“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” – Paul Muad’Dib, Dune
“Death and disaster; nightmares and phobias; new killing technologies; treacherous bodies – a seemingly endless range of terrifying trials and tribulations seemed to face people in the twentieth-century. Worse- there were times when all of history seemed to be reciting a tragic script,devoid of answers or ‘sense.’ On these occasions people’s terror was so overwhelming that their most fundamental identities were in danger of being engulfed. It took some time to notice the astounding creativity with which these men, women, and children made sense of their predicament and remade their world in the wake of the crippling energy of fear. Looking at our society’s fears, in both their past and present manifestations, enables us to meditate on the future. It is a future of our choosing” - Joanna Bourke
This column’s going to be weird, so bear with me…
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“Storytelling is clearly an extremely important function of societies, but it’s nonetheless unproven that to be human is to be a storytelling being. Even if it is the case that human beings are completely intrinsically storytelling animals, it doesn’t follow that that’s something to celebrate, any more than we should celebrate the fact that human beings are defecating animals.” – China Miéville
“The term “speculative fiction”, like most genre names, does not have a clear-cut or universally agreed-upon definition.” – from The Handmaid’s Tale Study Guide
“When you’ve come across a story or movie or game that both is and isn’t science fiction, fantasy, and/or horror, then you’ve discovered speculative fiction” – N.E. Lilly
I have been reading about and pondering the idea of “story” this past week, and as Paul Jessup has pointed out, there has been a conversation of sorts going on about it across the Internet. A lot of this conversation is taking place within the fantastic field of literary production, between writers and readers, bloggers and twitterers, all asserting their notions of what makes a good “story” within the realm of, well, pick your designation. My term of choice is fantastika, which is problematic in some respects, but within the broader realm of fantastic literatures, there is, as there almost always is, debate and critique about just what the heck we’re writing about, and how we choose to write it.
As I absorbed all of these ideas, a strange thought struck me, and in this column I want to examine it more closely and see if it has any merit. As I read about technique and context and craft and protocols (digging into my collection of criticism as well), I thought to myself “Isn’t the disjuncture here that all stories are in a sense speculative fiction?” I was not specifically reading much about the notion of speculative fiction, but as that idea presented itself, I saw a supposition forming that seemed useful to engage and take apart. My contention, for the purposes of this column, is this thought: “all stories are speculative fiction, and what speculative fiction invokes is a quality of the idea of story.” This covers both what that means for the idea of speculative fiction, and for the idea of story itself.
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“With all sincere respect to Jameson, Suvin, and Friedman, I don’t think ‘cognitive estrangement’ is the differentia specifica of SF. SF and fantasy are inheritors of visionary literature, and science fiction is simply one fuzzy set of that modern pulp wing of visionary literature which describes its vision through a sometimes spurious, sometimes accurate vocabulary of scientific rationality. But SF is about that kind of ecstatic vision.” - China Miéville
“From wonder into wonder existence opens.” – Lao Tzu
Right now, my heart is pounding as I write these words. I’ve spent the better part of the day writing and thinking about literature, when I haven’t been playing with my daughter. But none of that relates directly to the racing blood, to the tingling I feel as I take my initial notes and start the process of writing this piece. What has me so worked up is the thought of what I am doing here, discussing fantastika. And that excitement comes not just from the texts I have read and recall, but from some of the very things that sometimes frustrate us about genre and the social aspects of the literary field of production.
We often engage in very esoteric or prosaic conversations about “the genre” or specific genres/authors/trends/books, and I have cited (and written) some of those in the past. But what we often sideline or even delegitimize is something that Miéville refers to in the quotation above: that SF (and in allied ways fantastika more broadly) is the – sometimes radical, sometimes formulaic, sometimes intellectual, sometimes pulpy, and often a bit of each – communication of an ecstatic vision. It is a vision specifically invoked to create a sense of wonder, but that is only part of what it does. It also inspires an ecstatic response, whether of intellectual stimulation, disturbance of the imagination, or an unrealistic spectacle of images and ideas. That response arises not just from the text itself, but from our associations of its ideas and symbols to cultural assumptions and knowledge.
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“Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.” – Joanna Russ
“Russ’ ideas are radical. They’re scary in a genre that has the potential to be the most revolutionary of all but usually opts for the safety of the mainstream.” – Sue Lange
Joanna Russ died this past week. It made me quite sad to hear of it, because she was one of the first serious authors of fantastika that I read in high school, where I was fortunate to attend a sort of fantastic literature boot camp under the glower of my American History teacher Mr. Cahoon. He gave me a copy of The Female Man early on, and it profoundly affected my ideas about power, identity, and the edifying capacity of literature. Combined with a pile of other important books, such as On Wings of Song, Dhalgren and Nova, The Word for World of Forest, The Steel Crocodile, Friends Come in Boxes, Spacetime Donuts, and others, it pulled me to fantastika as both a world of words to love and a cultural perspective to explore.
I came back to her work again and again (mostly her criticism) until the early ’90s, when I attempted to abandon both fandom and literature for the halls of academia. Her criticism always shook me up with its combination of anger, uncompromising focus, and the recondite enlightenment that it inculcated in my mind. Russ’ perception was fiercely concentrated on the flaws she found in a literature that she found valuable, flaws that mirrored widely-reproduced perceptions about women and agency and the potential for literature to enquire about social issues. She was a critic in both the best and the toughest senses of the word, and her fiction was an extension of her concerns about the shaping and reinforcing (or questioning) of ideas through the written word. Her remorseless creativity served to illuminate the problems that she saw as inhibiting the potential of SF to achieve a greater understanding and analysis of the human condition, and in fact of the ways we construct that notion. As Farah Mendolsohn put it in her introduction to a volume on Russ’ work, “the refusal to go along with the storying of the world” was the backbone of her writing.
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“Realistic fiction leaves out too much.” – Gene Wolfe
“Reality is a crutch for those who can’t handle fantasy” – Old con button motto
Last week I discussed a few episodes of “fantasy” being denigrated or snubbed by the “mainstream”. A few days after that I had a long discussion with Paul Jessup and Nnedi Okorafor on Twitter about fantasy and realism. It was a very good, tough discussion, and it made me think more critically about the divide between realism and fantasy that has often been fomented in the wider literary field. Of course, this is not just a divide between realism and the fantastic; it is also about “literature” versus “fiction,” and other labelled dualities.
Rather than natter on about the labels, I would like to discuss how that one particular distinction, “realistic” versus “fantastic,” is a structuring principle of how literature is perceived and consumed. And, let it be known now, I am pretty solidly in fantasy’s corner in this debate, for reasons that will be clearer in this column.
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“You scream too loud. You know it.” – M. Senechal
“An important aspect of the modern search for identity has been the mapping to the limits and structures of human consciousness and experience by the humanities and the sciences. This exploration employs a modernist metaphysics, which posits a fundamental duality of the real and the fantastic. According to this metaphysics, to identify an entity as fantastic – a character in a fictional story, a monster in a nightmare – is to give it a special relationship to reality. For modernism, the fantastic belongs to the realm of the non-real, to which non-belief is the appropriate response. This exclusion of the fantastic (the dream, the fiction, the lie) from reality makes modernist truth possible. This metaphysics establishes an authority in terms of which proper critical discourse can occur.” – George Aichele, Jr.
This past week was a pretty distressing one for the realms of the fantastic, as it sustained multiple indignities from mainstream media and responded sometimes too harshly to the assaults. The first was a (mostly implicit) judgment rendered against fantastic literature by two BBC World Book Night shows. The more surprising ambushes came from writers at the New York Times and Slate; both critics launched scathing critiques of “fantasy” and those who love it under the guise of reviewing the new HBO series based on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series. In all of these cases the target was less a specific text or production than it was assumptions about the genre and its adherents; in each instance “mainstream” observers derided or disdained “fantasy” in some manner under the pretext of some other task (showcasing books people “really” read or reviewing a television show).
So much digital ink has been spilled responding to these attacks and omissions that there is little that I can add to the specific counters to the critics’ judgments. What I find more compelling to examine is the fact that a caricature of “fantasy” was subjected to this treatment, and that there was such a mighty response in each case (particularly from female fans to the NYT review). In each instance, there was an explicit and/or implicit slight, but all of them were made from a standpoint of privilege supported by an idea of the metaphysical assumption that Dr. Aichele discusses above. The BBC shows and the two TV critics were firmly lodged on the illusory solid ground of the mainstream; all use as their foundation a notion that “fantasy” is aberrant and has no genuine place in the wider media discourse.
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“I think the real strength of the genre [SF] has always been that there are all these hugely different things out there and yet they are in dialogue with each other. Because that’s the other meaning of a genre, genre as writers group, where the works are sparking off each other. Science fiction really is a genre in that sense.” – Jo Walton
“For all the courage and heroism shown by fantasy characters across 4000 years of great, compelling dramas — NOTHING EVER CHANGES!
Science fiction, in sharp contrast, considers the possibility of learning and change.” – David Brin
“Epic fantasy, with few exceptions, is about war. And the best epic fantasy offers more than escapism, more than comfort food. The best is consoling.” – Daniel Abraham
There has been a lot of discussion this past week about genre. OK, that’s nothing new, but this week, there has been an edge to the tonality of the discussions. In the past several days authors such as Daniel Abraham and David Brin (quoted above) have set out to not just discuss fantastic genres, but to make specific statements about a particular genre in ways that elevate their literary subject from the wider realm of fantastic literature. Abraham’s post set off some productive discussions by others (including Paul Jessup) but Brin’s statement was met with either vigorous agreement or exasperated eye-rolling. I think, however, that they are both trying to do the same thing: parochially demarcate a specific genre-territory and give it an exaggerated value and status.
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No witty quotation today; let’s get right to it. Last week John DeNardo wrote a piece for the Kirkus blog about the definition of Science Fiction, the latest in an ancient tradition of devotees of fantastika trying to explain just what it is they love. It was a decent try, but ended up being more about what SF is not, than what it is. The reason for this? “[A] specific definition remains elusive. Perhaps [author Damon] Knight was right: I know it when I see it. Perhaps the best I can do is to dispel some of those misconceptions.”
Shortly after that there was a long commentary over at io9 entitled (a bit misleadingly) “Why isn’t Shakespeare cosplay more popular?” In this piece Chris Braak attempted to articulate why “geek culture” was so special, why it was “the ONLY legitimate form of American culture.” Through a discussion that ranged from Foucault to Harold Bloom, anthropology to The Velvet Underground, Braak tried to quantify the uniqueness of what geeks do with their particular objects of affection (which were all some form of fantastika or another). While I found his discussion problematic, it contained something that resonated in relation to John DeNardo’s discussion, and made me realize one of the reasons that SF and/or Fantastika can be difficult to define. The issues of cultural practice and meaning are linked.
And what links them…is kittens in stormtrooper helmets…
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“In my usage, ‘imaginative fiction’ includes the definite group of stories…that are nonrealistic, imaginative, based upon assumptions contrary to everyday experience, often highly fanciful and often laid in settings remote in time and space from those of everyday life.” – L. Sprague de Camp
This week I want to ponder the idea of the novum a bit more, and explore, at least tentatively, how it might illuminate the coherence of fantastic texts other than those of rareified SF. I started with the above quotation from de Camp because I think that his definition of “imaginative fiction,” while problematic in some ways, points toward an underlying unity in fantastika that can be teased out to help us look at the novum more creatively. In the above quotation I skipped over de Camp’s invocation of “the fiction of the modern Western world” because the qualification is not needed; “imaginative fiction” is a worldwide literary practice. One can also argue against the idea of a “definite group of stories,” but if we think of that word as “limited to” rather than “exact” his formulation makes more sense.
What I find useful in this quotation is the idea of “assumptions contrary to everyday experience.” This idea seems like a useful characterization of the fantastic; whether hard SF or slipstream, all fantastic works do not just present something new or improbable, but one or more elements that are incongruous with our commonly-held ideas not just of the possible, but of the everyday. In fact, these elements are insubordinate, actively defying the mundane world as we perceive it. Fantasy implies “a detachment, a levitation, the acceptance of a different logic based on objects and connections other than those of everyday life or the dominant literary conventions.” (Italo Calvino,”Definitions of Territory: The Fantastic”); what is “normal” is inverted, exceeded, ruptured by the logic of the fantastic.
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“Even more influential in sf theory than cognitive estrangement is Suvin’s concept of the novum. The novum is the historical innovation or novelty in an sf text from which the most important distinctions between the world of the tale from the world of the reader stem. It is, by definition, rational, as opposed to the supernatural intrusions of marvelous tales, ghost stories, high fantasy and other genres of the fantastic. In practice, the novum appears as an invention or discovery around which the characters and setting organize themselves in a cogent, historically plausible way.” – Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., “Marxist theory and science fiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction pp. 118-119.
“[I]n SF, ‘the idea’ is the hero.” – Farah Mendlesohn, “Introduction: Reading Science Fiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, p. 4.
The differences between science fiction and fantasy have been characterized and analyzed in many different ways, from very simple bifurcations (science vs. humanities, material vs. spiritual, etc.) to more complicated formations that try to discover the core logic of each genre’s narrative strategies (logic in this case meaning “convincing forcefulness; inexorable truth or persuasiveness“). Some observers have argued for its uniqueness while others have averred that it is part of a broader genre, such as fantastika (that would be me, for example). As I read more criticism, academic and descriptive, I see an odd trend, where SF obtains a more rigorous attention that sets it off not just from “fantasy,” but from all other forms of fantastic literature.
This is not problematic on the face of it, but as I read more about genre, narrative, and the relationship of the reader to the text, I see a hierarchy emerging where SF is (explicitly or implicitly) characterized as the pinnacle of fantastic literature and the rest exist in a sort of unruly mob below it. While there have been some excellent discussions of how fantasy literature is structured and how it works, it seems that SF is bestowed with an imprimatur of greater validity by being analyzed with a theoretical tool that grants it a privileged status, not just unique but better, for a variety of reasons.
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“There is, I feel, a serious misconception at work here: to believe that a short story and a chapter in a novel are essentially the same, that a succession of stories about a character make him more ‘meaningful,’ more ‘memorable,’ more ‘understandable.’ But a novel is not a story: the method of the novelist is very different from that of the short-story writer. A story, to the degree that it succeeds as a work of art, contains within itself all that we need to know aesthetically. . . .” – William Abrahams
I decided to start this column with a horribly decontextualized quotation, because it is a good starting point for what I want to discuss this week, and it helps illuminate my argument. It is from a critical piece on Hemngway’s work that bemoans the tendency of readers to read more into Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories than are presented. They should not be read together as a shadow memoir of the author, he argues, but enjoyed for their inherent literary qualities (despite the fact that they are collected in one volume and organized chronologically for Adams’ life). While I disagree with most of what Abrahams says, I find a kernel of insight here that I want to plant, to see if it will germinate.
Abrahams’ idea is that “a novel is not a story” and that a story contains “all that we need to know aesthetically.” His idea of a story in this context is specifically a short story, all nice and tidy, and his concern is that readers are exceeding the boundaries of the story and doing something else, in a sense trying to make a novel in their own minds about this set of tales. He argues that this does not honor the story itself, the artistry of the piece of fiction. Yet what this piece reveals to us is a tactic of the reader that serves as a strong engine of creativity for fantastika.
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Today I am happy to present an interview with The Dancing Bear himself, Jeff VanderMeer! If you are not familiar with his work as author, editor, literate critic, and über-blogger, you should immediately go to his website and poke around. Just be nice to the sentinel squids. His latest publication Monstrous Creatures (for which a review will be shortly forthcoming on this very site!), is a sharp series of interrogations of tropes, genres, and writings that encompass the length and breadth of fantastic literature. Jeff kindly agreed to talk to me about his latest work, as well as the state of play in fantastic literature and his future projects.
[Note: This is a gently edited version of an interview I conducted with Jeff on March 6th. There is a slight spoiler to a forthcoming novella contained herein. We dispensed with pleasantries and got right to the conversation]
The Bellowing Ogre: Monstrous Creatures opens and ends with an elated, perhaps a bit wistful, appreciation of your idea of the monstrous. How has this idea influenced the way you write, and your perspective when viewing the writings of others?
Jeff VanderMeer: I have a hard time thinking of monsters as truly monstrous as opposed to possibly misunderstood. Which doesn’t mean I don’t believe that people can be evil, but that sometimes what we classify as monstrous is actually just looking at things from another point-of-view. I just rewatched The Thing on TV and on the one hand it’s about some humans trying not to get absorbed, but on the other it’s a desperate fight for survival by an alien life force far from home.
When it comes to my own characters and other people’s writings, this comes into play because when writing I don’t write any characters I cannot inhabit fully, even if they’re awful. I have to be able to truly see things from their perspective. And this means my readings of other writers tend toward acknowledging the ambiguous and the ways in which a writer’s views are not expressed through their characters.
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“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.” – Ursula K. Le Guin
“As Auden wrote, poetry makes nothing happen, which also implies the possibility of making “nothing” an event rather than a mere vacancy. Poetry rescues nothing and no one, but it embodies that helpless, necessary will to rescue, which is a kind of love, my love for the world and the things and people in the world.” – Kathy Womack
The title and opening quotations I’ve used for this column exemplify what I love about fantastika: the potential infinity of inspirations, its simultaneous distance and intimate inextricability from life, and the tricks of language that it uses to create wondrous nothings. Cribbing the title from a Raymond Carver story may seem like a strange way to frame a discussion, especially since that story is about the futility of love’s passion in the face of how our lives actually play out. But when I think of that closing image of the darkness enfolding the characters as they seem to wait for something to happen, I see an opportunity for the reader to reflect on what drives them, what they love, and how that love affects their lives. It causes me to consider what I love, why I love, and how I relate to and interpret love in different parts of my life (although, as it turns out, that ending is really someone else’s fantasy fused on to Carver’s original story).
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“I’m starting to think that if science fiction isn’t deeply worried about our present, it should be taken out and shot.” – Paolo Bacigalupi
[WARNING TO READERS: There are some spoilers in this column for the works mentioned. I have tried to limit them but it is hard to do so and discuss the works in-depth to give them their due.]
The title of this week’s column is taken from a passage in A. M. Lightner’s The Day of the Drones (which I was led to by Jame Donaworth’s chapter “Genre Blending and the Critical Dystopia in the Dark Horizons anthology) I like the quotation because it makes a strong statement about dystopia, particularly in its more recent iterations. It speaks to character agency and possibility, to the rupturing of the idea of the classic, monolithic dystopias of the past. It also exemplifies the development of new visions of dystopia; which, as I noted last week, Samuel R. Delany characterized as having “gone beyond this irreconcilable Utopian/Dystopian conflict to produce a more fruitful model against which to compare human development.” But in the new century, what has dystopia developed into in adult SF?
This week I would like to look at how writers of SF are using and elaborating the dystopian spirit. The best way to do this succinctly, but with some variety, was to focus on short stories, which I find are often ignored in analyses of dystopian literature. While they lack the vast detail of a novel, short stories can deliver the essence of dystopia with concision and emotional impact. Since I want to look at recent work, I decided to choose some stories from John Joseph Adams’ new collection Brave New Worlds. I recommend it highly for its combination of classic stories with newer tales that demonstrate the ingenuity that writers have garnered from the idea of dystopia. What do these stories tell us about the ways in which the idea of dystopia is expressed in SF, and do they address the concerns that dystopia has historically dealt with? Is Paolo Bacigalupi’s worry, which seems like a concern that dystopia could be used to explicate, being addressed by other writers?
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“[I]maginative literature is one of the most important means by which any culture can investigate new ways of defining itself and of exploring alternatives to the social and political status quo. Utopian literature, with its quest for the ideal society, represents the epitome of this project, and thinkers like Jameson have particularly stressed the importance of utopian impulses in literature. In the same way, literary works that critically examine both existing conditions and the potential abuses that might result from the institution of supposedly utopian alternatives can be seen as the epitome of literature in its role as social criticism.”
“Dystopias are often seen as ‘cautionary tales,’ but the best dystopias are not didactic screeds, and the best dystopias do not draw their power from whatever political/social point the might be making; the best dystopias speak to the deeper meanings of what it is to be one small part of a teeming civilization. . . and of what it is to be human.”
I wanted to open this column with these quotations because they exemplify two major ideals that underpin writing in a dystopian vein, and the tensions inherent in the idea of dystopian literature’s capabilities and objectives. The word “dystopian” is used frequently these days to describe all sorts of media productions with a variety of messages, but the resonance of its meaning is rendered vaguer and diluted as a result. In about 150 years the word has gone from a simple opposite of “utopia” to a powerful strategy of authorship to a broadly-employed, edgy synonym for a variety of ideas within literature, film, political theory, and philosophy. But what significance can the term have now when applied to literature, and what notions can it inspire for speculative fictional jaunts?
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“What I cannot bear, as a reader or as a person, is to be bored.” – Reginald Shepherd
Given what I wrote last time, this week’s column topic should not surprise anyone. I like difficult literature. I like books that surprise me, that subvert convention, that try to find not just a distinctive angle on a story, but actively meddle with that story. I like rich language that is not always to the point, that creates sensation rather than basic semiotic messages. I like to discover and spar with disquietude, unreliability, and perplexity in written art; I like works that create conundrums, that force you to defend and exercise your imagination and ideas, and that show us just how contingent and edifying the act of writing can be.
I became much more passionate about discussing this after reading Aidan Moher’s blog post that asked “Are Fantasy Readers ‘Dumber’ Than Science Fiction Readers?” The title comes from a commenter’s response to an earlier post, and resulted in an array of comments about the linkage (or lack thereof) between genre and intelligence, and between genre and complexity. Aidan encouraged the discussion by extending the (rather loaded) question and asking if Fantasy fiction was less “taxing” or if readers and writers felt that “smart fantasy” was not being published, but most commenters did not address these queries.
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“But this [historical critical] view only traces a single thread through what is essentially a tapestry of aesthetic productions. The line, of course, tries to connect the high points. Frequently enough, these high points are , in reality, connected. But just as frequently they are connected more strongly to other works and situations totally off this line. Historical artistic progress only exists through the perspective lent by hindsight.”
“Theft is an integral function of a healthy literature.”
In hindsight, I wish I was a better journalist.
Last summer I attended Readercon 21, which is one of the best fantastika conventions in the U.S. It focuses on the heart of the wider genre, literature, and is a small con in size but enormous in intensity. That focus is what makes it both an intimate and mind-expanding experience. Because of the focus on the written word, there are often panels and discussions on genre, and also alternatives to genre. Some panels have focused on denoting or explicating new genres, while others take genre(s) apart. It was at one such panel that I was introduced to an idea that I found both quite refreshing and a tad perplexing: interstitiality. Sadly, I did not practice assiduous notation of the proceedings, but the ideas discussed about interstitial fiction were compelling (and infectious) enough to keep nagging at my mind.
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“I have a theory that the secret source of fantasy is a failure to adapt to one’s environment. As human beings, we make our environments adapt to us, when we can, but we also learn to adapt to our environments when necessary. At the core of any fantasist or dreamer is a voice saying, ‘Yes, I know I could fly in one of those big noisy machines, but I wish I could fly like a bird. I know I can get money by working, but I wish I could change the rocks in my backyard into gold. I know that I can become famous by running for City Council, but I would prefer to slay a Dragon.’
Maladjustment is usually viewed as a bad thing, but the ability to dream about things as they are not may be related to the ability to change things as they are. Escaping briefly from the possible to the impossible may allow us to return with fresh eyes, to distinguish the way things as they are from the way we thought things were. How else can you get this kind of perspective on reality, except through fantasy?” – James Enge
As a writer, a reader, and as someone who finds human behavior and language to be endlessly fascinating, I find metaphors to be educational and entertaining. Whether a bold cliche or a meaning hidden under an obscure configuration of words, the power of metaphor and its linguistic cousins astonishes and intrigues me. That is the inspiration for the title of this column, which is taken from a metaphor that James Enge has used to concisely characterize how he came up with and writes about his creation Morlock the Maker and the world that he wanders through. The crooked-shouldered sorcerer is the central character in his artistic oeuvre , comprised to date of three novels and several novellas and short stories. While Enge is a recent rising star in sword-and-sorcery fiction, his writing has a maturity and deftness that makes it distinctive and worthy of critical appreciation. His work also exemplifies this metaphor in a number of ways, as Enge takes this imaginary hammer to his characters, to his stories, and in some sense to the reader as well, reshaping escapism and wish-fulfillment into something more invigorating. What I would like to do in this column is, briefly and in preliminary fashion, sketch out what makes Enge’s work so singular and remarkable.
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I have learned a valuable lesson about writing a weekly column, which is germane to today’s topic: make sure that when you mention your column topic for “Next Week” that you can actually write about it!
This is germane because, as I conducted my reading and pondering about the topic I had mentioned, I realized that what I want to talk about this week is not the anti-epic per se, but the step away from the epic in fantasy literature. The proliferation of subgenres (some of which are more clearly marketing tools than others) is not about producing a single antithesis to epic fantasy. It is more about the expansion of alternatives, a splintering of fantasy genres that mirror to some extent the raveling of the fiction market and its social webs. It is about creating new literary niches, it is about trying to gain congruity with readers’ ideas and existing categories (sometimes in an act of appropriation), and it is about a marketplace and reading culture that is undergoing rapid, sometimes momentous, change.
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Fantastika is the mirror-mythos of our times. The stories and experiences and connections contained within that vast range of literary creations encourage imaginative peregrinations, engagement and reflection, within our own minds and in the social worlds we fashion around them. Boundless marvels and perpetual illusions anchor the stuff of dreams into words and images. How we apprehend this stuff, and the meanings that we take from it and exchange with each other, form a rich tessellation that constantly flourishes, a vivid mosaic whose patterns and delights and quandaries are never exhausted.
One recent quandary has gotten a lot of attention in the last year or so: “Is Epic Fantasy Still Epic?” Terri-Lynne DeFino, the author of Finder, discussed this question over at Apex Book Company’s blog, and received an avalanche of comments in response (including several from me). She was responding in part to a panel on “The Continued Viability of Epic Fantasy” at the last World Fantasy Convention where most of the discussion focused on whether epic fantasy could survive in the marketplace, and what conditions were affecting its survival. Terri-Lynne focused more on the question of whether or not the transformations that panel discussed would diminish the “epic” in epic fantasy (her answer was: it would). Both of these discussions, however, were trying to figure out why epic fantasy, the flagship of Fantasy, was struggling.
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