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Posts Tagged ‘fantasy’

Hackeysack, Boozeomancy, and Virtual Languages

Hobbits don’t speak English.

We read their speech in English, sure, but the language in which Bilbo et. al. talk Longbottom Leaf bears little relationship to English as spoken in Tolkien’s day, let alone ours. We read a representation of that speech in English—that’s to say, a translation. And though I wouldn’t put it past Tolkien to have a detailed grammar of Western Common salted away in his papers, he wrote his manuscripts for the most part in English. So we have pipeweed and second cousins twice removed on the mother’s side, and birthday parties and country gentlemen turning the ripe old age of eleventy-one.

Translation, done right, is brilliant and difficult, but when done even a little wrong it can break the meaning and cultural associations of the source text. My favorite example: there’s an old Chinese sport / pastime that features prominently in Ming Dynasty fiction, which most modern translations render as “football.” Now, think about Ming Dynasty football. Have a vision in your head of what that would look like? Does it feature Ming Dynasty Pele or Peyton Manning?

Yeah, well, you’re both wrong. The term translated “Football” here refers to a game in which folks stand in a circle and attempt to pass a leather ball from one to another without using their hands. We’re talking, basically, about hackeysack as played by 15th-century Chinese gentlemen. I don’t know why American translators shrink from calling a hackeysack a hackeysack—except maybe that (a) it stinks of modernity (in much the same reason you can’t name a character in historical fiction about 11th century England “Tiffany” even though people back then were named Tiffany), and (b) it summons up weird cultural associations, mostly of skinny dreadlocked barefoot prep school boys kicking the sack with weed smoke heavy on the air and Widespread Panic playing in the background. (I guess that might be Mumford & Sons these days? I AM NOT COOL.) Now, I think those cultural associations are informative and interesting, but I’m not a professional translator and apparently there’s been a consensus of translation—but the consensus means uninformed readers of translations that describe the sport as “football” will have a picture of what’s happening in the story that’s as vivid as it is incorrect.

Language is weird. And it gets weirder in subcreated or “secondary world” fantasy, in which, ostensibly, neither English nor any of the hundreds of tongues it’s mugged for grammar and vocabulary exist. Do you like your secondary-world steampunk gentlemen to wear purple ascots? Then you’d better take care that your world has a Royal Ascot Club, because that’s where the word comes from. Anyone ever eat a sandwich? Where does that word come from? What do your characters drink? Wine comes from the French, rivverrun roundabout from Latin. Whiskey springs from a Gaelic source word, lager is German, vodka’s Russian, aqua vitae is Latin rendering of the meaning of the Gaelic, aquavit has similar origins but refers to something else entirely.

And of course, the physical correlates of all these linguistic artifacts have their own cultural significance! The ascot has the social connotations it does because of accidents of history—and the same’s true of spats, the necktie, golf, swing music, slam poetry, minstrels, druids, scotch, pinstripes, sagging pants, the zoot suit, the miniskirt, blue jeans, sequins. We could try to shuffle the significance of these symbols, but it’s rare to pull this off without utterly confusing the reader. We could try to invent new symbols whole cloth, but that way lies three-page descriptions of the significance of various characters’ modes of dress. Which is great if that’s the kind of book you want to write! But it’s a particular kind of book, meant for a particular audience.

The closer we get to a modern setting, the more we have to deal with modern words and concepts and frameworks: Dumpster’s a brand name, as are Kleenex and Xerox and Polaroid. Jazz is jazz because history. It’s easy to claim we see these things as complex and contingent because the modern world is complex and contingent, but I wonder if, say, 14th century France didn’t seem every bit as complex and contingent to people who lived there. There probably would be fewer brand names, sure, but it’s not as if fashion and prejudice are original to the 20th century.

There are many ways to deal with this in writing fantasy, and they’re all right when used well. One’s to use new language for old stuff with old connotations. That’s cool, but occasionally confusing. One’s to use new language for new stuff with new connotations. That works too, though it’s so easy to mess up by creating a world that’s too simple and too complex at once. (Readers may not be amused if, once they learn the seventeen new words you’ve asked them to, they realize your culture is a stripped-down analogue of Western European medieval feudalism. Then again, they may! Certain writers can make drying paint interesting. If you can get away with this, I doff hat and ascot alike.) One’s to use old language for old stuff with new connotations, a nice trick—one of my favorite examples that works is the position-swap of haute and rest stop cuisine in Samuel R Delany’s Babel-17, in which coq au vin is simple spacer fare, while burgers with French fries and ketchup are the height of elegance. It works because it’s funny, but even such a sharp writer as Delany has to spend half a scene in a very tight book highlighting the change. Another path is just to use existing words for existing stuff with existing connotations where it works, because readers know what a suit is, and they know what a cocktail is, and you can waste a disgusting amount of time trying to explain that a Fantasy Dark & Stormy is, you know, a Dark & Stormy—time that would be better spent building character, developing conflict, accelerating tempo, deepening tension.

I do a bit of all the above, and certainly there are other methods; the final one I listed is a favorite when I’m feeling cheeky or want to cheat in a slip of smooth exposition-free characterization, but it has weaknesses. Sometimes a Gin Mule will just throw people out of a story. And I don’t mean by, you know, a mule made of gin. Though that would be theoretically possible in a fantasy novel that contained, say, boozeomancers.

Hm. Boozeomancers. (*Makes note.*)

Anyway! To my mind this is one of the core fascinations of writing secondary-world fantasy: the creation of a working language and system of social connotations distinct from our own yet within our own, a sort of linguistic virtual machine. Tolkien walked these lines very well. He knew just when his characters should say “Namarie,” and when “I ain’t been dropping no eaves, sir, honest!” Sometimes the challenge feels an awe-inspiring. Sometimes it feels like kickboxing in a straightjacket: inherently limiting and on its face pointlessly difficult. But if you can pull it off, you’ll look so damn cool.

Sacred Kingship in Fantasy (and the Wolf of Wall Street)

As a fantasy writer, I have a chip on my shoulder about monarchies.

There are good reasons for this!  It’s pretty weird for fantasy lit to embrace a form of government that, when it survives at all in the modern day, tends to fall somewhere between a charming affectation and a confusing throwback.  So many books about rightful kings and the return of a grand  sovereign who will Fix Everything.  So many destined heroes and heroines.  Blood royal by the gallon.  And to make matters worse, some fantasy novels consume hundreds of pages taking nuanced and risky political positions like “serfdom is bad” or “maybe some people who are not aristocrats would be good at governing,” which seems to me the political equivalent of singing the Welsh longbow’s praises to the 1st Infantry Division.

Now, the genre’s been veering away from this rock.  The Lies of Locke Lamorra and The Name of the Wind, both wildly successful in the field, have hardly any kings at all.  China Mieville’s fantasies engage with 19th-century through postmodern modes of oppression and government.  The Shattered Pillars is in some ways a restoration-of-the-King fantasy, but one of the central noble characters has explicitly rejected any path to the throne or to aristocratic power generally, and the other spends a lot more of the first book wanting to save his commoner girlfriend than he does thinking about Ascending to the Throne.  Karen Lord’s Redemption in Indigo isn’t concerned with medieval kingship.  Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death isn’t either, though it’s a postapocalyptic fantasy and doesn’t belong in the same category as the others I’ve listed here.  I have my necromancer-lawyers in a fantasy analogue of late-millennial capitalism.  But still, the issue of kings arises.

I’ve wrestled with this question on and off for years, and this year I ended up on a panel called Why Root for Monarchies?, moderated by Vanessa Layne.  I went in raring for revolution—and then Ms. Layne mentioned that she approached the topic from her background in Jungian analysis.

At which point a lightbulb clicked on in my brain.

Because stories are dreams, in a way.  And we are everyone in our dreams—father, mother, kitten, needle-toothed-monstrosity.  (At least, this is an interpretive framework I’ve found useful.)  When we’re writing about kings, we’re writing about ourselves as kings of ourselves.

Because we are all kings, aren’t we?  Or queens.  Reigning monarchs, whatever our gender.

By which I mean: we stand in the center of our own minds—of our awareness that fills the universe we know (by definition).  The decisions we make every day shape that universe.  When the monarch of our mind is diseased, warped, evil, then the land—the mental land, the soulscape—twists and decays.  When the monarch of our mind is just, upright, generous, and kind, the land calms, and flourishes.  Possibilities grow.  New life enters the world.  Nothing can live in the land of the evil king because the evil king allows nothing to live there—nothing surprising, nothing beautiful, nothing that can flourish or transform or challenge.  The good king welcomes, and so allows growth, transformation, and the full richness of the world.

So a certain kind of spiritual kingship story can be profoundly democratic.  Most of our talk about the Campbellian monomyth and mystic kingship misses this critical point: if the monomyth is an initiation ritual, it’s a ritual which all members of society must undergo.  It’s not something special, a secret marker for kings or tribal leaders; all adults of the tribe walk this path.  To reach adulthood is to be Luke Skywalker, or Arthur, or Aerin-sol.

And when I say all members of society I do mean all.  Monomyth discussion can get weird and gender-essentialist for historically contingent reasons—but I don’t see anything gendered about the need to achieve generative agency in our own minds and lives.

This same kind of logic shows up in Vajrayana Buddhism, too—tantric meditation refigures the adept as an enlightened divine being in the center of a mandala-palace.  Every single adept.  Initiations are large ceremonies: thousands of people are all being told at once, “Envision yourself as a divine being at the center of the universe.”

So, am I giving monarch-apologist fiction a free pass?  No.  The spiritual self-rule I’m talking about (which by the way also plays nice with Christian theology; if you think what I’m describing sounds awfully prideful I humbly submit to you Augustine’s discussion about standing upright in The City of God, not to mention Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor scene from Bros. K) is the absolute reality; secular kingship is the shadow that reality casts on the cave wall.  To play in this territory, stories need to guide the reader away from the shadow, to the reality.  To make Arthur a secular Christ, storytellers gave him a mystic birth, a wizard advisor, draconic signifiers, a magical sword, tragedy and destiny and the Holy Grail and Green Men and all the like precisely because these things were weird.  These are symbols that Arthur exists in the realm of the sublime, of the archetype—White’s “Island of Gramarye” where you and I shall fare.

The funny thing is, because of their success, these same symbols have become so common as to be seen to define a world in which they make sense.  Rather than pointing us away from the cave wall, they posit another cave wall with a slightly different topology and physics.  When the reaction to the phrase “this is a magic sword” is not a feeling of wonder and awe—of being invited into the sublime by an object’s presence— but instead the question “is it more, or less, magic than that guy’s magic sword?” then I think it’s safe to say we’re back from the clouds and rooted once more in the mundane world, no matter how many wizards are whizzing about.

I don’t mean that rules-based high fantasy cannot evoke the sublime; it just has to evoke the sublime in such a way as to signify that something outlandish is taking place even by the standards of an outlandish world.  The Lord of the Rings does this well.  So does Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry.  So do Ursula K LeGuin’s Earthsea books—Earthsea’s magic is systematized, but by pressing around its edges LeGuin turns us again and again to the sublime.

And, of course, it’s possible to deal with these questions without any literal monarchs whatsoever!  Which brings me to The Wolf of Wall Street.

Wolf presents two opposed versions of adult manhood: Jordan Belfort, introduced riding a white Porche getting a blow job from his supermodel wife, and Patrick Denham, the FBI agent investigating Belfort for fraud.  Belfort’s character is presented as a secular monarch of US culture.  He has the castle, the millions, the everything.  Denham wears a decent suit, and rides the subway to work.  His scenes are tinged a slight gray, with washed-out colors.

Wolf of Wall Street, I think, is a brilliant depiction of the Wasteland of the Evil King.  In Belfort’s world, no one is old.  In Belfort’s world, no one is wise.  In Belfort’s world, there are no black people except for his female housekeeper.  In Belfort’s world, women exist entirely for sex and money laundering—and (this is my favorite bit) he’s not even any good at the sex!  Sexuality defines his physical life and the few times we see him get busy, he’s horrible at it.  Like, fourteen-year-old-boy-in-back-of-Dad’s-Camero, “um-shit-where-does-this-bit-go” horrible.  And at the apex of Belfort’s anti-initiation, the moment of grail-finding in a spiritual kingship narrative?  He finds his Grail, the ur-Quaalude, consumes it and transforms into an infant, unable to speak or walk or even crawl, in one of the best sequences of physical comedy I’ve ever seen in a movie.  For all the lushness of his surroundings, he inhabits a blasted land.  (Come to think, he’s just as bad at drugs as he is at sex!)

The few scenes which we don’t see through Belfort’s eyes we see (with one brief exception) through Denham’s—and these are the only scenes where the movie shows us women who aren’t airbrushed supermodels.  Near the end, we join Denham on the subway; a silent, unsensational minute or two of film in which he reads the paper, sets it down, and sits alongside the usual inhabitants of a New York subway car, old and young, of a range of body types and skin colors and styles of dress and affect.  No one talks, but they are there, being themselves.  No one needs to serve anyone.  The scene transcends in just how uncanny it feels, how different: how much it shows Belfort’s fantasyland for the husk it is.  Denham is the sacred king.  Belfort is doomed to himself.  And the film’s last shot indicts us for how hungry we are for secular kingship, and how little we understand the sacred variety.

In sum: the Monarchies panel reminded me of a symbolic role kingship plays in stories that I’d forgotten.  The role is complicated, though, and it’s not about kingship so much as initiation, ascendancy, and adulthood—about becoming.  Shiny hats might help get the point across, but shiny hat and throne are only trappings of a deeper reality.  The reality deserves our striving.  The trappings don’t deserve much at all, really.

—-

(All that said—I had an awesome time at Arisia.  Great panels, great questions, great thought.  Still recovering, but that’s to be expected.  Thanks to the whole con team, and especially to Shira Lipkin, who organized the Literary track!)

 

Teresa Frohock on Miserere, Religion, and “Woerld”-Building

Teresa Frohock’s first novel, Miserere, was released in late June, and to celebrate, she’s touring the blogosphere, answering questions about the novel, her process, and her world.  Miserere’s concept intrigued me because of the way it combines real religions with a fantastic environment–the garrison universe of Woerld, where chosen warriors from many faiths stand against the encroaching powers of darkness.

I come at religion in my work from a different angle, but as a lover of comparative myth and a child of two divinity school graduates, I couldn’t resist asking:

“How did Woerld, and your fantastical characters and creations, end up anchored in real traditions?  When writing, did you ever find yourself torn between the internal logic of your story world and that of the traditions and religions featured in it?”

Here’s Teresa’s answer:

Hey, Max, I’m really glad someone finally asked that.

It really didn’t start that way. It was a long, slow process based on logistics and the butterfly effect, I’m afraid.

Originally, I thought the Katharoi would be like time-traveling wardens to bring escaped demons back to Hell. Then I realized they wouldn’t just be running willy-nilly all over the place, there would have to be some sort of structure to the whole affair. So I created the bastions.

The bastions started out as universities, military academies, but then I realized the different groups would maintain the rites and ceremonies unique to each religion. There was no way to combine them all and have something recognizable.

And I had another reason: I think each religion has something very unique and beautiful to offer its adherents, and to merge them all into one giant religion would lose those distinctive qualities. So I chose to express their commonalities by showing their differences.

Writing Miserere made me realize how little I knew about Christianity. I mean, I knew the basics, but not the history of Christianity, the angelology, the demonology, or Gnostic Christianity and how it all fit together. It was like a whole new world had been opened up to me.

As I researched, I realized there was just a goldmine of legends that never made it into the Bible in addition to recently translated ancient texts on heaven and hell that rendered worlds beyond our imagining. This material was as vibrant as Celtic, Hindu, and Buddhist themes.

As to your second question, I did find myself torn many times. I want to emphasize that Woerld is not a utopian society at all. The Seraphs (or leaders) of the various bastions maintain a constant balancing act between the enduring interests of their doctrines and their need to hold back the Fallen. The bastions can (and will in future novels) experience some of the same frictions they experience in our society. It is inevitable.

No, they’re not all going to get along all the time. I want to keep it real.

However, how the Seraphs and members overcome those differences is what separates Woerld from Earth. Without fundamentalists screaming, they listen to one another. They debate, but they do not argue. There is a great difference between the two, because debate, genuine debate requires that you listen to the other person’s point of view.

The difference between Woerld and Earth is that in Woerld, there are times they must agree to disagree and move on.

Meanwhile, here on Earth, we’re bludgeoning one another to death with doctrine and words.

And so it goes …

Read a summary of and excerpt from Teresa’s novel Miserere, and check out her book trailer, after the jump!

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American Fantasy and The Half-Made World

I’m grooving on Felix Gilman’s The Half-Made World – grooving is absolutely the correct word.  This is the closest thing I’ve found yet to my vision of authentic American high fantasy.  Gilman takes as his point of reference not 14th century hierarchical societies, but cowboys, Indians, and the railroad.  It’s not “Weird West,” because the world is not our own; the signs and signifiers bear as much relationship to those of the mid-19th century west as the Rohirrim and the Dunedain bear to actual medieval European forces, and as such, the book is both an excellent story and a crowbar for breaking open the shells of myth we’ve built around these signs.  Self-mythologizing, and self-deception, are all through this book, but at the same time, these aren’t uniformly negative forces.  Heroes can be evil; righteous men can be stultifying; enlightened psychologists can be drug addicts.  This doesn’t change the fact that they are, at least on occasion, heroic, righteous, and enlightened.

My favorite small touch here is the religion called the “Smilers,” a Quaker-ish faith with no content other than well-intentioned frontier optimism.  No mystical content, just the vague sense that if you keep smiling, and working hard, things will always come out all right for you.  The story drives home the extent to which, while these are all fine things to think, they aren’t quite enough.

I have no idea how things are going to end (there are 100 pages left), but for now, I’m loving this book.

Flying

Nothing convinces me that I live in a fantasy setting quite so much as the fact that I can wave a piece of plastic at a glowing pane of glass and then, a week later, be flown from one side of the country to the other in the belly of a great metal bird.

What’s in a Fantasy?

Still reading Iron Dragon’s Daughter, and still impressed, though reading this book is like walking down a winding tunnel into a mountain: the further in you go, the darker it gets.  Maybe it breaks through into the light, but I’m not optimistic.  The light at the end of the tunnel, as Metallica said, might just be a freight train coming your way.

Poking idly around the internet for information on Michael Swanwick, I found an excellent 1999 interview with the website Infinity Plus, which touches on some of my biggest concerns about Fantasy as practiced on this side of the Atlantic.  Here’s a pull quote from Swanwick about IDD:

Consciously, I was trying to write a fantasy that was true to my upbringing and experience. When I went to Ireland in 1982, I saw castles and stone circles and fairy rings and the like for the first time, and they were none of them anything like how I’d imagined them! It seemed to me, then, that Americans had a lot of nerve writing Fantasy, when so many of the essential elements were alien to us. So when I came up with the image of a changeling girl forced to work in a factory, building dragons, I recognized it as an opportunity to utilize the kind of environments I knew and had grown up with: factories, and garbage dumps, and malls and stripper bars, and to invest them with a kind of faerie glamor, which would in turn comment fruitfully on the world we have.

For the last 7 years I’ve been thinking, talking, and writing about what Swanwick says there: elf-circles, castles, and hereditary nobility are all beyond our native experience as Americans.  We have privilege (mountains of it), and power, and authority, and a horrible history of slavery and discrimination, but we’ve never had dukes other than Duke Ellington, and our Kings are Elvis, Martin Luther King Jr, Nat “King” Cole, and Emperor Norton I.  At the same time, it’s hard to find a figure in English history and popular thought to compare with John D. Rockefeller, or William Hearst.  When I read American fantasy about European or French-style hereditary aristocracies, I start to feel as if a strange Orientalism, or something like it (Occidentalism?), is operating under the surface.

Which is not to say those books are bad – just that I feel there’s something complex at their core.  It is, however, nice to see many modern US fantasists setting their tales in US cities, and to hear about books like Felix Gilman’s The Half-Made World, which use the mythology of the Old West, rather than some subconscious memory of medieval Britain, as a jumping-off point.

Fantasy, Magic, and Power

Over at Alyssa Rosenberg’s they’re reading through Perdido Street Station, and some of the conversation’s turned around rules of magic, and to what extent they should be clear in a fantasy.

This has me thinking about knowledge and power.  Lots of modern fantasies, especially of the epic genre, are about the hero learning the ropes of some magical system — going to school, as it were.  In some cases (Harry Potter) the kid has lots of teachers and a structured curriculum; in some cases (Wheel of Time) the main character is mostly self-taught or home schooled, with the occasional tutor.  Still, their power scales directly with their knowledge of the rules.

Modern education’s a lot like this.  I had the time as a child to develop language skills, writing style, physical skills, even a bit of computer knowledge.  Then, in college, I had more time to figure out (poorly) how this fit into history, politics, economics.

Now, lots of this stuff I could have learned with a good public library and a lot of free time.  I wrote so much more on my own than I ever did for school.  But having that much free time, and parents & a community who respected it, is a mark of privilege.  My parents were both prep school teachers, which meant that we didn’t have much money, but our living conditions were stable and we had a lot of free time — never underestimate that.

In my fantasy writing now, I’m trying to write stories with a broader, more democratic range of central characters.  However, the Craft, which is how people talk about magic in this world, is very much like the practice of law in our universe.  Like law, it requires practical knowledge passed on through universities and professional training.  This builds a class element into the world’s structure, and three-quarters of the way through the second book I’m still working out the consequences of that.

In Three Parts Dead, the first novel in this sequence, my main character was a Craftswoman; even though she was born into a lower-middle-class landed farming family, she’s still a member of a privileged sorcerer class by virtue of the education she received.  The central character in the new book is not a Craftsman, coming as he did from an activist family which had a very troubled relationship with the Craft and its practitioners; in his career he’s surrounded by Craft but doesn’t quite understand it, which makes this novel much closer to horror than the previous one, given his lack of control.  Still, his family had a good bit of privilege under the old order, before the rise of Craftsmen.  I don’t think I’ve made my position much better.

There’s a longer essay here.  Still, I like the project of exploring a fantastic world and thinking about class & politics.  At the very least, self-critical reflection might expose preconceptions I don’t want to have, and help me reshape them.  Let’s see.