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Posts Tagged ‘the half-made world’

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.

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.