Sarah Horrocks had a great comment about sci-fi and horror in comics (and out. It’s reprinted below.
I’m miscommunicating if I’m putting across that I don’t think sci-fi genre work is as good as anything else.
I’m still reading Dune on the first go through, but there are lines in this book so magical that they are already amongst my favorite. Game of Thrones is an exceptional work. Prophet blows my mind every month. I obviously feel pretty passionate about Druillet’s work. I love Giger and Beksinski’s sci-fi/horror paintings.
And I say all of this as someone whose background in education IS the study of literature.
I think what upsets people about sci-fi is that they feel it’s “merely” escapism, and they’ve been taught to view anything remotely escapist as a pejorative. But it is these fantastic other worlds that most bend and expand your mind, and allow you to change expectations and ideas when you end the work and come back to reality. Sci-fi as a genre is a world shaper. We probably wouldn’t be having this conversation on this thing the internet without science-fiction and it’s mind altering qualities. Sci-fi is good drugs.
And Druillet and Moebius are for me masters of it. I find their works hugely inspirational, and full of ideas that are even today fresh and interesting. Even just technically what they were able to pull off was virtuoso work. There are certain mechanics within western comic art that they absolutely are the gold standard for.
Corben is I feel something of a different beast entirely. I see Corben more in the horror mold–though that’s shaped because most of the Corben I’ve read, and continue to read is horror. And I think horror operates with a completely different set of rules from any other genre but porn. I think great horror is not plot based at all, but rather about generating a particular mind state within the reader–like the example I always use is in the film Texas Chainsaw massacre–the original–there’s this section where he’s chasing the girl through the woods with his chainsaw, and the night is blue, and there’s almost an impossible amount of branches that keep getting in the girl’s way–and leatherface is always like just inches behind her no matter how fast she runs–and the forest actually morphs within this scene and elongates from how we had previously seen it in the film. Suddenly it changes into this seemingly neverending labryinth. She stars running across the screen in directions and at distances that should get her out of the forest–but don’t. In terms of realism it is a failure. But what the work is engaging with is that creepy dream logic that infuses all of the best nightmares.
Most horror work in film and comics of the last 20 years have been failures because they do not understand that this element is what makes horror work. The plot and the realism is what detracts you from the sublime horror moment where art melds with dream. Similar to the moment porn melds with fantasy.
Horror, particularly in comics I think, should be less interested in plot and story compared to any other genre of comics–and be interested in creating these nightmare images and scenarios that come off of the page. More horror comics creators need to be surrealist pornographers.
This got off track. But horror is I feel an instance where adherence to plot and characterization rules that work in other genres produces spectacular failures of horror. The only thing you are left with in a horror work whose focus are those elements is a gore-fest, and trying to out-shock the last person. But true horror is not just gore, or shock–it’s much more subversive than that. And so horror is a huge indictment as a genre of this particular approach.
For me an excellent work of true horror did come out in comics this year, and it was done by Richard Corben. It was called Ragemoor. I remember reading the opening pages of that book and that section where the castle history is being explained–gave me chills like a comic hadn’t in a long long time. I think Corben has always had the chops to do great horror, and sometimes he has–but when he has failed it has been because of writing which is overly concerned with itself. Which is why it is hard to explain to people Corben’s place in comics history–because he truly is one of the greats–but he has very few works that are masterworks–and if you don’t get Corben art, and can’t focus in on what he’s doing visually on the page–you won’t understand.
Druillet and Moebius are different in that I think both of them the writing is in concert with the art–probably because they are handling both functions.
Damn, that’s a cool piece of art! I’ve loved Corben’s work since the early 1970s, and I guess he’s still got the knack!
Now I just have to go out and find a copy of “Ragemoor.”
“More horror comics creators need to be surrealist pornographers.”
A perfect description of Junji Ito.
“but when he has failed it has been because of writing which is overly concerned with itself. ”
He’s failed because he’s drawn puerile stories that are no more advanced than your typical EC comics story. In essence, “Vault of Horrors” with breasts.
Yeah except he hasn’t. See also…I dunno…Ragemoor.
Also Junji Ito is great. I also like Suehiro Mauro a crap ton.
Corben is better than both however. Even in the service of shit stories.
Al Columbia is another one who is really good at horror.
Also Kengo Hanazawa’s I am a Hero. There are definitely people doing it right. But when you think about the standard stuff kicked out, especially in america that is coming out under horror–it’s mostly bad gore fetishism. I think some Ito and Mauro are somewhat about gore fetishes as well–but that they are that done right because of how cerebral the gore is, if that makes sense.
How is it exactly that sci-fi, horror, and fantasy limit artistic expression when some greats works of literature and film are of those genres?
The way I usually see the snobbery is that SF is held above fantasy, following Darko Suvin’s argument that while both use cognitive estrangement (making us see common things in a new, weird, alienated way) only the former requires that one think about the differences being made in the non-realistic changes. Fantasy gets lumped into horror as fascistic, anti-rationalist, etc.. There’s another critic, Carl Freedman, who relates Duvin’s view to Critical Theory, suggests that SF is actually superior to all genres for being able to deal with our alienation. (They both cheat by including Kafka and the like as SF.) But he’s kind of dismissive of horror and fantasy, too. China Mielville does a good job of rebutting the supposed rationalism of SF as of distinguishing feature. If my tummy weren’t hurting and I could drink coffee to restore my memory, I’d be able to explain this better, but hopefully that suffices.
Anyway, I’m with you on horror. I happened to use the porn analogy, too, just the other day to a friend. Affect is one of the most important features of both genres: if you don’t feel something, it’s not quite working properly. That’s why I think film can do horror better than any other medium: the immersive combination of sound and vision allows for a better control of the audience. Ito’s about the only comic book artist that’s caused me to feel queasy. Maruo, whose work I love, is more conceptual, like reading a transgressive erotic novel or something.
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somerandomdumbass says:
How is it exactly that sci-fi, horror, and fantasy limit artistic expression when some great works of literature and film are of those genres?
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Because in order to be a properly focused work of those genres, extraneous factors which would make for a richer, more complex whole routinely need to be downplayed.
As I’d mentioned in that thread from which Sarah Horrocks’ comment was pulled:
Science fiction and experimental fiction are trying to do different things than a John Updike or Henry James novel novel.
…I think that a work which does not fall within genre parameters or is trying to be “experimental” has a far greater capacity to be great Art; it can be more universal.
However, a work which is more narrowly focused can be weakened by this expansiveness:
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…what about the mystery’s widely admitted second-rate literary status? What is the basis for this reputation? The mystery’s inferiority is linked to its use of the formula of “flattening.” Characters are simplified so that they respond to the story rather than their personal psychological needs or higher aspirations. Plots are streamlined so that the variations are more clearly seen against the backdrop of uniform expectations. Settings are stylized so that topology rather than geography dominates. Isn’t it the case that the mystery story’s second-rate status is precisely what makes it so valuable?……
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The infinitely more complex and fascinating whole at http://art3idea.psu.edu/boundaries/documents/mystery.html
To turn a “Moby-Dick” into an adventure story would necessitate massive amputations, which would make it more effectively “adventurous,” but artistically a far lesser work.
To turn Goya’s “The Shooting” — http://web.sbu.edu/theology/bychkov/goya_shooting.jpg — into effective propaganda, the victims-to-be would all have to be stalwart, courageous, defiant (oh, and good-looking, too); instead, most are cringing in fear, a few stunned, showing resignation, or attempting a hopeless appeal to the humanity of the firing squad.
The converse does not work, though; to take a great genre work and shoehorn “serious, literary” stuff within only results in a bloated, pretentious genre piece.
The better SF, with which I am well acquainted (at least the stuff written 40 years ago or earlier) is more driven by “what if?” considerations; exploring extrapolations of current trends, scientific discoveries. With characters and plots to simply “flesh out” the idea.
In horror, we get fear; whether the crude version of the slasher movie, unease at loss of identity (as in the SF/horror “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”), or unease at the rug of reassuringly solid-seeming reality being either swept from under our feet, or twitched aside so we get a glimpse of strange things that swarm beneath (as in Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla”: http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/Horl.shtml ).
In all those cases, rich characterizations, emotional complexities, etc. are but barnacles clinging to the hull…
Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” — widely considered the first true work of science fiction — deals with fascinating, important philosophical questions; Wells’ “The time Machine” contains all matter of symbolic observations and commentaries about where societal trends, treatment of workers, etc. could lead to. There are Huxley’s “Brave New World” and “Island.” Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” ( http://harelbarzilai.org/words/omelas.txt ) is a fable that’s a painfully sharp analogy of our lives in the “developed” world, where $200 sports shoes, the chocolates we gorge on, are made or made possible by children slaving away in sweatshops or actual slavery.
Still, where are the rich characterizations, emotional complexities? The depth that makes for great literature?
SO, the odyssey, the illiad, the thousand arabian nights, the holy bible, the divine comedy, orlando furioso,the faeire queen, Alice in wonderland and through the looking glass, the tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, journey to the west, the works of italo calvino, Borges’ short stories,paradise lost, 1984,the gormenghast trilogy, grendel,and others I could aren’t great works of literature?
Frankenstein wasn’t a complex character? There is a number of great character driven genre stuff outh there. Only a limited imagination limits artisitc expression in genre. Brave New World was very character driven.
Also, stalker, solaris, 2001: A Space odyessey, Metropolis, M,The Color of Pomegranates, Faust, Werckmeister Harmonies,ugetsu, film of hayao miyazaki,the shorts of the brothers quay, etc. aren’t great films?
I’d lump comedy in with horror and porn as genres that try to elicit a strong visceral response. (Should/could we distinguish between porn and erotica? That’s a whole other battle)
These responses can be pretty subjective. What scares/amuses/arouses one person won’t work on another person. I know I’m not telling anybody anything they didn’t know, but has anyone tried to work out the way subjective (or “reader-response”) and objective aspects of this kind of material plays out? Is it about “use value?” Do I need coffee?
Mike: “Still, where are the rich characterizations, emotional complexities? The depth that makes for great literature?”
They all gathered in Jack Kirby’s stories, maybe?
RAGEMOOR is really great – I collected the issues as they came out, and I’m glad to hear it getting some praise. Corben sometimes rises and falls on his writing collaborators, which is why I think he’s best when you can just ignore the words and “read” the stories visually. This also applies to the early HEAVY METAL stuff that’s been getting some hate recently on re-examination.
Charles- But videogames have gone a few steps better. Is there any film scarier than the first two Silent Hill games? I dont think so.
I’ve seen hundreds of horror films and to my great sobbing despair, there is only about 25 that have had the desirable effect on me. I really believe there aren’t that many good horror films.
Music and books are often said to be scarier than films for the elements they dont have that allow you to tap further into your imagination. I certainly had more severe chills from books than films and music has given me some really sustained terror that I rarely get in movies.
I’ve said it before but here I go again: Scott Hampton’s adaption of R E Howard’s Pigeons From Hell is the scariest comic I’ve ever read, I was really fucking scared and had trouble looking back at certain images. It is in Spookhouse volume 2 in its full glory (other versions are incomplete).
Junji Ito is probably the runner up.
There is an adaption of Ramsey Campbell’s “Again” that has some really scary images.
I forgot to mention, one of the most complete and satisfying Corben works is Rip In Time written by Bruce Jones, its a good action science fiction adventure of the type Jones did several times. Really good fun.
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
Mike: “Still, where are the rich characterizations, emotional complexities? The depth that makes for great literature?”
They all gathered in Jack Kirby’s stories, maybe?
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Have I ever said Kirby’s stories had all that, or were Great Art? You certainly give the impression of considering anyone who sees any worth in Kirby’s oeuvre to be a deluded fanboy who thinks they belong up there with Shakespeare…
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Aaron White says:
I’d lump comedy in with horror and porn as genres that try to elicit a strong visceral response.
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But all in comedy is not barfing and pratfalling manboys, or — in horror — masked goons dismembering horny teens; there is comedy that is mildly whimsical, head-scratchingly strange (i.e., http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3211/2347642183_91247aa0c8_o.jpg , http://andyxl.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/anglo-saxon-smallest.png ) and “horror” that is just strange, unsetting (Aickman, f’r instance)…
i loved reading this. the focus on mood and effect and dream-logic is exactly what i try to accomplish with my horror comics. the plots are only sketches.
not sure if he’d actually attribute the label to his work, but Dane Martin’s “horror” comics are magnificent http://danemartin.tumblr.com/
Oh! What happened to this, then?
“sarah horrocks says:
Our disagreement isn’t that comics are foundationally narrative. The disagreement is over the improper imposition of a particularly kind of narrative upon structures where they critically have little place.
Is Tarkovsky’s Mirror a densely plotted masterwork which seeks to spellbind you in the same manner as a Hitchcock classic? No. Of course not. And it would be weird to approach the Tarkovsky piece from that angle because you are not making a criticism that deals with the fundemental qualities of the work, really whatsoever. If the qualities which define a work are one thing, what sense does it make to judge the work on a completely different set of qualities that it never had any intention of being?
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[Mike:] Bravo! What an utterly sensible observation, so routinely ignored, We get, in effect, arguments like “Jack Kirby’s comics are crap because they fail to live up to the literary standards of a Henry James novel.”
I dont know why people always imagine Domingos to be saying something far more extreme than he actually ever says.
Some other good people doing great horror pieces these days–Michael Deforge, Charles Burns, and Josh Simmons. Simmons and Deforge in particular have a knack for unnerving me.
Though both of them are more sort of gross out horror I think. Though some of Simmons work is wildly atmospheric.
I think Bernie Wrightson’s Frankenstein adaptions also set a standard in terms of what can be done graphically in horror for comics. A standard most aren’t up to. There’s so much you can do to make an image absolutely haunting. I think there haven’t been enough great artists in comics who have been bent the right way to really produce the kind of masterwork that I know must be out there for american horror comics.
I think in general we are about 10-15 years behind the Japanese in the horror genre in comics. And porn comics for that matter. The japanese seem to have a much better handle as a comic creating community on mood and atmosphere–at least on the whole. I think the cool think though is you can at least see that it can be done in comics. It’s just someone stepping up in american comics and knocking it out the park.
[Earlier…]
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
Mike: “Still, where are the rich characterizations, emotional complexities? The depth that makes for great literature?”
They all gathered in Jack Kirby’s stories, maybe?
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Have I ever said Kirby’s stories had all that, or were Great Art? You certainly give the impression of considering anyone who sees any worth in Kirby’s oeuvre to be a deluded fanboy who thinks they belong up there with Shakespeare…
[Then…]
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
Oh! What happened to this, then?
“sarah horrocks says:
…Is Tarkovsky’s Mirror a densely plotted masterwork which seeks to spellbind you in the same manner as a Hitchcock classic? No. Of course not. And it would be weird to approach the Tarkovsky piece from that angle because you are not making a criticism that deals with the fundemental qualities of the work, really whatsoever. If the qualities which define a work are one thing, what sense does it make to judge the work on a completely different set of qualities that it never had any intention of being?
[Mike:] Bravo! What an utterly sensible observation, so routinely ignored, We get, in effect, arguments like “Jack Kirby’s comics are crap because they fail to live up to the literary standards of a Henry James novel.”
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Uh, because Kirby’s comics are not Great Art, and hardly belong up there with Shakespeare…
…doesn’t mean I was saying they were “crap,” either.
How many, many binary-thinking Mr. A-types there are:
“If you disagree with the most outrageous statements any radical feminist makes, then you’re against equality for women!”
“If a creative work isn’t philosophically deep, richly literary…then it’s utterly worthless garbage!”
Wrightson’s Frankenstein stuff was just book illustrations, his recent Frankenstein comic had not so great art. I dont think he’s done good comic art since the early 80s. His best modern work always turns up in sketchbooks and book covers and things like that.
I havent seen any japanese porn comics I thought were drastically better than the usual american stuff, usually looking more or less like a list of sex positions. What artists are you talking about?
Sarah, have you got Spookhouse 1-2 by Hampton? Because you need them if you dont.
Since I mentioned Tim Conrad earlier, here is his Almuric…
http://www.buzzcomics.net/showthread.php?t=26131
…I cant find any good large images of Toadswart, but it is great stuff. Sadly his new Hunchback book has nothing but bad reviews.
[Earlier…]
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somerandomdumbass says:
How is it exactly that sci-fi, horror, and fantasy limit artistic expression when some great works of literature and film are of those genres?
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Because in order to be a properly focused work of those genres, extraneous factors which would make for a richer, more complex whole routinely need to be downplayed.
[Then…]
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Somerandomdumbass says:
SO, the odyssey, the illiad, the thousand arabian nights, the holy bible, the divine comedy, orlando furioso,the faeire queen, Alice in wonderland and through the looking glass, the tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, journey to the west, the works of italo calvino, Borges’ short stories,paradise lost, 1984,the gormenghast trilogy, grendel,and others I could aren’t great works of literature?
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I’d certainly agree that many of those are “great works of literature”; but not that they neatly fall into being “genre” works.
For instance, do people — and the literary establishment — consider the Bible a fantasy book?
Do we find Calvino, Borges, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “The Divine Comedy” — or the Book of Mormon, Koran — in the fantasy section in bookstores, cheek-by-jowl with “The Sword of Shannara” or the various “Forgotten Realms” books and assorted elf-drek?
No; because each of those is not — as my earlier wording put it — “a properly focused work of those genres.”
And as your own earlier wording put it, you were limiting what you were talking to, to works fitting in the “sci-fi, horror, and fantasy…genres.”
Even works which would technically qualify as fantasy — the “Popol Vuh,” “The Odyssey” — are instead considered, fairly or not, as mythology, folklore. And any “genre” pigeonholing would need to come from moderns rather than the actual authors.
In most of those, moreover, the fantastic elements are but catalysts for explorations into the human psyche, philosophical speculations, the dispensing of religious/moralistic strictures, how “Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be,” and so forth.
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Frankenstein wasn’t a complex character? There is a number of great character driven genre stuff outh there. Only a limited imagination limits artisitc expression in genre. Brave New World was very character driven.
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The tone of the book’s pretty much faded from my memories after all these decades; I certainly don’t recall Frankenstein as having much of a character beyond being obsessive. (I may be wrong…) And I don’t think “character driven” necessarily translates into “having psychologically complex characters.” Consider Master Chief in the Halo computer games.
I’ve actually earlier maintained (in an argument with Domingos, who else?) that a work can be lacking in qualities that are usually, stereotypically considered necessary for great literary worth (such as rich characterizations, emotional complexities, philosophical depth), and still, by utter brilliance in other areas, compensate.
I’d also earlier posted this quote:
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When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance, it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball. … Dumas Père had it. Dickens, allowing for his Victorian muddle, had it …
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http://chrisroutledge.co.uk/writing/raymond-chandler-on-writing/
You brought up “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and one could not ask for a better example of how genre-parameter thinking limits aesthetic quality.
As most here know, Kubrick contacted Arthur C. Clarke to write a screenplay starting from the basis of Clarke’s short story, “The Sentinel.” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sentinel_%28short_story%29 ). The final result was likely the greatest science-fiction film made; one which was initially a box-office failure until pot-smoking audiences congregated to savor its trippy “trip” sequence. Overall, audiences were unsatisfied with its enigmatic approach, flattened-affect protagonists, unseen aliens, baffling ending.
When genre thinking comes in, is that when writing the novel based on the screenplay, Clarke — not only a fine scientist but one of the true greats of science fiction — made sure to tie up messy loose ends, provide neatly satisfying explanations. When the pre-human throws that lethal bone up in the air, the orbiting object that it morphs to — a deleted voice-over narration in the movie had explained — was one of many orbiting nuclear weapons.
There’s even a hair’s-breadth escape at the end of the book for the people of Earth; as the Starchild is “born,” those orbiting weapons have been just activated by their controlling nations, and atomic war is about to break out. Using his immense mental powers, the Starchild blinks the weapons out of existence.
In greater detail:
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Clarke’s novel as explanation
Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s novel of the same name was developed simultaneously with the film, though published after its release. It seems to explain the ending of the film more clearly. Clarke’s novel explicitly identifies the monolith as a tool created by an alien race that has been through many stages of evolution, moving from organic forms, through biomechanics, and finally has achieved a state of pure energy. These aliens travel the cosmos assisting lesser species to take evolutionary steps. The novel explains the hotel room sequence as a kind of alien zoo—fabricated from information derived from intercepted television transmissions from Earth—in which Dave Bowman is studied by the invisible alien entities. Kubrick’s film leaves all this unstated.
Physicist Freeman Dyson urged those baffled by the film to read Clarke’s novel:
“After seeing Space Odyssey, I read Arthur Clarke’s book. I found the book gripping and intellectually satisfying, full of the tension and clarity which the movie lacks. All the parts of the movie that are vague and unintelligible, especially the beginning and the end, become clear and convincing in the book….”
…Stanley Kubrick was less inclined to cite the book as a definitive interpretation of the film, but he also frequently refused to discuss any possible deeper meanings during interviews…
Author Vincent Lobrutto, in Stanley Kubrick: A Biography, was inclined to note creative differences leading to a separation of meaning for book and film:
“The film took on its own life as it was being made, and Clarke became increasingly irrelevant. Kubrick could probably have shot 2001 from a treatment, since most of what Clarke wrote, in particular some windy voice-overs which explained the level of intelligence reached by the ape men, the geological state of the world at the dawn of man, the problems of life on the Discovery and much more, was discarded during the last days of editing, along with the explanation of HALs breakdown.”
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_2001:_A_Space_Odyssey
What I consider some of the film’s greatest aesthetic assets (as Kubrick was surely aware, in refusing to explain it all) is its ambiguity, mysteriousness. There is also a sense subtly, indirectly given (in the banality of their dialogue, the emotionlessness of the “heroes”) that the human race has reached an evolutionary dead-end, or is at a stage of transition. (One of the astronauts exercises by jogging around the inner circumference of the spaceship, while shadow-boxing: within one of the greatest technological achievements of the human race, traveling through space, he’s making fists and throwing punches!)
As a solidly genre-based author (and scientist, too), the talented Clarke and the SF readership would have no truck with that vagueness. Explanations were provided (even suspenseful “gripping tension”); and thus, the book inescapably became a literarily and aesthetically far lower item than the film.
I dont think it really matters whether A Midsummer Night’s Dream is in the fantasy section or not. Some books are not placed certain genre shelves just because people see them a different way (or that people looking for Shakespeare would never think to look in certain places) even if their contents are much the same as a genre work.
There are plenty of people who are self-proclaimed genre writers who write what a lot of people would not think was a focused genre work as you put it. If Borges and Angela Carter had appeared in the right magazines and hung around in the right places more often, I have no doubt they would be in the fantasy section. Apparently some genre writers kept getting their work steered into more traditional form by pulp editors and Moorcock’s New Worlds was an effort to get rid of those silly restrictions that reflected very badly on the genre.
If Robert Aickman hadnt edited so many ghost anthologies and associated with the horror community so much, he would have been in the general fiction section.
I’m reading The Dark Descent right now, it is a landmark horror anthology (but I think it is very overrated) and much of it is on the very fringes of horror. As I’ve said before, a lot of people pick up horror books expecting monsters only to get stories about harrowing relationships with an ambiguous ghostly tinge or a story about child abuse. Funnily enough, I often get annoyed how rarely I get what might be called quality “stereotypical” horror. All those CLASSIC HORROR vampire, werewolf and ghost stories I imagined were abundant are actually kind of a rarity. I really wanted lots of the Universal/Hammer style horror but since those films arent very good (with minor exceptions) I find that what seemed was very commonplace actually doesnt exist.
I’ve found very little that scratches the CLASSIC HORROR itch. Hugh B Cave’s Murgunstrumm is one of the few things that has this style and really worked for me.
If a lot of that list of classics dont fit neatly enough into the genre, then neither do a lot of the books on the genre shelves. I dont see why the worst and most cliched examples of fantasy should bring down the scope of anyone who calls themself a fantasy writer.
I’ve never really trusted standard definitions of what makes Literature, Genius, Masterpieces, Great Works Of Art, it never sounds convincing to me. I just care about the quality and intensity of a work regardless of how the creators get there.
The Bible really isnt that different from a fraud copy of Necronomicon (fraud since Lovecraft said it isnt real, yet I think some people have actually tried to sell a book as if it were real and that some crazy minority really do believe in it)to me.
Some ghost stories are written by people who believed in ghosts from times when the belief was common, but it goes on the shelves next to nonbelievers ghost stories and you can barely tell the difference if at all.
There is enormous room for debate on what is a properly focused genre work.
Genre boundaries are always porous. They’re also very much historically rather than formally defined, though. And those histories matter. Midsummer Night’s Dream really is not fantasy — in part because people don’t think of it as fantasy, and it hasn’t been an important touchstone for people creating fantasy works (not a ton of Greek myths in standard fantasy; not a lot of farce, etc. — when those things do turn up, they’re seen as variations or add-ons rather than as central genre tropes, and certainly aren’t traced back to Shakespeare.)
Which isn’t to say that the genre divisions make some sort of absolute sense. But I don’t think you can really effectively defend the fantasy genre by pointing to Shakespeare. He really doesn’t have much to do with the genre as it’s come to be.
There are fantasy books that I think are great…and lord knows a lot of “litarature” that’s pretty weak. I’d take the Earthsea books over Hemingway any day.
To defend genres by linking them to the likes of Shakespeare has never been a tactic of mine, I’ve been around the sf/fantasy/horror internet community for a couple of years now and everyone is sick to death of that sort of thing, all that genre fan insecurity.
Here is the best article I’ve ever read about this sort of thing with a bit of followup…
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/vandermeer_11_07/
http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2011/02/19/the-moments-between-vanquishing-the-language-of-defeat/
…It is strange, I often see Martis Amis treated like Rob Liefeld (not that their styles are comparable, but just the assurance of the ridicule) by both fantasy and realist fans. I sometimes find it tempting to jump on the middlebrow hating bandwagon, but I’d rather just judge each work on its merits than cultivating prejudices.
I’m a horror, fantasy, goth, prog rock, metal, dreampop, soft porn obsessive and it is difficult not to feel insecure occasionally from the sheer weight of prejudice but I know better than to squeal for the approval of the ignorant. I’m sick of prog rock fans being so defensive when the prejudices very much seem to have faded away in the right circles but you still get people acting as if punk was in absolute opposition, which isnt true at all, there is quite a bit of crossover.
I think in fantasy art and animation Midsummer Night’s Dream feels very much a common touchstone, guys like Charles Vess doing Shakespeare doesnt always look massively different from his other projects. Gaiman riffed on it a bit too?
I havent read enough fantasy to know if greek myths are common but I always imagined they would be, it might just be the heroes and monsters but it is a significant influence.
People still sneer at Journey, though. And Journey is awesome, damn it. (Way better than the boring Clash.)
I bought Journey’s Escape, I thought it was okay, some fun songs, I got it because Low did an amazing cover of “Open Arms”.
I’ve only heard London Calling of The Clash, I liked a few songs quite a bit but thought it was mostly dull, none of the things I love about punk. Siouxsie And THe Banshees hated The Clash and I think they tried to turn Pistols fans against them.
Having said all that above, I do think associating something perceived as low art with something perceived as high art is a necessary evil sometimes, because if all else fails, telling people that one of their heroes loves something with a bad reputation really makes people reconsider.
I wonder how many people changed their mind about R Kelly when Bonnie Prince Billy named him as one of his device muses.
I’m ashamed to say I didnt fully embrace some bands until someone considered cool spoke up for them.
I’m actually not a avid reader of the fantasy genre. I prefer to anything that’s simple good, regardless of labels. I have a loose definition of Fantasy. If it has fantastical elements in it ,its fantasy far as I’m concerned. Yes I would the Odyssey and Midsummer Night’s Dream as a fantasy because one has a guy going up against harpies and Cyclopes, and the other has fairies screwing around with people.
I can’t believe we’re still having discussions about fantasy not living up to literature in a post-game of thrones world.
Those books are fantastic.
Heh. Read the first few pages of Games of Thrones and really hated it. Maybe it got better, but I couldn’t hack it.
Gene Wolfe is great though; Book of the New Sun is the last fantasy thing I read that I really loved.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Genre boundaries are always porous. They’re also very much historically rather than formally defined, though. And those histories matter.
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Yes; and let us not forget the commercial aspect of “genre definitions.” Which for authors who aren’t independently wealthy, provides a ready-made audience, as long as you craft your work within those genre parameters.
Authors who’d write a romance book where the lovers get married, but then found out they didn’t get along after all, and got a divorce, or where the sleuth never discovers whodunit, however many possibilities for aesthetic improvement those approaches provide, would find their opus thrown across the room by infuriated readers; their genre-expectations — the literary equivalent of “comfort food” — maddeningly frustrated.
(Why, I was sure aggravated when, at the ending of Peter Straub’s “Koko,”[SPOILER ALERT] the villain just…walks into a forest and disappears.)
Arthur C. Clarke’s explaining of all that was unclear and mysterious in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (such as, why did HAL go mad?) reminds of Hitchcock’s concern with “Fridge Logic”:
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The phrase was technically coined by Alfred Hitchcock. When asked about the scene in Vertigo when Madeleine mysteriously, and impossibly, disappears from the hotel that Scottie saw her in, he responded by calling it an “icebox” scene, that is, a scene that “hits you after you’ve gone home and start pulling cold chicken out of the icebox.”
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http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic
…Hitchcock usually being careful to provide explanations to avoid such audience caveats, such as by having that shrink at the end of “Psycho” give that clunky “lecture” to explain how Norman Bates became his mother. The gloriously sinister final asylum scene (“Why she wouldn’t even hurt a fly….”) brilliantly dispelling the aura of logic and rationality the psychologist had tried to spread.
Ah, but there was that truly final scene, nowhere near as powerful: the car with Marion Crane’s body being pulled from the quicksand; to circumvent audiences wondering, “Hey, what about the body, and the money? Did they ever find it?”
Hitchcock also bemoaned his “mistake” in allowing a child to be killed by a bomb in “Sabotage”; though it provided a powerful motivation for the wife to kill her bomb-making audiences, the filmmaker said audiences were very angry with him for allowing that to happen, and that he should have passengers in the bus the boy was in hear the bomb ticking, and throw it out. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabotage_%28film%29 )
Where this ties in to “genre,” is that a focus on satisfying audience/reader expectations can lead to the lessening of a work’s aesthetic qualities. (Some more artistically successful creators can get away with violating those expectations, to a certain degree; i.e., Marion Crane’s sudden death in “Psycho”; the escape of the head crook in “The French Connection”…)
Still, as with Clarke’s “2001” book versus Kubrick’s movie, a comparison of Robert Bloch’s “Psycho” novel and the Hitchcock film (or the “Godfather” book and movie; the abysmal “Jaws” book and far better film) are instructive examples of how fine filmmakers can significantly improve their source material, making it into Art.
In fairness to Clarke, his much-later “Rendezvous with Rama” doesn’t try, with authorial omniscience, to explain the bizarre happenings and phenomena within the gigantic spaceship Earth-astronauts intercept and explore. They conjecture about what something might mean, or be, but basically remain dazzled and baffled. At the end, when they think Rama — as they have named the craft — is about to destroy itself by diving into the Sun, they, and we, are further amazed.
(Speaking of fantasy, Clarke also wrote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” [ http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/arthur_c_clarke.html ])
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Midsummer Night’s Dream really is not fantasy — in part because people don’t think of it as fantasy, and it hasn’t been an important touchstone for people creating fantasy works…
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Come to think of it, there’s a ghost early on in “Hamlet,” who plays a rather important role…
And Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” has a pretty important, and creepy, supernatural element…
That a work can be “an important touchstone for people creating fantasy works” is an interesting point; certainly “The Lord of the Rings” created a template that was most assiduously followed and imitated. (The aforementioned, massively successful “Sword of Shannara” series clearly in that mold.)
Then there’s Edgar Allan Poe’s creation of the first detective story; its C. Auguste Dupin — well-off, eccentric, brilliant, using logic to solve the mystery, considering the police unimaginative plodders — providing the template for many who followed, its success inspiring other authors: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-detective-story-is-published .
…And that’s how “genre conventions” are born.
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sarah horrocks says:
I can’t believe we’re still having discussions about fantasy not living up to literature in a post-game of thrones world.
Those books are fantastic.
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Um, I must have a more finicky definition for what constitutes “literature.” (Pretty lowbrow by Domingos’ standards, but…)
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Heh. Read the first few pages of Games of Thrones and really hated it. Maybe it got better, but I couldn’t hack it.
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I tried skipping about the first book at the library, and everywhere got bogged down in hyper-detailed accounts of minor events, inventiveness about stuff I couldn’t remotely give a fuck about. (In all fairness, I tried the same “scattered tasting” approach with a hefty copy of “Anna Karenina” yesterday, and was likewise turned off.)
George R. R. Martin had written “Fevre Dream,” the second-greatest vampire novel ever made; what happened?
But then, in commercially successful fantasy genre books, a series of massive tomes are standard, heavily-detailed “world-building” — alarm bells go off when a map of the fictive world is featured — is involved.
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Gene Wolfe is great though; Book of the New Sun is the last fantasy thing I read that I really loved.
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Yes; first got into the series via “The Shadow of the Torturer”…
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Robert Adam Gilmour says:
I don’t think it really matters whether A Midsummer Night’s Dream is in the fantasy section or not. Some books are not placed certain genre shelves just because people see them a different way (or that people looking for Shakespeare would never think to look in certain places) even if their contents are much the same as a genre work.
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If people “see them a different way,” doesn’t that affect the expectations people have of that work, the literary/critical cachet it has?
Modern horror writers gripe about how if Poe were writing these days, he wouldn’t be considered “literature”; Harlan Ellison has wished he could escape the “SF ghetto,” and just be placed among the general fiction.
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I’ve found very little that scratches the CLASSIC HORROR itch. Hugh B Cave’s Murgunstrumm is one of the few things that has this style and really worked for me.
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I loved the deliciously scratchy, quasi-“primitive” Lee Brown Coye art for that: http://chthonicmatter.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/murgunstrumm-cave.jpg
(More Coye: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-T2m5l4RQMwk/TzAOTDHKaQI/AAAAAAAAATc/AWYMSH-V5aI/s1600/thecimmerian_karl-edward-wagner_Lee-Brown-Coye-William-Hope-Hodgeson-The-Voice-in-the-Night2.jpg
http://www.askart.com/AskART/photos/HER20110912_69354/30012.jpg
http://miskatonicbooks.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/lee-brown-coye-limited-edition-title-sales-out-pre-publication-but-we-have-a-few/
http://www.horrorartist.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Weirdisms_LeeBrownCoye1.png
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_xQwP8MNj0EA/RsVAkaLaLqI/AAAAAAAACuI/jtSMVec8dQc/s400/coye.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NoTUKM2CUBo/TzAOTHNf9VI/AAAAAAAAATY/zSIesES5GTE/s1600/thecimmerian_karl-edward-wagner_Lee-Brown-Coye-Wilbur-Whately.jpg
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mctgvbwxvc1rjcjjxo1_500.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/as4nbgh )
Re recent work in the “classic horror” vein:
It’s hardly a new tale, but Ray Russell’s “Sardonicus” (and the quite good movie adaptation) should satisfy. (Though likely you’re aware of it.)
Aickman’s World Fantasy Award-winning “Pages from a Young Girl’s Diary” — she becomes a vampire; how “classic” you can get? — is another fine story, told from her point of view…
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I dont see why the worst and most cliched examples of fantasy should bring down the scope of anyone who calls themself a fantasy writer.
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If authors are independently wealthy (or “write for the trunk,” like Emily Dickinson), they shouldn’t. But there are commercial expectations; trends in publishing, if you fall outside of which, your work just won’t sell.
And if Hollywood is involved, well… A story from another HU thread:
Neil Gaiman wrote a hilarious story from the POV of a screenwriter who sees his script (as I dimly recall) changed from a hard-boiled gangster movie into a musical. As it turns out, based on personal experience:
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“In February of 1991 it was cold and rainy in Los Angeles, and Sovereign Pictures flew Terry Pratchett and me from England to LA, to talk about turning our book Good Omens into a film.
“It was a very odd time. In the afternoons and evenings Terry and I would write outlines for the movie. In the mornings we would have meetings with a tableful of producers and studio development people, where they would ask us questions that would indicate that they hadn’t read the latest draft of the treatment, and ask for changes in the next draft of the treatment.
“It was not much fun.
“Eventually, Terry and I went home and we wrote a script…We sent it in…’It’s too much like the book,’ said the Sovereign pictures person on the phone, as if this was the worst crime a script was capable of committing….Terry, extremely sensibly, resigned from the project at this point. I probably should have as well, but I didn’t. I was curious. I wanted to see what would happen next.
“They didn’t want Good Omens…They wanted something else. Something heartwarming. Something small. Something relatively straightforward. And for reasons I no longer remember, the producer desperately wanted an abandoned pier with a miniature town in it. Also, they wanted Satan to appear.”
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More at http://trashotron.com/agony/reviews/2004/gaiman-screenplay.htm
Dagnabbit, should’ve been another Coye piece in that tinyurl link…
Robert Adam Gilmour
> There are plenty of people who are self-proclaimed genre writers who
> write what a lot of people would not think was a focused genre work
> as you put it. If Borges and Angela Carter had appeared in the right
> magazines and hung around in the right places more often, I have no
> doubt they would be in the fantasy section
As an aside related to this point, one of the first Borges stories to appear in English, “The Garden of Forking Paths”, ran in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
> I havent read enough fantasy to know if greek myths are common but I
> always imagined they would be, it might just be the heroes and
> monsters but it is a significant influence.
Gene Wolfe, who has been mentioned in this thread already, wrote a series of novels (Soldier of the Mist, Soldier of Arete and Soldier of Sidon) which are set in ancient Greece (among other places) which treat the Greek gods and goddesses as real; indeed, the protagonist of the novel has suffered a head injury that a) gives him anteretrograde amnesia such that he forgets the events of each day, and b) gives him the ability to see and speak to gods, goddesses, ghosts and other “mythological” beings. Interesting series, though like many readers (and the protagonist!) I felt a bit lost in places and had to constantly refer to online historical sources, etc. to try to figure out what was going on.
Gene Wolfe is great and is one of the first authors I bring up when tedious discussions about the literary merit of SF/fantasy come up. The Book of the New Sun series is astonishing of course (as are the followup series in his “solar cycle”, Book of the Long Sun and Book of the Short Sun) but if I had to point to a single work of his that I think will stand the test of time I’d point to The Fifth Head of Cerberus. I’ll borrow China Miéville’s summary here:
“Wolfe is a religious Republican, but his tragico-Catholic perspective leads to a deeply unglamorized and unsanitized awareness of social reality. This book is a very sad and extremely dense, complex meditation on colonialism, identity and oppression.”
I’ll also mention that it includes (possibly) shape-shifting aliens, intelligent, self-aware robots (a recurring Wolfe trope) and even a four-armed mutant clone or two. But trust me, it’s brilliant!
Mike- Lee Brown Coye is a big hero of mine, good to see him praised.
Daniel- There are a lot of stories of big writers in minor genre magazines; Tennesse Williams got an early story printed in Weird Tales. I think Borges went to the odd fantasy convention, because quite a lot of fantasy authors have met him.
Game Of Trones (which I recall Domingos saying he enjoyed some of the tv show) has a mixed reputation, partly because the books are expanded for commercial reasons, he said he was going to tell the story in far fewer books but the publisher demands more big thick books. Many have said the books suffer for this padding.
I’ve got about 400 unread books of mostly horror and fantasy; presently OCD is buggering me and it takes me 10 times longer to read a book than a normal reader. I cant say anything with well-read authority but my impression is that the best fantasy writers are Mervyn Peake, Catherine L Moore, Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, Fritz Lieber, Michael Moorcock, Gene Wolfe, Tanith Lee, M John Harrison, Robert Holdstock and China Mieville. I have a lot of their books unread and waiting for me, I read my first Tanith Lee story recently and the beauty of her writing really impressed me.
Michael Moorcock’s Wizardry And Wild Romance is a great overview of fantasy, he talks about the importance of Walter Scott and the romantic poets on the foundations of fantasy (probably on guys like Dunsany more than Tolkien) and of interest to people who like hateful takedowns like recent HU articles, he devotes a chapter to ridiculing Tolkien, A A Milne, Richard Adams, C S Lewis. In other chapters he bashes super misogynist John Norman and dismisses Martin Amis as “middlebrow” faffing. Great book, but Moorcock sometimes seems as if he cant enjoy someones writing if he hates the politics of the story; he changed an ending to a book (Gloriana) because his close friend Dworkin said it showed a problematic depiction of rape.
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Robert Adam Gilmour says:
…presently OCD is buggering me and it takes me 10 times longer to read a book than a normal reader.
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Well, yes; hard to focus when the pages keep shaking like that!
(Sorry, couldn’t resist!)
Mervyn Peake is fantastic. Moorcock, on the other hand…tried rereading one of his books recently. He’s just not very good.Poul Anderson and Fritz Leiber are also very iffy. The conventional wisdom is accurate — Tolkien and C.S. Lewis really are better than just about anyone.
The Patricia Wrede Enchanted Forest books are good, especially the first one.
Mervyn Peake – I have the kind of standard but boring view that the first two Gormenghast books are great but the third one is essentially unreadable. I know that China Miéville and others don’t accept this view, but I’ve never been able to get past about a page or two of it. Peake was of course originally known as an illustrator and his own illustrations of the books are excellent, though not essential.
Michael Moorcock – Elric et al never bowled me over, though the ones I’ve read are decent enough. Oddly, I find that I tend to enjoy comics adaptations of his stuff more than his own books. The awesome spacerock band Hawkwind did some great Moorcock adaptations/collaborations. Warrior At The Edge of Time (mostly Elric-based but also with some truly great drug songs) is well worth a listen.
Gene Wolfe – see my earlier comments. One of my favorite writers, period.
M John Harrison – fresh on my mind as I just finished the omnibus volume of his Viriconium novels/stories. China Miéville rates Harrison very highly indeed and it’s easy to see the influence, but the Viriconium stuff is a mixed bag. Two of the short novels and some of the short stories are decent to excellent, but at least one of the novels (A Storm of Wings) was a real let-down IMO. Like Wolfe, he seems to be in love with the sounds and meanings of obscure words, but he uses them a lot less skillfully than Wolfe does and it often feels like he wrote with a thesaurus close at hand. p.s. Has anyone ever read the graphic novel adaptation of the Viriconium story “The Luck in the Head” with art by Ian Miller? Sounds intriguing, but I’ve been hesitant to buy it on ebay without actually seeing it.
Robert Holdstock – I’d place his novel Mythago Wood among my absolute favorites of fantasy, but each of the sequels gets worse and worse with the fifth book (fourth novel) Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn coming as a major disappointment to me. I gave up after that. Someone who can draw spooky trees and forests well should really do a comics adaptation of Mythago Wood.
China Miéville – Perdido Street Station and The Scar are both pretty good with some excellent world-building, memorable characters and imagery; King Rat was pretty fun, if slight. But Miéville seems to have something of the Alan Moore problem with regard to female characters. They always seem to end up getting raped or otherwise treated very badly. The City and The City is probably the best thing I’ve read by him so far. It’s based on a very Borgesian idea: a police procedural that takes place in two cities that occupy the same area but are somehow distinct.
CS Lewis – I love his stuff and always have, but I can see why some folks might really hate it. Tolkien apparently hated it.
Ursula Le Guin – I came to the Earthsea books later than most and really enjoyed them. One unique aspect of Earthsea is that Le Guin’s later books in the series (Tehanu et al) were written after she had become a bit more radicalized and exposed to feminist thinking. Reading the venomous reviews on Amazon from Earthsea fans disappointed by the distinct change in tone in the alter books is highly entertaining in and of itself. Her SF is all pretty great too though I’ve been trying for years to get into Always Coming Home, but I keep getting bored and putting it down. A fascinating exercise in world-building, but it makes for kind of dull reading. I’ll probably give it another try one of these days.
Others worth noting – I recently tried to read William Morris’ “The Well at the World’s End” and fascinating as it is to witness the birth of the modern fantasy novel, I actually found it kind of boring. I’ve also recently started reading Charles Williams, one of Tolkien and Lewis’ fellow Inklings, but I’ve only read one so far (The Greater Trumps) and while I enjoyed it, I had some reservations but I intend to read more of them. Tim Powers’ Anubis Gates certainly made a strong impression, but again, I’d really need to read more of his stuff to see if he maintained that level. William Hope Hodgson’s short novel House on the Borderlands is astonishing, with a very Lovecraftian vibe (and bits of H.G. Wells). Richard Corben actually did an adaptation of it, but I haven’t seen it yet.
And hey, how about comics? I’d put the original 20-issue run of Elfquest high on my general list of fantasy favorites. The Pinis manage to successfully throw away some of the most overused tropes of fantasy fiction (e.g. ditching the usual pseudo-medieval trappings, in favor of a kind of Native American milieu). Oddly enough it’s also a very personal work in its own way with several characters quite clearly based on aspects of the Pinis themselves. Later comics in the series aren’t nearly as good (IMO) and when they began ousourcing it to others and finally shifted the setting to a boring pseudo-medieval world, things really, really went downhill. Elfquest is a great example of how to water down something genuinely idiosyncratic and special into a generic “sitfan”. Reader’s tip: you can read the whole thing for free on Elfquest.com.
E. R. Eddison blew the doors off my teenaged mind, but I’m afraid that a revisit would resemble this:https://hoodedutilitarian.com/2011/03/strange-windows-the-suck-fairy-will-get-you-if-you-dont-watch-out/
I”m a big M. John Harrison fan. His cranky blog at http://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/ is often rewarding.
Tehanu is not as good as the original trilogy, I don’t think, but is inventive and audacious in its reversals. The Earthsea books after that, though, are almost parodically dreadful.
The best CS Lewis book, and one of the 20th centuries greatest and most underrated novels, is Till We Have Faces.
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Robert Adam Gilmour says:
Mike- Lee Brown Coye is a big hero of mine, good to see him praised.
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A finely quirky talent; I can’t see him achieving the relative popularity of, say, a Virgil Finlay, though…
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Daniel- There are a lot of stories of big writers in minor genre magazines; Tennesse Williams got an early story printed in Weird Tales. I think Borges went to the odd fantasy convention, because quite a lot of fantasy authors have met him.
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The work of Borges — who richly deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature, over some of the infinitely less gifted authors who did win — at times bears relationship to Lovecraft (and vice versa), as astutely noted here: http://www.contrasoma.com/writing/borgeslovecraft.htm .
For that matter, Borges — a superlative critic in his own right — regularly tipped his hat to Chesterton’s murder-mystery stories; he had no trouble thinking that genre writing was capable of ascending to Literature.
In Borges’ most Lovecraftian story (fortunately devoid of the Mythos name-dropping and tongue-strangling incantations that mar other HPL pastiches), “There Are More Things,” the narrator encounters furniture unfit for the human form, strange instruments:
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By way of relating what he has seen without breaking his promise to not explicitly describe narrator presents a series of analogies:
An armchair implies the human body, its joints and members; scissors, the act of cutting. What can be told from a lamp, or an automobile? The savage cannot really perceive the missionary’s Bible; the passenger does not see the same rigging as the ship’s crew.
Bracketing these analogies are two seemingly contradictory observations: “In order to truly see a thing, one must first understand it,” and “If we truly saw the universe, perhaps we would understand it.”
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http://www.contrasoma.com/writing/borgeslovecraft.htm
This actually tying in somewhat to the observation elsewhere about how understanding context, etc. can be considered necessary to a fuller appreciation of an artistic work…
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Robert Adam Gilmour says:
Game Of Thrones…has a mixed reputation, partly because the books are expanded for commercial reasons, he said he was going to tell the story in far fewer books but the publisher demands more big thick books. Many have said the books suffer for this padding.
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Ah! Thanks for that information…
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Michael Moorcock’s Wizardry And Wild Romance is a great overview of fantasy…
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Indeed fine, though I found his trashing of Tolkien unjust and incorrect. That Moorcock for all his inventiveness isn’t fit to shine Tolkien’s shoes didn’t help; couldn’t help wondering if he wasn’t diminishing some of the greats of fantasy, that his own star would shine the brighter.
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In other chapters he bashes super misogynist John Norman…
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Now, there’s someone who richly deserves to get “Gor-ed” by feminists!
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I’ve got about 400 unread books of mostly horror and fantasy…
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I can relate; when am I going to be able to read — even at my own reasonable clip — the boxes and boxes of stuff I couldn’t resist picking up? It’s not like that “retirement” thing will ever come to pass; but I keep on buying!
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Daniel C. Parmenter says:
Michael Moorcock – Elric et al never bowled me over, though the ones I’ve read are decent enough. Oddly, I find that I tend to enjoy comics adaptations of his stuff more than his own books.
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Same here; doesn’t hurt that superb talents like P. Craig Russell and Simonson did the comics art. While reading through a series of Elric books, I gave up midway through the last one. Realized I didn’t give a shit about Elric and what happened to him, utterly unlike the case with Tolkien’s characters.
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CS Lewis – I love his stuff and always have, but I can see why some folks might really hate it. Tolkien apparently hated it.
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“Perelandra” I found fascinatingly inventive (Lewis’ versions of angels remarkably original, striking), with some beautiful writing. But his preaching and ideas about women (basically, that they’re fine if they’re “natural,” but if they start “tarting themselves up” with makeup and such, they’re headed to Hell; for the crime of being — as Susan in the Narnia books — “interested in nothing…except nylons and lipstick and invitations.”) were noxiously off-putting.
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Fantasy author Neil Gaiman’s 2004 short story “The Problem of Susan” depicts its protagonist, Professor Hastings (who strongly resembles an adult version of Susan), dealing with the grief and trauma of her entire family’s death in a train crash, as she is interviewed by a college literature student regarding her opinion on Susan’s place in the Narnia books.] Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling has also commented on the same issue:
“There comes a point where Susan, who was the older girl, is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She’s become irreligious basically because she found sex. I have a big problem with that.”
—J. K. Rowling
Since the publication of Gaiman’s story, “the problem of Susan” has become used more widely as a catchphrase for the literary and feminist investigation into Susan’s treatment.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Pevensie
What Tolkien hated about Lewis’ fantasy was the way C.S. tossed fantasy items in a blender, creating a mishmash rather than Tolkien’s own carefully-crafted Middle-Earth; and theological heavy-handedness.
(About their friendship: http://gratefultothedead.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/j-r-r-tolkien-and-c-s-lewis-a-legendary-friendship/ )
Mike:
> Same here; doesn’t hurt that superb talents like P. Craig Russell and Simonson did the comics art.
Right. And Elric, like Tarzan, seems to bring the best out of the artists who draw it. (I find the Tarzan books unreadable, but I certainly enjoy Burne Hogarth and Joe Kubert’s take on the character.
Thanks for the link to the Tolkien/Lewis article. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship sounds like it might be worth a read. SALON critic Laura Miller’s book, The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia covers some of the same territory.
Re: The Problem of Susan, I keep reading the first page or so of this at book stores. I suppose I should just grab whatever Gaiman anthology it’s in from the library and finish the damned thing.
Noah:
I should have limited my comments about Le Guin’s revisionism to Tehanu. I misspoke (miswrote?) and in fact I didn’t read any of the post-Tehanu ones. But as I said, at least part of the fascination of Tehanu is the reaction that it got.
I’ve tried to read Till We Have Faces a few times, but it never seems to grab me in the first chapter or so. I suppose I’ll give it another whirl.
I will mention that I find The Screwtape Letters pretty fecking awful.
And hey, that reminds me: we haven’t even mentioned Phil Pullman in this thread!
Till We Have Faces is a really feminist book. It’s almost a response to some of his earlier novels. It’s not exactly fantasy, but it’s amazing.
Phillip Pullman is dreadful. I hated those books.
I enjoyed the Screwtape Letters okay
Did you really hate His Dark Materials series that much? I enjoyed the first two quite a bit, but for whatever reason I never got around to the third, which many folks seem to think was the bad one. China Miéville had this to say:
“… and then in book three, The Amber Spyglass, something goes wrong. It has excellent bits, it is streets ahead of its competition… but there’s sentimentality, a hesitation, a formalism, which lets us down. Ah well. Northern Lights is still a masterpiece.”
BTW, Miéville’s Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read (http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/50socialist/full/) is an interesting list if you haven’t seen it. His definition of “fantasy” (and perhaps “socialism”) is broad enough to include Max Ernst and I particularly love his statement about M. John Harrison: “Punishes his readers and characters for their involvement with fantasy.”
Yeah, I really disliked it. Any series which encourages me to root for a child murderer is going to provoke a good deal of skepticism. I also found his whole the-church-is-responsbile-for-vivisection thing incredibly stupid. And the oh so tragic ending….uck.
I know it’s supposed to be a response to cs lewis’ space trilogy…but the space trilogy is about a zillion times better.
Clearly it’s time to revisit Pullman, but Julio Cortázar’s HOPSCOTCH seems to be queued up right now. It’s a book I’d been meaning to read for a while and when it came up several times in some of the discussion about Chris Ware’s BUILDING STORIES I decided that the universe was telling me to read it now.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Phillip Pullman is dreadful. I hated those books.
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*Sigh* …Why am I not surprised?
Not only rivetingly gripping and imaginative, but the greatest fantasy epic since Tolkien, I believe; utterly brilliant.
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Any series which encourages me to root for a child murderer is going to provoke a good deal of skepticism…
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As opposed to C.S. Lewis’ “Space Trilogy” and Narnia series, which encourage you to root for Christianity, responsible in the real world for millions of deaths (the Holocaust fueled by generations of its preaching “the Jews killed Jesus”) and untold persecution, intolerance, suffering?
(Yeah, it’s done some good things too; overall, though, the harm outweighs it.)
I think it’s really hard to just blanket state that Christianity’s harm outweighs the good. I don’t really think it’s responsible (or certainly not solely responsible) for the racialized anti-Semitism of the Holocaust. The entire history of the West has plenty of blame to go around for that…and that certainly includes Pullman’s preferred brand of skepticism.
Lewis is really smart about the weaknesses and dangers of atheist thought and modernity in the Space Trilogy — just really perceptive and wickedly funny and scary and weird. Pullman’s criticisms of Christianity are mostly puerile and idiotic. Blaming the church for vivisection is just gobsmackingly stupid. There are plenty of things to blame the church for; vivisection just isn’t one of them. And when your supposedly heroic free-thinking atheist proves his freedom from convention by torturing and murdering a child…well, that just pretty much confirms Lewis’ critique of modernity, it seems like to me.
Lewis’ biggest problems I think have to do with sexism and homophobia; there’s a truly heinous lesbian caricature in the last book of the space trilogy. It’s worth noting, though, that he fairly deliberately apologizes/rethinks his attitude towards those things in “Til We Have Faces,” which is about an extremely sympathetic cross-dressing female protagonist.
Oddly enough, my only real beef with Pullman has nothing to do with his critique of religion. The thing that I had a hard time with was the conceit that a world where everyone is accompanied by shape-shifting dæmons isn’t all that different than our world.
Okay, maybe I’ll tackle “Till We Have Faces” as my next-next book. You’ve piqued my interest. I picked it up some years back but never finished it.
It’s interesting to see people stick up for CS Lewis and Tolkien here, I rarely see that. Makes me want to read their stuff but George MacDonald (Phantasts, Lilith) sounds more interesting to me.
But please dont tell me you guys like Star Wars too.
William Hope Hodgson (from what little stack of books I have read) is my favorite writer, I own all his work except for a couple of poems. The Corben adaption is good but very different (which is a good idea, I dont understand the idea of wanting to do a faithful adaption)
No love for Tanith Lee and Catherine L Moore?
Eddison is on my list, also Anna Kavan, Dunsany, Cabell, David Lindsay and many more I’m excited about, especially Abraham Merritt.
Even though I havent read any Moorcock yet (I own a pile of his work), it probably wouldnt be fair to judge him on Elric, which is his most popular character but never referred to as one of his best works. Mother London (realistic work), Byzantium Endures, Dancers At The End Of Time, Behold The Man, Gloriana and the Jerry Cornelius books are said to be his best, but I’ve also heard people say his trashy crazy pulpy books are his best.
Ted Chiang is said to be hot stuff in SF today.
Hey, Noah, maybe you know something I don’t about it, but I’ve always thought vivisection was largely justified by saying animals didn’t have souls, souls are what keep us from being automatons, so cut and watch the machine move. That was Descartes’s reasoning, more or less.
Descartes’ certainly an iconic moment. But just in general, vivisection is a scientific practice. Attributing it to the church is just silliness. Pullman only does it because he’s responding to Lewis’ critique of science by saying, “you’re another,” even if it doesn’t make any sense.
It’s not like there’s any lack of things to indict the Church for, goodness knows. This particular way of going about it is not especially clever, is all.
Robert, I’ve read George MacDonald — and he’s not so great, really. You’re better off trying Chesterton, I’d argue.
A really great Moorcock article about fantasy/sf, familiarity, complacency, comfort and prejudices in genres and in middlebrow literary circles. Also some talk about comics.
http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/20011209/full/
“Until Kingsley Amis took an interest in New Maps of Hell, sf didn’t know what it could or couldn’t do. When I started, it could be anything we wanted it to be. Of course, that was before we hit the very orthodox hard-core sf fans whose response to our work has scarcely changed in fifty years. These boys and girls don’t want anyone taking away their big throbbing machines or loveable vermin. As I said at Armadillocon recently, the sf fan world offered New Worlds nothing but antagonism. We triumphed in spite of it and our influence went far beyond the sf field. But Amis, in the end, came to hate what Ballard and I were doing while Richard Hamilton (whose Kennedy As An Astronaut is still in the Tate Gallery) feared we were dropping the very imagery he loved and was using ironically in his pop-art paintings. But those were in the days when there was nothing odd about a panel at the Brighton Arts Festival including Ballard, Disch, Edouardo Paolozzi, A.J. Ayer, Michael Kustow, Director of the Institute for Contemporary Arts, Edward Lucy Smith, John Calder, the publisher and George MacBeth, then head of the BBC poetry department.
What changed this?”
…
“Every time I wrote a literary novel there would be at least five reviews which announced that I had left all that infantile stuff behind and was now engaged in doing grown up books. After a while, even those critics noticed that I was still clearly addicted to my earlier embarrassments and now they talk about how there are ‘two’ of me: Jekyll, the respectable literary writer, and Hyde, the slumming sword and sorcery slut. It makes me hard to trust.”
“But just in general, vivisection is a scientific practice.”
It’s interesting that you can now draw such a sharp line between science and religion. But the justification wasn’t really coming from a scientific belief, right? A religious view was driving the morality of the scientific practice. On the other hand, I can imagine a justification based on a lack of consciousness in animals, as well, but that wasn’t the one used as far as I know.
I mean, drawing any line is somewhat tricky I guess — but vivisection is a modernist practice, not a medieval one. Descartes was at the vanguard of a new empiricism and new scientific thinking. C.S. Lewis certainly was very much of the belief that you should treat animals humanely; it’s a central theme throughout his work (especially in the Narnia books). To the extent that Pullman is setting himself up in opposition to Lewis (and that’s to no small extent) the decision to place experimentation and vivisection at the door of the church is incoherent, to say the least.
And that Miéville list is great, many books I should read on it.
(So far, I much prefer Miéville’s essays to his fiction. Perdido Street Station is a lot of ordinary seeming characters sitting around talking about madeup politics not so different from our own despite their being bugs, birds, demons and whatnot. There’s some real corny scenes in it, too, largely due to Miéville’s not exploring the otherness of the characters far enough. His demon realm reminded me far too much of Robert Aspirin’s.)
If you’re arguing that mind/body split and God/creation split as part of the western theological tradition is responsible for the scientific program, and that therefore all of Western science is essentially a branch of western theology, I have some sympathy for that. But if you’re trying (with Pullman) to blame the church for the fruits of science while touting skepticism as truth and Nietzschean freedom from convention as morality, then I’m going to argue, again, that you’re really not making any sense at all.
Fair enough, Noah. I haven’t read the Space Trilogy (but it is on the to-do list). And the movie adaptation really stunk for Pullman’s book (but I might read it someday).
Can’t recommend the space trilogy enough. Really an amazing series, and just a completely different way to approach sci-fi as literature than just about anyone else.
That was to your former comment.
I’d ground Christianity’s philosophy in Greek beliefs, preferably, so, no, I’m not arguing that.
See here for Plato’s dualism (skip to 1.2).
Is there a difference, do we think, between people who act on their sincere religious convictions and people who retro-fit religious arguments to justify the stuff they just, you know, want to do?
What I’m getting at is, there were lots of really persuasive secular arguments in favor of vivisection in Descartes’ time. What an amazing coincidence that a neat bit of philosophical/theological sophistry was discovered to justify vivisection, then.
Yeah; I could be completely wrong, but my sense is that Descartes was not someone especially driven by piety.
Now, just to be more controversial…
I think throughout history you’ll find that when popular religion and religious thinking can be used to affirm the agenda of the financial interest, they will be so used…and when they stand in opposition to that interest they will be labelled extreme or outdated (or outright ignored.)
The Enlightenment needed vivisection (or earnestly believed it did) and imperialism needed some sugar to go along with the whole “let’s subjugate the world” agenda, so miraculously it turns out Christianity endorses those things. Today certain groups harbor a historically idiosyncratic view of the End Times that (coincidentally, I’m sure) supports continued American involvement in the Middle East.
Now, I’m of the belief that if the prevailing religion was Christianity, Islam, Roman paganism, Pierce Hawkthorne’s Laser Lotus Buddhism, or even not a religion at all, but some kind of widely-accepted Code of Conduct based entirely on rationalist principles, well, convenient sophistries would be found.
There’s something to that…though I don’t know that I buy that it’s always the case. People really will act out of ideological beliefs rather than economic interests at times. I don’t think there was any rational economic reason for the Inquisition for example….
I agree — I wouldn’t argue that it’s always the case.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…I don’t really think [Christianity is] responsible (or certainly not solely responsible) for the racialized anti-Semitism of the Holocaust.
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Not solely responsible, but it laid a solid groundwork of hatred and loathing for the Jews (“They killed Jesus!!!“) for others wishing for a handy scapegoat (ironically, the “scapegoat” an old Hebrew custom) to build upon.
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Lewis is really smart about the weaknesses and dangers of atheist thought and modernity in the Space Trilogy — just really perceptive and wickedly funny and scary and weird.
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I’ll take your word for it; nothing like that struck me in “Perelandra,” the one book from there I’d recently reread.
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Pullman’s criticisms of Christianity are mostly puerile and idiotic. Blaming the church for vivisection is just gobsmackingly stupid.
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Been a few years since I’d read his trilogy; if it truly was a straightforward “blaming the church for vivisection,” that indeed would be a pretty dumb argument. Though I’m used to having the most lucid and explicit statements routinely misread and distorted; so I’m not assuming Pullman is necessarily guilty.
As for “criticisms of Christianity” being “mostly puerile and idiotic,” do criticisms of something responsible for such vileness, hatred and destruction (along with many positive things) have to be intellectually and philosophically sophisticated?
With Christianity’s history of burning books, heretics, and freethinkers, torturing and killing in order to “save souls,” persecuting and instilling self-hatred in homosexuals, teaching women they should submit to man’s divinely ordained role as ruler of the household, that birth control and abortion are evil, that slaves should be subservient to and grateful for their masters…
…do these brutal, malevolent actions need to be criticized in an intelligent, erudite fashion? Bluntly calling all that vicious and evil may be “puerile and idiotic,” but those accusations are definitely on-target.
As someone once said, “sometimes reality is as unsubtle as a Herblock cartoon.” (Some examples: http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/swann/herblock/fire.html , http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/swann/herblock/crook.html )
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And when your supposedly heroic free-thinking atheist proves his freedom from convention by torturing and murdering a child…well, that just pretty much confirms Lewis’ critique of modernity, it seems like to me.
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When a fictional hero performs an action that was probably never done by any hero in the entire history of fiction, “that just pretty much confirms Lewis’ critique of modernity”? Not fictional modernity, but that taking place in the real world?
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The Church started killing unbelievers as early as the 4th century. The killing (often with torture) of heretics, church splinter groups, dissenters, atheists, agnostics, deists, pagans, infidels and unbelievers was supported by almost all mainstream Christian theology for over a thousand years, starting with the intolerant St. Augustine (died 430 AD).
…Rudolph J. Rummel [ http://markhumphrys.com/world.html#power.kills ] estimates the Crusades killed 1 million innocent civilian men, women and children (not in combat).
…The capture of Jerusalem, 1099. When they took Jerusalem, the Christian army butchered almost every man, woman and little child in the city.
In 1209, Pope Innocent III (also here) called for a crusade to exterminate the Cathar people of France (the Albigensians), simply because they had different superstitious beliefs to his own stupid beliefs. Men, women and children were butchered by the Pope’s forces.
Rudolph J. Rummel estimates they butchered 200,000 innocent men, women and children.
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http://markhumphrys.com/christianity.killings.html
These and countless other real-world atrocities (including the present-day persecution and murder of gays in Jamaica, inspired by fundamentalist Christian churches [ http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/full-story-jamaica%E2%80%99s-anti-gay-%E2%80%98love-march%E2%80%99170912 , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Jamaica ) can be laid at the feet of an institution which considers “modernity” an abomination.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Lewis’ biggest problems I think have to do with sexism and homophobia…
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Certainly!
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…It’s worth noting, though, that he fairly deliberately apologizes/rethinks his attitude towards those things in “Til We Have Faces,” which is about an extremely sympathetic cross-dressing female protagonist.
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Is that a gay protagonist? I read the synopsis at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Till_We_Have_Faces and couldn’t tell. There’s also much more tolerance in straight culture for cross-dressing women (how many are there in Shakespeare?) rather than for men who do it.
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Daniel C. Parmenter says:
…my only real beef with Pullman…was the conceit that a world where everyone is accompanied by shape-shifting dæmons isn’t all that different than our world.
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They seemed but fantasy analogues for facets of our minds/selves. Or, as Jung called them, “subpersonalities.” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpersonality )
Jung and his concept of “daemons” came to mind; an online search leading to:
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Eudaemons, the good daemons, were understood as guardian spirits, bestowing protection and guidance to ones they watched over.
As a counselor, the eudaemon whispered advice and opinions in one’s ear. Such person escorted by the eudaemon was considered fortunate. It was said that Socrates during his lifetime had a daemon that always warned him of threats and bad judgment, but never directed his actions. According to Socrates, his daemon was more accurate than the respected forms of divination at that time…
Under philosophic views such as those by Aristotle, a happy person is one who is eudaemon, but still in a literal manner one possessing a good or fortunate daemon. And for Heraclitus, the man’s character is his guardian daemon. …
According to psychologist Carl Jung there is not eudaemon or else cacodaemon but only the daemon, which is a unique independent spirit neither good nor bad, living in everyone.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaemon_%28mythology%29
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John says:
Is there a difference, do we think, between people who act on their sincere religious convictions and people who retro-fit religious arguments to justify the stuff they just, you know, want to do?
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The telling point is when somebody wants to do something, their religion says “no,” and they don’t do it. Which can lead to moral behavior or, alas, tortured, closeted gays…
There certainly is no shortage of new religious revelations conveniently happening along when there are external motivations for change. Like the Mormon Church all of a sudden getting the “revelation” it was OK to allow blacks in the hierarchy, when continuing that policy was untenable, PR-wise…
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Noah Berlatsky says:
There’s something to that…though I don’t know that I buy that it’s always the case. People really will act out of ideological beliefs rather than economic interests at times.
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Yes, “at times.” But, what percentage of the time is that? If most of the time — rather than a tiny minority — then Bible-thumpers would be the most moral people on Earth; following in the footsteps of Jesus by turning the other cheek, rejecting violence, practicing tolerance, rejecting the accumulation of wealth and material possessions, always treating children kindly, not making a fuss over the mote in another’s eye while ignoring the beam in their own…
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I don’t think there was any rational economic reason for the Inquisition for example….
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Certainly the witch-hunts were highly profit-oriented; the alleged witch’s property confiscated and split up by the witch-finder (with his array of trick gadgets to “prove” witch-ness) and local authorities; the witch’s family charged for the expenses of torturing and killing them. (In England as well as in Spain.)
I Google’d your “economic reason for the Inquisition” phrase, and found:
“King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain established the Inquisition in order to end Jewish economic and spiritual dominance over Spain.”: http://suite101.com/article/the-spanish-inquisition-a91369
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…the local nobility of Cangas, along with the village’s richest men joined with the Inquisition to denounce “witches”– typically women with significant wealth. If convicted (or confessed) the Inquisition would seize the “witch’s” wealth, some of which would also accrue to the local nobility. The nobles and others accused Maria of being a witch, arguing as a proof that she used to go for a walk on the beach every night in order to commune with her [deceased] husband and son; she was tortured until she confessed and her possessions were seized….
The two main periods of the Inquisition finances are:
(i) 1480-1560
The Royal treasury was in charge of the Inquisition’s finances, that is, the treasury paid all Inquisition expenses (wages, ordinary and extraordinary expenses) and was in charge of collecting confiscations, fines and penalties.
(ii) 1560-1830
The Inquisition had its own treasury, completely independent of the royal treasury. District tribunals administered their own income and expenses under the supervision of the Suprema.
While in the first phase the sources of income were just confiscations and fines, in the second stage the Inquisition treasury incorporated censos and canonries as sources of income.
The primary expenses of the Inquisition were the salaries of the inquisitorial personnel, ordinary expenses (expenses from the ordinary activity of the tribunals) and extraordinary expenses (construction and repairs costs, cost of feeding prisoners and the cost of Autos de fe).
Confiscations were monetary punishments imposed to any prisoner convicted of heresy; Fines and penalties were payments in order to avoid “life sentence” or monetary punishments for prisoners that were not proven guilty; Canonries was the income collected from the canonries under Inquisitorial control; censos were forced loans with high interest rates. Moreover, the Inquisition acquired Juros (Crown’s bonds) from directly purchasing them from the king, from confiscations or from royal concessions.
…the Royal treasury found in the Inquisition treasury another source of income. In the first years of her existence, the Royal treasury was in charge of the Inquisition treasury too. Afterwards, the Royal treasury obtained income from the Inquisition in two ways: the sale of inquisitorial offices and the sale of juros to the Inquisition.
Llorente, a nineteenth century Inquisition historian, proposed that the Inquisition was essentially an income maximizing institution. He argued that its main objective was the extraction of wealth from accused people through confiscations and penalties. Years later, Millán (1984) and Kamen (1965) offered different opinions of this view of the Inquisition. While Millán argued that the amount of confiscations and penalties represented a small percentage of the total wealth obtained by the Inquisition, Kamen emphasized the role of confiscations through their indirect effect on the finances of the institution. His argument is that confiscations allowed the Inquisition either to buy juros or to obtain censos, which would ensure a significant amount of income.
Netanyahu (1978) also rejects Llorente’s explanation, arguing that the Catholic Kings would not create an institution that would harm part of their taxpayers. Instead, he proposes that the main and only motivation of the Inquisition was the religious persecution, mainly against Jews. This persecution and the creation of the institution would be due to the popular pressure to eradicate heresy. However, Contreras (1984) states that the Inquisition was a top-to-bottom institution, given that the Pope created it while the Spanish Crown controlled and supported it. Moreover, given the strong hierarchy existing in that society, he continues, it does not seem plausible that a popular pressure could influence the creation of an institution like the Inquisition…
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More, at http://tinyurl.com/ac6v7nk
I’m not really seeing a difference between sincere religious beliefs and retrofitting religious beliefs on a preexisting belief. Religion didn’t invent morality, so it’s pretty much always been about retrofitting. And is sincerity something like literalism?