When I attended Illogicon last month, one of the things that stuck with me was Tim Powers’ comment that he tries to incorporate science into his fantasy novels (like the use of quantum mechanics in Last Call) because readers know fantasy, by its nature, is impossible, so he tries to make it more plausible.
This is something that never much bothers me—I usually assume anyone who reads fantasy is okay with that. There is, however, a long tradition of giving fantasy an SF overlay. Fritz Leiber’s classic Conjure Wife implies that there’s an underlying scientific logic to magic, even if it’s not clear exactly what it is. A. Merritt’s superb fantasies (Face in the Abyss, The Moon Pool, Dweller in the Mirage) usually have pseudoscientific rationales (racial memory, other-dimensional energy beings, guardians vibrating so fast they’re invisible). Even if it doesn’t draw more readers (I honestly have no clue), it can certainly be entertaining (as Powers always is).
But the point of this post is that there’s two ways in which pure fantasy can work that SF just doesn’t.
•The impossible happens.
In reading New Worlds of Fantasy II this week, I came across the short story “En Passant” by Britt Schweitzer. The concept is simple: A man’s head falls off his body and has to find a way to climb back on the neck.
That’s something you can only do in fantasy—a story built around a completely impossible premise. Not impossible in the “magic works” way, just impossible.
Likewise, Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo centers on Jeff Daniels as a movie character (“Tom Baxter—poet, explorer, of the Chicago Baxters.”) who sees Mia Farrow watching his film over and over and walks off the screen to meet him. Again, no explanation, magical or scientific, it just happens.
These are the kind of stories where any sort of scientific explanation would probably work against it, not for it.
•Poetic reasoning.
In the 1949 film Orphee, Death comes and goes from our world using mirrors for gateways. Why? Because “mirrors are the doors through which death comes and goes—look at yourself in a mirror all your life and you’ll see death at work.”
That’s the logic of poetry, not science. It works because it’s poetry.
Like so much else in writing, success with fantasy-as-science is a matter of judgment, of knowing when it works and when it doesn’t. No hard and fast rules.
Monthly Archives: February 2013
Indistinguishable From Science?
Filed under Movies, Reading, Science vs. Sorcery, Writing
It’s Woden’s day, so let’s celebrate with links!
Sen. Marco Rubio offers a rationale for why Republicans shouldn’t move to the left: If they stand firm, then they can all say “Ha, told you so! We were right all along!” when Obama’s policies fail. Which he assumes they will (and have for a while).
This is not a good thing. Repubs and I are never going to agree, but any move toward the center would improve things. And the implication is that they have the same goal they did in Obama’s first time—to make him fail. So we can expect more gridlock and more mindless opposition.
•Roy Baumeister (a male supremacist I’ve referenced in the past) argues that science shows women found it easier to reproduce than men did. Therefore, evolutionary pressure must have been stronger on men, which is why they’ve become far superior to women. Echidne of the Snakes dissects this. Among other points, Baumeister ignores that some of men’s superior genes would pass to their daughters.
•Unsurprisingly, Catholic bishops are not happy with Obama’s latest compromise on insurance and birth control. I do not believe any compromise that allows women to get coverage will ever satisfy them. Meanwhile, a Catholic hospital director argues that abortion to save the life of the mother means “doing evil to bring about good.” and is therefore unjustifiable. Apparently letting the mother die to save the baby is morally unremarkable.
Meanwhile, Republicans in Iowa now advocate trying mothers for murder if they get abortion. No surprise that they’ve gone there, despite long-time insistence that Of Course That Would Be Wrong. And they extend it to cover drug-induced abortions—which makes me suspect given the claims that the pill is an abortifacent (it isn’t), that they’ll interpret taking birth control drugs as murder too. Because they hate women’s right to choose. More from LGM.
•When it comes to appointing torture-apologist John Brennan as CIA head, the Senate is suddenly not obstructionist—in contrast to appointing a head for consumer-protection agencies.
•A small legal step that might make it easier for Jews to move into the neighborhood? Horrors! And I say that despite the sexism of many ultra-Orthodox Jews (as Echidne has observed, the far right of all three Abrahamic religions is dreadfully sexist).
•Trying to think like a rapist is just another way of saying it’s the woman’s fault. Sarah Over the Moon considers the relationship between complementarianism and rape (which is also covered in one of my And columns). A Christian blogger reminds women that when men rape, it’s not because women drive them to it.
*A San Francisco restaurant steals by underpaying employees. Now it has to pay them back. Banks that dealt in bad mortgages, however, are being allowed to review their own mortgage portfolio to decide if they did anything wrong.
•The Daily Howler argues that claims Rosa Parks saw Malcolm X as her “personal hero” are a kind of anti-myth (she wasn’t just a sweet, tired cleaning woman, she was that radical!). The Howler does make clear she admired Malcolm X, but not his hate for whites in the early years of his activism. The blog has had a lot to say about Rosa Parks in the past week or so, and it’s worth reading.
•If you’re Muslim, one school makes your right to get the holy days off contingent on your GPA.
Filed under Politics, Undead sexist cliches
Nothing happened: The setting story
“Ralph Mellish, a file clerk at an insurance company, was on his way to work as usual when… (da dum!) Nothing happened!”(from Monty Python’s Adventures of Ralph Mellish)
Of Orson Scott Card’s four story types, I think setting-centric stories are the toughest.
A “setting” story focuses on the milieu, not the characters or the plot (though presumably it has both). The protagonist enters the setting, spends some time there as the writer shows off the world, then leaves. Gulliver’s Travels and Alice in Wonderland, police procedurals and “slice of life” stories are all examples.
It’s tough because sitting back and watching the world go by works against dramatic tension. In Lewis Carroll’s Alice tales, Alice has no personal dilemma to work through, and she’s not trying to achieve any goals. The story is about what weird thing Carroll’s crazy worlds will throw at her next.
Likewise, in police procedurals (John Creasey’s Gideon novels or Hill Street Blues and similar TV shows) the characters are usually juggling several plot threads at once. Some will have a happy ending. Some a downer. Some just trail off inconclusively. The purpose is to create a lifelike feel, but in return you lose some of the dramatic payoff.
For another example, my short story Learning Curve, which came out some years ago in Byzarium, is set in a world where maggots do generate spontaneously in rotten meat and the four humors control our emotions. My protagonist is a science teacher and we follow her through one week in school, coping with uninterested students and annoying bureaucrats.
Nothing’s really resolved. At the end of the week, the protagonist’s problems haven’t changed, she hasn’t changed either. The story just looks at what science and culture are like, given the underlying premise.
To pick a more famous example, there’s Lord Dunsany’s Idle Days on the Yann. The narrator enters the dreamworld and pays for a boat to take him down the river Yann to the sea. There’s no conflict, no opposition, no obstacles to overcome, just the world to explore. We pass a city where rituals have been unchanged for centuries in hopes of binding Time himself, and Perdondaris, where the city’s ivory gate is carved from the single tusk of an unknown behemoth. No conflict, no character development could add up to a dull story, but Dunsany makes it fascinating.
For an even more extreme example, there’s Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel, which hardly has any plot at all. The story consists of the librarian protagonist describing the seemingly infinite library in which he works and the significance of the endless shelves of apparently meaningless books. We don’t even get an underlying rationale (who built this place? Where does the food come from? Where do new librarians come from?), let alone a narrative thread.
But it works, wonderfully, because Borges’ little world is so fascinating. Which is why he’s a Nobel-prize winning author and most of us aren’t.
I know Learning Curve isn’t in the same league though it was interesting enough to sell. But coming up with a world that’s interesting enough to focus on, then writing it interestingly enough to work is a tough challenge indeed.
Filed under Writing
More Undead Sexist Cliches than you can shake a stick at!
Suzanne Venker, a career woman who thinks other women should stay home and make babies, is once again recycling a boatload of undead sexist cliches. Which makes it kind of amusing she opens her piece by stating “It’s time to say what no one else will” which is that feminism sucks.
This is a popular cliche in itself: Feminists have repressed the media so that nobody dares speak truth to power (much the same way that they castrated TV shows). As witness that Venker has to post on Fox News an obscure website that nobody ever heard of—oh. Wait. And Caitlin Flanagan, a professional woman who employs a household staff and a nanny can only get her sexist op-eds (which explain that women should never let a household staff or a nanny take over Mom’s duty to the family) published in the New York Times. Yeah, that’s some oppressive power.
Venker continues “Feminism didn’t result in equality between the sexes – it resulted in mass confusion. Today, men and women have no idea who’s supposed to do what…. Prior to the 1970s, people viewed gender roles as as equally valuable. Many would argue women had the better end of the deal! It’s hard to claim women were oppressed in a nation in which men were expected to stand up when a lady enters the room or to lay down their lives to spare women life.”
It is difficult to sum up this argument concisely—no, actually it’s easy. Venker’s spouting bullshit. A fairly old bullshit I remember from childhood as stock props of sexism: Yes, men may have all the money, all the jobs and all the power but women are just as important. And women aren’t shackled or oppressed, why they’re on a pedestal! Men stand up when they enter the room! Women really have all the power.
I give Venker extra points for the weaselly phrasing. She’s not actually saying herself that women were better off 70 years ago when it was legal to fire someone based on gender, let alone 200 years ago when a woman’s property automatically became her husband’s when she married. Gosh no, she’s just mentioning that lots of people (I presume she’s not naming them because she’d end up with a list of right-wing pundits) do think that.
And as Echidne points out at the second link in this post, the idea of chivalrous men back in Ye Ancient Days is a myth. Chivalry didn’t stop men raping women, beating women, murdering women. As several feminists pointed out after the Titanic went down (Venker references that as well), the men who gave up their lives for women on the boat had no problem treating them like dirt in sweatshops.
I will agree with her that feminism hasn’t accomplished equality yet, but that has more to do with the endless right-wing pushback against it, and the fact women have had such a long way to go (and still do).
The rest of Venker’s piece (I don’t link to it directly, but you can click through) is a standard regurgitation of more clips about women (other than Venker) are miserable when they don’t fit traditional roles and men won’t commit if they get the milk free.
As for “men and women have no idea who’s supposed to do what,” astonishingly most people are capable of dealing with that as individuals. They don’t need a gender essentialist checklist (“I’m a woman, guess I’d better make dinner.”). It may get awkward if we don’t have neat little square holes to fit into without thinking, but you know what? It’s a lot nicer for everyone who’s a round peg.
Filed under Politics, Undead sexist cliches
Working like a dog
I’m finally drafting that post for Raleigh Public Record that I was working on last week. So just links today, starting with my new And column on the current state of endless war. Related to which, we have this Prospect post arguing that Congress isn’t doing its duty to check-and-balance the executive branch. And the media fall down on the job too.
•Speaking of the media, Fox News explains that Germany has a better solar power program because it’s so much sunnier there than anywhere in the US.
•Salon lists bad arguments for refusing to reaauthorize the Violence Against Women Act. The most batshit is that offering women protection increases the risk of abuse: ““Women are about twice as likely as men to be injured in a domestic violence incident and we’re forced to conclude that one of the most important things we can do to protect women is teach them ‘don’t hit first.’”
•Digby glumly concludes that Obama’s going to steer us toward greater austerity in return for things like military spending cuts that will easily be put back. In another post, she ponders why so many Americans are supportive of drone strikes.
One factor Digby touches on here is that some people are fine with it just so long as it’s their president in charge of the power. Roy Edroso looks at rightbloggers divided between supporting drone warfare (since after all we’re at war/9-11/Muslims!) and not wanting to endorse Obama doing it.
•Getting through airport security with a Costco card for ID. And here’s a puzzler: An American veteran living in the Middle East is allowed to fly home to visit his ill mother. He spends a couple of weeks with her, no problem. But he’s too dangerous to allow to fly back out of the country.And since the “no fly list” doesn’t offer specific charges, he can’t counter them.
•A woman tries to attract support for her Kickstarter art project by showcasing other people’s art (as an example of the sort of thing she’ll be doing, she says).
•A homeowners association bankrupts itself over a yard sign that was four inches too tall. More detail here.
•Another story of criminal foreclosure practices.
•The World Economics Forum reports the US is Number One on GDP, but scores much lower on pretty much everything else.
•David Sirota says it’s hard to be a Randian if you see the levels of suffering in the Third World.
•While I doubt I will ever be writing about female musicians, here’s some good advice for anyone who does: Do you compare the artist only to other women? Would your writing sound ridiculous if you said the same things about a guy?
Filed under Politics
What we need is more worker drones, dammit!
So according to North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, state universities should stop offering liberal arts degrees (gender studies were particularly singled out) that don’t provide good employment. Which may indicate some sort of Repub meme emerging, as Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s task force has proposed charging more for degrees that don’t serve Florida’s job market (so people who want to do something that doesn’t make a lot of money will have to pay more to get qualified to do it).
This doesn’t surprise me. I think college is increasingly seen by conservatives (and probably some liberals too) as a tool to churn out more of whatever the business world needs. McCrory is, I gather, also big on increasing vocational education, which fits this trend: The rich are always going to need plumbers and auto mechanics, so let’s bulk up the supply (I agree with one interviewee at the link that making this call in high school—college or trade?—is too soon for a lot of people).
Of course, McCrory also seems keen on wiping out gender studies and similar courses that question the status quo. And he’s Republican, go figure on that one. I’m willing to bet that despite the fact growing numbers of law-school students can’t land jobs (as Paul Campos has discussed in many posts on LGM)—in some parts of the country, less than half—I suspect we’re not going to see any changes there.
During McCrory’s interview with right-wing pundit William Bennett, Bennett offered this thought: “”We’ve really created this elitist cult of hierarchy … where people who know how to do things with their hands are looked down on by people who don’t know how to do anything.”
Which is actually a fair criticism, even though Bennett constitutes an elitist himself (former cabinet official, best-selling author, radio talk-show host, extremely wealthy). Plenty of educated people do look down on blue-collar types. Of course, so do lots of rich people and Wall Streeters, but I doubt McCrory or Bennett are going to fling that sort of flak their way. Much better to play the old Evil Elitist card for a right-wing audience. After all, we know a regular guy who’s a Real American can write about history just as well as people who actually study it, right?
Writing links
A couple of years back I linked to Ursula LeGuin discussing Google’s plans to digitize everything that wasn’t in print, whether or not it was still under copyright. Since then, a publishers’ group has settled with Google (terms undisclosed) and a university project, Hathitrust, creating a database of works based on Google scans has won in court (no copyright infringement). At the link, there’s concern that since the judge was unimpressed by problems with the university system (digitizing books that were still in print and under copyright, for instance), this bodes poorly for stopping Google doing the same. Some discussion of “orphan work” issues (orphan works being those under copyright where the rights-holder can’t be found or identified) here.
•Bricks-and-mortar stores are where lots of buyers go to research the market (before moving online to buy). Online book promotion isn’t as effective. In related matters, here’s an argument that cracking down on piracy hurts authors by also cracking down on their ability to promote themselves online (both links courtesy of Kate Traylor
•Regarding bricks and mortar, I recently linked to a story concluding Barnes & Noble is going to die and take hard-copy books with it. Consumerist is more optimistic. It’s a particularly good point about used-book stores—lord knows, when I was in my twenties, almost all my book-buying came that way (and I’d never have spent money on a Kindle). And here, Mari Ness argues that if K-Mart can keep going, so can Barnes & Noble.
Oh, you can find my own thoroughly uninformed speculation about the e-book future here, and on predictions of e-books dating back to the 1990s here (readers will be dirt cheap, ebooks will cost pennies, and no discussion of having to deal with multiple formats).
•Blogger John Seavey writes about something I’ve blogged about before, SF that assumes culture stops dead in the present. While Star Trek is particularly bad about this, it’s hardly unique: Marvel’s Ghost Rider 2099, for instance, has computer intelligences appearing in the form of 20th century TV characters, which makes as much sense as an AI that only talks to me in quotes from Charles Dickens.
•Bottleworder wonders if taking more responsibility for our selling and marketing will make us more susceptible to market pressure.
•Some thoughts on how to shut out distractions. I whole-heartedly recommend four and six; three doesn’t work for me because I never know when TYG might need to call me for something.
•Here we have a possible way to start the morning. It’s close to my MO, though I usually do more personal stuff before starting writing (yoga or other stretching, watching some TV, etc.). As she notes, you should adjust this to your schedule—given my oft-discussed problems writing in the evenings (in brief, if it’s choice between snuggling with TYG and working, working usually loses), I start writing earlier than she does. More thoughts on scheduling here.
•A Writer’s Digest article on raising the stakes for your characters.
•Mighty God King critiques an online strip dealing with nerds, nerd culture and relationships and why he thinks it goes off-beam (this is not a writing link, but I’m guessing at least some nerds are reading this). There’s much interesting discussion in comments before getting into a “I’m not making up a straw man, you’re making up a straw man!” debate.
I completely agree with MGK that not knowing the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek isn’t even remotely a test for non-nerdness; these days, most people know. Overall, though, I think the strip is just a variation of a time-honored rom-com cliche: The perfect man almost always loses to the seemingly inadequate rival. Of course, as with bad boys, using a cliche doesn’t mean it works (I don’t follow the strip so it’s hard to assess).
Filed under Writing
Comics
Rereading G. Willow Wilson’s and MK Perker’s regrettably short-lived Vertigo series AIR, I’ve worked through volume one (Letters From Lost Countries) and two (Flying Machines). The protagonist is Blythe, a stewardess who finds herself in an on-going battle between the good guys (or are they) and the sinister Etesians over the power of hyperpraxis, the ability to fly instantly across any distance, which Blythe happens to possess. To further complicate things there’s her possibly terrorist boyfriend Zayn, a lost country that doesn’t exist and Amelia Earhart as Blythe’s mentor. Fun.
SHOWCASE PRESENTS THE SEA DEVILS reprints the first 20 or so appearances of the Sea Devils, one of DC’s Silver Age adventure teams (along with the Challengers of the Unknown, Rip Hunter and the original Suicide Squad). Four divers, each with personal reasons driving them to the sea, join forces as divers-for-hire—though before long they’re moving away from normal adventures into a zany version of the Seven Seas where running into a merman (“I’m really a fish, but I’ve been transformed into a half-human freak!”) or King Neptune is just part for the course. The stories here (mostly by Robert Kanigher) are uneven but entertaining; it helps that as things go along, the Sea Devils get more and more matter-of-fact about the weirdness (in contrast, Kanigher’s War That Time Forgot series suffers from having everyone emphasize in every story how unbelievable everything is).
AVENGING SPIDER-MAN: My Friends Can Beat Up Your Friends is a collection of Spider-Man teamups with Red Hulk, Hawkeye and Captain America, with the Red Hulk story (the two of them going up against the Mole Man) the best. Overall though, none of this was very memorable.
Nor was I very impressed by Dave Gibbons’ THE ORIGINALS, a too-familiar story of a graffiti artist getting involved with a street gang and falling into nastier sorts of crime and rumbles with rival gangs. The fact it’s happening in a near-future SF story doesn’t help this one.
SPIDERGIRL: Like Father, Like Daughter, by Tom DeFalco and Pat Oliffe has Peter Parker’s daughter (in a parallel world where the Marvel Universe heroes are 20 years older and Peter’s retired) coping with new super-hero Ladyhawk, veteran super-hero Nova (and the idea of this 1970s teenage hero now a stuffy older statesmen in the hero community is a hoot in itself), finally convincing Dad to accept her career choice and getting sent back in time to her father’s early teenage years (very Back to the Future-ish but fun). A series I highly recommend.
IRREDEEMABLE is the companion series to Incorruptible in which the Supermanesque Plutonian goes crazy and proceeds to kill everyone by the millions. In Vol. 8, the Plutonian escapes the aliens who captured him and returns to Earth with a team of ET super-villains. Can the heroes of his former team, the Paradigm, do better against him than they’ve done in the past? I wasn’t impressed with the start of this series, but it’s picked up a lot of steam since.
Filed under Comics, Reading, Uncategorized
Movies and Books
LIANNA (1983)is a frustrated faculty wife who gets a new lease on life when she starts an affair with a female professor only to have her marriage and her new relationship both fall apart. As with Return of the Secaucus Seven, John Sayles approach (this was his sophomore directing turn, though he had several screenwriting gigs between them) is low-key and naturalistic. It doesn’t work quite as well here, but it’s still well executed—close to how the story would play out if the lover had been a man, but not too close (if that makes sense). Sayles casts himself as a lecherous film teacher. “You’re not gay, you’re hysterical.”
THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1971) is an AIP film starring Jason Robards as the had of a Grand Guignol theater troupe rehearsing an adaptation of the Poe story, and haunted by Herbert Lom as a scarfaced Phantom of the Opera figure fixated on Robards’ wife. An entertaining job. “There was no murder—he already had a death certificate.”
UNKNOWN (2011) has biochemist Liam Neeson attending a Berlin conference with wife January Jones only to wake up from a car crash with his identity erased and Jones insisting that Aidan Quinn is her real husband. This got largely unenthusiastic reviews, but while it starts slow, I quite liked the overall result. Diane Krieger plays a helpful Bosnian immigrant and Frank Langella colleague of Neeson’s. I’d suggest Trading Places as a double-bill for another story about a man mysteriously replaced in his own life. “You had time after I called—why didn’t you run?”
ALABASTER by Caitlin Kiernan is a collection of Southern Gothic shorts about Dancy Flambeau, the albino SAPS hunting protagonist of her novel Threshold (which I haven’t read) here criss-crossing Southern Georgia battling various horrors crawling out of swamps and pine forests, or holed up in trailers or an isolated gas station. Well written and extremely effective.
THE YARD by Alex Grecian is a Victorian-set police procedural in which Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad tries to hunt down a mad killer whacking their own while also coping with gun-toting hookers and the death of a chimney sweep. Nothing really wrong with it, just by-the-numbers and lacking in spark.
FIVE STORIES FOR THE DARK MONTHS by my friend Kate Traylor is a collection of self-published short stories available on Smashwords. The best story is “The Boon” (a Gothic version of Thumbelina), followed by the secondary-world fantasy “Warmth in Winter” (familiar elements nicely nixed); the only one that really didn’t work for me was “Sans Merci” (well written but too predictable). For the record, while I’d be unlikely to write a negative review of a friend’s book, I wouldn’t write a positive one I didn’t believe in (I’d just not mention it).
MONSTER EARTH is the anthology that includes my Peace With Honor story. The others include the first recorded appearance of the monsters during Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, a version of Pearl Harbor where a Japanese kraken battles an ancient Hawaiian spirit and a fifties-set one where the giant sasquatch-like Johnson runs wild in Los Angeles (probably my favorite besides mine). One where my judgment is obviously biased, but I really do think it’s good (whether the Kindle version or print)
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