Having spent the weekend at Readercon, I feel like I should talk about it a little. For those who have never been to a SF convention, it’s not all people dressing up like space aliens and fairy princesses– in fact, the cons Kate and I go to tend not to have all that much of the dress-up thing going on. Instead, they’re run more like an academic conference, with lots of panel discussions on different topics relating to stuff in the genre. Why this happens is somewhat mystifying, when I stop to think about it, but it’s entertaining enough in its way.
Anyway, I went to a handful of panels that had elements worth commenting on, and I will proceed to comment on them here. I can’t type as fast as Kate does, so I won’t even try to make these posts comprehensive, but I’ll throw out a few comments on things I thought were particularly noteworthy. These comments are entirely based on my own impressions and opinions, and may or may not match with what other people at the same panel thought, but that should at least provide something to discuss.
Panel the First (description here, my comments below the fold):
Embracing the Uncomfortable
R. Scott Bakker, David G. Hartwell (+M), Ellen Kushner, Kelly Link, China Miéville, Paul ParkAccording to Tolkien, a formally ideal fantasy tale ends in “consolation” and may provide “escape” (not from reality but from metaphoric jail). John Clute does not disagree, calling the final stage of a fantasy story “healing.” It follows that such a fantasy story provides at least some comfort to the reader. Yet this notion has been recently challenged by works of fiction designed to make the reader uncomfortable (and by authors championing this as a proper task of fantasy). Is this an interesting variation on the classic structure, or something fundamentally different?
As is somewhat traditional, the panel opened with an opportunity for each panelist to present a little rant of their own, before settling into a more directed question-and-answer sort of format. Miéville opened by saying (as he had at an earlier panel on beginnings and endings (that Kate will write up later)) that any work of fiction that is at all consolatory is fundamentally dishonest. Kelly Link observed that what counts as consolation sort of depends on the reader, to general nods of agreement.
Taken together, these two comments pretty much explain why I gave up a hundred pages into Perdido Street Station— everything is incredibly grimy and unpleasant because Miéville is working very hard to minimize the possibility that anyone reading it will find any note of consolation. He can’t drive the probability all the way to zero (I think it was Emmett O’Brien who listed The Wasp Factory as a “comfort read”), but he gives it a good try.
Miéville sort of hammered on the importance of shaking things up on a formal or structural level, praising M. John Harrison for using different names for the same city at different points in the Viriconium books, and suggesting things like putting in maps that are just wrong, to thwart the expectation fantasy readers have that the story will visit all the countries shown on any map. It occurs to me that Rosemary Kirstein has sort of done this, albeit in more of a character-appropriate way, and less of a I-want-to-fuck-with-my-readers sort of way– in the third Steerswoman book, they visit a bunch of territory that is marked “unknown” on the map provided, and in the fourth book, those regions are sketched in. I thought that was a nice touch, though it’s not really the sort of thing Miéville is pushing for, I don’t think.
In contrast to Miéville, Bakker insisted on the importance of respecting or following the established forms of genre fiction, while attempting to shake people up via the content. He was sort of vague on exactly what he had in mind, and Link eventually asked him to clarify what he meant by “form” and “content” in this context. This still failed to produce really concrete examples of what he meant by all this. He did seem to be the only one on the panel concerned with being able to sell books, as opposed to making a Point of some sort about Art– he mentioned several times that he wanted to be able to appeal to readers of what people on rec.arts.sf.written used to call Extruded Fantasy Product, and open their minds to new ideas via his disturbing content. I haven’t read his books, so I can’t tell you whether they’re likely to succeed at that, but it was nice to have at least one person talk about the desires of the readers.
Ellen Kushner and Paul Park mostly said sensible and moderate things, which means they have mostly slipped my mind. David Hartwell is the sort of moderator who really doesn’t inject himself into the conversation, so he mostly just directed traffic. They never did open the panel up for questions from the audience.
I just finished Bakker’s series and do know what he’s talking about. It’s superficially ultra cliche in the intro (oh, shit, “boy” with no knowledge of the world sets off to discover an evil in the north is about to reawaken) but then switches gears to visit other interesting yet familiar characters/scenes before returning to the main character introduced at the begining who you suddenly learn is as far from a fantasy cliche as you can get.
Incidentally, I do recommend the series if you’re not entirely turned off by philosophy. The first page is a Nietzche quote, and the main character is a monastic student of an isolated order who follows an interesting mix of sociopathy/causality as the only way to free will and individual enlightenment. (Humanity is a slave to superstition, culture, history, and the influence of his peers, his every thought and action determined by others. Solution: deconstruct/discard all of this bullshit and ensure you control events and your own mind by recognizing these useful fantasies and using them to control the less enlightened.) Along the way he just happens to take over a holy war, set himself up as founding prophet of a new religion, and consider the reality that some “superstition” is real (sorcery), and the possibility that another might be (a prophecy that he’s the harbinger of a second apocalypse at the hands of the Bad Thing in the north). But really he’s just trying to find his dad. Who he’s supposed to kill. And might. It depends.
Weird and interesting, at least when the main character is onscreen, which is a large minority of the time. My biggest complaint is too much sex. Perverted sex from the bad guys, cheap sex from the prostitute who is a chief secondary character. And don’t look to this for uplifting/powerful female role models. They’re pretty much chattels and offscreen. “Real,” maybe, but disconcerting to my sensibilities.
I guess when one realizes that Miéville is a Marxist of some sort of stripe (Leninist? Trotkyist? Maoist?), his need to attack the reader’s assumptions make sense. He is using literature as part of the world wide struggle to bring about a change for the better. My problem with this is people who are trying to make a Point often annoy the hell out of me. Even Brust, who I normally love, annoys me with his Marxist allegory in Brokedown Palace. I like to contrast this with Banks who often makes a serious point about the role of rich, powerful states in a world with places run by horrid bastards and the contradiction of a freedom loving egalitarian society using force,
but he does so by telling a really good story.
I would note that I habitually reread Banks, though I would never describe The Use of Weapons as a “comfort read”.
Beginnings & endings panel: http://kate-nepveu.livejournal.com/190318.html
I’m getting better at this “venture forth away from LJ” thing, really I am.
Still chewing on people’s opinions of Miéville, about which more later I am sure. But I wanted to say that I had the same thought you did, about the maps in the Steerswoman series, and like you, instead of being disconcerted, I found them absolutely thrilling.
(And yes, of course, the whole point of Kirstein’s novels is that true knowledge can be found, and ought to be shared, and all and all, which, although we witness people being uncomfortable and shaking up their own assumptions, is not at all what Miéville was looking for.)
(But yeah, thrilling. Competence is the awesomest thing ever.)
I just finished Bakker’s series and do know what he’s talking about. It’s superficially ultra cliche in the intro (oh, shit, “boy” with no knowledge of the world sets off to discover an evil in the north is about to reawaken) but then switches gears to visit other interesting yet familiar characters/scenes before returning to the main character introduced at the begining who you suddenly learn is as far from a fantasy cliche as you can get.
It looks vaguely interesting, but I’m already in the middle of two series of whopping huge fantasy novels (Steven Erikson and George R. R. Martin), and hesitant to pick up another. Also, I am not currently suffering from an excess of free time.
I guess when one realizes that Miéville is a Marxist of some sort of stripe (Leninist? Trotkyist? Maoist?), his need to attack the reader’s assumptions make sense. He is using literature as part of the world wide struggle to bring about a change for the better.
It’s that, and I think he’s also of a somewhat academic bent. At least, he speaks humanities jargon fairly fluently on panels.
I really would’ve liked some more examples of books that he thinks do a good job with whatever it is he’s after. I haven’t read the M. John Harrison books he mentioned (there’s a new omnibus edition, but it’s one of those horrible floppy trade paperbacks that Ace and Spectra make, which has kept me from buying it), and he didn’t really talk about any other specific books.
And yes, of course, the whole point of Kirstein’s novels is that true knowledge can be found, and ought to be shared, and all and all, which, although we witness people being uncomfortable and shaking up their own assumptions, is not at all what Miéville was looking for.
Yeah, they don’t strike me as his sort of thing. They’re very… nice, in a weird sort of way. The on-stage characters are all decent, competent people, and nothing really outrageous happens– even the shocking events of books two and three are pretty muted, in an emotional sense.
I forgot to mention in the other panel write-up that I was happy that Teresa Nielsen Hayden was there to put in a pitch for the importance of Story. I think the borderline nihilist “real life doesn’t make sense” position Mieville was pushing is taking things a bit too far. I may dig up and re-post an old article about narrative in science, while I’m thinking about this…