On fantasy and a preference for fantastical fiction

Filed by: Darren on May 17, 2007 at 7:57
Filed In: Books

"If more writers didn't write 'fantasy' so self-consciously and follow imagined 'rules' of the genre then the whole thing might not be so hidebound and repetitive. It should be the most creative writing around but is frequently the most conservative."

From an interview with Steph Swainston that I've just posted over on UKSFBN. She also says:

"What I find jarring in fantasy is 'magic'. It's usually a way of systemising lazy plot devices."

It's always a question of subjective taste - horses for courses, each to their own etc. - but I do have to say that over the past few years, the sort of fiction I've most enjoyed reading recently has been exactly that: fantasy in name, but without all the trappings and paraphernalia of magic, or a magical 'system': no spells, rituals, wizards, glowing swords, enchanted artefacts, elves, dwarves, dragons, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

A few examples off the top of my head: China Miéville (Perdido Street Station etc.), K.J. Bishop (The Etched City), Scott Lynch (The Lies of Locke Lamora, Red Seas Under Red Skies), Alan Campbell (Scar Night; which I'm currently reading and thoroughly enjoying), Jeff Vandermeer (Veniss Underground), Jeffrey Ford (The Physiognomy), and indeed, Steph Swainston (The Year of Our War and No Present Like Time)... oh, and yes, I do realise I've just reeled off a list of mainly 'new weird'-type authors. I'm obviously a mainly 'new weird'-type reader.

The reason these books are labelled 'fantasy' is the incredibly rich sense of the fantastic that they're steeped in: exotic settings sometimes utterly unlike our own mundane world, populated by esoteric and idiosyncratic characters and fantastical creatures, or entities with powers and abilities beyond those of your average mortal man; an atmosphere that's strangely alien and weirdly compelling and that opens up huge vistas of imagination to your mind's eye. All the stuff you'd presumably expect to find in the pages of any fantasy novel - and do to varying degrees - but, well, without the sound of dice rolling in the background...

Having said that, there are a number of 'traditional' fantasy authors whose work I do still enjoy - or would undoubtedly still enjoy if I actually had the time to read them - George R.R. Martin, Steven Erikson, Greg R. Keyes, Glen Cook - as well as a few new fantasy authors who are writing in a more traditional style but whose work I nevertheless have found to be very rich and satisfying, such as Joe Abercrombie (The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, who has a wonderful habit of twisting classic fantasy tropes until they beg for mercy) and Brian Ruckley (Winterbirth, a debut that, to be truthful, could have been enriched by the inclusion of stronger fantastical elements, yes, but promises much for volumes to come).

It all comes down to the quality of the writing, obviously, which in itself is the result of a blend of natural talent and sheer, bloody-minded hard graft; the honing and polishing of prose far beyond the "it'll do" state that seems so commonly acceptable to some. So I think Steph Swainston's point about "lazy plot devices" is especially pertinent. There are a number of fantasy authors - whose names are well know and need not be reeled off here - for whom the grazing of the cash cow seems to be much more important than the exploration of new territories, the uncovering of rich troves of concept and idea, the sheer joy of expressing an unbounded imagination. "It'll do, it's set in the same world, the same characters are back again, it's got lots of magic in it, they'll love it."

But then, perhaps you actually need a fair-sized dollop of that sort of thing to keep the genre viable. If we didn't have the cash-cow-herders churning out their same-old, same-old (to return briefly to one of yesterday's themes) to sell in vast numbers to their legions of adoring fans, then genre sections in bookstores would rapidly shrink, and publishers would lose the little leeway they currently have to bring out the more interesting work alongside the mainstream mass-market stuff.

Or perhaps it's just the way the genre market is structured that naturally lends itself to a gradual, progressive filtering process. You start - as nearly everyone starts - with the obvious, in-yer-face stuff: Tolkien, Eddings, Brooks, Goodkind, Jordan et. al. but then - and this is the important bit - you have a choice:

You can, quite happily, wallow around in the shallows for the rest of your reading life, just grazing on what's put in front of you by the booksellers and bean-counters, then move on to nothing more challenging than whatever comes along from the next batch of imitators.

Or, you can evade the nets of advertising and '3 for 2' promotions and wade a little deeper, guided by the online word-of-mouth of the brave souls who have ventured forth before you, to see what's lurking out there, amongst the reefs and rocks...

Come on in, the deep water's lovely... :)

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63 Responses to 'On fantasy and a preference for fantastical fiction'

DavidHeb on May 17th, 2007 10:28 am

I wish you were wrong about needing the unimaginative big sellers to keep the rest of the field afloat; but, alas, something tells me you're probably right. Then again, who knows what might happen if punters were properly offered the good stuff in shops, and had more knowledgeable booksellers to guide them. You can't enjoy something if you don't even know it exists...

On the subject of magic, I don't think it's a problem in itself, it depends on how authors approach it. To do it properly, I think you have two choices: either you cam make it into a fully rigorous 'scientific' system and work out all the ramifications; or you can put it in opposition to science, and tackle its irrationality head-on.

Either way, it's a lot of work to figure out what 'magic' would really be like; so it's no surprise if authors prefer to take an easier option, and either depict magic as just waving a wand to defeat the bad guys, or ignore it altogether. I wish more would take a harder route; I would hate to see 'magic' -- or, worse, 'fantasy' -- become dirty words.
Ariel on May 17th, 2007 10:53 am

Good points all, mate. I too would love to see knowledgeable book-sellers offering the widest possible choice to the potential reader - and it does happen sometimes, but it's a bit of a lottery, obviously.

And yes, magic can take many forms - what's that old quote: "Any sufficiently advanced science is indiscernable from magic." etc. etc. - and when it's done well, it's a joy to read. And that's where the laziness issue comes in again - does the author, as you say, spend the time and effort developing a rationale for the irrational, or do they just assume that anyone with enough powdered-frog and the ability to squint for long enough can cast first level 'let there be light' spells?
Kirsten (KJ) Bishop on May 17th, 2007 7:52 pm

Thanks for the link.

Magic can also be a means of vicarious wish fulfilment and power tripping for the reader, which makes it one of the attractive elements in fantasy fiction for readers who suffer from a sense of powerlessness - the young, the unpopular, the tired adults who are sick of the workmill, et al. The writer becomes the reader's dealer - which all writers are, no doubt, in one way or another.

Magic can be very interesting, I think, once you start looking at what its costs might be - deals with demons (a la Elric), damage to the magician's mind and his/her relationships - that is, when the writer wields it as a tool for exploring character and putting characters under pressure as well as letting them kick some.
Kev on May 18th, 2007 9:31 am

I agree that in theory fantasy should be the most imaginative writing around. Also it should be an amazing way of exploring a world that is itself increasingly made up of a landscape of the imagination, rather than mundane familiar experience.

But I also think, as I guess you point out, that the label can be a bit of a red herring. In the final analysis, my feeling is that books should just be books, and lean towards the fantastic or even revel in it, because that is what best gets across the writer's vision or story. A mature writer to me should be able to write general fiction, literary fiction, fantasy or detective fiction, depending of what interests them at the time, and what questions they want to explore.

Then again, there are unique qualities and sensibilities in some forms of writing that a clever writer can use, ride and evolve with reference to the form itself. Fantasy is pretty good at projecting visions of cultures, mythological human fascinations, or making worlds inspired by what we might feel rather than what we actually see.

It is difficult sometimes not to feel as though a book, or many books, called fantasy are homage to past forms, or just trundle along in the cart ruts they have made out of laziness. Perhaps this is something to do with the calibre and dedication of the writers. Probably a great deal to do with it.

There is a lot of fantasy out there, and I don't read that much any more, but one thing often apparent to me was that unlike other genres or forms of literature, fantasy does not really have many giants or geniuses who really push the form. Writers might well cross over into what we might call fantasy and write well without necessarily seeing themselves as specifically fantasy authors, but writers who really love a form and really want to see where it can go. Not many come to mind.

I guess that would interest me about a fantasy book with magic would be where the magic reflects or explores in some way something about being human, or perhaps something about reality. Metaphysics, or emotional resonances perhaps.

DavidHebs comment on this is pretty sensible I think too, as is your own comment, Ariel, about magic systems and SF science.

What I found interesting about the closing of your post Ariel was where you mention moving from the obvious elves and dwarves to the fringe, and finding the ellusive better realised material you might not find in every book shop.

Agreed, certainly, but what has always struck me about fantasy, and it is a genre I write in myself and I do love in theory but groan at in practice more than I would like, is that to really make it take off and finds its measure as a literature, books need to be written which do interesting things but are not elusive and have the kind of power of storytelling and engagement that does not rest on easy solutions, but complex ones, with the ability to get a wide range of readers involved but also show them something that makes them feel differently about themselves.

In this respect perhaps the narrative axis is a very relevant issue. If the traditional entertainment book has a narrative axis which passes through movement, action and thrills, then a book which has a dual axis would have all of these things, an axis of movement and event, but also a second axis, the true axis of the narrative which is characters, vision and metaphysics or philosophy or whatever interests the writer to make the reader feel something about themselves and the world.

It is this kind of dual axis book that I suspect will help transform the core of fantasy, not the perhiphery. Something that looks like a roller coaster ride, but transforms your heart and your mind, not just your guts.

Of course, this is just one approach, but certainly subversive fantasy of this nature could help change the landscape some.
Ariel on May 18th, 2007 11:12 am

Hi KJ and Kev - thank you both very much for stopping by and for commenting - or in Kev's case, essaying... :)

I'm afraid I'm about to dash off for an Internet-less weekend at the in-laws, but I'll make a point of responding in full after the weekend.

[ Although Kev, I think your paragraph about a lack of fantasy geniuses might just provoke a spot of reaction from elsewhere in the meantime... :) ]

Incidentally, if you're a regular commenter and you find you're having problems leaving a comment, it's probably because my Akismet spam-filter is being over-zealous and is picking up on words like 'fantasy' (or maybe even 'magic' or perhaps 'wish fulfilment') and temporarily blocking the comment. And if you're a first-time commenter, your initial comment will be held in a moderation queue until I can check that you're not trying to sell me drugs or pr0n...

I'll be back online on Sunday evening and will check, mod and post any further comments then... apologies for the inconvenience and any cross-comment confusion that may arise...
mhayinde on May 18th, 2007 2:35 pm

Nice comments all round! For me, the main thing is this: if a writer is good, it doesn't matter what they write - I'm carried along by it. I think good writing intrinsically opens the eyes of the reader. A classic fantasy setting in the hands of a brilliant storyteller can be just as compelling as an utterly original world.
Kirsten (KJ) Bishop on May 18th, 2007 7:18 pm

Re Kev's comment about the lack of fantasy writers who push the form - from my own experience (and I'm only speaking for myself here), it's difficult to push the form in fantasy because you're already pushing the material. Push both and the whole thing can get wobbly for lack of a basis in something, whether facts of life or conventions of literature, already established in the reader's - and writer's - mind. Using the real world gives you a better chance; Burroughs managed it in his "Cities of the Red Night" trilogy, which is fantasy, I would argue. I think Michael Moorcock has done some very inventive things with form (Jerry Cornelius, the Blood books) - he's one author who has been able to work an alternate reality from different writerly approaches. But genius doesn't have to consist in pushing the form - there's always handling of character and theme to look at. Still, fantasy is a difficult region in which to find the unfamiliar corners of human nature and explore them. All the stuff that comes with "traditional" fantasy - the magic and monsters - mixes none too well with Proustian introspection, Woolfian illumination of character within the matrix of society, Joycean experiment with form and language, or the strange pathologies of Mishima. Which isn't to say that it's impossible to mix them and do justice to both, just a tall order.
Joe on May 18th, 2007 9:23 pm

Really the more generic forms of fantasy have become the recognised generic forms because they have repeated so often in one variation or another, but that's part of how a genre is created. Once established you can start to kick against some of those rules and subvert them, which is as true of fantasy novel as it is of, for example, another very recognisable genre, the Western. Pretty well established for decades, by the 60s along come the Spaghetti Westerns which have many of the generic elements - six guns, showdowns in dusty streets, horses - but mixes them up into new patterns. Genre and storytelling in books, movie or any other medium will alter and evolve in relation to the well-known components of its own genre and in relation to external events such as societal change.

Last month the book group I set up here had the Lies of Locke Lamora as our choice and I found it interesting that several members were making comments along the line of "it's not really fantasy, is it?" because it didn't have dragons, elves etc, which naturally stirred me into pointing out that fantasy is just a label and covers a pretty wide range of possible storytelling devices, just as SF does (and, as Neil Gaiman once noted in the intro to a short story, all fiction is, by definition, fantasy). The most important thing is that everyone really enjoyed the book and found it highly enjoyable, well-written and with great characters and suspense.

On the subject of magic I'd agree with much of what has been discussed above - no problem with it in a novel is used intelligently by the writer (ditto advanced science, which, as you said, can be rather analagous to magic); Jim Butcher creates good rules for the use and cost of magic in the Dresden Files for example, its the lazy use of it as an easy way out for an incompetent writer I can't stand.

On a related topic, good choice of writers for your tags for this piece, mate, all good recommendations for anyone wanting to expand their horizons a bit.
gabe chouinard on May 19th, 2007 5:03 am

See, now, I take the opposite path when it comes to "magic" in fantastic fiction. I just don't think it's fantastic enough.

In most fantasy novels, magic has been relegated to a bit part, where it doesn't mean much. "Rigorous scientific magic"? Blah! Give me some Dunsanian "Worlds beyond our ken" already, wouldja? I like my magic mysterious, unknowable, unexplained. To me, that's what makes it magic. So while I certainly enjoy a lot of the fantasy out there which takes a different path (ie Perdido Street Station), I can't help thinking that magic - what it is, what it represents - loses when it's treated as nothing more than different physics. While I can appreciate the thought experiment (much like good hard SF), to me, it robs the fantastic of what makes it Other.

But then, maybe I'm just nuts....
urban-drift.com » interview with Steph Swainston on May 19th, 2007 5:08 am

[...] Also of note (and related) is Ariel's thoughts on fantasy and the fantastic, wherein he absolutely nails my own views on reading fantasy, and the allure of the fantastic. [...]
DavidHeb on May 19th, 2007 10:35 pm

I must say that this post has generated a fascinating discussion!

Kev is right, I think, that there are relatively few writers who are consciously trying to push the fantasy form. China Miéville is a good example of a writer who loves the genre and is constantly interrogating it (or at least the conventions of generic fantasy); but it's quite hard to be sure on both counts for some authors. Neil Gaiman, perhaps (though I think he challenges the form more subtly). Sean Wright, probably (though his writing hasn't yet matched his ambition). Hal Duncan, Jeff VanderMeer, Allen Ashley all push the form, but I don't know their opinions of 'fantasy'.

What really concerns me is when you get writers like Pullman who express disdain (or even outright hostility) towards 'fantasy', even as they write it, even if they write it well. That can't be good for the field. There's the whole business of works of fantasy not being published as fantasy; which is good if it gets more people reading fantasy, but it might stop writers aiming as high as they could. For example, there's a book called The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall that was published earlier this year to some rave reviews. It wasn't published as fantasy, probably wasn't written as fantasy, but fantasy it is. It's a good book, but if you're familiar with fantasy, it's not quite so remarkable. You can write good fantasy from 'outside' the genre, certainly; but to really go places, we need people pushing from within, who know what's already been done and want to find new directions.

KJ, aren't writers 'pushing the form' by the very act of 'pushing the material'? But I take your point that it gets harder to write the further you travel beyond the fields we know. Having said that, I think the goal of fantasy should be to do just that whilst maintaining a coherence. Perhaps there does have to be some sort of trade-off, though; I'm sure I remember hearing Christopher Fowler say something about fantasy taking issues like relationships as a given and starting beyond that (if anyone has issue 1 of Postscripts handy, I think it's in there).

On the subject of subverting conventions, much as I can appreciate subversions of heroic fantasy clichés, I'd rather read something else. But I suppose the market demands that change must progress slowly...

I agree with Gabe that irrational magic is the best sort; certainly it's more 'realistic' than scientised magic. Of course, it takes more work to depict it convincingly (I mean without lapsing into laziness), and too few writers rise to the challenge. Tom Arden did in his Orokon series, with characters literally vanishing for no reason other than it suited the plot, but that was all part of the fun. I'm impressed with how Tim Lebbon deals with magic in his Noreela duology; but I haven't finished the second volume yet, and don't know if he carries it through to the end...

And of course, as MH says, a good story and good writing can trump all.

(I am just imagining how much I might have written if I disagreed with the previous comments...)
gabe on May 20th, 2007 4:13 am

The question is, where do you push the form or the content that it hasn't gone before? When you consider "fantasy" can mean anything from Robert E. Howard to Jorge Luis Borges, from James Branch Cabell to JRR Tolkien, from David Lindsay to Robert Jordan... what is left beyond distinctive literary voices?

I'm not trying to be a naysayer - lord knows I loves me the fantasy! But saying, for instance, that China Mieville is "innovative" is ridiculous. Mieville is Clark Ashton Smith mashed up with Jack Vance mashed up with... well, actually he's a whole bunch of writers mashed up. But a mash-up is a mash-up, and the originals are always in there somewhere.

I think the reason fantasy is, for the most part, so un-fantastic has to do with its commercialization. Fantasy is a publishing commodity, and save for the writers that are distinctive in either their writing ability (hey, you over there, Bishop!), their individual viewpoint (Gaiman thinks magically), or what they say with the fantastic (MJH!) (and I should note that most of the fantasy authors I truly love cross over these three and more, all balled in one package), the field has simply collapsed in upon itself in a heap of mediocre product. Any time the art of the writing is overshadowed by the desire to sell more copies, we end up with Terry Goodkinds and Robert Newcombs.

I personally think the only way to produce good fantasy is by being passionate about it.
Kev on May 20th, 2007 7:19 am

My apologies if this is another long comment. However, I would like to make some responses to the thoughtful contributions to other participants in the discussion.

I agree with Joe's point about genre being created by repetition of certain forms that create rules that can subsequently be subverted. I also feel that, ultimately, the rules of a genre are frameworks, that help invoke or capture sensibilities and feelings about ourselves. It is perhaps these sensibilities which attract people to the genre on a deeper level, rather than the rules themselves - probably why the genre can be subverted, but still feel like fantasy.

Kirsten's point about magic reflecting wish fulfillment, costs and consequences – essentially, I suppose, using magic to explore aspects of our humanity - I think is a good strategy. One writer who does this quite well is Robin Hobb, in the Farseer books, with the Skill as an egoistic magic of mastery, and the Wit, a magic of empathy and connectivity. Both have consequences. For me, at least, these are essentially two polarities in human behaviour, a kind of yang and yin. It is not a comprehensive model, but a not unsuccessful way of using magic in a fantasy world to reflect human psychology.

Gabe's point regarding a desire for magic about mystery and mysticism, perhaps expressing illogical but intriguing qualities beyond the material world, I can appreciate. It attracts me too, as reader and writer, though perhaps not exactly in the way Gabe means. Finding more out about what is already inside us, or even things we might have forgotten about our potential seems a definite possibility of magic in fantasy and perhaps of fantasy itself. However, this is not for everyone. I suspect this is one of the aspects of fantasy that makes readers of a certain mindset lean more towards science fiction, or other forms of writing. It makes more sense to imagine what might actually happen, rather that something nebulous that is based on feelings or inklings or spiritual yearnings.

In response to Gabe’s point about where to push fantasy, I tend to view fantasy from a writer's perspective. As a writer of fantasy, the genre does not look limited to me at all. It does feel somewhat habitual and lazy, although as Aerial’s original post points out, at the fringes this has changed. If feels like a new literature with so much to do and explore.

Fantasy for me, is the freedom to take things I feel about the world I live in, and shape another world around them to help make sense of those feelings. It is pure literary freedom. As a fantasy writer I feel that I can write about other worlds with different histories, cultures and fascinations and realities with different visions of the relationship between the inner world and the fabric of reality itself. There are no fathomable limits to those combinations, especially when you factor in the different narrative themes you can explore in a fantasy setting. It is an invitation to find the heights of your imagination, though as Gabe points out it needs passion, really working ideas out well and seeing where they can go, rather than being satisfied with half measures.

It sensible to try and write stories in your own way rather than batter your head against a wall looking for true originality, but I don’t buy this idea that everything has been done before. I think we are just not trying hard enough. If it is so impossible to come up with new combinations or visions of fantastic world, how come the real world keeps surprises us with things we never imagined or thought of, and new ways of thinking about ourselves?

I also agree with the notion of mixing genres, I think DavidHeb and Gabe both have good points about the relationship between the publishing industry and notions of genre, and have plenty to say about all these things, but really this post is getting too long. So I will stop here.
DavidHeb on May 20th, 2007 1:55 pm

I agree with Kev that there is still loads left to be done in the field. Mimetic fiction keeps going as the world we know is always changing; there's no reason to think fantastic fiction won't do the same. To give just one example, I think there is still (despite numerous paranormal romance-thrillers) enormous scope for bringing traditional icons of fantasy into the contemporary world and working out what might happen. It's just that, as you say, Kev, people generally don't try hard enough.

But I don't mean to suggest that authors have to be entirely original to 'push the form'. Everybody has their influences, and you can do something different by juggling them about and responding to what's going on around you - which, I think, is what Miéville did.

So come on, all you authors - rise to the challenge!
gabe on May 20th, 2007 4:36 pm

If it is so impossible to come up with new combinations or visions of fantastic world, how come the real world keeps surprises us with things we never imagined or thought of, and new ways of thinking about ourselves?

Because no matter how hard we work at it, the real world will always be infinitely more complex than any fictional construct we cobble together. :)

And I ought to clarify that I don't think fantasy is limited at all; quite the opposite. Fantasy offers one of the widest canvases for telling stories. Which is why so much of the fantasy on offer is so disappointing, because there are a lot of authors that do not choose to use it that way.
Kirsten (KJ) Bishop on May 21st, 2007 4:20 am

David>> KJ, aren't writers 'pushing the form' by the very act of 'pushing the material'?

I don't think so - lots of books out there with wild subject matter presented in forms familiar to all, in transparent prose which doesn't draw attention to itself (thus foregrounding the material).

I guess we all know it's pretty hard to be original - as opposed to a mashing together, as put by Gabe (I consider myself a goulash - ghoulash? - of others) - and even harder to be original and get published with a major house, not just as a fantasy writer but as a writer, period. If we were like artists and produced unique works requiring only one rich shopper...that could be interesting. But in writing you hit walls concerning what works for a decent number of readers. Visual art can be incredibly out there partly because the viewer controls the amount of time spent engaging with it, so it won't outstay its welcome. But books are demanding of time; there is pleasure in the strange but there is also pleasure in the familiar, and I suspect most readers want at least a bit of the latter. We also shouldn't forget that a good many readers of fantasy are young, and at 15 most of us aren't looking for literary experiment or other kinds of envelope pushing.

On another tangent, perhaps the complexity of reality makes it more attractive than fantasy to the truly adventurous writers?
Kev on May 21st, 2007 10:48 am

There is a lot more ground to cover here, but for me it tends to veer off into speculation of how fantasy writers might be working (which is unknowable without getting inside their working methods, a big project with no guarantees of success) and what I would like to do with fantasy, which would involve a lot of waffle about, goals, hopes and fears for my own work. And this is not the space for that kind of thing, I feel.

It is refreshing to have a discussion like this in the sense that it is something I have tried in some writing forums or among those who profess to want to write fantasy, and I have found fantasy writers pretty defensive, the published ones the worst of the lot (I wonder why :) ). Yet enough lovers of fantasy are dissatisfied and enough readers of other fiction who might want to explore fantasy are confused by where to go without wading through mediocre fiction (Ariel's original post and those like it obviously would help), that I think fantasy writers published and otherwise should take notice.

What I would like to add is that I think writing fantasy is harder than writing mimetic fiction. It is seen as illegitimate as literature, still, by many, and that does not do a lot for your confidence or the cultural capital you make from the hard work of doing it well.

It involves a whole level of weaving theme, characters, style, perception into conceptual landscape that mimetic writers do not have to deal with. They can use a certain template of reality presented by the complex world Gabe mentioned, they can research real people or documented situations.

If a fantasy writer does this, they have to adjust it for the considerations of a new reality, or an altered version of our own. If they look to past fantasy fiction for inspiration, as perhaps a mimetic writer can to the vast literature of realism (or more realistic fiction, realism is a very particular strand of literary fiction), to do this, they are not unlikely to end up repeating past forms, or being tempted by them.

And then you have the issue of getting someone to put money behind what you have produced. And yes, publishers are not looking for literary fantastic experiments, and neither are 15, years olds. But both can be persuaded and inspired by a good solid book that gets hold of their imagination, does not loose their attention through artifice and obscurity, but shows them something in the writing and in the vision that gets them talking to people around them about the book they have just read.

A wrtier I know... she realised she would have to

They have the basic foundation of the world covered. They can concentrate on style and on vision without worrying how they relate to the world they are creating.
Kev on May 21st, 2007 10:51 am

sorry folks ended up copying two paragraphs from another post meant for somewhere else on the end there, in case it got confusing :)
The Nature of Fantasy « Ramblings in Space and Time on May 21st, 2007 11:42 am

[...] 21 May 2007 Posted by mhayinde in Science Fiction, fantasy, Publishing, writing, Books. trackback I've always been of the opinion the all fiction sits on a continuum, rather than in discretegenre spheres, and that perceived genres bleed into each other and are merely extensions of what has gone before. On this topic, among others, is this great post about fantasy over at The Genre Files, and the resulting conversation has really made me think about what fantasy actually is. It's definitely worth a read. [...]
urban-drift.com » more on the fantastic on May 21st, 2007 1:11 pm

[...] The comments on Ariel's post I mentioned earlier have grown into quite an interesting discussion in and of itself. [...]
gabe on May 21st, 2007 1:26 pm

And yes, publishers are not looking for literary fantastic experiments, and neither are 15 year olds.

This is such a salient point, and one that is very often forgotten... at least by me. As an adult, it's so easy to forget that from a publisher's standpoint, I am not the audience for fantasy novels, even though in truth I really am. But we adult readers are in the minority here, I believe.

Is this the way it should be?

I don't think so. I believe fantasy has a lot to offer even the most discerning of adult readers. But we're still working against the embedded notion that "fantasy is for kids", something adults have to put away as they grow older. And while I don't often consciously consider it, I think in many ways that misconception indirectly leads to much of the friction that creates great fantasy. The best authors understand that fantasy *isn't* just for kids, and are writing against that boundary whether consciously or not.

I think in many ways, today, fantasy is undergoing a really cool period of growth. Some authors are actively writing to retrain adults to understand that fantasy isn't something that has to be set aside, actively proving that the fantastic is "worthy" of consideration. It's become a process, where we're retraining everyone: readers, publishers, authors themselves.

And like I said, this isn't something I remember to consciously examine, and a lot of the time I forget it. I wonder if forgetting causes me to lose my perspective on the field of the fantastic as a whole? It's easy to defame and criticize lazy fantasy, to forget that I am not the intended audience, but only want to be?

Hmmmm. Thanks for making me think here!
KJBishop.net » Blog Archive » Yarning, moving, pruning on May 21st, 2007 7:42 pm

[...] Over on The Genre Files a few people, me included, are shooting the breeze about fantastical fiction. [...]
Kirsten (KJ) Bishop on May 21st, 2007 9:28 pm

Early morning thoughts:
Contemporary fantasy - the high fantasy kind, with quests and battles - has roots in fairytale and myth, genres which tend to refer to human constants (or things that have been constant for a long time): rites of passage, the struggle to survive, defeating your enemies and your own demons. I think modern high fantasy reiterates these references, sometimes with concessions to modernity but rarely entering a full engagement with the modern human being with all his/her uncertainty, anxiety and familiarity with rapid change. Fantasy that employs a secondary world, or introduces a strongly codified, working system of magic into the real world, is able to provide its characters with underpinnings of certainty that modern man doesn't have, since, at the writer's discretion, a great deal which is mysterious to us can be explained definitively within the playhouse of the invented system. To write mature fantasy for modern human beings requires a certain amount of deracination of the genre, I think, which can topple the fantastic elements (e.g. if you decide that quests are passe, you don't need your magical MacGuffin holy grail). Not that there aren't ways around it, but you have to put up with a lot of complaints from readers who don't get what they thought they were paying for.
gabe on May 21st, 2007 9:38 pm

deracination

Niiiiiice use of a word, that.

I think it would be very interesting to examine the correlation between mysticism and the fantastic, and society's changing relationship with mythology through the past, say, 100 years. Does this recent 'evolution' of fantasy have anything to do with the... well, I hesitate to say 'rise in rationalism', but perhaps more clearly 'decline in belief'? To me it seems modern fantasy exists with a schism dividing the mytho-centric high fantasy from the more... existential? rational?... fantasy, representing two conflicting points of view.

Is mytho-centric fantasy consoling, while the other stuff is confrontational? Is there something to be examined in the friction between the pastoral fantasy and the urbanized fantasy? Backed into a corner, I would say so... but I'd also say it would take someone far smarter than me to examine it. :)
DavidHeb on May 21st, 2007 9:55 pm

Sigh, it's not much fun to remember you're in a minority of readers... But is it necessarily a minority composed of adult readers? Seems to me there is a fair amount of good, 'proper' fantasy aimed at younger readers and a fair amount of rubbish fantasy aimed at adults; may even be easier to get the good stuff published if you are writing for teenagers.

Thinking back to when I was 15, I read my share of tosh, and my share of good stuff; but I didn't discriminate the way I would now. Perhaps I wasn't aware of the need to discriminate; perhaps, at that time, there was no need to discriminate. Perhaps, when you're young, you (or some people, at any rate) don't even recognise literary experimentation in that way -- because you don't know the rules yet. Certainly it's a time of life when a book can change how you think. I really got turned on to fantasy when I read Escardy Gap by Peter Crowther and James Lovegrove; if I read it now, it might not have the same effect, but it left me dizzy at the time because it broke rules I didn't know existed. One reason I read fantasy is because I want to experience that feeling again.

I do think it's harder to get adults to read fantasy if they've decided they don't like it. This may partly be down to the word itself, or that we use the same word to denote generic tales of warriors 'n' elves; any story that breaks the rules of the world we know; and a childish whimsy.

KJ's last question leads me to say that I think fantasy can capture something fundamental about lived experience far better than mimetic fiction ever could... just another reason why we need to keep using the word 'fantasy' to indicate the stuff we really want to write and read.
DavidHeb on May 21st, 2007 9:57 pm

(PS. My last post was written before the two immediately above it appeared.)
Kirsten (KJ) Bishop on May 21st, 2007 10:00 pm

My gut answer on mytho-centric fantasy is that it presents a consoling myth of violence - a myth in which you can solve your problems by slaughtering your enemy. I think the technological and societal complexities of the modern world render this myth obsolete - if indeed it was ever useful at all.

I remember reading, years ago, an abstract of a paper on Milton which proposed that the mission, or function - I forget the exact word - of the heroic was to destroy the pastoral. I suppose it was referring to aesthetic or psychological function, though it might be applied to physical reality too. I would say that the relationship of man to the pastoral, and even to beauty, is different in high fantasy than it is in modernised fantasy, and might be worth delving into. I think Tolkien observed the change in that relationship and mourned it.
Kirsten (KJ) Bishop on May 21st, 2007 10:11 pm

My above post was written before David's...
David>>I think fantasy can capture something fundamental about lived experience far better than mimetic fiction ever could...

I have to admit, I haven't read fantasy for quite a while for the very reason that I foujnd it wasn't capturing those fundamentals of lived experience. But while I now read mainly mimetic or social fiction, most of it is from the 1920s - 1950s, which is long enough ago that the books from that period have a patina of fantasy in any case; and the characters are modern, not postmodern, and certainly not posthuman. I must also admit that none of these books give me the fix that fantasy used to before I started dissecting it. Now, to get the same fix, I watch anime. That fix might be tied to something fundamental but I'm not sure it's anything mature or worthwhile; it may just be an addiction to the pornography of violence.
DavidHeb on May 21st, 2007 10:21 pm

Just to clarify what I meant by that point... An example: sometimes it can feel as though you inhabit different worlds in the same life. You can be one person at home, a different person at work, and so on -- because these are different worlds, metaphorically. Fantasy can take ideas like that, and make them literal. Of course, it doesn't onlydo that, but that's the sort of thing I was talking about.
DavidHeb on May 21st, 2007 10:22 pm

Ruddy HTML...
gabe on May 21st, 2007 11:25 pm

For a long time, I viewed Stephen Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant as the pinnacle of fantasy. Donaldson used what can only be described as the generic tropes of fantasy, but in a startlingly conscious way. His "fantasyland" is an externalization of his protagonist's psyche... which to me is what using the mythographic forms is all about. Call it the collective unconscious, call it the Hero with a Thousand Faces, call it whatever you want; but I've always believed the universality of the fantastic is what gives it its distinct power. Unfortunately, in the main, those tropes have been allowed to decay into cardboard cutouts of what they once were by all of the cookie-cutter fantasies.

Meanwhile, I really need to go back and read Delany's thoughts on sword and sorcery, and the representation of a transfer from a barter to a monetary economy....
gabe on May 21st, 2007 11:26 pm

David, your ruddy HTML has infected us all now!

[fixed the Ruddy HTML - Ariel]
Kirsten (KJ) Bishop on May 22nd, 2007 6:51 am

Gabe, could you elaborate on what you mean by the universality of the fantastic? I wonder how universal it really is, but I may be misinterpreting the statement.
Ariel on May 22nd, 2007 7:32 am

Gabe >> For a long time, I viewed Stephen Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant as the pinnacle of fantasy.

Gabe mate, I'd be interested to know at what point in your fantasy reading you encountered Donaldson. I had completely the opposite reaction - couldn't identify with the lead character, I think for his utter cheerlessness more than anything, and thought the world itself was flat and generally uninteresting - but I think I probably read it too early, when my view of the landscape of fantasy literature was coloured mainly by my exposure to the bold primaries of Tolkien, Lewis, Brooks, Eddings, Dragonlance, et. al. so I rather suspect I missed out on a lot of the metaphorical subtleties. And in my defence, I read and loved his Mordant's Need duology a few years later, although it's probably a much less densely woven work.

KJ >> ...it may just be an addiction to the pornography of violence.

Now that is a very interesting point indeed, and one which ties in very well to the first one you made, about fantasy (and magic) empowering the powerless.

I wonder, how many hard-core fantasy fans aren't the kids who - for one reason or another, and yes, just like me - were bullied at school for being more intelligent, more sensitive, or just plain different from their peers, and therefore turned to worlds of make-believe as a form of self-defence by escapism..?

How many of those same kids wouldn't have drawn the obvious parallels between themselves and the orphan scullery boy who discovers a magical talisman that carries a secret heritage, and uses it to fulfil their destiny, rise to glory and slay the legions of the evil ones (read: jocks / bullies / morons at school who won't just leave you alone, dammit).

And then, bringing in David's point about our different worlds in 'real' life, how many of those same bullied kids went out into the big, wide adult world only to find that those self-same bullies and morons hadn't actually received their just desserts and were still the ones in positions of power, lording it over the poor, down-trodden office IT geek, taking the piss out of their clothes and lack of social life and membership of the local LARP group? How tempting then, to take that same refuge in the imaginary worlds of the fantastic that they always read and probably will always read?

And so maybe an awful lot of fantasy fans do still need the pornography of violence inherent in the high (and mighty) 'slaughter the evil-doers' type fantasy, because it constantly acts to reaffirm their escapist world-view; with themselves as the secret hero of their own story, just waiting for that moment of magic to throw off their shackles and rip their enemies' still-beating hearts from their crushed and broken bodies...

What's the alternative? Being 'grown up' and 'fitting in'. Having to dumb-down and succumb to the mass-mind-wipe of popular culture; resorting to watching Big bloody Brother just so you've got something to talk to your work colleagues about around the water-cooler...

[As an aside - interesting inversion of that in Heroes, in which the pretty, blonde cheerleader makes the journey from popular but bitchy intellectual non-entity to accepted, valued, real queen of the down-trodden masses' hearts by "embracing the inner freak"...]

Perhaps reading Mieville et. al. as opposed to Eddings and co. is a sign that you've overcome the insecurities of your inner geek and embraced your own freak within. Maybe 'New Weird' is the sign of the well-adjusted fantasy fan? (Hmmm. Not sure how much mileage there might be in that theory, come to think of it...)

Many, many more interesting points from earlier comments as well, but I'll have to come back to those later... work-time beckons.
Kirsten (KJ) Bishop on May 22nd, 2007 7:06 pm

Ariel - even if the majority of fantasy readers are or were misfits, it would be hard to attribute cause; imaginative, odd, quiet or bookish ones might well be into fantasy novels before the age when severe ostracism starts (since a lot of YA fiction is fantastical, young bookworms are likely to read fantasy as a matter of course). The otherworlds might then become a retreat - and perhaps a barrier to successfully negotiating with the real world.

The alternative? Learn to negotiate with the real world and respect the humanity of those around the water cooler. Their inner lives will sometimes surprise you and when they don't it's still data for your files on homo sapiens. Put your imagination and sensitivity into your work, whatever it is. Be a secret agent, commit random acts of beauty and kindness, and learn to shapeshift.
Ariel on May 23rd, 2007 7:02 am

KJ >> ...since a lot of YA fiction is fantastical, young bookworms are likely to read fantasy as a matter of course

You're absolutely right. In fact I'd go as far as to suggest that the vast majority of children's books are inherently fantastical, even if they're not in explicitly set in a fantasy milieu. Maybe that's because writers (and publishers) assume that kids have better imaginations than adults, maybe - as Gabe pointed out - because the expectation is that adults should put aside fantasy and concentrate on proper, real-world subjects.

But I'd suggest that it's actually fair to say that the majority of all children who read are 'fantasy readers'. It then becomes a question of how quickly the child in question 'grows out of' reading fantasy (or perhaps reading, full stop...) and how the genre as a whole can help to prevent that happening - which segues into another conversation that I was dipping into over at SFSignal, where they've set up a Harry Potter Outreach Programme as a means of trying to keep kids who've read and loved HP to keep reading the fantastic genres afterwards.

But as KJ and Gabe pointed out, most (post-HP) 12-15 year olds really aren't looking for the mythic thought experiments of the (so-called) 'New Weird' writers, and let's face it, probably wouldn't be ready for them yet. So perhaps that's where the fat-fantasy schlock-epics can play their part most effectively - by assisting in the transition from specifically children's and young adult themed fantasy, through the stuff that uses many of the same tropes (coming of age, quest for acceptance, conquest of one's inner and outer demons, etc.)

As long as they help to ensure the continuation of reading from childhood through to adulthood, then that's actually a pretty important mission in and of itself.

So the trick then is to introduce more discerning readers to the more discerning, interesting, intelligent, challenging and outre material that's available at an appropriate juncture and then let them find their own path out to the fringes, or the deeps. The challenge is to persuade more publishers to take the gamble on putting the weirder material out there, and the best way of doing that is to help generate increased book sales.

And again, that's where effective, trusted filtering systems - like Scalpel and other sites and magazines, and the Internet in general - will really come into their own. The tyranny of the bookstore '3 for 2' table only has a short time left to run, I reckon, before the majority of fantasy readers - once they've passed through the 'transition' phase and have had their fill of fat-fantasy for fat-fantasy's sake - will be completely ignoring the often mediocre or just downright predictable fare on offer and seeking out material that more closely matches their individual tastes as a matter of course.
Kev on May 23rd, 2007 8:45 am

For my mind there is a certain amount to be said for theories of why and how people read fantasy, but it only goes so far. If you actually did a study on fantasy readers, I suspect you would find a leaning towards certain character types, but not by a huge percentage and that may be sullied by the fact that clear ideas of what the genre is really about, or could be, still fights with certain cliches commonly accepted as common sense in the cultural realm.

Somehow, at some point, some people do stop loving fairy tales or stories with impossible goings on, and draw reassurance or identification from cultural channels they can relate to everyday experiences.

Perhaps all of us or one time or another have met a person who says something along the lines of: "It just can't happen. It is not real. I just don't get it."

Some learn not to get it, or accept it, through becoming intellectually identified with traditional ideas of the value of certain types of fiction, some just feel more comfortable with stuff they can see and touch and relate to what they have experienced from day to day. Fair enough, let's not argue with people who just have their way of relating to the world.

But on the whole, I sense that the greater number of people do get fantasy and respond to it. If Joseph Campbell is right about mythic structures to the human psyche that are common to most cultures, or even if Jung is, about collective consciousness, then it is not all that surprising.

Certainly from my reading about studies in the use of hallucinogenic drugs, and well... okay the period in my life when I wasn't as orthodox a corporate citizen as I might be now, shall we say - when you start to break down the ego self of most human beings they start to enter a realm of mythic stories and forms, of encounters with symbols and scenarios and worlds with fantastical elements to them.

I find it hard not to conclude that fantasy, in the sense of a fluid sense of reality driven by feeling and whatever is necessary to frame the inner world, in order to find meaningful interpretations of the contradictory feelings inside us, is actually the norm for human beings.

And there is another side to this, the fact that people are not straight forward, in fact many are not - may be most are not. We cannot put them in boxes, but they do face a sense of boxes of concept in literature when they look at what they might want to read.

Fantasy for some, is something they turn to in the same way that the guy you know who is in the army turned out to like to knit. Or the role player is a part time football star or gets all the galls. They just get it and it gets them. To know why is to invite you to get intimately involved in a project to discover who they are. And even then little quirks of experience against the grain could have made them find pleasure and meaning in a form that makes not sense in terms of their overall pyschology.

People have different aspects to their personalities and figure them out and feed them in different ways. I see plenty of different people reading fantasy on trains over the years, and I have met some highly placed and powerful people in certain fields, who read it and love it and embrace it... but they just might not bring that up during a lunch with some foreign digniatries or experts in an intellectual field, because they is not accepted script for that sort of conversation without causing a stir or an invitation for personal explanation.

I prefer to speculate about what fantasy can offer to those who are open to being curious through a certain type of imaginative process.

Also I don't think we should under estimate 15 years olds, they can actually be a lot clearer and perceptive than those a decade or more older. They will respond to some immensely complex stuff if it is done in such a way that they can find their way into it without getting put off too much.
Benjamin Solah on May 23rd, 2007 11:36 am

A thought-provoking post, but forgive me for not reading through the comments as there's a heap of 'em which is encouraging.

Firstly as a Marxist writer, the trend of the publishing industry towards 'mass-market' stuff has a lot to do with the publishing houses not caring one bit about literature or the future of genre fiction. They care about the bottom line. They want to make as much profit as possible and in a society such as the one we live in, literature is an inevitable casualty of this drive.

And as a horror writer, I can see many similarities in the horror genre with cliches taking over as rules in the genre and the whole 'it'll do' mentality that doesn't challenge writers to break the barriers set out for the genre. And in my opinion, this and the scope created by a capitalist publishing industry is what is killing literature overall.
Ariel on May 23rd, 2007 12:01 pm

Hi Benjamin - Thanks for stopping by. I have to admit I'm not particularly well-versed (in fact, not versed at all) in the principles of Marxism, but it seems to me that any large-scale publishing industry is inevitably going to be capitalist in nature, and therefore is inevitably going to be driven by the profit motive, or at least the break-even motive. After all, if they don't make money, they go out of business... (again, it's a numbers game).

Having said that (just before you hit me with the Marxist counter-argument) what the WWW does is enable a widespread and wide-ranging niche-publishing cottage industry to push back the boundaries and bring a much wider choice of literature to those who choose to look beyond the mainstream and explore the fringes (which is what we've been chewing over in the comments to-date).

The problem then becomes the signal-to-noise ratio: for every work of utter brilliance that's published this way, there will be 99 other pieces of utter crap, which is where the trusted filtering mechanisms that I've been banging on about come into play... as a reader and potential purchaser, you need access to a reliable means of assigning a 'quality' tag to the good stuff. That's a task that can be fulfilled by a particular reviewer, review journal or small publisher, but it has to be one that you can trust.

And yes, it's all subjective and everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but that's the point. On the WWW there's enough room for everyone and their opinions, it's just a question of working out who you can trust, and then sticking with them to see what they have to say. So if Marxist science fiction is your thing (for example) then it's just a question of finding a publisher who specialises in just that, or a reviewer who knows a lot about the subject, and then seeing what they produce / recommend, as appropriate.

And at that point, the mainstream becomes a complete irrelevance for you, personally speaking, even if it isn't for large numbers of readers who haven't quite made that leap yet...

But that's what the WWW offers that the average bookstore seldom can - the freedom for the book buyer to make informed choices via trusted, reliable sources of opinion. And that's how the genre publishers of the world can thrive and grow broader, that's where it will draw its strength and depth in the future: by engaging with those same sources and providing them with new material - everything from press releases to author interviews to the books themselves...

Sorry, another mini-essay...

Anyhow, before I go, I do have to query the suggestion that "publishing houses [don't care] one bit about literature or the future of genre fiction..." which might be true of publishing houses as corporate entities, ruled by the bottom-line, but definitely isn't true of individual publishers, editors and publicists.

I know a lot of the UK's genre publishers, and I know for a fact that the majority of them would love to offer the same width and eclectic choice as the small presses, but are shackled by the structures in which they work: the need to generate minimum sales volumes in a limited time in order to justify their publishing decisions.

So yes, maybe capitalist industry is to blame for the perpetuation of the mainstream, but my point would be that these days people have a choice; they just need the confidence and encouragement - backed up by as much reliable information and trusted opinion as they can comfortably digest - to exercise it.

By all means feel free to hit me with that Marxist counter-argument any time now... :)
Kirsten (KJ) Bishop on May 23rd, 2007 6:51 pm

Ariel>>maybe capitalist industry is to blame for the perpetuation of the mainstream, but my point would be that these days people have a choice

Indeed - capitalist industry is not to blame for the market forces it responds to. You could say that in all mass-market fields of entertainment we've got what you get when a semi-educated middle-class proletariat is the arbiter of taste - which is putting it too cattily, but in a world where lousy reality TV shows are avidly watched and inane magazines are snapped up at the checkout, where we are inculturated to expect entertainment without a mentally or spiritually exercising component, it's no wonder that when the majority bother to read at all they want the written equivalent of smooth peanut butter.
gabe on May 24th, 2007 3:06 am

Gone for a day, and look what happens! Aaargh! So much to read....

it's no wonder that when the majority bother to read at all they want the written equivalent of smooth peanut butter.

Great. Now I have to conduct a poll of readers to see if there is a correlation between what they read and the kind of peanut butter they prefer.

I'm an organic chunky peanut butter guy myself... specifically .
gabe on May 24th, 2007 3:06 am

Bugger. Mussed up my HTML.
Kirsten (KJ) Bishop on May 24th, 2007 8:50 am

I was gonna say something about the fantastic actually not being universal. As a woman I don't find Joseph Campbellism universal. Most heroic fantasy doesn't speak to my experience or my desires. I think our society blithely maps masculine experiences onto feminine lives because patriarchy is not interested in women's differences from men except for the jiggly bits.
So we've got a marxist and a feminist... any other -istas out there?

I like super crunchy. And definitely not low salt, but low sugar is ok.
Ariel on May 24th, 2007 2:12 pm

KJ>> ...inculturated to expect entertainment without a mentally or spiritually exercising component...

And the sad thing is that most of the reality-tv-grazing herd wouldn't have the first clue what you're talking about... :)

Kev, been thinking on what you said about fantasy being the psychological norm for people; in which case, I wonder why do so many people seem so desperate to 'grow up' and abandon the inner fantasy in their lives; to refute the willing suspension of disbelief in favour of a slavish adherence to the societal norm of banal rationality? Is it as simple as a case of drones with less active imaginations being easier to control and keep in their place, therefore that's what the powers-that-be strive to indoctrinate in us all, or is that just too David Icke for comfort..?

Oh, and organic crunchy for me, too. Sun-pat at the moment, alas, because Tesco seem to have been out of their own brand for a while. Although super-crunchy does sound damn fine, and these babies certainly look interesting...
gabe on May 24th, 2007 5:16 pm

Is my previously written comment lingering in limbo? I hope so... Ariel?
gabe on May 24th, 2007 5:17 pm

Kirsten, you raise a very interesting point.

Way back in the dark ages, when I mentioned the "universality of fantasy", I was speaking of the fact that a) everyone, no matter who they are, fantasizes. We all know what "fantasy" is, because we've all engaged in flights of fancy. Also b) that all cultures have mythologies, and when we write about myths, they are familiar to all.

I agree with your point that the Campbell heroic journey does not speak to women, and the fact that so many writers fail to understand that may in fact be the reason we find ourselves with bookshelves clumped with fat tomes aimed at... TAA DAA! Adolescent males! The so-called "target audience" of fantasy! But it is important to remember that fantasy does not have to be the masculine journey, and in fact Campbell (was it Campbell? At this point I can't remember.) also examines the feminine journey, which differs greatly from the masculine. I think the onus lies on the author to explore other avenues.

Ariel, I wonder though, how many people replace the imagination of the fantastic with the imagination of the religious? It would be crude of me to make a correlation between the number of reality-tv watchers who are also apparently church-going fundamentalists, but....?
Ariel on May 24th, 2007 5:21 pm

No, nothing in limbo. Did #45 and #46 get chronologically reversed somehow..?
Laurie on May 24th, 2007 5:28 pm

I'm not so sure I agree with the general sentiment that all the trash (perhaps too harsh of a word, but I lack a better term atm) on the market is a bad thing. Surely it would be better if there was less of it, in favor of more fiction of a more intellectually stimulating sort, but I for one read both, and genuinely, thoroughly enjoy both.

I read (or watch, in the case of visual media) on two different levels. I read to be challenged, to be dazzled, to learn and grow and share in a deeper human experience; I also read to be entertained, to feel good, to obtain that 'fix' that KJ mentioned. The addiction to the pornography of violence is a big part of it, and I would argue that that addiction is worthwhile, precisely because it is such a universal, basic part of the human experience which writers are trying to communicate. I don't particularly read trash or porn or things like that for the express purpose of soul-searching, but it certainly happens of its own accord - because these images, the excess violence, the visual debauch, the repetitive cliches, they appeal to me for a reason, and exploring what precisely fascinates me so about them and why (and what fascinates the general public about them and why) is, I think, of invaluable importance to the growth of a writer.

(Smooth for me, please, but make it the grainy natural kind, with a touch of molasses!)
gabe on May 24th, 2007 5:48 pm

This is the best peanut butter ever, although it isn't good for everyday use; too sweet.

Nah, Ariel, I just clicked back on my browser and re-posted the second one after it apparently disappeared the first time.
gabe on May 24th, 2007 6:22 pm

For the record, I was thinking of Maureen Murdock's fascinating The Heroine's Journey.
Kirsten (KJ) Bishop on May 24th, 2007 6:27 pm

You in the States seem to have vastly more peanut butter choices than we in the Antipodes.

Gabe - there's also the consumer imagination. I would say the materialist mindset is heavily invested in fantasy. I think shopping is the modern incarnation of the quest. We don't just shop for things, we shop for a lifestyle; in fact, we try to transform ourselves through the purchase of objects and brands that will, we hope, work the magic their advertisers have claimed for them and make us sexy, successful and hip. If that ain't fantasy i don't know what is.

Laurie - yeah, I would miss the 'trash' if there was none of it. Just because I get my fix from manga doesn't mean someone else shouldn't get theirs from novels. I do know, though, that I came rather late to an awareness of the qualitative difference between entertainment and Art, Dahling. I didn't really have a clue until my early twenties that there was this thing called literature and it tickled a different part of your brain than Dragonlance did - even though I'd read Paradise Lost, but that had Satan in it, so it was you know, cool. I just wonder how many people are in the same boat I was. I regret not having come earlier to a knowledge of good writing.

I also wonder how many people are aware, like you, of the nature of that which addicts and fascinates, and how many are getting off on it with a blindfold on. That isn't a snide rhetorical question, I'm truly curious.
Ariel on May 24th, 2007 6:35 pm

Hi Laurie, and thanks for dropping by. That's a very good point there. Trash does have a place and a purpose and of course there are folks who genuinely prefer it for whatever reason. At the end of the day reading is a subjective experience and of course different people read different material for their own reasons. For example, a friend of mine used to be a solicitor specialising in licensing, so she worked long hours, travelled the country, represented clients in court, dealt with the implementation of new legislation. And she devoured (and still devours, as far as I know) gossip magazines - mainly, I suspect, as an antidote to the de-humanising effects of all those hours and hours of legalese. Shame she never developed a taste for fat fantasy; would probably have saved her a fortune in glossies.

But then what gets me is the entrenched industry assumption that the majority of readers want trash and only trash, all the time, and mountains of it.

In my own experience, both as a bookseller and as an editor of a review 'zine, I've found that almost as soon as you start to introduce the schlock-fantasy reader to a wider range of more interesting material, they begin to show a marked preference for the better stuff; craving it, even. Sure, every so often they'll want to sit down with a 700-page kiddie quest and wallow in it for a weekend, and there's nothing wrong with that.

But so many readers are denied that chance to even exercise their choice to read the better stuff (or at least, they are until they get online and read round a few of the better blogs...) which is a real shame.

Again, it comes down to the tyranny of the bookstore shelf - aided and abetted by the curse of EPOS - which demands that only a very narrow range of proven 'best-sellers' are always going to be preferred to a wider range of more interesting and challenging work. This is also a real pity, because if the combination of limited bookstore space and EPOS technology were both utilised properly - to ensure that the minimum required stocks of best-sellers were kept in on a perpetual, rolling back-order basis, it would free up so much more inventory and stock budget for a wider range of titles; and the book-buying public would respond to that, I'm sure.

And hey, I'm not immune to the attractions of a bit of the old ultra-violence myself - makes for a great mental safety-valve sometimes - just so long as it isn't taken to gratuitous extremes...

[Which reminds me, must formulate my thoughts on David Devereux's debut novel.]
Ariel on May 24th, 2007 7:08 pm

KJ:>> (sorry, your latest comment appeared whilst I was typing out my answer to Laurie...) I didn't really have a clue until my early twenties that there was this thing called literature and it tickled a different part of your brain than Dragonlance

Heh! Glad to hear I'm not the only one... :)

Although my case was even more tragic: in my mid-teens I actually stopped reading fantasy altogether, precisely because I'd read all the obvious stuff that was available in the mid-late '80s, and it was all much of a muchness (again, the tyranny of the shelf, and no Internet to broaden the horizons, remember) so clearly fantasy wasn't worth the time of day.

So for four years I pretty much only read Pratchett, despite the fact that I was an avid fantasy roleplayer (most of my reading time went on AD&D rulebooks and into creating campaigns etc.) and whilst, ironically, a full set of Dragonlance books was growing mushrooms on my Mum's 'devoured and discarded' pile (she reads trash fantasy like Dubliners drink Guinness).

It was David Gemmell's Knights of Dark Renown that saved my fantasy soul, by the way. I picked it up on a whim and suddenly I was exposed to a fantasy saga that was completely unlike the endless kiddie-quests I'd tried before. But it was still a long time before I started in on anything that you might call properliterary... I think Tim Powers' The Drawing of the Dark was probably my first real quality eye-opener.

[Come on everyone, you know you want to: "The book that got me into literary fantasy was..."]
gabe on May 24th, 2007 7:29 pm

In my own experience, both as a bookseller and as an editor of a review 'zine, I've found that almost as soon as you start to introduce the schlock-fantasy reader to a wider range of more interesting material, they begin to show a marked preference for the better stuff; craving it, even. Sure, every so often they'll want to sit down with a 700-page kiddie quest and wallow in it for a weekend, and there's nothing wrong with that.

This is a statement I can get behind 100 percent, having also worked on both sides. In the bookstore, people loved having a knowing guide to help them discover new, invigorating works. I had a lot of return customers that came to me for recommendations. Likewise, even with DisloFics, I got loads of emails thanking me for pointing out works that people just wouldn't have been aware of.

It's all about the education, baby...
gabe on May 24th, 2007 7:32 pm

[Come on everyone, you know you want to: "The book that got me into literary fantasy was..."]

This review tells the whole sordid story.
Ariel on May 24th, 2007 8:04 pm

All about the education. Never a truer word...

And, ah... Heroes Die! Absolutely wonderful stuff... should definitely have included MW-S in that initial list of alternate fantasists of choice...
Ed on May 24th, 2007 8:38 pm

[Come on everyone, you know you want to: "The book that got me into literary fantasy was..."]

Haven't read that much from within the fantasy genre as the rest of you learned folks, probably because in my formative years everything seemed to be Belgariad-a -likes. SF did, and still does, appeal to me more, even when it's just big ships battling in space.

But a few years ago I read positive reviews of Steph Swainston's Year of our War so decided to check it out and was suitably impressed. I'll admit I haven't read the follow up books yet but after that discovery I checked out George RR Martin's Game of Thrones. Thus my faith in the genre was rekindled. Still treading tentatively using, as Ariel correctly highlighted, the numerous on-line resources to get reliable opinions on what is worth spending my precious reading time on.

And don't diss the 3 for 2 offers completely. Those of us who have to buy our books do find them cost savers. Granted there is a lot of mainstream dross clogging up the piles but occasionally some good stuff does filter in, especially when you apply any new found web knowledge to the choices on offer. Only last year the whole SF/Fantasy section in Waterstones was included; that was an expensive few weeks for me I can say. Must have bought about 30 , and I was selective in my choices.
Laurie on May 25th, 2007 6:36 am

Ariel: Oh, I'm completely agreed on the matter of publishers (and television producers, ect.,) assuming the public only wants trash - it's disgusting. And also untrue. I know plenty of people who aren't exactly of the intellectual writerly crowd or anything, who take my recommendations of really great works and enjoy them immensely.

KJ: I'm not rightly sure when I came to understand the difference. I think it happened so gradually through my teens that I didn't notice that I was, er, noticing.

Really, same thing goes for what book got me hooked on literary fantasy - I don't really know. There were many things I read here and there along the way that tickled my brain and changed the way I looked at the world, until, at some point I can't put my finger on, I was consciously seeking such things out. Although I can say for sure that The Etched City was what got me hooked on the 'new weird,' specifically.
Kirsten (KJ) Bishop on May 25th, 2007 8:09 pm

The book that got me hooked on literary fantasy was either Invisible Cities, Maldoror or Viriconium Nights - I can't remember. But Viriconium Nights was the one that showed me you could introduce surrealism and the mysteriousness of real life to the genre.

Before I read those, though, there were Hugh Cooks's Chronicles of an Age of Darkness (the "W&W" books). Did anyone here read those? Fantasy, yes, with heroes and monsters, but all gritty-like, with some damn good writing - though it was an uneven series whose lesser books suffered from an encroach of silliness. But the better ones hit a sweet spot for me in terms of delivering action and reflection and in portraying the fighting man without a white hat or the protection of fate.
Ariel on May 29th, 2007 7:49 am

I always intended to read the Hugh Cook books when I was a lad but never quite got round to them. All out of print now, I assume? Might have to raid my Mum's shelves; she's bound to have a set tucked away somewhere.

Invisible Cities I read when I was probably too young to fully appreciate it, and it's one I've always intended to go back to. I have a copy of Viriconium Nights on the to-be-read shelf, and again, it's one I intend to sit down and appreciate when I have the time to do it justice.

Heh. So many books...
Kev on May 30th, 2007 10:24 am

The latest, Hugh Cook, if Amazon is telling the truth, has turned up on Lulu, originally as of feb 2006 and marked down to a sparrow's weight of its original asking price.

Not sure of the history of this. Given that some quite well known authors of yesteryear do find themselves in the wilderness in the contemporary climate, it seems quite plausible really.

I do recall, from reading Cook's books at the time of publication (80's I think most of them) a lot of quite inventive ideas married with some definite spells of clumsiness or perhaps some kind of literary haste or ill confidence in execution. It was as though Cook could have done with a collaborator to help turn the flow of ideas into a full realisation of their potential.

Having said that, I have come across more than a few pieces over the past 10 years or so that were a little pale in comparison to what Cook actually did achieve.

Interestingly, he mixed genres, but never made it exactly clear what was going on in the background that brought about the circumstance. There was some kind of forgotten or decayed advanced world that had given way, through entropy of a kind, to a more recent and devolved world of magic.

I am not sure that readers of the time quite got it, but also not sure of what they would make of it now if Cook were to burst upon the scene with a more hip way of titling the books and a bit of rap or postmodern chic mixed in their somewhere to get the new natives boogeying on down to the mix.
Ariel on May 30th, 2007 10:30 am

I think Hugh Cook is living out in the Far East (picked that impression up from somewhere, might not be accurate) and has been writing short fiction of late, rather than novel-length work. Of course, that's not to say that he hasn't been churning out best-sellers under a pseudonym or something...
The Infinite Linkness « Torque Control on June 3rd, 2007 9:16 am

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