30 Days of Genre, Day Four (The Guilty Pleasure)

Day Four: "Your Guilty Pleasure Book:"

As I have noted elsewhere, I don't have a lot of "guilty pleasures," because I try to own up to what I read and watch and enjoy. And because, in a way, being a fan of fantastika means that anything I read with that designation is thought of as a guilty pleasure by many "ordinary" folk (and sometimes, by connoseiurs of the fantastic as well). Which make me sad for them, sad that they feel they have to label anything not "mainstream" or validated by some hegemonic cultural agreement to be somehow innocent or upstanding as something to feel "guilty about." Certainly, the idea of guilt has a range of meanings, from severe judgment to joking, but the notion that we should feel in some form (even playfully) ashamed about our choices of art seems more about the reinforcement of rather stolid norms than about looking at our pleasure from different angles.

Generally, I would put some of my sword-and-sorcery reading and movie watching in this category. It's less a question of feeling apologetic than talking about pleasures that deviate from certain standards. I have read sword-and-sorcery since I was a teenager and despite some of its excesses I often find it more satisfying as pleasure reading than epic fantasy or urban fantasy. Why?

"While lurid and often emotionally stunted, there was a genuine pleasure to be had in the adventures of these flawed protagonists. Problems could not always be solved with wit or moral fiber; destiny and the favor of the gods could be a right pain in the ass. And the frequent delightful skewerings of upper classes and power structures appealed to me . . . .

While these tendencies often arose in other fantasy subgenres, they were fully realized in S&S. Panache and excess were encouraged and could be used for tragic and comic effect by writers, made more intense by the often small-scale, personal stories being told. The visceral intimacies, the sensuality of all aspects of life, and the suddenness with which fortunes could change and lives could be lost were heady."

It is that distinctive combination of overflowing fecundity and bold indulgence in the pursuit of avaricious adventure with resistance to political, social, and cultural norms that has kept sword-and-sorcery appealing to me.

Fortunately, the requirement is for a "book," not a novel, so I will put forth the Flashing Swords anthologies, specifically the first volume, which is a collection of novelettes that give the reader a variety of approaches. In one book you get the sly fun of Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, the stylish decadence of Vance's Dying Earth, a great saga-like tale from Poul Anderson, and a brutal introduction to Amalric the Mangod by Lin Carter. It is a mixture that for me codifies the manifold pleasures of sword-and-sorcery, and also demonstrates some of the things that make me uncomfortable sometimes (such as the palpable testosterone in Carter's story). Flawed heroes in imperfect worlds try to survive and sometimes do a bit of good, challenging powers beyond their ken; the stories are rich, lunatic excursions into other worlds, quintessential S&S.

30 Days of Genre, Day One

Over at the blog Bibliotropic Ria discusses a meme that I found interesting, regarding the history of one's appreciation for "genre" fiction (which I took to mean fantastika). There's a different topic for 30 consecutive days, and I thought it would be fun to do, so here I go!

Day 1: First "genre novel."

I've tried to figure this out on several occasions, from tracing my history with Conan and other barbarians to considering my start as an SF reader, from remembering when I first saw Frank Frazetta's art to looking at my relationship with space opera. I'm not sure that I can really point to that one book that did it. Last year I wrote a comment over at SF Signal about the subject:

"But what drew me to the genre in the first place? I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family (and was a childhood evangelist, but that's another story), and we were expelled from the church for my father's assorted transgressions (also another story). I entered high school completely unprepared for the real world (I had been partly homeschooled, partly religious schooled, and had attended 13 different schools in-between before 9th grade), and I retreated almost immediately into books.

After exhausting the biographies of veterinarians and pet detectives, I was unsure where to go next. My cousin gave me a copy of Lester Del Rey's Rocket Jockey, which I found to be unlike anything I had read before. The book imagined things that had not happened, maybe could not happen, but that were treated as fact. I had heard to things like this, of movies such as Star Wars (which I had been banned from seeing, along with most movies in theaters). The book looked ahead and made a world out of things that might occur. I was hooked by the idea of looking at the future that way.

Uncertain how to find more books like that, I wandered the aisles of the library until something popped out. That led me to Space Cadet, which I checked out of my high school library and carried around so often that it became a derisive nickname for me. Brooks' The Sword of Shannara, which was accessible and appealing to a youngling unexposed to such imaginings, was another gift from my cousin. From here I dove into Heinlein's juveniles, Asimov, and many of the classics, and these sustained me in my freshman year until I discovered my history teacher's shelf of wonders. "

When I compare this to other writings, I realize that my chronology is mixed up. I actually read Rocket Jockey twice, the time of religious fervor in-between having partly erased the memory. All I really remember from that first reading at the age of 5 was the rocket ship, and the meteorite punching through the ship's hull. I think that was the earliest book I read, but it's hard to say that that first reading was what put me on the path. What little chronology there is in the space opera piece is vague, especially when I remember reading a couple of Heinlein's seminal works, such as Space Cadet and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in high school (and in fact carried the former book around so much that it became a derogatory nickname for me).

I was exposed to SF and fantasy before and after my family's religious phase, and while I romantically like to draw narrative connections between them, I did not really become a reader of fantastika until I was in high school and came under the influence of my history teacher Mr. Cahoon, he of the cabinet of book wonders. There's no doubt that Rocket Jockey was important, but so were the planetary romances of Burroughs. Heinlein gave me a lot of words to dive into, but so did Poe (and I was profoundly affected in middle school by Lorne Greene's readings of his works, especially "The Cask of Amontillado"). And yet I did feel really brought into the genre until I read Le Guin and Delany, and had my skull cracked open by their imaginations. For me, it took a number of books to make me a fan, and later writer, of genre literature.

"I am forcing meaning on their ghosts:" A Review of J. M. McDermott's Last Dragon

I am an admirer of difficult fictions. Not the sort that are intentionally obtuse or so intricate that a manual is required to understand them, so dense and esoteric that you need a sharpened stick of literary theory to penetrate them. Thought-experiments are sometimes enjoyable to read, but for fiction I need more than that; I need to be pulled into the story, not left outside of it scratching my head. I need a reason to engage and enter a piece of fiction, and work that is obtuse, chaotic, or bereft of recognizable, involving characters might as well be a homework assignment.

J. M. McDermott's Last Dragon starts off by making you worried. After the first several pages you wonder if you have entered into a metafictional puzzle, some sort of stereotypically-postmodern labyrinth that wants you to feel lost, worried, and perplexed. You are drawn into parallel stories of a dying, bitter empress writing to her lost lover and of the woman she was in her youth, tackling a quest that seems simultaneously foolish and impossible to fulfill. Names of characters and scenes from her past life are written in her letters out of sequence, mixed in with longing and regret and guilt. While there are two stories that emerge here, they are not the point of the novel. This is an ambitious work that wants us to reflect on how we make sense out of our lives and constantly strive to bring all of its disparate elements into a whole that inevitably slips away from us, regardless of desire or intent.

The web metaphor at the beginning is deceptive; you might think that this means a pattern will emerge, an easy narratology that guides you through the morass of memories and contrition. But that idea quickly fades and is replaced by ants, who appear not just in the words of the novel but crawl over the pages as scene breaks, and scramble over a neat grid of squares at the start of each section. Ants feasting on corpses, crawling in odd places, scattering here and there, infesting, escaping, being caught in webs, overflowing from cracks and mouths. This novel is not a web, not a latticework of supports and linkages; it is a colony of ants running about gathering all what they can find and bringing it back to the queen, who then chooses what to consume, what to leave scattered around her. By the time the narrator invokes the web again towards the end of the book, you see the metaphor as the trap that it is.

It is a quest novel, but that quest is immediately dropped on the ground like a platter of food, and the rest of the novel is an attempt to not re-assemble it, but to find choice bits and let the ants bring them back for the narrator's mnemonic digestion. The novel does not reconstruct either the narrative of the quest or of the empress' bitterness, it is an attempt to use them to make the reader ponder the process of understanding the past. It is a subjective exploration of how our attempts to impose meaning and reason are often transformed by distance and longing and guilt, how the story never ends up being straight even if we know the progression. Who we are when the story is told, who we are when we witness it, what we hope to gain from it; all of these factors shape the story, and that is as true for the reader of Last Dragon as it is for the dying narrator.

The book is intentionally disorienting and bewildering. We come to know Zhan, the narrator, both by her admonitions of her long-fled lover and by the slow assemblage of the story of the journey that unintentionally birthed an empire. As she pleads with Esumi to write back she tells him a tale that, after awhile, you realize must already be known by him. The tale is told through a gathering of recollections about Zhan's hunt for her murderous grandfather with her Uncle Seth (who is only a few year her senior) and a mustering of companions who seem both fated and doomed to be a part of the story. As the story aggregates (I would not call it moving forward) many significant moments come to light, but the view of them is hazy when seen from so far away in the future they helped to create. It is up to the reader to discern not just the order of things, but what clarity is even possible.

As the reader you are never permitted to relax or just coast through the story. You must actively attend to the words, and constantly work to make sense of what they tell you, of what the narrator tells you, of what the very form and presence of her memories tell you. It is fragmented, sometimes overly much. It is a novel that requires a lot of work from the reader, because it is disconcerting by design. Which is part of the point; the novel's narrative is broken up into a series of impressions which the narrator is trying to make sense of even as her emotions and desires and regrets keep getting in the way and making the task of strict re-assembly impossible. The depth and richness of the novel comes from the reader interacting with the effects of that task, with these disarrayed vignettes and reflections.

As we gradually learn the outlines of the story, we see the future solidify, gain clues from the quest that tell us why the empress is deteriorating in spirit as well as body. To make the story more understandable to herself and Esumi she uses "masks" and talks from the perspectives of some of her companions. But what we come to realize is that the entire work is a masque itself, an artifice of wishes and disappointments. McDermott has, to paraphrase Catherynne Valente, broken the fantasy quest novel and made it beautiful. The beauty is not in its content, for Zhan's world is merciless and filthy, built with the remains of corpses and betrayals, with no happy endings, or even bearable ones. As Zhan herself puts it:

"And when we sleep we see inside ourselves at the web of memories. The smells, and the sights, and the tastes and textures. And afterlife, this is all we have. This is all I have left. I reach for the ghosts that melt together. I try to rattle the truth of my life."

One could take away from this novel the conclusion that life sucks, that memory is fickle, that love and will and purpose all fade, that everyone is already a ghost in the minds of all around them. The novel is saturated with the roughness of life, with all of the ways that people use each other yet cannot escape the decay of existence. And it has its flaws, moments that don't feel right, some artificiality of explanation to keep the reader from feeling completely adrift or an exchange between characters that feels forced. It feels so elemental that these stand out, but are then put behind you, like a mistake in one's own life. The human truths that suffuse the novel are unimpeded by these small moments.

But none of these things are the point; we are all well aware of these conclusions. Who needs a novel to tell them that life is difficult and memory is more than a repository of facts and events? There is no pretension here that we are being acquainted with something new, from the shattered contours of a quest novel to the saudade that assails us throughout the novel. We are being reminded that we are human, we are being forced to remember that, as we try to comprehend the metaphors and dialogue and descriptions. McDermott uses us, our very ability to read and interpret and ponder, to make his point. It is not an easy point to assimilate, but that too is part of our humanity and the stories we tell.

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.

The Invisible Movement of the Sun

Today is a snowy day, gray but bright. The amount of light coming into my desk window is just right. I love the luminous weight of winter outside, how it defines things with its burdens. It's a good day to stay in and rest, think, and write.

A cold is building in my head and the resulting sinus headache is making the tasks for today difficult to accomplish. Lots of writing: a short review for SFSignal, my Apex post, and stories. I've decided to alternate in one-hour blocks between resting and writing; we'll see what I can produce in that manner.

I did manage to write a poem, inspired partly by the title of Jay Lake's Link Salad today, and partly by this ridiculous holiday:

I dreamt that the President of Mars

had asked us to stop driving cars

because the glint from our planet afar

made it look like a chunk of feldspar

and for him that was much too bizarre

he preferred that we shine like a star

but we cursed him in flippant Magyar

and said "You ain't our (káromkodás) tsar!"

and as we drove we all lit up cigars

'til we drowned on this drenched world of ours

making us, not him, our bête noire.

I wrote it in 20 minutes. It was fun to write.

I've been thinking about a topic for Apex, and I was leaning towards a response to this piece over at Black Gate, but I think that it is not worth my time to engage it directly. I feel that doing so just validates an incredibly subjective, pointless debate that really comes down to ideology. So, instead, I think I shall be inspired by this quotation from Jeff VanderMeer, pointed out earlier today by Paul Jessup:

"Fantasy doesn’t have to serve a purpose, really, any more than any kind of fiction. It’s often “just” deep exploration of what it means to be human, what our world is like, to try to capture some kind of truth about the world, I guess. And to entertain, which is often the same thing. Art and entertainment aren’t actually in opposition to one another."

We could do with having more barriers like these eliminated.

All the Little Moments Between

Yesterday as I was riding the bus to work I opened my bag to take out Jo Walton's new novel Among Others, which is a wonderful and heartfelt, but not schmaltzy, book that I look forward to reviewing in full soon. But when I opened my courier satchel, I found that I had left the book at home, and instead had a few duplicates that I was bringing to the store to trade in (it is a bad habit of mine to see a book, bring it home, and later find its twin elsewhere in the collection. The other returns were The Master & Margarita, Sputnik Sweetheart, and The Yorkist Age). One of the books was Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which is one of my favorite books of his and is one of the best examples of fantastika of the 20th century. I got so absorbed in it that I missed my stop, and I was honestly surprised that I could get so lost so quickly.

This morning I left Walton at my bedside and brought along Jeff VanderMeer's new collection Monstrous Creatures, which is also in the review queue. I read "The Third Bear" which was a lot of fun, and finished "The Language of Defeat" before I got downtown (and got off at the right stop this time). This piece was downright inspirational, in part because Jeff makes what I think of as an anthropological argument for looking at genre's effect on our conceptions of literature. In particular, his discussion of "the syntax of defeat" resonated with me, because the ideas of symbolic capital that inhere to certain genre categories and distinctions can powerfully affect how we look at books and their place in our creative and imaginative lives.

What I took away from that was an odd thought: that in both over-valorizing or denigrating particular literary categories, formations, and ideas, we miss all of the little moments between conceptions, when literature works its way into our minds and our ontology, makes us feel and dream and reassemble our view of the world, if only for a few seconds. It was heady to read the Murakami and feel those strange episodes dance with the warm ideas of Walton's book. I wonder how I would have responded to the golden beasts in the Town's fields as a teenager like Mori, far more damaged than she but with far less magic in my life, except that of the library. Back then these moments in-between were blurred as I fled for the solace of genre, for the security of escapism and the comfort of books that had nothing to do with the world around me.

The syntax of defeat is part of a struggle on multiple levels, of meaning, belonging, and representing our conflicts and desires. People would not invest so much energy in these debates if there were not affective elements to them. Sadly, this does not make the debates much more useful, unless people do use them to better understand theirs and others' ideas of the power and joy of literature. Wrangling over an "umbrella term" for fantastic literature, for example, seems more about authorial or critical identity, about one's position in relation to various literary conceptions and communities, than about finding an agreeable way to characterize a massive swath of literature. Don't misunderstand; these debates fascinate me, and I personally stick by "fantastika" as a useful term, but they do contain within them some of that syntax of defeat.

The trick is to think about those moments between, what lies inside and between the categories and assumptions that we project and ingest and wrestle with as we read and think and imagine. It is easy to conflate the cultural and literary utility and pleasures of genre with other considerations, and create not just borders, but outright barriers that inhibit our ingenuity as readers and writers and editors. The syntax of defeat creates obstacles, rather than conditions for creativity. The question for me is, what ideas enrich our experience of literature, increase our insights into what it gives us, and help us to recognize and incorporate the little moments between into the life of the mind and spirit that literature invigorates in us.

Because it in those moments that the magic of the word becomes powerful, when it evades and exceeds expectations and pretensions, when an assemblage of words is becoming literature. A "science fiction book" is not literature until we apprehend it, overlay our notions and understandings on it and turn its symbols into a literary experience. Those moments between are individual instances of sense and comprehension that we pattern and render significant. Genre can give them added meaning or shape, or help us relate them to constellations of stories in our heads, give us another angle of perspective or flavor of experience, but when we lose all sight of them, and think of them as building blocks rather wonders in themselves, we give strength to the syntax of defeat and lose a bit of the gift that literature gives us.

The drunkenness of things being various

I have always loved the poetry of Louis MacNeice, particularly his "Snow." I am not sure I understand some of it, but I feel that it is trying to tell me something big. The line that forms the title of this post is my favorite line from that poem, and I understand it, at least as it relates to my own life. The feeling that it tries to qualify is one that I struggle with often.

I wrote a new column for SF Signal and once again forgot to link to it. So here it is. I also led the contributions to last week's Mind Meld, about genre-related guilty pleasures, and felt oddly proud that I did not try to take apart the idea of "guilty pleasure" first. I just wrote about my favorite one, which was enjoyable and right.

I've been thinking a lot about different modes of writing lately. As I write fiction, columns, reviews, and blurbs for the bookstore, I find that I am shifting more comfortably between modes, that I am more agile in responding to the demands of the moment, to the goal for each piece of writing. I am enjoying my writing more, I am writing more as a result, and I am producing more for people to read. The latter two might seem a bit odd to separate, but it has been a gradual process of getting my writing in front of people's eyes. I am slowly putting more of work out into the open. After over a decade of most of my writing (conference papers, academic book reviews, even the journalism) being meant for small, very particular audiences, the shift to writing for a wider, more public audience, with a simultaneous shift in what I am writing, has been a bit of challenge, for several reasons, ranging from lack of confidence to depression to the tumult of everyday life.

What is gratifying is that the writing gives me what I need to build up to the new challenges. I have to be careful not to objectify the writing or grant it some mystical powers; it comes from me, after all. But the act of writing is powerful to me, and it always has been. There is no surer sign that something is awry than when I stop writing. "Writer's block" to me is, and pardon the overdramatization, a crisis of the spirit. When the words don't come, regardless of their quality or lucidity, something is jammed up inside me, something needs release.

Writing regularly is a practice that opens me up, often regardless of what I am writing. It is not about catharsis (usually), it is about flow. It clears ideas and anxieties out of the way and exercises my imagination and intellect in ways that help me see other parts of my life more clearer. The act itself is engaging, but the fact of the act gives me confidence and a feeling of anchorage. It is a practice of expression that exerts ineffable creative muscles, and in doing so loosens up other aspects of mind and spirit. The product is important, but the process is where I get most of vitality and value from the work.

Variety is not just the spice, it is the meat and wine of writing.

Writing and Thinking

It's a bit late to announce here, but I am happy to proclaim that my first SFSignal column is up! It's been well-received and I have gotten some good comments on it. After chatting and exchanging ideas with people I would like to expand it in the future, especially regarding how expectation and structure of narrative work together in the production of a story. One friend's comment on the exaggerated Manicheanism within epic fantasy also has me wondering about the moral components of the literature.

I am working on the next column, which is about the rise of the anti-epic and other shifts in the literary terrain like the creation of the "urbanfantasy/paranormal romance" black hole). I feel very inspired by the move to a larger venue and I am working harder on the columns than I did before. Also, Ekaterina Sedia recently posted a strong analysis of the problem of exoticizing language in fantastika that has me thinking about language and expectations in fantastic literature. So much to think and write about! I just need to watch my time and not lose out on fiction writing.

Some Thoughts on a Unicorn Apocalypse

Theodora Goss discussed the utility of writing exercises over at her blog yesterday, and I found one of her ideas particularly fascinating, that of (following Holly Black) a unicorn apocalypse. While I have never been a great lover of the unicorn, it is a creature rich with symbolism and weirdness. And the act of imagining how these creatures might be the destroyers of civilization, rather than purveyors of glitter and happiness, was too good a challenge to pass up.

I decided to go with the Rule of Three and just discard my first two ideas, which were unicorns as secret harbingers of a worse apocalypse, and unicorns as a warning from Mother Nature about ecological imbalance. My third thought was encapsulated in a comment I posted on Theodora's blog:

"The first title to come to mind was ENDLESS RAINBOWS ON A CLOUDLESS, EVER-LASTING DAY. The first line I thought of was 'On the fifth day, Ellis died, most likely from an overload of rainbows. We decided to go to the lake and give him to the narwhals, hoping to placate them and, perhaps, their earth-walking cousins. No other sacrifice had yet helped to stave them off, or bring any measure of blessed darkness back to the world.' I like the idea of the world itself being transformed by this apocalypse."

After a bit of poking around on Google (between pricing outrageously rare poetry chapbooks), I realized that this was ludicrous; there is NO WAY there would ever be narwhals in Cayuga Lake, even in the event of a unicorn apocalypse. Besides, narwhals are actual animals, and only very pale stand-ins for the unicorn, which here is the harbinger of destruction and remaker of the world. And not in a "back-to-nature" way, but in a "we're tired of being pushed around and made into cute notebook covers" kind of way. The entire way the world works must go, decree the unicorns, and the apocalypse arises from there.

The blend of classical traits and tropes with the current softening of unicorn symbolism seemed like an enjoyable path to take. Unicorns are detectors of virtue, instant healers, and savage fighters. They are hard to kill, not just because of their swiftness, but because, as Holly Black points out, their death shakes the universe. I decided that this was literally true, and what makes the unicorn apocalypse even harder to deal with is that a unicorn's death wreaks earth-shaking havoc around it. Sorry humans, killing them literally does more harm than good.

This remaking of the world, on the surface, might sound compelling or even pleasing. As the unicorns emerge in strength from haunted woods, unknown canyons, and the other hidden places of the world, they spread sunshine and rainbows, flowers and blue skies. But quickly people realize that these new conditions are permanent; the skies are cloudless, it never rains, and it never gets dark. The new flowers act like hyperactive weeds and choke all native foliage out of an area, creating endless carpets of cheerful wildflowers that sink their roots into the earth and climb anything they can't choke into oblivion. They thrive in the everlasting sun, but are sadly inedible to all except the unicorns. Monstrous rainbows appear in the skies, hypnotic and maddening in their omnipresence and unfounded joy. The land masses turn into vast unicorn playgrounds where humans (and indeed, most animals except for the chirpiest of birds and most pleasantly buzzing bee sand dragonflies) can no longer thrive.

Initially human governments try to use coercion, and then force, to deal with the unicorns. But once the first few are successfully killed, the effects of their demise obviously far exceed what little benefit is gained from eliminating one. Some humans go to sea, hoping to avoid this bright, shiny horror of a world. Others retreat to extreme climates such as mountaintops and deserts. A few just lay down in the endless fields of flowers and wait to become fertilizer. Others attempt to figure out a way to fight back, until one day, a young woman asks an odd question: what if fighting them is not the answer?

That's as far as I have gotten.

EDIT: Here is Theodora's take on the unicorn apocalypse. I'll happily link to others as they appear.

EDIT THE SECOND: This was quite helpful as a loosening-up exercise! I wrote about 250 more words on a story and polished up a complete story (cut about 200 words from it, slightly altered the characters' main interaction). I'm debating whether the latter is ready to send somewhere.

The Idea Train and the Alluring Countryside

Work was slow this evening, and I had ample time to think about writing and life as I priced a seemingly endless pile of books. I got several ideas for stories and solved an impasse I had in one that I am trying to complete right now. The idea train was chugging along, which was nice, but then I turned to some practical considerations, such as timetables for writing, noting to myself that, during Nanowrimo I had done a decent job of putting words on the screen, but since the end of that exercise my fiction writing had slowed down. The stories I've been working on have not flowed as well as the initial novel-writing had in November.

I started thinking about why this was so. It was partly due to illness (myself and the kidlet both has stomach bugs, and she got a second one), and partly due to the season. There was more to it than that, though; my work habits had not slipped, but I was much less productive with the short fiction in the time that I wrote. One problem? The gods-cursed internet!

It came to me a little while later, as I noted to someone earlier this evening, that when I am writing non-fiction, the internet is both more necessary for research and sourcing, and less of a distraction. When I am writing fiction, however, it is hugely diverting, like losing yourself watching the endless countryside roll by. The idea train barreled along with no problem, but when it came to settling in with the idea, distraction was a given. At the time, I wasn't sure why I had thought of that, or why that might be the case, but as I pondered this conundrum on the way home from work, some ideas came to mind.

Non-fiction is relational, links much more to external matters, and does not come from deep inside me, unless it is some sort of memoir. And non-fiction is easy for me; after years in academia I can formulate arguments, outline papers in my head, calculate paragraph proportions, and put the puzzle pieces into place quickly. I can theorize, criticize, and analyze adeptly. But fiction is more creative, comes from inside, and is more contingent on a combination of confidence and interior generation of material and structure. Fiction is more personal, comes more completely from me, and having not written much of it in the last decade, I am both getting back into the groove and rediscovering my voice now, unearthing ideas and meanings and connections that are dependent on me much more intensely than a piece of criticism.

And my confidence in that process is rather shaky.

When I feel particularly distracted I usually get off the main laptop and pull out another machine to write upon (longhand is not really an option, given my horrid handwriting and the speed at which I write) that is not connected to the internet. That helps sometimes. But what I need to cultivate more is confidence and a sense of groundedness in my creativity. Nothing in my life has done more to keep me sane and happy than writing, and more than ever I am committed to writing as much as I can, to get published, and to live the life of a writer as fully as possible. It is easy to lose that anchorage when you're careening down the tracks and there are so many interesting things outside your window. It is easier to watch the world go by. But that is not the point of the ride.

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.

Since Everyone Else is Doing a Fraggin' Top Ten List. . .

. . . allow me to jump onto the bandwagon!

I've been meaning to do some reviews for a bit, but NaNoWriMo and illness delayed them. So, I can banish two daemons with one incantation via a Top Ten List. These are the ten creative works (not all released in 2010) that I most enjoyed and admired this year.

The List, in no particular order:

---The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms: A rich and provocative book that takes the fantasy tale and brings out new features for us to marvel at. I love the world-building and the care with which Jemisin put this book together. It is wonderfully written, enjoyable, and thoughtful all at the same time. I am looking forward to The Broken Kingdoms, which I just received, to see what happens next.

---Blood of Ambrose/This Crooked Way: I discovered James Enge through his story in the Swords & Dark Magic anthology, and I am so glad that I did. His work has rekindled my love for sword & sorcery through its combination of vigorous action, depth of character, and crisp prose. People who call his prose "slick" are missing some of its deeper pleasures, such as his economy of description, his deft characterizations, and a cavalcade of fascinating ideas that are woven together unassumingly into a cultural fabric that makes his work both warm and visceral. He takes the basic heroic mode of sword & sorcery and expands upon it even as he plays with it. His books have a classical heft to them, but are neither stiff nor dated. He refreshes the genre by taking old roads and then suddenly going off into the misty woods beyond, making new paths that wind in and out of our expectations. Really top-notch stuff!

---Haunted Legends (Tor, edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas): This is the best anthology of the year in my book. It is a collection of literate, evocative, well-crafted stories; even the few stories that did not appeal to me were well-done, just not my cup of oolong. What makes this collection so great is that many of the stories are not what you would expect; this is not a compendium of spooky ghost stories or tales of bloodcurdling horror. Most anthologies have a thematic that you expect will be directly reflected in the story. In this anthology, the theme is far more inspirational than that, and is taken in many different directions by the contributors.

The great pleasure of this anthology is that you find so much that is unexpected; stories that are not just about spooky monsters or strange folklore but about people, about regret and loss and wonder expressed and explained through parables and yarns of the unconventional and the painful. In many of these stories legends integrate anguish, the unnerving, and the inexplicable into our lives. Our trespasses against each other and the world, or those of others, becomes the stuff of chagrined, sad tales. Our feelings of suffering and powerlessness are explained by forces outside our control: our loneliness both revealed and, sometimes, combated by strange fables that integrate the cryptic and peculiar aspects of the world around us into something culturally manageable and socially connective.

---Agents of Atlas/Agents of Atlas: Turf Wars/Agents of Atlas: Dark Reign: These three volumes contain some of the best comics I have read in a decade. Writer Jeff Parker takes a group of forgotten characters and makes something fresh and lively out of reuniting them to help their erstwhile leader become reborn and deal with a family legacy that would make the Corleones flee in terror. It's consistently quirky, almost campy at times, but leavened with fast pacing, delightful twists, and genuinely likable characters. Comic-book soap opera is left by the wayside, as are most of the more tired cliches of the superhero genre. Parker instead goes for smart, punchy stories mixed with intrigue and humor. Leonard Kirk, Gabriel Hardman, and Carlo Pagulayan all do excellent work on the art, although Kirk is my favorite artist for the Agents.

---Farthing: Jo Walton is a treasure. She writes great books and perceptive criticism, and her love and critical appreciation for speculative fiction comes through in all of her writing. Farthing demonstrates this in a curious way: by reproducing an entirely different genre (the English country-house mystery) packed with speculative twists that are so well blended into the narrative that you feel transported into that other world. Her deep understanding of the genre comes out in the careful crafting of this novel, which is note-perfect in tone and consistently subversive. I don't like mysteries, but this book is much, much more than "just a mystery." It is an astute, engrossing novel that makes you think hard about what we take for granted.

---Who Fears Death: Nnedi Okorafor's book was a revelation for me, in ways that I am still pondering. As I wrote in one of my FoG columns, the book "mingles destiny, brutality, and liminality in the story of a young woman's coming-of-age in a harsh, dystopian future. Despite a few missteps, the book is 'without preachiness or didactic overkill,' and demonstrates both Okorafor's gift for storytelling and her ability to create deeply grounded stories out of folkloric traditions and speculative insights." It is a very hard book to read sometimes, challenging and discomforting, but consistently engaging and often poetic.

--- Wizardry & Wild Romance: This is a re-issue of Moorcock's extended ruminations on the history and state of epic fantasy. As I said in another review "Moorcock employs detailed discussions of older, sometimes obscure works and weaves them into larger literary trends and literary-historical forces to produce a critique of fantastic literature and its niche in Western cultures. Moorcock's analysis is fun to read and persuasive, and made even a devoted Tolkien fanboy like me start to question what I find so compelling about his work. What this book does best is get under the skin of both individual works and broader ideas and engage the conundrums contained within them. Whether or not you agree with his conclusions, Moorcock makes a compelling case for viewing fantasy critically and productively that will help you read the genre with discernment and inquisitiveness." I am still chewing over this book, and will for some time.

---Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, And Society in Saga Iceland: This book is simply fascinating. William Ian Miller takes the sagas and legal codes of old Iceland and performs a stunning act of legal and anthropological interpretation on them. He teases out assumptions, inconsistencies, and deeper meanings in both story and conduct and outlines the interrelations between law, culture, and myth. It is an intelligent analysis that is also a joy to read, and that spends most of its time on the source material instead of theory. I learned a lot from this book that I am applying to some of my fiction.

--- Apex Magazine, Issue #18: This was the Arab/Muslim issue that came out in November, and Cat Valente did a stellar job of assembling and editing this issue. The three short stories were wonderful, and the implicit themes of identity and authority heightened the intensity of the works. The poetry was gorgeous and evocative, and the inclusion of a Turkish fairy tale rounded out the offerings and gave the issue a definitive continuity and context. Certainly the best single-issue periodical I read this year.

2010 was a good year for reading, personally. I read much more than I have in several years, and I feel that I read a lot of good work. Best of all, I found a lot of inspiration in what I read; not just ideas, but creative energy as well. I'm looking forward to tackling my big stack of To-Be-Reads in 2011.

On Writing Crap, & Loving It

So, NaNoWriMo this year has so far been a brutally wonderful experience. While I am behind, I am writing more consistently and with more confidence than ever before. There are two reasons for this that immediately come to mind: first, I am setting aside time to write and doing my best to just write. Currently, that means 1-2 hours each evening (after 8PM, when either my daughter has gone to bed or I get home from work) and two dedicated pockets of 90 minutes on Sunday morning and during my laundry run. What makes me pleased about this is that, for the first time, I feel horribly guilty when I am not writing during a designated time. I have the compulsion and the desire to use that time to write.

The other reason, which partly buttresses the first one, is that whether I am writing a description of a city, a fight scene, or a diplomatic exchange, that I regardless of what I am writing, I embrace the fact that I AM writing, and that even the worst crap, the most awkward prose, the lamest idea, is progress. Everything is forward motion.

That doesn't mean that everything I write has inherent utility. In fact, when I look at some of what I have written, I find awful passages, stilted dialogue, and vague descriptions full of cliche. I also find promising writing, but what is important at this stage is to accept that I am doing the basic task of getting words on the page/screen. If I am writing crap, that crap has to be written to clear the way for the other stuff that is rolling around in my imagination. I used to refuse to write when things got difficult, but what I am learning through this exercise is that getting the flow going, getting the mind working, and stimulating my creativity is what is important. And as a result, good stuff comes out, and other ideas come out that can be improved or that can serve as a gateway to others emerging later.

I was thinking about this last night after encouraging a friend to wade through the crap, regardless of how it might feel to do so. I was having a bit of trouble as well (and did not make my word goal last night), trying to work through a flashback scene. I took a sort break, and happened to see that Holly Black's NaNoWriMo pep talk had arrived in my email inbox. It was not merely inspirational, it was a blueprint for how to change your thinking about the process, how to see the struggle as necessary to get through to the accomplishment of finishing. The idea that most resonated with me right then was "You don't have to believe you can; you just have to do it." So, instead of staying bogged down, I started on the next section, and found that I had worked out an idea that could be expanded later, and that had given me some insight into the plot that led to a much more interesting scene that provided some of the texture that I have felt lacking in the novel to this point.

Of course, this sort of fortuitous situation does not always occur; sometimes, crap is crap, and just needs to be exorcised from your brain and from the page. Once you see word count and the task of writing as not just abstract goals, but a concrete part of the process, the notion of crap itself can change. Writing crap is setting yourself up to get to the good stuff, to utilize your artistry and work up an intellectual sweat, to get yourself into a groove where the words that come inspire something better, or create a moment that makes you smile. Taking the hard work seriously, and realizing that the results of your efforts will vary and need shaping, means affirming to yourself that crap has a place in your process, and that it will always be there, and that dealing with it will make you more disciplined and more productive. Writing crap, and loving it, means that you are a writer.

Aetheric Ephemera: Coded Conundrum Consonance Edition

1) Jess Nevins finds some fascinating portrayals of robots in the 1920s. I think Robot Madam is the best.

2) Apex Magazine's editor fantastique Catherynne Valente has announced that the November issue will focus on stories and poetry from Muslim and Arab perspectives. "It will show how Islam is as much a part of the human experience as any other faith or story system that writers of the fantastic draw from," she says. The focus is in response to Elizabeth Moon's recent diatribe about 9/11 and the Muslim cultural center being planned in Manhattan.

3) Charlie Stross discusses why he will never, ever write high fantasy. I completely agree with the problems he sees with doctrinaire fantasy, but I think that makes it a ripe target for messing with, for making new stories that push against the monarchical model and still make compelling, exciting tales. And I can't guess why his alt-history proposal might not be interesting in 2002.

4) Christopher Monckton is an incredible idjit.

5) A Devastator is no substitute for narrative process: Paul Jessup lays out an argument for video games having an effect on our apprehension of narrativity itself. I find the argument compelling, but I don't think it's all about the way narrative works. Why do we engage it in this way, and what factors (cultural, social, political-economic, aesthetic) condition how these participatory narratives are used? This sent me diving into the syllabus for my fandoms class, to look at a few things I had in the archive about fantasy and displacement.

6) A hilarious chapbook for charity, based on one of the strangest pieces of geek art in recent memory. I downloaded it and made a small donation, and so far it's a lot of fun!

Readercon XXI: Friday, Part the First

Exhausted, mostly because I am full of ideas and other people's words. I had a good first day atReadercon. We got there without getting lost for the first year ever (their address foiled GPS in the past) and got set up in our room and registered quite smoothly.

The panels were not all fantastic, but mostly solid. The first panel was "Interstitial Then, Genre Now" which had some heavyweight critics in the panel. John Clute and Michael Dirda seriously interrogated the idea of interstitial fiction, while Peter Dubé, attending his first SF convention, provided some fresh thoughts to how to strategize and envision the idea of writing between genres. Theodora Goss, a participant in the Interstitial Arts Foundation and co-editor of the firstInterfictions anthology, guided the discussion but had to think fast to deal with the depth of the panel's critique of the idea. I am going to do a much fuller, reflective write-up of this panel later.

The next panel, "History & Memory in Historical & Spec. Fic," ended up being a much more personal discussion by the panelists than I had anticipated. Howard Waldrop told a great story about an ancestor who fought in the Confederate War, N. K. Jemisin talked at length about her preacher grandfather and his influence on her work, and David Anthony Durham discussed how he projected feelings about the father-son relationship into his portrayal of Hannibal in Pride of Carthage. The anecdotes were compelling, but were much more linked to individual history than ideas of history in fiction. I had hoped to hear about both during the hour, about how personal memory/history and larger ideas of the historical are channeled into an author's work.

I was pretty excited about the next panel: "New England: At Home to the Unheimlich?" Another stellar group of panelists were on hand to discuss the peculiar resonance of the region to horror and the uncanny. Everyone on the panel contributed to the discussion, but I wanted to hear about more than how Stephen King influenced everyone and how the change of seasons is significant to fiction set in the region. I appreciated how people kept coming back to the deep, peculiar history of New England, and I loved the idea of Cotton Mather as the first regional horror writer, and there were a number of moments where you could see how region and genre interacted, how this setting influences a number of tropes and can be both rote and surprising.

The last panel I attended before taking a break was "Non-Western Cultures in Fantasy." Theodora Goss once again led a spirited discussion about respect, cultural appropriation, and getting a feel f0r walking around in other people's skins. There was some tension in the discussion of owning people's stories and a rather unreflective take on the idea of universalism, but Cat Valente did a smashing job of reformulating the idea of borrowing with the metaphor of renting/leasing stories. Nalo Hopkinson provided some strong advice on writing about other cultures, including the need for writers to realize that regardless of who the subject is, you cannot write about "the other" without creating some friction, and it is important to have not just respect, but a moral compass when deciding how to write about things outside of your personal experience.

It was a thought-provoking morning. I had a lot to digest as I headed to the Bookshop.

More tomorrow!

Aetheric Ephemera: Ruminations and Hortations Edition

1) First off, my new column at Forces of Geek is up. It peripherally invokes my obsessions with genre and the Great E-Book Kerfuffle, but tries to move on from that as well. Go. Read. Comment. Enjoy!

2) Jason Sanford has a rant about science fiction around the world that is worth taking a look at. I agree with his points in large part, although a few commenters have pointed out that there is more to the article he decries (written by Norman Spinrad) than a poor knowledge of world SF. But, as Jason notes, why in the name of the Eleven Horny Hells of Glaverdoon would someone write about SF around the world and not take five minutes to google basic information that would not make them look myopic?

People are already responding; Charles A. Tan has a thoughtful response that is more forgiving of Spinrad than Jason's. I think Charles gets to some of the frustration that Jason is asserting (and that I felt too, on first reading the piece) when he says that "[t]he problem with picking just one paradigm is that it’s reductionist." Spinrad really can't get to the multiplicity and (sorry if this sounds too postmodern) hybridity of identity in the contemporary world. The structure of his argument makes some solid points, such as the problem of colonialism in so much Anglophone SF, but it falters because it has to assign a single identity to an author, in a time when many authors cannot be pigeonholed in that manner. There's a struggle for some notion of authenticity in Spinrad's piece that is problematic because it reproduces an Anglophone notion of purity of identity and singularity of origin.

And it does not help that Spinrad's piece reads as rather disjointed and clunky. It's long and it rambles, makes some points that need more discussion than they get, and has a rather patronizing tone to it.

Hmmm. . . I feel a longer blog post about this is necessary, especially after having read The Windup Girl and The City & The City recently, and thinking about a remark N.K. Jemisin made on Twitter the other day about people trying to "Butler" her (i.e. turn her into the next Octavia Butler).

3) There's a lot of crap on Wikipedia, but while doing a bit of research on Alice Bailey, I found a very well-done article on the idea of the New World Order. It is a far better piece than the Bailey entry, with a ton of footnotes and some good analysis. The Bailey piece has extensive footnotes, but not much analysis. The NWO piece, however, was informative for a short-story that is on the backburner, and I will return to it later.

4) In the "Things That Would Make an Awesome Novel" Department comes an article from the Fortean Times about Robin Hood and possible links to the Knights Templar. I don't think this kind of angle has been played up in the Hood mythology, but it could create some compelling tensions and philosophical/religious discussions as part of the legend. A few commenters have poked a hole or two in the author's ideas, but I'm curious now to get ahold of the book and at least see where the ideas (and any evidence) come from.

OK, back to other writing!

The Last Post!

Of the year, of course!

December has been rather unkind. Illness has plagued my footsteps, mostly of the "breathing sucks" variety. I've also gotten a temporary boost in hours at the bookstore (and am also running the store's Facebook page), which means more money, but less time to do stuff such as write. Now that the holiday season is over, my hours will magically be reduced, which means more time to write. I've managed to scribble my Forces of Geek columns, and do a bit of short story writing, but that's been it. I had really hoped to have my wacky take on the Four Horsemen ready by, well, today, but sadly the tale is unfinished. I will still finish it, because I'm enjoying the ideas that are coming up as I write it.

My New Year's resolution is a simple one: create more, consume less. I want to write more, improve my health, and make my life fuller and richer. I want to buy less stuff, own less stuff, and take in less bullshit. I think that is both an encompassing and simple goal for the coming year.

I wrote my latest Forces of Geek column on "13 Books for Doing Your Thinking About SF". It's not as in-depth as some of my other columns, but I wanted to respond to all of the "Best Of" lists coming out right now . I've thought about doing a "Best Of The Year" or "Decade" post here, but it seems so trite. I'd rather do something else to reflect on the decade, something that jibes more with the idea of "doing your thinking."

This idea comes from my college mentor, Dr. Thomas Buckley, who wrote an article with that title for Parabola some years back and gave it to us to read in a Native American religions course. It is essentially the notion that you need to combine appreciation, analysis, meditation, and reflection to not just critique an idea or a subject, but to understand it as fully as possible. He wrote about it in his excellent book on Yurok spirituality also. This is an idea that is about creating good thought and good action, not just consuming information. It is about learning all of the time, not just taking in and spitting out data. I'd like to enact this idea more in the coming year as well.

Happy New Year to all!