Black Gate

The Zeitgeist has been tying its ectoplasm in knots lately about urban fantasy. Here’s Lilith Saintcrow, underdefining the genre in a recent guest column at Pat’s Hotlist (with a followup at her own site):

Chicks kicking ass. Well, leather-clad chicks kicking ass. Leather-clad chicks kicking ass in an urban environment where some form of “magic” is part of the world. There. That’s about it.

But that’s not all there is to it.

Certainly not, but that really may be the central genre-defining element. I was thinking about this while reading Justina Robson’s excellent Keeping It Real recently. The book kept reminding me of sword-and-planet–with the gender polarities reversed.

I was reading buckets of sword-and-planet last year (some of which I reviewed in this space) and it constantly occurred to me that the aboutness of these books is concerned with male identity: they present idealized images of the lone male adventurer. For Edgar Rice Burroughs, the idealized image was that of an immortal Virginia gentleman. For Robert E. Howard, a man somewhere midway between the barbarism he considered man’s natural state and the aspirations of human intellect. For Otis Adelbert Kline, he’s a down-on-his-luck member of the American aristocracy. For some other three-initialled author the idealized image might be somewhat different, but they share some core similarities.

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Though I’ve understood since childhood that not everybody shared my love of the fantastic, it wasn’t until quite a ways into my adult years that I realized this must be in large part due to differences in how people’s imaginations operate. One spur to this realization was an on-air comment by a local arts-and-culture talk show host that she couldn’t get into a book where things happened that couldn’t in real life (yes, a statement we could unpack at length). At the time I was observing my young son discover stories. It was clear to me that he derived some of the greatest pleasure from precisely those things that never could happen in real life. Moreover, the stories he invented to tell me from two years onward (which I wrote down whenever I could) were gleefully fantastic: night being stolen, his father putting on breasts, the street sucking our house off its foundations. From watching his friends I also was able to see that not all kids do love the fantastic equally; he was close to one end of some bell curve. When the differences show up so early, they start to look like something innate.

The term mimesis is sometimes used to describe techniques of realistic fiction–as imitation, in other words, of something that already exists. All kinds of questions occur here with regard to how people, whether adults or small children, form judgments about what real life consists of and what constitutes an imitation of it, or a violation of its principles. Many of these principles are culturally constituted. Laura Bohannon’s much-anthologized article, “Shakespeare in the Bush,” describes how the Tiv rejected Hamlet as unacceptably unrealistic, on the basis of, among other things, the motivations of nearly every character. Others arise out of an individual’s experience. For those born with synaesthesia, there would be nothing at all unreal about descriptions of numbers possessing color, or (my own case) sounds having a tactile component.

According to Wikipedia, imagination is a “term is technically used in psychology for the process of reviving in the mind, percepts of objects formerly given in sense perception.” In this view, in other words, imagination is mimetic in the purest sense–it “revives in the mind” what one has already experienced. I suspect that the psychologists initially formulating this definition shared the type of imagination described by our talk-show host. For others like my son and myself, the mind is just as prone, or more so, to gravitate to things that one hasn’t experienced, that violate the expectations and principles of real life. The Calvin cartoon in which he has to fend off an attack by his breakfast oatmeal is iconic for me in this regard.

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I was reminded of the Angeline Joline as sexy monster, 3D retelling of Beowulf, which actually was not as bad as it could have been, when I chanced upon this January 3rd interview with English professor Kenneth Tiller (there’s a download link in the right hand corner that gets you to the MP3 of the program); it’s always nice to hear an academic who sounds like a “real guy.” Of note is that his career choice in medievalist studies was an adolescent fascination with Dungeons and Dragons.

Though not strictly about fantasy, also check out the companion interview with poet David Wojahn, who reads one of his poems based on hearing a Johnny Cash/Joe Strummer duet on a cassette tape, what he called listening to two dead guys on a dead medium.

When Tolkien created the Orcs, he unleashed upon the world a blighted race that embodied the worst aspects of ourselves; a race whose name became synonymous with cruelty and hate, with savage violence and genocidal fury.  Slaves, they were.  Foul servants of fallen gods and dark lords and wizards who had strayed from the light.  But, an odd thing occurred: Orcs evolved beyond the scope of their creator.  They grew and multiplied.  Their origins and aspects changed; they infested dungeons beyond number, became the military backbone of ambitious princelings and sorcerers-who-would-be-kings, and even found their way into the Chaos-wracked depths of space.  But always they remained lackeys.  Single-minded minions.  Sword-fodder beneath our contempt.  And yet . . .

And yet, not long ago Wizards of the Coast sparked a furor when they announced that half-orcs would no longer be a core character race in the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons.  Fans wanted them to stay; some even declared that no game could bear the D&D banner and not have half-orcs.  Indeed, the past few years have seen a sort of Orcish renaissance burst upon the fiction scene: a US omnibus edition of Stan Nicholls’ Orcs, Morgan Howell’s Queen of the Orcs trilogy, RA Salvatore’s The Orc King.  But, rather than the villainous beasts typified by Tolkien, these modern Orcs have been engineered into perfect exemplars of the Noble Savage. …

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Episodic novels (or fix ups) have a bad reputation these days, and I don’t think that’s entirely undeserved. For instance, I find the individual “weapon shop” stories of A.E. Van Vogt sort of intriguing, the way Van Vogt can be intriguing before he lets you know what he’s really driving at (usually something like Tyrants Are Nice People, Really). But The Weapon Shops of Isher, based on the same stories, is a chunk of dreck by comparison, and its sequel is even worse.

Van Vogt was always mutilating his best short stories by trying to make them part of something bigger: consider the sad fate of “Black Destroyer” and “Discord in Scarlet”, welded into the bulk of an ungainly construction dubbed The Voyage of the Space Beagle. (Although that’s an awesomely tone-deaf title. One envisions an indefinite series of sequels: Bride of the Space Beagle, Son of the Space Beagle, Revenge of the Space Beagle, etc., all featuring the further adventures of the star-spanning canine suggested by the original title.)

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Clint Eastwood never starred in or directed a sword-and-sorcery or heroic fantasy movie, and since he’s declared his retirement from acting with 2008’s Gran Torino, chances are he never will. That’s too bad, since the leathery, iconic actor might have made a nice fit into certain dark fantasy worlds. Michael Moorcock thought he would have made an excellent Eric John Stark; I agree. But Eastwood as a performer and director was more interested the realistic American landscape, and he never got near the world of the overtly fantastic.

Except once. On a poster. A really damn awesome poster. From one of the legendary fantasy artists. And therein lies an interesting little tale of marketing and artwork.

In 1977, Eastwood had just come off two large financial successes: The Enforcer, the third Dirty Harry film, and The Outlaw Josey Wales, a Western that he also directed. Although both films pulled in big box-office receipts, neither got the critical establishment excited. The Enforcer was reamed—hard (“Maggoty with non–ideas,” sniped The New York Times). The Outlaw Josey Wales fared slightly better, but most reviewers dismissed it. Rex Reed remarked that it “seems to last two days. Never before has so much time been devoted to such trivia.” I have never taken Reed seriously as a critic because of this review. On the other hand, Time magazine listed it as one of 1976’s Top Ten films. Eastwood has often said that The Outlaw Josey Wales is the film of which he is most proud, and today critics and fans fawn over the movie as the masterpiece that it is. (I don’t care much for The Enforcer myself—it’s the least entertaining of the Dirty Harry movies—but The Outlaw Josey Wales sits at the top of my short list of favorite films.)

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I’ve just started the Jeff and Ann VanderMeer edited The New Weird, a kind of anthropological excavation of a genre movement earlier in the decade that many of its adherents started to disavow once they got labelled with it (bad enough to be in the sf/fantasy ghetto and then get relegated to an even more narrowed niche), about which I hope to have more to say in this space at some later time. For now, though, here’s what China Miéville said about this when I interviewed him at the height of all the debate about what constitutes “New Weird.” And, as long as I’m touting my own miniscule involvement in the discussion, here’s something else I had to say about the supposed follow-up to New Weird — The New Wave Fabulists.

For some more contemporary comment, here’s the ever-hip Paul De Filippo on the latest nominations to the sub-genre.

Excuse the short post, but I think I’ve got some reading to do…