stories in Hospital Station (they've been spackled together into a quasi-novel, but they're connected novellas, really) are about the rejection of bigotry and prejudice. Conway, White's most frequent Sector General protagonist, gets read the riot act not once, but twice, for his disdain for Monitors, and it is perfectly clear that his attitude--the attitude of an uninformed pacifist toward the Federation's fighting force, and an attitude, as Williamson's explanation makes clear, that the Monitor Corps has in fact gone to a good deal of trouble to instill in people of Conway's class background--would be more than enough to get him booted from Sector General if it weren't for the fact that in the course of "Sector General" he learns the error of his ways and straightens up and flies right. Williamson is equally scathing toward the patients being brought into the hospital from fighting an interspecies war. Sector General stories preach tolerance and liberal thinking, and honestly that's one of the reasons they're good comfort reading. They're Utopian problem-solving stories, and I love them.
But.
At the end of "Trouble with Emily," O'Mara (Sector General's Chief Psychologist--and there's a whole 'nother critical essay about how he gets there in "Medic") and Conway are discussing Conway's progress from raw, self-righteous newbie to a valued part of the Sector General staff:
"... It has been apparent since you first arrived here," the Major had told him, "that you mix more readily with e-ts than with members of your own species. Saddling you with Dr. Arretapec was a test, which you passed with honours, and the assistant I'll be giving you in a few days might be another."
O'Mara had paused then, shook his head wonderingly and went on, "Not only do you get on exceptionally well with e-ts, but I don't hear a single whisper on the grapevine of you chasing the females of our species ..."
"I don't have the time," said Conway seriously. "I doubt if I ever will."
"Oh, well, misogyny is an allowable neurosis," O'Mara had replied, then had gone on to discuss the new assistant.
HS 112
Now, this is the same O'Mara who is described in the previous story as a "latter-day Torquemada" due to his zeal in "guarding against wrong, unhealthy or intolerant thinking" (HS 82). The Spanish Inquisition probably didn't mind a little good woman-hating either. An aversion, even a slight one, to another species is a problem, but hating half your own? Enh, no big. You'd only waste your time "chasing" them anyway.
I sound bitter, don't I? It's because of the sucker-punch. Even in these early Sector General stories, there's very little blatant misogyny (and, as I said, later books adapt and correct their worldview); White's careful building of a world almost embarrassingly rich in species diversity means that most nonhuman characters are referred to as "it"; all Earth-human characters are referred to by last name only (and rank, if they have one). It's easy to miss the fact that there aren't any female doctors, especially if, as I did, you grew up reading science fiction and fantasy that didn't have female characters, and learned to read as if the male pronoun were genuinely the generic gender-neutral object that eighteenth-century grammarians and their followers have tried to make it. You make compromises to get the story. That's how it works.
Misogyny is an allowable neurosis. I read past it the first time I read "Trouble with Emily," and I nearly read past it this time. But something shook me out of the story so that I parsed the sentence, not as a piece of dialogue between O'Mara and Conway, but as something that James White in 1962 thought it was perfectly all right to have a sympathetic, intelligent parental figure say. And then I sat there, staring at the page, feeling winded and a little sick. Because I like James White and I like the world of Sector General and it hurt to discover that Sector General's all-embracing tolerance didn't extend to me.
I exonerate James White of deliberate malice. And it's not like I'm going to go out and burn all my Sector General books, or sell them to the used bookstore, or even stop searching for the ones I don't have. But still, the unthinking bigotry--in a series of stories carefully and obsessively concerned with the refutation of bigotry--says something about science fiction and something about 1962 and shows us why we're glad that people can change.
