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Author: Foz Meadows

Unempathic Bipeds of Failure: The Relationship Between Stories and Politics

Unempathic Bipeds of Failure: The Relationship Between Stories and Politics

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The Axis trilogy (published in the US as the first three novels of The Wayfarer Redemption)

Owing to recent political developments, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about politics in SFF, not just as a general concept, but in relation to my own history with the genre. So often when we talk about politics in SFF, it’s in the context of authors – rightly or wrongly, consciously or unconsciously, skilfully or unskilfully – conveying their personal views and biases through the text, the whens and hows of doing so and why it matters, depending on the context. As a corollary conversation, we also talk a great deal in personal terms about the importance to readers, and particularly young readers, of representation; the power of seeing yourself, or someone like you, in multiple sorts of narrative. These are all vital conversations to have, and to continue having as both culture and genre evolve. Yet for all its similar importance, I haven’t often seen discussions about the ways that SFF informs our concept of politics in the more institutional sense: the presentation of different systems of government, cultures and social systems within narratives, and the lessons we take from them.

Which is, to me, surprising, because as far back as I can remember, I was always aware of the role of politics in genre stories, even if I couldn’t always articulate that knowledge at the time. At the very start of high school, Sara Douglass’s Axis trilogy became my entry point to the world of adult (as opposed to YA or middle grade) fantasy. In hindsight, there’s a great deal in that series – and in the sequel trilogy, The Wayfarer Redemption – that I now find deeply unsettling, but which, as a tween, I absorbed uncritically. But at the same time, I also recognized the predatory, insular monotheism of Artor the Ploughman as a deliberate analogue to certain toxic expressions of Christianity, its displacement of and propagandising about the Icarii and the Avar reminiscent of lies told about various native populations by white invaders. I wasn’t yet literate enough to identify the racial stereotypes underpinning the Avar in particular – a dark-skinned race who claimed to “abhor” violence, yet were externally said to “exude” it – but something in that description still unsettled me; I remember feeling strongly that it was an unfair characterization in a way that went beyond the story, but couldn’t explain it any more than that.

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The Fascination of Dragons

The Fascination of Dragons

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The Flight of Dragons DVD-smallI don’t remember when I learned about dragons, but I do remember the first time they took my breath away.

I was ten years old, helping to restack the shelves in my school library while a younger class watched a movie in the next room: a cartoon I’d never seen before, but which I eventually learned was called The Flight of Dragons. As it played in the background, I gleaned that there was a princess called Melisande and some sort of dark sorcerer trying to take over the land — and then, just as the bell was ringing, I saw the dragons: a sleeping field full of them, multicolored and wise, taking flight as the evil magic was lifted.

That image struck some chord within me I hadn’t known was there. Before then, with the saccharine exception of the colorfully coiffed dragons of Lady Lovely Locks, the only dragons I’d seen in stories were evil: the monster slain by St George, Disney villains Maleficent and Madame Mim in dragon form, the fearsome mountain dragon in Emily Rodda’s Rowan of Rin.

But with this single portrayal, I suddenly realized they could be more than that: that dragons could be awe-inspiring, noble, beautiful.

Soon after, I stumbled on Graeme Base’s newly released The Discovery of Dragons, a singularly gorgeous book that only affirmed my fascination; so much so that, nearly twenty years later, I still have my original copy, dust jacket and all. Then came Falcor, the beloved luck dragon of The NeverEnding Story.

But what really sealed the deal for me was a game: the original Spyro the Dragon. Despite the fact that I didn’t have a console, I played video games compulsively whenever I visited friends who did. Thus it was that, during one fateful trip to a neighbor’s house, I discovered the demo version of Spyro and became obsessed. I’d wanted a console before, but now, the idea of not having one — of not being able to play the full game — was intolerable.

I must have been pretty persistent, because sure enough, come Christmas morning, my parents revealed that they’d been paying attention: I received both a PS1 and Spyro and spent the rest of the day playing it. As, indeed, I still sometimes do, along with the first two sequels, Spyro: Gateway to Glimmer and Spyro: Year of the Dragon — not just for the nostalgia value, but because, despite the now woefully outdated graphics, they’re still good games, full of clever puzzles and fun environments, many of which had a similarly fundamental impact on how I envisage fantasy landscapes.

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The Roots of Early Love Go Deep: Five Stories Which Affected Me Deeply in My Early Teens

The Roots of Early Love Go Deep: Five Stories Which Affected Me Deeply in My Early Teens

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Sinner Sara Douglass-smallOne of the many minor consequences of having a child – in my case, anyway – is the extent to which you suddenly become nostalgic for the stories of your youth.

As such, and even though my shelves are overflowing with new and as-yet unread books, my thoughts keep straying to stories I loved in my early teens. And not just novels, but games, films, and TV shows, too. Revisiting these narratives as an adult, however, can be something of a mixed blessing: for every thrill experienced on finding that a particular story touches me just as deeply now as then, there’s often a corresponding moment of disappointment on identifying a hitherto unnoticed, winceworthy problem.

Even so, there’s an important difference between acknowledging that the things we love – and particularly the things we first loved as teens and children – are flawed, and throwing them out entirely. We cannot wholly excise our passions without removing something vital of ourselves; instead, we must learn to live with them.

What follows here, then, in no particular order, is a slightly different list to the sort of thing I might usually compile: five stories which affected me deeply in my early teens and which continue to influence me now, sometimes without my even consciously realizing it. The roots of our early loves go deep and even though I haven’t explored some of these stories in years, as I go about revisiting them, I’m consistently amazed to find echoes of them, not only in my own work, but in my expectations for the works of others.

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Challenging the Classics: Questioning the Arbitrary Browsing Mechanism

Challenging the Classics: Questioning the Arbitrary Browsing Mechanism

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Malinda Lo Adaptation-smallOn what basis, really, do we choose the books we read?

Imagine you’re given a voucher to spend at your favourite bookstore, the value of which is sufficient that, in addition to picking up whichever must-have titles from your favourite authors you’ve been desperate to get your hands on, you’re able to grab some new things, too. The store is well-stocked, you have all day to browse, and a keen desire to spend your voucher all at once, just for the sheer satisfaction of going home with as many books as possible.

So how do you decide what to buy?

Actually, scrap that: there’s a more important question to ask first. Namely: how do you  decide what to contemplate buying? Because regardless of how much free time you have or how broad your tastes, it’s highly unlikely you’ll give equal attention to every book on offer. For whatever reason – or sometimes, given the automatic, reflexive nature of our deeper mental processes, for no real reason at all – in a sea of unknown titles and unfamiliar authors, certain works will nonetheless catch our eye. The font, the cover image, the colour scheme, the title; even the author’s name is sometimes enough to have us reaching for one equally unknown story over another, and if the blurb or first page looks promising, too, then why not give it a try? I’ve certainly bought books that way, and while the resulting purchases can be hit and miss, the act of experimentation is always fun.

But there are different gradations of unfamiliarity. Some books we flirt with over time, never quite sure when we’ll finally take the plunge, but ghosting their spines with our fingertips in the interim – a preemptory possession. Other books are so ubiquitous, their titles and themes infest our consciousness, forcing us – sometimes against our better judgement, but more often in keeping with our desire to exercise it fairly – to see what all the fuss is about. There are books we’ve heard about from trusted sources, titles we’ve seen reviewed by favorite blogs or which our friends have raved over; but also books that have caused a stir, whose reviews have been mixed or strident enough that we want to read them just to see which opinion feels right, or to join in the conversation as it happens.

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Challenging the Classics: Questioning the Immutable Hallmarks of Genre

Challenging the Classics: Questioning the Immutable Hallmarks of Genre

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The Gone-Away WorldEvery once in a while, usually in the midst of conversations about the history of SFF or arguments about its greatest works and writers, I’ll guiltily remember how few of the Classics I’ve read, and make rash promises to remedy the situation.

I know Orson Scott Card is a raving homophobe, I’ll think to myself, but I really should read Ender’s Game. In a fit of mad optimism, I’ll add various works by Isaac Asimov and William Gibson to my Amazon wishlist, only to delete them the next time I’ve got money to spend, because I just can’t muster up the interest. Friends have lent me copies of Jack Vance, Vernor Vinge, and Gene Wolfe, and each time, despite my best intentions, the books are left to molder by the bedside in favor of something by Catherynne M. Valente or Nnedi Okorafor.

It’s not like I have any moral objection to books by straight white male writers – after all, I’ve been compulsively reading and rereading both Discworld and A Song of Ice and Fire for over a decade, I’m an absolute sucker for China Mieville and Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World will forever be one of my all-time favorite novels (and that’s just for starters).

But with the genre developing in so many different directions at once, it feels needlessly regressive to pry myself away from the latest book by Elizabeth Bear or N. K. Jemisin and instead try to read, out of duty rather than passion, some decades-old novel that’s already been analysed, reviewed, and criticised ad nauseum.

Which doesn’t make them bad novels, or mean that there’s anything wrong with loving, critiquing, discovering and talking about them now. They’re just not for me, is all, and most of the time, I can live with that. But then I’ll read yet another article complaining about newcomers to SFF reinventing the wheel for lack of familiarity with the Classics, or hear someone bemoaning the fact that fantasy Isn’t What It Used To Be, and part of me starts to doubt my own credentials. Can I really call myself a fan of science fiction if I’ve never read Dune? If I let slip that I never made it past book one of The Wheel of Time, are the Geek Police going to come along and revoke my right to talk about epic fantasy on the Internet?

If I’ve never read the Classics, then how did I get into SFF in the first place?

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