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.

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.

Aetheric Ephemera: Gilded Robots of Clockwork Tyranny Edition

1) Jay Lake is cancer-free. Suck it, cancer!

2) Via the aforementioned wordwright: "The Death of the Book has Been Greatly Exaggerated." A reasoned piece that points out how irrational a lot of the exuberance is over the end of books. Certainly this trend will develop, but all of these people who seem eager to watch the book disappear are being pretty premature in their mocking eulogies for the printed word. In this vein, Paul Jessup reminds us of other trends that were supposed to transform/eliminate the book

3) At the same time, the market fluctuations, driven by the specific changes in the trade and larger shifts in national and global economies, have created a glut of books. While this article is from the UK (and the photos are a pretty egregious example of what's going on), there is no doubt that there is a contraction going on, and used bookstores are at the end of the chain. I can testify that this dynamic is alive and well in our local market, where we daily get large loads of books, so many that we can be extremely picky about what we buy, particularly as people now just leave books behind rather than lug them back home. It's strange, and a bit unsettling, even as it means that we have better books to sell and this attracts more patrons to our store.

4) A literary critic reflects on bad reviews and the writer/critic dynamic.

5) Welcome to the family, Kosmoceratops!

6) In other news, I just finished reading Swords & Dark Magic, and I'll post a review on the weekend. In brief: I liked a lot of it, but I am still not sure there was a large amount of "new" in this sword & sorcery. A few standout stories, several enjoyable tales, and a couple of meh entries. I'm working on my Apex blog entry and a couple of these stories will feature in it.