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This Page is Half Empty: The Five Horsemen of Literary Apocalypse

This Page is Half Empty: The Five Horsemen of Literary Apocalypse

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428px-durer_revelation_four_riders1Right now, as I type this — and as you read it — I’ve got a new manuscript half done. For a writer, this is sort of like me saying that at this very moment I’m not wearing anything under all of my clothing. Well, duh, most people are thinking, while trying to not involuntarily imagine me naked. For writers, the thought continues, there’s always the current project.

The process of forging the first draft is much like any other relationship between the mind and the will. Romance, for instance. There’s the initial flare of interest, the slower “getting to know you” stage, and a much longer “I know you, now” period. These are all easy to navigate, because they are exciting and interesting. They are effortless, and writers know the feeling of a Work-In-Progress crush.

But this infatuation period cannot last. While in it, there’s always the potential that your feelings are mercurial, diaphanous dream-fluff that make no sense when you try to go deeper. To your shock, you realize that perhaps your burning love isn’t the stuff of ages, but mere puppy love. Your ardor has brought you no glamour, but instead made those around you somewhat uncomfortable, hoping, for your sake, that it will all end soon without you getting hurt too badly.

Am I just a puppy-lover? you find yourself asking.

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The Meta-Reality of Fandom

The Meta-Reality of Fandom

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Did I say I was an unapologetic geek? My wife, Amber, offered our son to a dragon at GenCon!
Did I say I was an unapologetic geek? My wife, Amber, offered our son to a dragon at GenCon!

I’m an unapologetic geek. I don’t just watch genre shows and read genre books, I immerse myself in them. The ones that stay with me, that I actually decide to devote myself to, linger with me, becoming part of the fabric of my internal world, the thought processes that help me deal with the mundane levels of reality. I analyze these cultural components, trying to pick them apart to figure out why the events unfolded the way they did and, more importantly, what I can learn from it. (For an example, consider how I found an excuse to talk about Thor on my Physics blog, using the film as a lesson in how to be a good scientist.)

Black Gate is also dedicated toward this sort of exploration, publishing not just fantasy fiction but also thoughtful commentary on the genre, in both the magazine and also on this blog. (At this point, I feel the need to point out Aaron Starr’s recent excellent post “The Gods Never Urinate,” which is an exceptional case of this.) Even on our Twitter feed, @BlackGateDotCom, we try to share as much of this sort of material as we can.

But let’s really think about what’s going on here. The genre of science fiction and fantasy, more than any other, reflect upon the fundamental nature of reality. They can do this literally, metaphorically, or (when at its best) in complex combinations of the two. So you have reality, and then you have the genre literature which is reflecting upon that reality.

And the truly motivated fans don’t just read the literature. Remember, the word “fan” comes from “fanatic.” If you don’t obsess at least a little bit, you aren’t a fan, you’re just someone who likes the show or the book. Fans go a step further, and we reflect upon the genre. We reflect in our own minds, and through the written word, both online and in print, in podcasts and vidcasts, and in person at gaming stores, comic shops, bookstores, conventions … or, let’s be honest, any time more than two of us are in contact with each other. The depth of the analysis can vary widely, of course, but that reflection on the genre is the defining trait of fandom.

Fandom is the process of reflecting upon the reflection of reality. …

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The Lord of the Rings: A Personal Reading, Part Two

The Lord of the Rings: A Personal Reading, Part Two

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The Two TowersThis is the second of three posts prompted by a recent re-reading of The Lord of the Rings. As I said in the first post, I went back to the book with the general idea of approaching it as one would a medieval saga, rather than a contemporary novel, and seeing what struck me as a result. I wrote in that post about what it seemed to suggest to me about Tolkien’s sense of character, and next week I intend to write about his use of irony — or, if you prefer, an anti-irony that shows how good can emerge out of apparent evil.

But this week I want to consider the aspect of the work which is perhaps the least saga-like thing in it, and something which has been criticised even by readers who have generally liked the book. And that is Tolkien’s depiction of landscape, and his approach to the natural world. Specifically, his tendency to describe his settings in detail.

I should say firstly that I am not one of the readers who dislikes the detail of the book. I generally prefer long books; I think the tendency to brevity is natural for stage and film dramas, but I’m not convinced it’s either natural or desirable in prose narratives like the novel or the romance. That is, the short story obviously has to be brief, and you can get certain effects from stories of certain lengths. But when you’re talking about a novel-length work, I think there are many approaches one can take; and I think that sometimes the best books are made out of digressions and an author exploring obsessions at the risk of apparent narrative shapelessness.

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The Gods Never Urinate

The Gods Never Urinate

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zeus-heraIt’s true: the gods never have to go pee.

Unless they want to, that is. But they’re never inconvenienced by it. As far as I know, never in the history of human mythology has a divine being hurried someone else along during a meeting, or interrupted some vital piece of work, to relieve themselves. Even nature deities, whom you’d image to be most in tune with this sort of bodily necessity among the living, and, presumably, have some sway over its function (or lack thereof… yow!), don’t seem to bother with it themselves.

Eating? Sure, okay.

Sex? Yes, please.

Excretion? Nothing beyond normal breathing, thank you.

And that is the true magic of deities, and why fantasy is destined, on the longest scales, to have greater longevity than science fiction. Because fantasy never gets brought down to the level of the mundane. It never misses a mark that reality has hit square. Science fiction, for all its glories, inevitably diverges from reality, and rarely for the better. We expect science fiction to be somewhat oracular, in that the technologies and situations presented remain plausible.

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The Novels of Black Gate

The Novels of Black Gate

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childoffire“Why do the review pages always seem to be full of books which no one buys and the bestseller lists full of books no one reviews?”

This was tweeted the other day by a lit. agent called missdaisyfrost and the first thing it brought to my mind was Black Gate.

Day by day, genre short fiction magazines seem to grow more literary even as their sales plummet, while BG — may I call you BG? — is one of the few to proudly assert its pulp roots and to cater to the majority of people who like, you know, something to happen in the stories they read.

So, it’s interesting that while a lot of my fellow BG buddies haven’t had stellar success in most of the Big Mags out there in the wild, many of them are now kicking ass in the real market, novels: the only place outside of Hollywood that writers can make an actual living from their craft.

The first story I ever read in the magazine was Harry Connolly‘s The Whoremaster of Pald. It totally knocked my socks off.

Nor was I the only one to suffer from sudden chills in the foot area — people raved about that story and now, years later, Child of Fire, by the same author has 108 reviews on Amazon.com, most of them equally thrilled.

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The Lord of the Rings: A Personal Reading, Part One

The Lord of the Rings: A Personal Reading, Part One

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The Fellowship of the RingWhen I first read The Lord of the Rings I was young enough that I no longer remember how old I actually was. It’s a story that seems to me to have been around forever, a part of the background from which the world was made. I reread it often, though not as often as I’d like; and I’m not sure that ‘reread’ is even the right word here, because every time I go back to it, it’s a new tale.

These are characteristics of a great book: having read it once, you’re drawn back to it again and again; and, once returned to it, you find always something within it that you did not remember. Or else you find a new way of reading it. You are not the same person and the book is not the same book; the rhythm of the plot has a more subtle balance, the imagery aligns in a new way, the characterisation acquires new significance.

I went back to The Lord of the Rings recently, in part because I had some ideas about character and setting and irony, and how they manifest in the book, and I wanted to see if they made sense. That is, I wanted to see if these ideas suggested, not so much a meaningful way to read the book, but a way to read the book to help one approach the meaning within it. I think they did, and now I want to try to work out how and why.

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Teaching Fantasy Part 1: Rewards, Backfires, Escapes

Teaching Fantasy Part 1: Rewards, Backfires, Escapes

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bgolympian“What do you do when nobody’s making you do anything?”

His parents are making him meet with me for tutoring in the first place, so why should the kid trust me? I look like any other English teacher to him. No matter what he does when he’s free, he assumes I’ll disapprove. He’ll answer with embarrassment, and be surprised when nothing bad happens.

“And what do you read when nobody’s making you read anything?”

Most of my students, boys and girls both, answer, “Fantasy.” They say that with embarrassment, too, because English teachers are famous for their aversion to fantasy.

Yet when you read around in books about teaching teenagers, or teaching writing, or the intersection of gender and learning, it’s common to find the authors lamenting that fantasy is not just a boy genre (as the reviewer Ginia Bellafante notoriously called it), but the boy genre, the only one their male students read voluntarily. Why does the education community fall into this error? Is it that the girls are able to conceal their preferences better, or that they’re able to stomach the tedious mainstream books they’re assigned better? Or maybe it’s that the kinds of fantasy novels girls prefer are less vexing to their teachers? I don’t know.

I will concede that the boys I tutor tend to be more shut down as learners, and more shut down about literacy, than my female students are. Some education writers have explored this widely observed disparity eloquently and imagined fantasy literature as one of a range of remedies for it. In Boy Writers: Reclaiming Their Voices, Ralph Fletcher implores his English teacher readers, whom he assumes will be mostly female and uniformly hostile to genre fiction, to allow their students to read and write fantasy at school. He takes particular pains to advocate for fantasy stories that incorporate violence.

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James Schmitz’s The Demon Breed: SF as a Test-bed for Living (With Women who Kick Alien Butt)

James Schmitz’s The Demon Breed: SF as a Test-bed for Living (With Women who Kick Alien Butt)

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demon-breed1I’d like to take some time to talk about the impact of simple truths and how perceptions long thought changed need regular revisits so we don’t forget. We become comfortable after tectonic changes occur that alter the landscape, so comfortable we sometimes get caught by surprise when an example of what we believed was long gone springs up before us, not nearly as banished as we’d thought. We forget, most of us.

And yes, this is about science fiction and fantasy. Really.

I collected the original run of Terry Carr’s groundbreaking Ace Specials back when they first appeared in the late Sixties. Some truly phenomenal work came out under that imprint, work still published and read today.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, Alexi Panshin’s Rite of Passage, Keith Roberts’ Pavane, The Black Corridor and Warlord of the Air by Michael Moorcock. A number of others that were influential but you have to search for them today, work by Wilson Tucker, Bob Shaw, and Joanna Russ.

Among them was a little novel by a writer not much talked about today except in certain “knowing” circles — James Schmitz. The novel was The Demon Breed and it featured a character that just riveted me.

Tough, smart, capable, a role model for anyone who wanted to grow up competent and self-assured and substantial. Nile Etland.

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Through Mordor to the Unreal City: A National Poetry Month Post

Through Mordor to the Unreal City: A National Poetry Month Post

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Today, for a little while, I remove my monster mask (sort of) and don my Purple Hat of Poetry.

Over at my new homepage, I’ve been sharing some of my poetry stock in honor of National Poetry Month. I started with a poem of mine called “Phase Shift,” that’s half upside down, and recently paired with an awesome space vortex illustration.

Now, because I can, I’m taking a series of poems gathered in my 2008 collection The Journey to Kailash and I’m running them, with accompanying audio readings, one a day on my new WordPress blog until the end of the month.

The Enchantress of the Black Gate, on learning I was doing this, asked me to write a blog entry on Poetry and Fantasy.

“Wow, that’s an immense topic,” I replied.

Cooney the Enchantress
Cooney the Enchantress

“Write it about your own relationship to it,” she said.

Okay, that I can do.

True statement: I discovered poetry through heroic fantasy.

I had no idea at the time, of course, what a curious path this would lead me down.

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Lord Dunsany and “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save For Sacnoth”

Lord Dunsany and “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save For Sacnoth”

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Lord DunsanyLord Dunsany’s short story “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth” has been called the first sword-and-sorcery story ever written. That attribution has been contested elsewhere, though. I don’t particularly intend to grapple with the question — it seems to me that genres are defined by conventions, which is to say by expectations held by a reader; whether a story fits a genre therefore depends on whether the conventions it uses are the ones that the individual reader expects, and while many stories use conventions in such standard ways that there’s broad agreement about sort of tale they are, some, like ‘Sacnoth,’ will vary in definition from person to person. But as a story, I think “Sacnoth” is worth discussing. Like most of Dunsany’s early short stories, it’s really quite brilliant.

(You can find it online here, and if you’ve not read it before I strongly urge you to give it a try.)

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