Aetheric Ephemera: The Edifice of the Self Edition

No blogging this past week because I have been writing my ass off elsewhere:

1) My new Apex blog post, which did not get much attention, although my editor loved it. I like the idea of the Paradox Continuum as a metaphor for how fantastika is looked at as a genre with both adoration and scorn. I hope to write more about it in the future.

2) I get my lit dork on in my latest SF Signal column. Hal Duncan responded with some good observations and pointed me to his work on the subject, which is intriguing and productive (I also liked this piece by him quite a lot). I'm going to explore the novum idea more in next week's column and see if I can either wring some utility out of it for fantasy or figure out more of its problems.

3) I also posted a long review of Jeff VanderMeer's Monstrous Creatures. I highly recommend the book for its combination of insight and evocative observations.

4) I have a few things in process. I just submitted a guest blog to Bryan Thomas Schmidt which should be up on Monday. I am finishing a review that should be up at Functional Nerds in the next several days, and reading two more books for review. And I added another thousand words to what is becoming a novella. Little fox child has a bigger story to tell than I thought!

5) In other news, Diana Wynne Jones has died. If anyone demonstrates the effect of children's fantastika on creative folk, it is her. Many writers fondly remember escaping into her books. I never thought of her as an influence, but as more people talk about her work her effect on the collective imagination is obvious. It underscores for me the importance of good children's literature for our own children.

Aetheric Ephemera: I Love Everything Edition

1) I have a new column up at SFSignal. It's about why I adore made-up stuff. I conclude that:

"It is a love that constantly reminds us that we are given all of the world, and always in exile, but that we can choose to engage nothing, to not sit at the table and just listen to our hearts beat, but to open them again and again, and gain sustenance, joy, and maybe even a few glimmers of wisdom from taking that leap of imagination into what isn't, but we wish could be."

2) I am going to guide the discussion of this month's Apex Book Club. We'll be talking about The Apex Book of World SF, edited by Lavie Tidhar. I'll have more specifics and a link once I am on a computer that does not arbitrarily shut down the web browser. But I suggest that folks are interested check out the free story at the book link, and also take a gander at The World SF Blog. There may be a quiz at some point. Just sayin'.

3) Over at Grasping for the Wind there's a guest post entitled "Science Fiction is Ridiculous," by David Goodberg. The title is pointedly provocative; what he discusses is how to distinguish SF beyond the idea of technological speculation, of how to separate SF from being just a thriller or drama with a tweaked setting. His thesis is that SF should be "ridiculous" and "extreme," a "new twist on the familiar." But it's difficult to see the distinction he is making because of the brevity of his discussion.

As an example he uses the film My Dinner with Andre, if it "actually took place on a distant planet and all characters were robots." But this is a straw-man argument: if that film had those elements, wouldn't the story be different? Why would those elements be there? It's true that the completely arbitrary addition of SF trappings is ludicrous, but it's unclear what his idea of ridiculous is implicated with the idea that "Science Fiction is a statement. It's a satire." What is the satirical statement being made, and what is being ridiculed in the process? I'm not sure that this notion opens up SF and moves it beyond the narrow idea of Orson Scott Card's that he invokes at the start (which seems truncated from a somewhat different idea that others quote).

In fact, it seems pulled down by Card's distinction, whether using the real/unreal comparison or the more precise idea of how rules work within the broader genres. While SF often utilizes speculative/extrapolative science based on current knowledge, unreal things can certainly happen. We know very little about alien biology, but people generally do not disallow SF about aliens from the canon because none currently exist. The rules distinction works a little better until you realize that some SF works to bend and sometimes break the rules in speculative fashion, while some fantasies have very specific rules (see Blake Charlton's invocation of "hard fantasy"). Both genres are fantastic, as all literature is, no matter how hard it strives to represent reality. The differences are often in the tropes, conventions, intentions, and types of knowledge used to give them a foundation. I like the initial idea of exploring what might be ridiculous in SF, but it needs more unpacking.

Angles of Vision

A quick post as I work and take little breaks to flesh out the new SFSignal column:

My new post is up at Apex. I did tack back towards a response to the whole morality argument (which is not really about morality, methinks). I tried to write something critical, but thoughtful, and I think it works.

As several friends have noted, ::headdesk:: inducing opinions bout fantastic literature continue to proliferate. Steve Davidson over at Grasping for the Wind discusses "Why I Don't Like Fantasy," and concludes:

"Where I see Science Fiction as pointing the way forwards to possible (better) futures, I see Fantasy as the true escapist literature. Escapist in the sense of not being willing to engage in the here and now. Hiding in more pleasant make-believe worlds rather than looking for solutions."

While I appreciate that he (unlike Grin and "Theo") makes it clear that this is a personal opinion, and not some attempt to impose his own perspective on others, this summation really bugged the shit out of me. Not because there is no truth to it, but because it once again paints an enormous range of creative endeavors with one sullying hue. As several commenters pointed out, SF is also fantastic literature, and all fictions are just that, fictions. Some aspire to more realism, or naturalism, or try to follow certain rules more closely, but at the end of the day they are all fantasies, and quite honestly, all of them provide some form of distraction from the world around us. They may teach us things, and may try to ground the story in "the real world," but all of them are figments of our imagination.

What really grinds my gears is this sudden wave of people jumping on fantastic literature for being either socially deviant or decadent, or being too "unreal." There seems to be a need to either impose rules upon fantasy or argue that it's, essentially, too imaginative. Both perspectives imply that there is some flaw or deficiency in "fantasy" as a category that opens it up to corruption or excessive fancifulness. Because exercising creativity is dangerous, leading to moral decline and diverting mystification.

In both indictments, there is a poverty of evidence and an extravagance of oversimplification. These broad indictments rely on generalized hyperbole and stereotypification of the genre category. And they seem to stem, moreso from the morality argument, from an anxiety or concern about the potential boundlessness of vision in fantasy fiction. as if getting too far away from "reality" unmoors the reader from it. There is a disquiet about the power of imagination, as if the reading of a book will result in contamination or some sort of perverse enchantment that takes the reader away from the real and the moral.

Again, I think the arguments of folks like Grin and "Theo" are much worse, but both arguments also rile me because they think that this enticing malignancy is not just within fantasy, but an effect of society that fantasy helps us fall prey to with its alluring excesses. Is fantasy literature really that powerful, that it can send souls spinning away from the physical and social actualities that the reader is part of as a human being? Is it really simultaneously a blasphemous attraction and an inseparable reflection of society?

The truth is, there is not an "it." The breadth and variety (and definitional instability) of fantastic literature makes such a reduction dubious. What writers intend, what they produce, and how it is received cannot be handily condensed like that, unless you consciously ignore the vastness (in several senses of the word) of the field. Reduction is only possible with the most egregious abstraction of the idea of fantasy from the teeming literatures associated with it. That condensation not only unhelpful, it is unwise.

Updates! Opinions! Tomfoolery!

1) My second (and apparently more controversial) column went up on SFSignal on Thursday. I am a bad blogger. . . .

2) My new Apex column went live yesterday. Very reflective. I really need to do a review roundup soon so that I can say more about Dark Faith and why, despite the unevenness of the stories in it, I found it to be a stimulating read.

3) The discussion topic in fantastika right now appears to be whether the term "speculative fiction" is useful or not. It started on the Coode Street podcast and has been discussed by Cheryl Morgan and now (with more depth and a pile of comments, including a few from me) by Cat Valente. I come down, unsurprisingly, on the "side" of fantastika as an umbrella term. "Spec fic" and "speculative fiction" are terms that I have used sometimes in the past, but I have abandoned them for either my preferred umbrella term or for something more specific. As I said on Cat's blog, genres are imperfect representations and subject to contestation. I wonder if it's worth writing a column about this?

4) I am reading and writing a lot. In addition to the columns I am working on two stories at the moment, and once February comes I am going to get back into the novel. Can't wait to start getting rejection slips.

A Few End-of-Year Thoughts

With the closing of the calendar year comes many things. First, my final Forces of Geek column. After over 18 months in residence, it was time to move on. I really enjoyed writing the column, and I think I wrote some good ones (and a few, well, OK ones), but I felt a bit like the oddling out there, sandwiched between TV show discussions and viral videos. I am very appreciative for Stefan's support, however, because the column got me back into writing.

It was the confidence I gained from writing that column that made me take up Jason Sizemore's invitation to write for the Apex Book Company blog, where I had the, ahem, honor of writing the the Christmas Day entry this year. A totally random honor, you understand, but it made me think about celebrations, stories, and endings. I tend towards the dark and critical perspective on some things, and I tried to write something a bit brighter, but still smart. It was a bit of a challenge and a lot of fun to write.

And now I am moving on to something bigger, in three senses. First, I will soon be the newest columnist for a website that is much more my cup of tea than FoG. It should be set up by the New Year, and I am extremely excited to be writing for these folks. Second, I am at the critical point in writing my novel, just over the 50K mark, and I have had an avalanche of ideas come crashing down on my head, and I am currently digging my way out of the pile and figuring out how to put all of this material together in a strong narrative edifice. Third, I will have two stories ready to send out after the first of the year, perhaps three if I can get past my thinking that it's "not my kind of story."

I am writing more, and more seriously, now than ever. It is so gratifying to be doing the work, even if I still need to work on consistency and discipline a bit more. For the folks who read this wee blog, and my work, and for the support and comments you have sent my way, thanks. 2010 was difficult, but productive, and I look forward to 2011 being much better in every way.

The Magic of the Update

1) Still NaNoWriMoing, still behind. But I am at about 34K, so I may not make the magic 50, but I have been more consistent and inspired in the past month than, well, almost ever. Making the time is difficult, but the experience has been rewarding and heartening. The trick will be to keep at it after November 30.

Once it's over, I am going to put the novel aside and take a hard look at my short fiction. I have one story that needs editing, one that needs finishing, and three that are in the foetal stage and are screaming to be born. I would like to start submitting pieces (finally!) after the holidays, and start racking up the piles of rejection slips. I am, weirdly, looking forward to it.

2) I did my usual Apex and Forces of Geek posts. I really like the former, and want to get more into it. The latter was a bit rushed, but I would love to expand it.

3) I just finished re-reading Jo Walton's Farthing, which is a fine piece of literature and one of the best alternate-history novels I have ever read. I recommended it in my "Diabolical Dozen" guest post over at Culinary Carnivale and just had to go read it again. It's so well done that I forget that I don't like the sort of novels it is based upon, the dreaded "country-house mystery."

I am nearly done with Haunted Legends, the new anthology edited by Ellen Datlow & Nick Mamatas. Holy carp it's good! This is for me the best anthology of the year, because it fulfills the promise of the title in unexpected ways, and the authors write stories that are soulful, visceral, and that find the truths of life in the legends they use as their inspiration. Even the few stories that I did not like I still admire for their writing. I will definitely be putting up a longer review once I finish the last few stories.

Rounding Up Them Doggies

Lots of writing going on:

1) New Forces of Geek column. Some rambling about NaNaWriMo.

2) So, yeah, I am participating in NaNoWriMo this year. I am working on some background stuff and a very basic plotline in the days running up to the start of the marathon. Check out my profile there and feel free to "buddy"me.

3) I decided to work on a sword-and-sorcery idea after writing my latest Apex column. A brief exchange with Will Shetterly gave me not only an idea for a longer column about S&S, but also made me think of a story idea I have been banging around for awhile, and NaNoWriMo is a good place to get the guts of it out onto the virtual page. Michael Moorcock's Wizardry and Wild Romance was also an inspiration for this project. I will have to write a review of that soon, mostly to get some of the insights I gleaned from it into better form for further cogitation, and to argue with some of the ideas I did not agree with in his essay.

The working title of my project is A Crown of Crusted Blood. Here is the initial blurb:

The Dread Shepherd Gromkidach is dead, and the Bound-Lands have been freed by a band of revolutionaries who must now figure out how to bring peace to the Lands while dealing with the fragments of empire left in his wake (as well as rival rebels eager to capitalize on the chaos). As one of them decides whether to take up the Shepherd's Mantle and the Scarlet Crown, the rest of the band must decide how to deal with a rigid society in turmoil and an ancient, corrupted alliance held together only by old magics, fear, and entrenched traditions.

I'm sketching out some of the contours of said society, nailing down characters and establishing a basic progression for the story. The WIP I posted earlier is a possible opening for this work. I've started reading Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland , by William Ian Miller, which has some useful insights into the workings of law without an elaborate state apparatus. I'm thinking about ways to create a polity that is not the usual Empire; in this case, the Bound-Lands, a group of allied and subjugated communities and peoples who are "protected" by the Shepherd (who was not always "Dread"). I am also considering how my little band of revolutionaries succeeded in toppling him, and what immediate ripples this would create in the political and social fabrics.

That is as much fun as writing the story for me. I'm pretty juiced about writing this story.

I Did A Thing. . .

. . . over at Apex today. They were looking for an extra post, and boy howdy did I give it to them. 1600 words later, I overexplained the idea of postmodernism and its relationship to fantastic literature. I am sure that it will not be hard for people to take my definition (and contentions) to task, but then again, that's pretty postmodern. . . .

Given the flexibility of postmodernism, and the difficulty of defining it, I think I did a good job. We'll see if the two authors whose ideas I discussed feel the same (or if they even give a crap). While I agreed with VanderMeer that Sanderson's essay was problematic, I thought that the misconception that suffused Sanderson's use of the terms was partly a result of trying to simplify ideas that are all about resisting simplification. But I found Sanderson's contention that the new generation of fantasy authors are trying to retask essential tropes and conventions to make more interesting stories to be a valuable idea worth more consideration, and thus I could not dismiss his essay out of hand, which some commenters (including VanderMeer himself) seemed to do.

What bothered me about both initially was how they naturalized and immediately decoupled postmodernism as a literary mode from the larger history and insights of postmodernism (as the discrete movement to historicize the problems of modernism). It looks like "postmodern literature" itself has done this by being codified into a combination of meta-genre and subdiscipline of critical writing. Both defined it implicitly as integrated into the wider literary landscape, which is the case to some extent, but which still misses the point. Just because a term has been appropriated or modulated in literary discourse does not mean it has lost all connection to its past, or its more incisive potential to influence the present.

Having said all this, I have to say that I am a tentative postmodernist myself; it's the anarchist in me I'm sure. It and deconstruction are so open to abuse and misinterpretation that I embrace some of its ideas while not using all of its methods. Regardless, more precise use of these terms, and more reflective understandings of what they signify and question, are necessary to having better conversations on how literature works, and how writers and readers can improve their interaction with the texts that compel our attention and invigorate our imagination.

Edit, 9/15/10, 9:55PM: I just posted a longish response to Jeff's concerns over in the comments section of the essay, but I wanted to reproduce it here to cover Jeff's comment here as well:

Jeff: It was absolutely not my intention to take your words out of context, or to give offense with this essay. The point was to discuss what I believe is left out of conversations on postmodernism in fantastic literature, in a very germinal formulation. My response to your piece, in retrospect, was less well-developed than to Sanderson’s, and also hyperbolic in its characterization. I was not trying to misrepresent what you said, because there was resonance there with what I was heading towards in my piece, but I was making the point, perhaps in too limited and unreflective a fashion, that the focus on technique missed some aspects of a postmodern standpoint that I think need more consideration.

My objective was not to denigrate what you were saying, but to proceed farther with it. I did miss the important distinction you highlight regarding your comment on elitism, which I am happy to correct in the piece. I think some rather excessive language and not enough attention to your post as a whole weakened what I was trying to in that section of the piece. So yes, I think we are pretty much on the same page, I just needed to make that clearer and use more positivist discourse than deconstruction. :-)

As for the observation that I did not take comments into account, that is quite true. I did not get into comments from either post because I wanted to focus on the two essays themselves, and talk about the interplay between them. It is obvious from the erudite avalanche of comments on your site that a very rich conversation is taking place, which is precisely what I was talking about at the start of my piece. The engagement that you started, and that I was working to extend, has flourished into a muscular exchange of ideas. Thanks for getting that going, and for inspiring this essay.

They Are Two, and They Are New

Just wanted to let folks know that both my Apex and Forces of Geek posts are live. They are a bit related, both worrying at an idea that I want to examine more thoroughly. Enjoy!

Two! Or Three! Or Maybe More!

I just finished my latest Forces of Geek column, for your enjoyment. It put me in mind of this little bit of fiction I wrote some time ago:

"The Wonders"

She lay there on the ground, breathing deeply, sifting the alien sand through her fingers.

Why doesn't this atmosphere hurry up and kill me, she thought, taking another deep, rattling breath.

The shuttle lay nose-buried in a dune with colorful featherlettes protruding from its dome. No dust had settled; rather, little fey motes had streaked away from it in terror until it stopped groaning, and now clustered on the crumpled landing gear.

Well, her lungs were about to seize up. About time, she thought.

She was tired of it; tired of all the wonders. Her eightieth exploratory landing, her twelfth planet discovered. And still her bones were tired, and she couldn't get a date, and her dog had died a hundred years ago.

Racing light is for suckers, she thought. Fuck the wonders! C'mon already, oblivion!

"What is this. . . oblivion?" something said in her ear.

"Buddha wept in a cantina!" she shouted. She leapt to her feet, coughed, and her knees buckled. Man, she thought, if there were more chlorine in the air, this would all be over. . . .

There was nothing there but a voice, perhaps a twinkle in the air. Hallucinogens in the atmo; great! Now she could sink into delusion before she died; that should make it easier. . . .

"You will not transition," the voice said carefully, as if language was something new and delicate to manipulate. "You cannot achieve your goal of discorporation here."

Hell I can't, she thought. Her lungs were blazing and her pulse fluttering. It sure felt like dying. . . .

"No, our world will adapt to you momentarily. Your form will not lose your essence." A pause, and then, like an invocation. "It is so."

With one last rattle, her breathing cleared. She felt something surge through her bloodstream. The sky went from off-pink to a faint, faint blue. The featherlettes danced in a sudden light breeze, and the fey motes shifted in their swarming and their lights dimmed.

Crap, she thought. Please, I would just like to die.

She felt a presence shake its head. "I am apologetic, but no. You must earn your end here."

She felt the presence fade. The sun shone brightly, and off to her left, the featherlettes wilted, and something like an apple tree began to spring up.

Fuck the wonders, she thought. Maybe I can hang myself from it in a couple of days.

My Apex blog contribution is also up, on time! An exciting two-parter! I was trying to find out what had been said about this idea before, and could not find very much. I found a lot of material on time-travel, but that's not what I want to talk about. My goal is to explore the idea of time (and of being-in-time) and how that differs between science fiction and fantasy. If anyone has seen any writing on this, please let me know.

In other news, my entry into the Great Cephalopod Contest was a sad failure. Well, I still like it! I guess it was too Cthulhuan for Mr.VanderMeer's taste.

Onward! Next up: a revision, an expansion, and a new story for an anthology.

Apex anew!

So, my blog post for Apex last month was just posted. Comments are encouraged.

Having just re-read it, I find myself wanting to explore this idea in more depth after some of the panels and conversations I engaged in at Readercon this past weekend. I will be writing more about that over the next week or so.

Quick!

I have a few announcements:

---My monthly Apex bloggination is up. It is about one of my favorite things, something that I believe is critically important to SF as a creative genre and as a community. There's more to say about it, certainly, but that is for later. For now, read, comment, pass it on.

---I am now Networked Blog. Please follow/like/stalk me. After I get 7 followers I get more exposure, which would be fab. But adding a photo costs $5/month. Urk.

---Working on my FoG column, after an emotionally tough day. Trying to make it light and fun. I will post it up as soon as it goes live.

Time Passing

I apologize for the lack of writing in this blog for the past month. It has been a humdinger of a time for me, and I have woefully neglected this blog. I hope to return to it soon, with more vigor and joy (and quantity of posts) than before.

For now, here is some recent writing for folks to check out: my latest Forces of Geek column, and last month's Apex blog piece. Enjoy!

Oh,Yeah, That.

I am working on something for SFSignal's Mind Meld at the moment, but as I was reading a few previous posts here to remind myself of a point that I wanted to make, I realized that I had never put up the link to my Apex blog post! You can find it here. I am quite happy with it, and I would like to write at greater length about this idea in the future.

Juggling ideas for the next Forces of Geek column, and squirreling away scenes for fiction projects, unfortunately at the same time that I am trying to finish the piece I need to finish today! Writing just gets the mind working, which is great, but I wish that I could queue my thoughts rather than have them all rush through the conceptual door like a pack of kids vying for the biggest cookie.