More on Tolkien Criticism

Following up on Norbert Schürer’s “Tolkien Criticism Today” article that we previously discussed, Robin Ann Reid, herself a Tolkien scholar, has posted a rebuttal.

Schürer’s argument was essentially that Tolkien criticism had to navigate a difficult path between the difficulty of the material, and the popularity of the material; at once being scholarly and critical, yet still appealing to the fans which requires being not too critical. In his view, most criticism fails to navigate this path correctly.

Reid disagrees. Strongly.  In her view, all literary criticism is at risk of descending into cheerleading for the fans (and frequently does so), while the field of Tolkien studies is filled with excellent scholarly works that do not pander to fans.

Her first point is that to evaluate a work of Tolkien criticism one must be aware of the author's intended audience. Whereas some works are written with other academics in mind, others are surveys aimed at students, and still others are aimed at a wider general audience. Schürer, she argues, often evaluates works intended for a general audience according to standards that should be applied to academic criticism.

Second, Reid argues that, if anything, Tolkien scholars have typically mocked fans rather than pandered to them:

One major Tolkienist, who is one of the experts on Tolkien scholarship ... Michael D. C. Drout and his co-author Hilary Wynne call out Tolkien critics for *mocking* fans.

In their bibliographic essay, they argue that academics need to stop making fun of fans in their Tolkien scholarship: Endnote 36: "Among the many critics who go in for fan-mocking, the most distinguished are Rosebury (1–3) and Humphrey Carpenter in his January 20, 1997 interview in The Independent (cited by Pearce, 3)") (in: "Tom Shippey's J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century and a Look Back at Tolkien Criticism since 1982," (2000), Michael D. C. Drout and Hilary Wynne). 

Third, Reid gives examples of the many self described (non academic) fans who are themselves are quite critical of Tolkien.

I am not well enough read in the area of Tolkien scholarship to weigh in on this debate.  But if I ever choose to become better read in this area, I could do worse than start with Reid's long bibliography of works of Tolkien criticism.

 

Designing Species in SFF

The Positron Chicago blog has an interesting report on a panel at Windycon entitled Designing Species in SF & F, and featuring writers Rachel Neumeier, Richard Garfinkle, and Katherine Wynter, as well as biologist Susan Weiner and astrogeologist/paleobiologist Jonathan Sneed.

Among the many interesting points raised:

1. Many imaginary non-humans appear to be psychologically human. What is needed are species that are psychologically non-human.
2. The psychology of a species need not be strictly tied to "naturalism"; they can have minds not bound to evolutionary psychology.
3. Many institutions of the society that may come to define a species can be thought of as solutions to coordination problems (these are my words, interpreting the posts emphasis on solving the prisoners dilemma).
4. As far as terrestrial species that might serve as a basis for intelligent alien life, the panelists cited:
1. Parrots & corvids like crows and ravens.
2. Cetaceans like whales and dolphins
3. Elephants
4. Cephalopods, like an octopus or squid (with the caveat that they are not social or linguistic and don't live long enough).
5. Non fiction recommended reading: Bostrom's "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" (2014).
6. The post gives many examples of alien/fantasy species that have been done well in SFF. A selection of them is:
1. Kate Elliott's "Spirit Walker" trilogy.
2. Peter S. Beagle's "The Last Unicorn"
3. Martha Wells' Raksura books ("The Cloud Roads" etc.).
4. CJ Cherryh. The "Chanur" & "Foreigner" books in particular. Also "Cuckoo's Egg".
5. Brin's "Uplift" series.
6. James L. Cambias's "A Darkling Sea".
7. Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life".

I recommend you go read the original post.

Authors Behaving Badly: Scott Bergstrom

Scott Bergstrom is the author of the novel The Cruelty. Originally self published, it has since been sold into 16 markets, and had its rights purchases by Paramount with Jerry Bruckheimer attached. In USA, the book is set to be published by Macmillan's Feiwel and Friends. The description "YA Girl with the Dragon Tattoo meets The Bourne Identity, with a dash of Homeland" certainly sounds like a potential blockbuster.

Based on this, I think it is fair to say that Bergstrom is a big success. The problem that many people have with Bergstrom is that he shows little respect for existing YA fiction, those who write it, and especially those who write YA fiction that is SFF.

In an interview with Publishers Weekly, Bergstrom began with:

“The morality of the book is more complicated than a lot of YA so I wanted to try doing it on my own,” Bergstrom said. “In a lot of YA, the conflict takes place inside a walled garden, set up by outside adult forces. If you think of those stories as a metaphor for high school, they start to make a lot more sense, but that was one thing I wanted to depart from.”

This obviously distressed those already writing morally ambiguous YA fiction, which includes pretty much every famous YA offering from Twilight to The Hunger Games to Divergent.

Later, in an interview published on The Pen & Muse, Bergstrom went on to say the following:

I’m inspired by the world around me. What troubles me about so much of today’s fiction aimed at young adults is that its set in an imaginary time and place.

This is, at least, a slight against the SFF genre.

YA author Victoria Aveyard responded to each of the above statements in the following way:

I’m not going to waste breath listing the literal hundreds of morally complicated YA novels out there. And there’s not much excuse for to think there isn’t any. The big hitters (Twilight, The Hunger Games, Divergent) are all exceedingly complex in their morals. As another person on Twitter mentioned, pretty much everything is a metaphor for high school. I’m actually going to venture a guess and figure “dumpy girl becomes a slick warrior” is a metaphor for growing up and coming into your own, a major high school trope. But that’s just my opinion.

and, on the second quote:

This reads as a knock against genre fiction, which I write, which I think is worthy of as much merit and praise as any literary or contemporary fiction. This is a trend in most media though. Genre is usually written off come award season in fiction, film, and television. Of course, Bergstrom is entitled to his personal tastes, and I’m not saying he has to change tastes and start liking genre fiction. But you know, he doesn’t have to kick it in the dirt, not to mention ignore the great strengths of genre fiction. I don’t see anything “troubling” about the upswing in fantasy and honestly, it sucks to think another writer looks down on you so much.

Again, one need only look at the heavy hitter (The Hunger Games) to realize how important genre fiction is, particularly in raising tough questions that other genres can’t get away with asking so easily.

She summed it up with:

Overall, it’s disheartening, largely because this is not an isolated incident, and will not be the last time a guy wades in and claims to be doing what no one else is, while hundreds of women have already walked the path before him. Mr. Bergstrom could’ve taken a week, read 5 YA genre books written by women (I’d suggest Collins, Roth, Bardugo, Lu, and Tahir to start), and known that both violent and morally gray books already exist, and have existed, for a long ass time.

I know it feels like a pile on with the combined weight of the YA community up in arms over this, but we’re angry, offended, and quite frankly, sad. This is a very welcoming community, as I’ve learned firsthand during the last year, and Mr. Bergstrom basically walked in the door and sneered at us. He might not know he did, and I truly believe he did not intend to say things so harmful. Hopefully in the future he reads a few more YA books and quits knocking things to get ahead.  

I think this is the real issue---insiders are angry that an outsider, especially a man, feels free to criticize the huge YA literature, much written by women, without first becoming well informed about the area.

Laura Tims makes similar comments:

The thing that annoys me is how he makes this character out to be some groundbreaking feminist revolution. The “action girl” is not new. There’s a TVTropes page to prove it. YA is spilling over with Katniss Everdeens, Triss Priors, Meadow Woodsons, and a bazillion other kill-em-dead lady warriors who abhor pink, avoid dresses at all costs, and shoot first, ask questions later.

The thing that confuses me is that these male authors always seem convinced that theirs is the first.

Once, in a writing group populated mainly by older males, I listened to a thriller author explain that his protagonist was not like other girls. “She’s tough,” he explained. “She’s not into girly things.”

What I don’t think these male authors realize is that when they reassure us constantly that their female characters would never deign to touch anything pink-Barbie-cheerleading-related, is that it’s pretty clear that this disdain for femininity doesn’t just belong to their characters. It belongs to them. And they’re telling us that the only way a female character can be strong is if she acts, in every way possible, like a man.

See, these male authors are going to save us from traditional feminity by daring to write a female character who rejects it with the scorn it deserves. They often cite their daughters as inspiration for their rescue mission. They’re going to provide a positive example for the poor young girls drowning in pink.

Comments like these are all over twitter associated with the hashtag #MorallyComplicatedYA.

Even Chuck Wendig has weighed in, from the perspective of all of us living on "Hetero White Dude Mountain." Essentially, he argues that this is just another manifestation of white male privilege:

It also would seem to give us license to saunter boldly into a space that’s new to us and pretend like it’s new to everybody. We take a shit in it and pretend we’re planting a flag instead of, y’know, taking a giant shit where other people are already hanging out. “I claim this space in the name of me!” you scream, hauling up your drawers and leaving behind a steaming present while ignoring everyone else standing around gaping at the horror-struck literal shit-show you just performed.

You must unlearn what you have learned, Jedi.

This isn’t your manifest destiny. You’re entering into spaces that have already been built and shaped by people who aren’t you. You’re not colonizing it — except maybe only in the grossest ongoing historical sense, where you invade territory and overpower those who dwell there already. And you damn sure shouldn’t come into a space with the desire to “fix” it, either. I wrote a YA novel about a teen girl and crime-flavored moral complications. I was not the first to do it and I will not be the one to put the capstone on it. Neither will you, rando. I didn’t fix it. I didn’t make it better. I don’t own it. I’m sharing it. And I’m sharing it by the grace of those who came before me. (And I don’t shit on genre work, or teenagers, or Twilight or Hunger Games or any of it, because I don’t get to exist as I do without them.)

You do not honor or create your own success by ignoring or crapping on the successes of those who came before. That is gross and weird. Don’t do that. Be humble. Look back and point others to look that way. Look all around you at the present and look ahead, too. See that you are not alone — you are not the peak of this mountain and you are not the owner of this house nor its sole occupant.

It’s like borrowing a ladder from your neighbor and then pretending that you built it. Or worse, pretending that you invented the concept of the ladder, or that the mere act of you ascending its rungs has improved it in some incalculable, cosmic way. (Then you kick the ladder away to make sure nobody else ever climbs to the same height. Jerk.)

Don’t be crappy.

Give respect to others.

Admire and acknowledge their success.

Do not overtake their achievements and claim them for yourself.

Whoever you are, see yourself as part of a whole and not the sum of it.

You owe them. They don’t owe you.

I've had my disagreements with Wendig in the past, but I agree with him here. I'd go even further and say that any new entrant to a field (of science or literature), whether hetero white male or not, should pay respect to those who went before them. But they should not show not too much deference; it often takes an outsider to come in and challenge the implicit assumptions of a field in order for that field to progress.

The remarkable thing to me is that this seems to conflict with the recent brouhaha in SFF about whether modern readers are reading (and if not, whether they should read) the classics of the genre. Note that I am not criticizing Wendig for this---as far as I know, he did not weigh in on that debate on either side. But I suspect that many of the people who seem to think its is OK not to pay respect to the giants of the SFF genre would agree with Wendig when he says we need to pay respect to existing writers of YA fiction. It is this hypocrisy that I find repellant.

Recommended Reading: Another Year End Best SFF List

Elizabeth Bernstein at NerdMuch? has released her list of the top 23 best fantasy books of 2015. Why 23? I have no idea; perhaps she likes prime numbers? Since I like centered square numbers, I would have chosen 25.

Someone should really put together a meta list of the best SFF of 2015, tallying up the opinions of multiple reviewers and commentators. In the unlikely event that I find the time, I will try to do so. For now, however, I will content myself with simply reproducing Bernstein's list. More information can be found at the above link.

1. The Philosopher Kings by Jo Walton
2. Firefight by Brandon Sanderson
3. Fool’s Quest by Robin Hobb
4. The Providence of Fire by Brian Staveley
5. Uprooted by Naomi Novik. See my review.
6. Half The World by Joe Abercrombie
7. The Autumn Republic by Brian McClellan
8. The Skull Throne by Peter V. Brett
9. The Liar’s Key by Mark Lawrence
10. The Aeronaut’s Windlass by Jim Butcher
11. Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson
12. A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab
13. The Mechanical by Ian Tregillis
14. The Price of Valor by Django Wexler
15. The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson
16. An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir
17. Twelve Kings in Sharakhai by Bradley Beaulieu. Bernstein writes

    There are so many epic fantasy novels on the market that often, they can begin to feel a bit formulaic; sometimes you come across one that really stands out, though, like Bradley Beaulieu’s Twelve Kings in Sharakhai. His worldbuilding skill shines in this diverse setting with multiple distinct cultures, and he employs multiple character point-of-views and flashbacks to build a captivating mystery as the protagonist, Çeda, searches for clues regarding her own heritage. While it seems Beaulieu got off to a shaky start with his Lays of Anuskaya series (although some readers greatly enjoyed it), it seems he has vastly improved with the onset of this new trilogy, the second installment of which is planned for next year.

18. The Invasion of the Tearling by Erika Johansen.
19. Knight’s Shadow by Sebastien de Castell
20. Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman
21. Vision in Silver by Anne Bishop
22. The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemesin
23. Magic Shifts by Ilona Andrews

Not a bad list, although it contains a lot of books that continue a series and so they might not make the best holiday presents. I have read two, and posted a review of one of them (the other will follow soon).

I was especially interested to see Brad Beaulieu make the list. I saw a reading of his a few months back and was impressed by what I heard. I plan to start with the Lays of Anuskaya, despite the underwhelming support offered in the above quote.

Inspiring SFF Books

The latest Mind Meld column at SF Signal collects answers to the question What SF/F/H book (or books) inspired you the most? which was posed to a group of authors.

Their answers:

1. Dan Koboldt:
1. Robert Jordan The Wheel of Time
2. Michael Crichton Jurassic Park
3. Frank Herbert Dune
4. Robin Hobb Farseer Trilogy
5. Patrick Rothfuss The Name of the Wind
2. Nicole Cushing
1. Thomas Ligotti Teatro Grottesco
2. Anonymous The Nightwatches of Bonaventura
3. Sadegh Hedayat The Blind Owl
4. Roland Topor The Tenant
5. The work of Bruno Schulz, Witkacy, and Mário de Sá-Carneiro
6. Hermann Ungar The Maimed
3. Jeremy Szal
1. George R. R. Martin Game of Thrones
2. Stephen King
3. Karen Traviss Halo: Glasslands
4. M. Darusha Wehm
1. Nathan Lowell Golden Age of the Solar Clipper series. Writes Wehm:

Beginning with Quarter Share, the series follows Ishmael Wang as he navigates the world of interstellar cargo hauling first as a green, unskilled recruit through to running his own ship in the “final” book, Owner’s Share.

5. Anatoly Belilovsky
1. Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire
6. Dawn Bonanno
1.  Mercedes Lackey Valdemar series.
7. Amy Sisson
1. Eleanor Cameron The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet.
2. Laurent de Brunhoff Babar Visits Another Planet.
3. Poul Anderson Tau Zero
8. Kate Heartfield
1. Pat O'Shea The Hounds of the Morrigan

I thought this was a very interesting list. I look forward to checking out Lowell's Solar Clipper series, which sounds right up my alley. The Hounds of Morrigan also sounds pretty cool from the brief synopsis you can find at the original link.

Creative Artists Giving Away Their Work

There is an ongoing debate among creative artists of all sorts, including SFF writers, as to when it is OK to "give away" their work without compensation.  This debate recently came to a head again with two recent posts by artists.

First, Wil Wheaton of Star Trek: The Next Generation and The Big Bang Theory fame sounded off in a blog post you can’t pay your rent with “the unique platform and reach our site provides”. In Wheaton's case, he complained about an "offer" from The Huffington Post to reprint a blog post he had written entitled Seven Things I did to Reboot my Life. Although excited by the possibility of reaching a large audience, Wheaton was less than enthused by their refusal to pay for the work with their approach to him including the following:

Unfortunately, we’re unable to financially compensate our bloggers at this time. Most bloggers find value in the unique platform and reach our site provides, but we completely understand if that makes blogging with us impossible.

 Wheaton's response on twitter was

Writers and bloggers: if you write something that an editor thinks is worth being published, you are worth being paid for it. Period.

This advice applies to designers, photographers, programmers, ANYONE who makes something. You. Deserve. Compensation. For. Your. Work.

 After all, as he mentions in his blog post on the subject:

Huffington Post is valued at well over fifty million dollars, and the company can absolutely afford to pay contributors. The fact that it doesn’t, and can get away with it, is distressing to me.

Second, following the announcement that the World Fantasy Convention is seeking designs for a new trophy (after the old H.P. Lovecraft one was abandoned in light of his disgusting racist past) but was not offering financial compensation, the artist John Picacio posted Artists Beware calling on all artists to boycott the process. In his mind, the process is "predatory" and that promises of "exposure" and "prestige" are not enough compensation. As for what would be acceptable compensation, he wrote:

It’s a convention with assets, even if it doesn’t want to compensate artists with money. It could have compensated all professional 3D artists who submitted ideas with a membership to a future WFC. It could have compensated the winning sculptor with a lifetime WFC membership. It could have found any number of creative solutions.

I expect that the WFC will offer something like this very soon.

Unlike The Huffington Post, the WFC is not a highly valued company. Rather, it is a volunteer run organization that does not make profits (although I do not think it is a registered non-profit) which relies on its members participation. As a result, Picacio's post attracted a lot of negative comments on his facebook page. Irene Gallo (of Tor Books, and of Hugo Awards controversy fame) directed people to www.shouldiworkforfree.com which lays out very limited conditions under which giving away your work is acceptable.

Naturally, if a person wants to be a professional creative artist, they have to sell their work at some point. But I can think of many good reasons for giving away your work for free, including the prospect of getting exposure for a new artist trying to break into the field. Whether to donate work is ultimately up to the artist and they should do whatever seems right for them.

However, it is important to keep in mind that calls for artists not to give away their work are not entirely free from bias; they are not always the "public service announcements" that established artists claim them to be. Make no mistake: some of the hostility from creative artists to giving work away for free stems from a fear that this will eat into their own earnings. After all, why should publishers pay top rates to an established artist when you can get a similar (even if slightly inferior) work for free from a newcomer? For established artists, these pleas not to give away work are attempts to form and enforce a cartel aimed at raising prices. And as usual with cartels, the incumbents stand to gain while newcomers will lose.

Of course, this all relates to the question of how to run a short fiction SFF (or literary) magazine. As I have argued elsewhere on this blog, the economics of this market makes it very hard to pay authors professional rates. Quite simply, the demand for short fiction is limited, while many, many authors are supplying works of short fiction. This naturally tends to drive the price---the compensation offered to authors---down. I've argued that the future of short SFF requires a new business model, perhaps along the lines of that used by academic journals (in some disciplines) and I've seen nothing since to lead me to change my views.

 

Recommended Reading: SFWA Nebula Suggested Reading List

For what I understand is the first time ever, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) has made its Nebula Suggested Reading List publicly available. The list is compiled from SFWA member suggestions made throughout the year, and there are separate lists for novels, novellas, novelettes, short stories, and dramatic works.

The list of novels, including the number of suggestions/nominations in parentheses (as of the date I looked at it; this will change as more nominations come in), with an asterisk denoting self-published and indie-published novels, is:

1. (16) Uprooted Novik, Naomi
2. (14) The Grace of Kings Liu, Ken
3. (12) Karen Memory Bear, Elizabeth 
4. (11) The Traitor Baru Cormorant Dickinson, Seth 
5. (8) The Fifth Season Jemisin, N. K. 
6. (7) Last First Snow Gladstone, Max 
7. (7) Updraft Wilde, Fran 
8. (6) Beasts of Tabat Rambo, Cat 
9. (6) Seveneves Stephenson, Neal 
10. (6) Sorcerer to the Crown Cho, Zen 
11. (5) A Darker Shade of Magic Schwab, VE 
12. (5) Ancillary Mercy Leckie, Ann 
13. (5) Aurora Robinson, Kim Stanley 
14. (5) The Just City Walton, Jo 
15. (5) The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps Wilson, Kai Ashante 
16. (5) The Water Knife Bacigalupi, Paolo 
17. (4) Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard Schoen, Lawrence M. 
18. (4) Radiance Draven, Grace*
19. (3) Castle Hangnail Vernon, Ursula 
20. (3) Clockwork Lives Kevin J. Anderson and Neil Peart
21. (3) Galapagos Regained Morrow, James 
22. (3) Half A War Abercrombie, Joe 
23. (3) Silver on the Road Gilman, Laura Anne 
24. (3) The House of Shattered Wings de Bodard, Aliette 
25. (3) The Library at Mount Char Hawkins, Scott 

followed by those receiving 2 nominations

1. Alien Separation Koch, Gini 
2. An Heir to Thorns and Steel Hogarth, M.C.A.
3. Dark Orbit Gilman, Carolyn Ives 
4. Empty Space Black, Alan*
5. Forgotten Suns Tarr, Judith 
6. Last Song Before Night Myer, Ilana 
7. Long Black Curl Bledsoe, Alex 
8. Mating Flight: A Non-Romance of Dragons Bloom, Bard*
9. Nemesis Games Corey, James S. 
10. Persona Valentine, Genevieve 
11. Raising Caine Gannon, Charles 
12. Signal to Noise Moreno-Garcia, Silvia 
13. The Border McCammon, Robert 
14. The Empress Game Mason, Rhonda 
15. The Flicker Men Kosmatka, Ted 
16. The Fold Clines, Peter 
17. The Galaxy Game Lord, Karen 
18. The Glittering World Levy, Robert 
19. The IX Weston, Andrew 
20. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street Pulley, Natasha 
21. Wonders of the Invisible World Barzak, Chris 
22. Working for Bigfoot Butcher, Jim 
23. Zero World Hough, Jason 
24. Zeroes Wendig, Chuck

There were another 37 that received a single nomination.

An interesting list for a couple of reasons. First, both Seveneves (6 nominations) and The Water Knife (5) received a significant number of nominations, but were unable to crack the Barnes and Noble top 25 leading me to further doubt the sense of that list maker. Second, two self-published and one indie-published book received multiple nominations.

List of recommended novellas, novelettes and short stories are available at the above link.

On Getting and Giving Critiques

The blog Book View Café has a post about the role of criticism in the writing process by Mindy Klasky entitled C is for Critique. The focus is on criticism an author receives from a "critique partner" defined as:

trusted individuals who read and evaluate a book it’s in a final state. These people go by many other names—you might call them your beta readers, or your critique group, or your writers group. Most authors have more than one critique partner, and they learn different things from different critics. One partner might excel at catching plot mistakes, gaps in storytelling or oversights in timeline that destroy the credibility of a story. Another partner might be best at noting character inconsistencies, those times when an author makes a character do something completely unexpected, solely to advance a plot. Yet another partner might point out factual mistakes or grammar errors or any of a million other details that keep a book from being its best.

Ideally, an author assembles a team of critique partners who address all these areas, along with any other known weaknesses.

Much of the post is bout how an author can shape the critique process to be most beneficial:

There are multiple methods for receiving criticism (most of which are designed to minimize the sting.) Some authors conduct all critique work online—they submit their files electronically, and they receive comments electronically. That computerized distance translates to an emotional distance. The author can temporarily stop reading criticism if it becomes difficult to process. She can rant and rave in the privacy of her own home, without building permanent barriers to communication with her critique partners. This method, though, can lead to a lack of understanding; without direct time-synced communication, the critic and the author might inadvertently be at cross-purposes.

Other authors conduct critique work in person, at weekly or monthly meetings. Many of these sessions follow a workshop model, where each member of the critique group presents his comments within a limited time period (for example, three minutes.) During that presentation time, the author must remain silent (except, in some cases, to ask for a clarification of a specific point.) The author then has a limited time period to respond to all the issues raised. This method allows each critic and the author to present points in a planned, methodic fashion. It also reduces purely emotional responses. This method, though, requires real-time communication, either in person or through an electronic tool such as Skype. It also requires restraint on all parties, who must stick with time limitations and speaking restrictions.

Yet another model involves direct, ongoing exchanges between the author and his critics, without limitations on time or subject matter, either in person or by a Skype-like tool. Critics and the author make statements and ask questions without restraints on time or subject matter. This method allows everyone to flesh out ideas more completely—critics can state their problems with a work, and authors can delve more deeply, pinpointing specific issues. This method, though, has the potential to dissolve into debates. Aggressive critics and defensive authors can quickly derail the effectiveness of direct, unlimited communication.

There is also advice on how to give critiques:

• Begin with a general introduction. This is the place to state that you’ve never liked farmboy-saves-the-world epic fantasy novels so your comments should be taken with a grain of salt, or you had a bad experience at a high school pep rally so you have trouble finding a gym teacher a sympathetic heroine. Put your own biases on the table to allow the author to better understand your critique.
• Move on to positive statements. What works in this book? Why? Always find something positive about a work, even if it’s the formatting or enthusiasm of the author.
• Follow up with critical statements. What needs work in this book? Why? Start with larger topics (“this romance novel has no conflict between the hero and heroine”) and end with smaller topics (“the White House is on Pennsylvania Avenue, not Connecticut Avenue.”) Consider grouping smaller topics into catch-all paragraphs (“Geography: review a map of Washington DC to double-check locations for the White House, the Capitol, and the Convention Center.”)
• Present potential fixes as suggestions, rather than as mandatory statements. (“Consider making the heroine a blind orphan to heighten the tension with her fellow boarding school students” instead of “Make Sally blind.”) If you don’t have a potential solution to a problem, admit as much.

Critique partners offer authors valuable insight into what works and what does not work in a book. Sometimes, that criticism is directly on point—the mere statement of the problem is enough to help an author see what needs to be fixed. Other times, an author concludes that a critic is mistaken—she doesn’t understand the book, or she isn’t familiar with a particular sub-genre, or she was having a bad day as she wrote her criticism. Even in those cases, the rational writer considers the criticism as a warning that the reader was pulled off track at that particular point. Often, a critic finds fault with a particular aspect of a book (e.g., “your heroine sounds whiny when she talks to her best friend”) but an author discovers a completely different fix (e.g., the heroine shouldn’t be talking to her best friend in that scene; instead, she should be taking steps to solve her problem more directly.) Critics aren’t omniscient, but they can be good barometers of when a story succeeds.

I thought this was pretty interesting, especially as it compares and contrasts with what I do editing and reviewing academic papers, as well as to preparing book reviews on this blog.

When reviewing an academic paper, it is typical to prepare a letter to the editor (not seen by the author) that discusses in a frank (and occasionally brutal) way the strengths and weaknesses of the article, as well as a report to both the editor and author. I typically write my reports along the lines advocated above. I start by briefly summarizing the work and placing it into context (for the benefit of the editor, who is usually not a specialist in the precise subfield). I follow it up with some comments about what the paper did well, and then describe any problems I found on a macro level. I then delve deeper into any of those problems, suggesting remedies when I know them, and then follow that up with some miscellaneous smaller criticisms.

Just like with any other form of writing, it is important to know your audience. As an editor, I want a no-nonsense and frank evaluation of a paper's strengths and weaknesses. If the recommendation is to publish the paper after revisions, then I want to report to be constructive and as specific as possible as to what type of revision is required. As an author, I want criticism to be constructive.

When reviewing fiction for this blog, my audience is other readers and fans of SFF. I would not mind if an author read something I wrote and it influenced them, but that is not why I write (I don't even write reviews in the expectation that they will be read). And so I do not write my reviews in the same way that I would offer a critique to an author desiring feedback. Rather, I write them more along the lines of an editors letter.

Mike Carey on Genre vs Literary Fiction

Continuing with the recent theme of authors defending genre fiction from literary snobs (see my posts on ), a couple of weeks ago I noticed a post by Mike Carey, author of the Felix Castor novels, works for comics publishers Marvel and DC, as well as the “literary zombie” novel The Girl With All the Gifts. The article posted at The Norwich Radical was entitled Literature vs Genre---Seconds Out (Part 1).

Recently, Part 2 of this article was published and so I thought it opportune to review the arguments raised.

Carey starts by noticing that this ongoing debate is pretty one-sided:

One thing you tend to notice after a while, though: it’s almost never writers of genre fiction who are picking the fight. To be fair, it’s often not “literary” writers either – it’s academics taking up the cudgels on their behalf; considerately telling us which stories are worth serious consideration and which aren’t. And I guess we appreciate the help, right? Because it’s a bewildering fictional landscape out there and an innocent young seeker after truth could easily go astray.

He then goes on to illustrate this with the example of Jonathan Jones attach on Terry Pratchett in The Guardian, which we have talked about recently. He then talks about an example from last year:

Last year it was Oliver Burkeman’s turn to tell us – I’m assuming with a straight face – that one way to “be a smarter reader” and “get more from what you read” is to stick to literary fictions. Why? Because a “well-designed study” at a US social research think tank (it’s Kidd & Castano if you want to look it up) found that literary fiction produces more powerful emotional identification with its more fully rounded characters and has a lasting effect on your ability to empathise with others.

The relevant section of Burkeman’s little how-to guide is called “Keep it Literary” – building on the most tendentious of Kidd & Castano’s five linked experiments, in which subjects read selected passages from either literary or genre fictions and then performed a range of tests designed to measure their empathy. The smoking gun here is “selected passages”. The experimenters hand-picked texts which they felt exemplified the differences between the two kinds of text, which is a little like marking the deck before you do a random shuffle. Six passages in all, by the way – three from genre fictions and three from the world’s canonically great literature – so this generalisation about all literary fiction and all genre fiction is based on about a millionth of a per cent of each. And despite being able to skew their sample in this bespoke way, Kidd & Castano reported differences between test and control groups that were barely larger than the margin of error. Mark Liberman dissected these procedural inadequacies very thoroughly in the Annals of Overgeneralisation on Language Log, and he was far from the only one.

So a spurious claim is being worked up out of a flawed study that seriously over-sold the significance of its findings. You can’t help but feel that there’s an agenda here, or at least a presumption – that literature has merit and that what has merit is by that same circular definition literature.

He has some other examples:

Other writers have been less coy about saying exactly this. Here’s Arthur Krystal, writing in the New Yorker in 2012:

“Genre” is not a bad word, although perhaps the better word for novels that taxonomically register as genre is simply “commercial.” Born to sell, these novels stick to the trite-and-true, relying on stock characters whose thoughts spool out in Lifetime platitudes. There will be exceptions, as there are in every field, but, for the most part, the standard genre or commercial novel isn’t going to break the sea frozen inside us. If this sounds condescending, so be it.

and

I hate to rake up ancient history, but here’s another example from a little further back – dredged up because in this case it is a writer of literary novels (Edward Docx, in the Observer in 2010) who’s saying this, so the agenda is maybe a little more naked.

Even good genre… is by definition a constrained form of writing. There are conventions and these limit the material. That’s the way writing works and lots of people who don’t write novels don’t seem to get this: if you need a detective, if you need your hero to shoot the badass CIA chief, if you need faux-feminist shopping jokes, then great; but the correlative of these decisions is a curtailment in other areas. If you are following conventions, then a significant percentage of the thinking and imagining has been taken out of the exercise. Lots of decisions are already made.

Carey begins his rebuttal with the last of these:

Yes, of course there are constraints when you write genre fiction. There are also constraints when you write literary fiction. Totally unconstrained writing would be (to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut) gibberish interspersed with exclamation marks. When you write – when you write anything at all – you write on the end of a tether. But it’s a flexible tether, and it’s all about the dance you perform on the end of that thing and how you work with it or strain against it or in some cases tie it into knots that were never seen before.

And then, referring to his own novel, The Girl With All the Gifts

If Docx’s thesis is right, the fact that I was working in a space that had been partially defined for me should have robbed whatever I produced of all or most of its potential value. I think the opposite was the case: being coaxed out of my comfort zone made me take creative pathways I’d never noticed or thought about before, and the results were unexpected and exciting. I realised almost as soon as I’d sent the story in that I couldn’t part company with Melanie so soon. I’d inadvertently written the first few scenes of a much larger narrative. There were events that hadn’t eventuated, other characters waiting in the wings, and a box (Pandora’s) that had finally to be opened.

The constraints were liberating, and believe me when I say that I speak as someone who has no interest in bondage.

Carey then revisits the debate on why some classic works are not considered "genre" pieces despite having all their trappings, as with Hamlet and Macbeth, despite having ghosts and witches in them. aren’t genre fictions, and both were unapologetically designed to get the crowds into the theater.

Lastly, he ends up quoting on of my favorite writers:

If I’m honest, I tend to see the entire “literature versus genre” debate as a dead horse so cruelly and relentlessly flogged that it isn’t even vaguely horse-shaped any more. It lies in a neglected corner of the academic meadow close to the intentional fallacy and the vast midden of post-modernism. But since Mr Burkeman has tried to put a saddle on it, I felt it was probably worth offering an opinion (“It is an ex-horse. It has ceased to be…”). And on top of that, to slip in a reference to one of my favourite writers and her eloquent rebuttal of this whole daft non-argument. I’m referring to Ursula LeGuin, who in the introduction to The Left Hand Of Darkness laments the tendency of people who don’t like or get science fiction to pronounce (ham-fistedly) on what science fiction is and does. Along the way, she has this to say about the relevance and importance of her chosen genre:

All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life – science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.

A metaphor for what?

If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words.

I like this formulation very much. I seldom write pure sci-fi, but LeGuin’s words apply just as well to horror and dark fantasy and probably to serious-minded works in any genre. I also like T.S.Eliot’s famous dictum about everything you write being “a raid on the inarticulate”. A genre is a tool you pack and carry along when you go on one of these raids. It takes it place – its honourable, earned place – among the other tools of the writer’s trade.

All-in-all, another well argued response to the dismissal of genre fiction. But also a reminder that many writers working in SFF have a (well deserved) chip on their shoulder.

Tolkien Scholarship

Following on from Ursula Le Guin's discussion of academic treatments (and the scorning) of Tolkien, Norbert Schürer has published an article in the Los Angeles Times Review of Books titled Tolkien Criticism Today.

As Schürer sees it, scholarship on Tolkien has struggled to find a path between recognizing the difficulty of the literature:

ON THE FACE OF IT, J.R.R. Tolkien’s works are not exactly easy reading. The Hobbit veers between childish asides and grandiose battles; The Lord of the Rings trilogy presents 1,000 pages of unrelenting heroism; The Silmarillion makes the Bible look like easy reading — and this doesn’t even begin to consider The History of Middle-Earth, the 12 volumes of manuscript variants compiled posthumously by Tolkien’s son Christopher. Furthermore, much of Tolkien’s work is written in an indigestible faux-medieval style; there are long descriptions of imagined countrysides, and he sprinkles in countless obscure references to invented fantastic histories.

and the popularity of the works:

Tolkien is nonetheless one of the most popular authors of the 20th century. In poll after poll, readers declare him their favorite writer; his main books remain bestsellers 60 years after their publication, and the recent movies based on his works are box office hits. On a superficial level, Tolkien’s success is easy to explain: He offers timeless stories about hard moral choices, and he creates a marvelous world of magic, including talking eagles, walking trees, and hobbits — invented figures with whom many contemporary readers can easily identify.

As he says it, scholars face a difficult trade-off:

On one hand, critics do not want to be seen as fawning fans, so their writing adopts a scholarly tone. On the other hand, they want to appeal to fans, so they have to cater to popular sentiment. They need to address controversial topics, but they cannot attack the author if they want to find readers among fans, and while they often try to address the entirety of Tolkien’s published imaginary writings (known as the legendarium) they can only rely on readers being familiar with The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and often only in cinematic form.

As a result, he concludes that Tolkien scholarship is in a sad state. He then goes on to review seven recent works of Tolkien scholarship, and comes away unimpressed for the most part.

The best of the seven, he argues, is A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Stuart Lee, and published by Wiley Blackwell. The next best, the essay collection Tolkien: The Forest and the City:

these books show the two requirements for good Tolkien criticism. For one, he should be treated like any other author in being discussed in seriously peer-reviewed journals and established academic presses rather than in essay collections and niche publications. Just as importantly, Tolkien should not be treated with kid gloves because he is a fan favorite with legions to be placated, but as the serious and major author he is.

Recommended Reading: Barnes and Noble's Best SFF of 2015

Barnes and Noble have come out with their list of the best SFF of 2015:

1. Radiance, by Catherynne M. Valente
2. The Traitor Baru Cormorant, by Seth Dickinson
3. Ancillary Mercy, by Ann Leckie
4. Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson
5. A Darker Shade of Magic, by V.E. Schwab
6. Sorcerer to the Crown, by Zen Cho
7. The Grace of Kings, by Ken Liu
8. Ink and Bone: The Great Library, by Rachel Caine
9. The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin
10. Flex/The Flux, by Ferrett Steinmetz
11. Uprooted, by Naomi Novik
12. The Library at Mount Char, by Scott Hawkins
13. Half-Resurrection Blues, by Daniel José Older
14. Planetfall, by Emma Newman
15. Signal to Noise, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
16. Dark Orbit, by Carolyn Ives Gilman
17. The Drafter, by Kim Harrison
18. Wake of Vultures, by Lila Bowen
19. Vision in Silver, by Anne Bishop
20. The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers
21. Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, by Kai Ashante Wilson
22. Revision, by Andrea Phillips
23. Karen Memory, by Elizabeth Bear
24. Twelve Kings in Sharakhai, by Bradley P. Beaulieu
25. The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut’s Windlass, by Jim Butcher

I have read only three of these so far, although I have plans to read another four. Lots more recommendations to think about.

But overall, a pretty strange list. Neal Stephenson's Seveneves did not make the cut? Terry Pratchett's The Shephered's Crown? Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife? I thought Seveneves was one of the better novels I read this year, and so far (I am not finished yet) The Water Knife is excellent. Should I infer from this that the other books on the list are better than these? If so, I have some great reading ahead. Or should I infer that the list-maker's tastes are very different from mine?

The list also features a large selection of books by women writers, and by writers of color. Given that we continually hear about how the profession is dominated by white males, we might infer that this is a disproportionately large representation of women and people of color. That is a good thing; I think it is important to draw attention to new and different voices.

David Mitchell on Literary vs Genre Fiction

David Mitchell is an unusual author. He has been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize 3 times, shortlisted twice, and was also the author of Bone Clocks, which recently won the World Fantasy Award. His recent novel, The Slade House, is a haunted house story. As such, he is uniquely qualified to speak on the separation of literary fiction from genre fiction, a topic that has been of substantial interest to me on this blog (see my posts on the views of  C.S. Lewis, Terry Pratchett and Ursula Le Guin).

In a recent article in The Guardian, based on a Wired podcast and entitled David Mitchell: separating literary and genre fiction is act of 'self-mutilation', he spoke at some length on this topic. The title pretty much sums up his views, but I think the arguments are worth repeating.

He starts by listing some of his childhood influences, listing Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin (I recently reported on David Mitchell's stirring tribute to Ursual Le Guin's Earthsea books), Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, British SF comic 2000AD and EE “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series. These were all books I read as a child, too.

He then goes on to talk about the “ghettoisation” in bookshops:

“It’s convenient to have a science fiction and fantasy section, it’s convenient to have a mainstream literary fiction section, but these should only be guides, they shouldn’t be demarcated territories where one type of reader belongs and another type of reader does not,” said Mitchell. “It’s a bizarre act of self-mutilation to say that ‘I don’t get on with science fiction and fantasy, therefore I’m never going to read any’. What a shame. All those great books that you’re cutting yourself off from.”

He also pointed out that many books accepted as literature, such as Dickens, are “shot through with fantasy” and argued that works that “become sanctified in the canon of English literature, people then forget – conveniently – are what we now called genre”. He listed George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the works of HG Wells and Margaret Atwood. I would add Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, much of magical realism, and many, many others.

He also had a lot to say about Kazuo Ishiguro’s distancing of his novel The Buried Giant from the fantasy label (for which he was criticized by Ursula Le Guin):

Mitchell said he admired both writers. On Ishiguro – and those readers and critics who also sought to downplay the fantasy elements in his novel – Mitchell said: “There was just this big, big, big brouhaha in the press. In the admittedly tiny corner of the press that the book world occupies, there was this, ‘How dare he? Has he lost his marbles? What does he think he’s doing?’ A lot of people just didn’t get it. But this is what the book wants to be. You’re personally entitled to not like the book because you don’t think it works, you’re allowed to not like the book because you don’t get on with his style of writing, you don’t like the book because of its absurdity or strangeness – but don’t not like it because it’s got a dragon in it!”

Le Guin remains a personal favourite: “I visit Earthsea about once a decade, and I read myself when I’m there – my earlier selves, reading them as a boy of nine, as a teenager of 15, as a young man of 26 or so, as a writer of 35, and as a person who re-read them to write an introduction to the Folio Society’s recent hardback reprint of A Wizard of Earthsea. So it’s kind of come full circle.”

 I've not read any of Mitchell's works, but will seek some out in the near future.

Le Guin on Where Ideas Come From

In my last post on transcript of a talk by Ursula Le Guin from 2000 that was published recently online (“Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?”; see my discussion here and here), I review what Le Guin has a lot to say directly about the topic of the title of the talk.

“Where do you get your ideas from?” is the question people in my line of work—fiction writers—get asked most often. We never know how to answer. In self-defense, most of us develop a sound-bite answer. Harlan Ellison’s is the best; he says he gets his ideas from a mail-order house in Schenectady.

When people ask, “Where do you get your ideas from?” what some of them really want to know is the address of that mail-order company.

That is, they want to write, or more likely what they want is to be a writer, because they know writers are rich and famous; and they know that there are secrets that writers know, like that address in Schenectady; and they know that if they can just learn those secrets, those mystical post-office box numbers, they will be Stephen King.

Alas. Writers don’t have secrets. Except maybe the well-kept secret that about 99 percent of writers are neither rich nor famous. Writers talk. Writers are wordy people. They talk, blab, whine all the time to each other about what they’re writing; they teach writing workshops and write writing books and yadder on talk shows. Writers tell all. If they could tell beginning writers where to get ideas, they would. In fact they do, all the time. Some of them actually get rich and famous by doing it.

What do the how-to-write writers say about getting ideas? They say stuff like: “Listen to conversations, note down interesting things you hear or read about, keep a journal, describe a character, imagine a dresser drawer and describe what’s in it”—yeah, yeah, but that’s all work. Anybody can do work. I wanna be a writer. What’s the PO box number?

Well, the secret to writing is writing. Writing is how you be a writer. It’s only a secret to people who really don’t want to hear it.

So why do I want to try to answer this foolish question, “Where do you get your ideas from?” Because underneath the foolish aspect of it, the question is a real one that people really want to know the answer to, even though it is ultimately unanswerable; and unanswerable questions are just what fiction writers like to answer.

It’s a big question—where do writers get their ideas, where do artists get their visions, where do musicians get their music? It’s bound to have a big answer. Or a whole lot of them.

One of my favorite answers is this: Somebody asked Willie Nelson how he thought up his tunes, and he said, “The air is full of tunes, I just reach up and pick one.”

Now that is not a secret. But it is a sweet mystery.

And a true one. For a fiction writer—a storyteller—the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it’s there; you just reach up and pick it.

Then you have to be able to let it tell itself.

First you have to be able to wait. To wait in silence. Wait in silence and listen. Listen for the tune, the vision, the story. Not grabbing, not pushing, just waiting, listening, being ready for it when it comes. This is an act of trust. Trust in yourself, trust in the world. The artist says, “The world will give me what I need and I will be able to use it rightly.”

Readiness—not grabbiness, not greed—readiness: willingness to hear, to listen carefully, to see clearly and accurately—to let the words be right. Not almost right. Right. To know how to make something out of the vision; that’s what practice is for. Because being ready doesn’t mean just sitting around, even if it looks like that’s what writers mostly do; artists practice their art continually, and writing happens to involve a lot of sitting. Scales and finger exercises, pencil sketches, endless unfinished and rejected stories. The artist who practices knows the difference between practice and performance, and the essential connection between them. The gift of those seemingly wasted hours and years is patience and readiness; a good ear, a keen eye, and a skilled hand, a rich vocabulary and grammar. The gift of practice to the artist is mastery, or a word I like better, “craft.”

With those tools, those instruments, with that hard-earned mastery, that craftiness, you do your best to let the “idea”—the tune, the vision, the story—come through clear and undistorted. Clear of ineptitude, awkwardness, amateurishness; undistorted by convention, fashion, opinion.

This is a very radical job, dealing with the ideas you get if you are an artist and take your job seriously, this shaping a vision into the medium of words. It’s what I like best to do in the world, and what I like to talk about when I talk about writing. I could happily go on and on about it. But I’m trying to talk about where the vision, the stuff you work on, the “idea,” comes from. So:

The air is full of tunes.

A piece of rock is full of statues.

The earth is full of visions.

The world is full of stories.

As an artist, you trust that. You trust that that is so. You know it is so. You know that whatever your experience, it will give you the material, the “ideas,” for your work. (From here on I’ll leave out music and fine arts and stick to storytelling, which is the only thing I truly know anything about, though I do think all the arts are one at the root.)

“Idea”—what does that word mean? “Idea” is shorthand for the material, the subject, subjects, the matter of a story. What the story is about. What the story is. “Idea” is a strange word for an imagined matter, not abstract but intensely concrete, not intellectual but embodied. However, “idea” is the word we’re stuck with. And it’s not wholly off center, because the imagination is a rational faculty.

“I got the idea for that story from a dream I had.”

“I haven’t had a good story idea all year.”

“Here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm.”

That last sentence was written in 1926 by Virginia Woolf, in a letter to a writer friend. I will come back to it in the end, because what she says about rhythm goes deeper than anything I have ever thought or read about where art comes from. But before I can talk about rhythm I have to talk about experience and imagination.

Where do writers get their ideas from? From experience. That’s obvious.

And from imagination. That’s less obvious.

Fiction results from imagination working on experience. We shape experience in our minds so that it makes sense. We force the world to be coherent, to tell us a story.

Not only fiction writers do this; we all do it; we do it constantly, in order to survive. People who can’t make the world into a story, go mad. Or, like infants or (perhaps) animals, they live in a world that has no history, no time but now.

This excerpt led to the discussion of distrust of imaginative fiction that Le Guin claims to find most obviously in American academics.

Le Guin also talks about using other writers as inspiration and as a guide to writing material she was unfamiliar about. She illustrates this with her own work.

I want to use some of my own fiction as examples of Where Ideas Come From. I have written fantastic stories closely based on actual experience, and realistic stories totally made up out of whole cloth. Some of my science fiction is full of accurate and carefully researched fact, while my stories about ordinary people doing ordinary things on the Oregon coast in 1990 contain large wetlands and quicksands of pure invention. I hope to show you that fictional “ideas” arise from a combination of experience and imagination that is both indissoluble and utterly unpredictable.

In my Earthsea books, particularly the first one, people sail around on the sea in small boats all the time. They do it quite convincingly, and many people understandably assume that I spent years sailing around on the sea in small boats.

My entire experience with sailboats was during my junior semester at Berkeley High School, when they let us take sailing for gym credit. On a windy day in the Berkeley Marina, my friend Jean and I managed to overturn and sink a nine-foot catboat in three feet of water. We sang “Nearer, My God, to Thee” as she went down, and then waded a half mile back to the boathouse. The boatman was incredulous. “You sank it?” he said. “How?”

That will remain one of the secrets of the writer.

All right, so practically all the sailing in Earthsea, certainly all the deep-sea sailing, does not reflect experience. Not my experience. Only my imagination, using that catboat, other people’s experience, novels I’d read, and some research (I do know why Lookfar is clinker-built), asking friends questions, and some trips on ocean liners. But basically, it’s a fake. So is all the snow and ice in The Left Hand of Darkness. I never even saw snow till I was seventeen, and I certainly never pulled a sledge across a glacier. Except with Captain Scott, and Shackleton, and those guys. In books. Where do you get your ideas? From books, of course, from other people’s books. If I didn’t read, how could I write?

We all stand on each other’s shoulders; we all use each other’s ideas and skills and plots and secrets. Literature is a communal enterprise. That “anxiety of influence” stuff is just testosterone talking. Understand me: I don’t mean plagiarism; I’m not talking about imitation, or copying, or theft. The stuff from other people’s books gets into us just as our own experience does, is composted and transmuted and transformed by the imagination, just as actual experiences are, and comes forth entirely changed. If that were not so, if I thought I had really stolen and used any other writer’s writing, I certainly wouldn’t stand here congratulating myself. I’d go hide my head in shame and wait for the lawsuit. But as it is, I acknowledge with delight my endless debt to every storyteller I have ever read, my colleagues, my collaborators—I praise them and honor them, the endless givers of gifts.

So, in a science fiction novel set on a planet populated by people whose gender arrangements are highly imaginative, the part about two people hauling a sledge across a glacier is as factually accurate as I could make it, down to the details of their gear and harness, how much weight they haul, how far they can get in a day, what different snow surfaces are like, and so on. None of this is from my direct experience; all of it is from the books I’ve read about the Antarctic, ever since I was in my twenties. It is factual material woven into a pure fantasy. As a matter of fact, so is all the stuff about their gender arrangements; but that’s a little too complicated to go into here.

and

My book The Telling started this way: I learned that Taoist religion, an ancient popular religion of vast complexity and a major element of Chinese culture, had been suppressed, wiped out, by Mao Tse-tung. Taoism as a practice now exists chiefly in Taiwan, possibly underground on the mainland, possibly not. In one generation, one psychopathic tyrant destroyed a tradition two thousand years old. In one lifetime. My lifetime. And I knew nothing about it. The enormity of the event, and the enormity of my ignorance, left me stunned. I had to think about it. Since the way I think is fiction, eventually I had to write a story about it. But how could I write a novel about China? My poverty of experience would be fatal. A novel set on an imagined world, then, about the extinction of a religion as a deliberate political act in counterpoint to the suppression of political freedom by a theocracy? All right, there’s my theme, my idea if you will.

I’m impatient to get started, impassioned by the theme. So I look for the people who will tell me the story, the people who are going to live this story. And I find this uppity kid, this smart girl who goes from Earth to that world. I don’t remember what her original name was; she had five different names. I started the book five times, and it got nowhere. I had to stop.

I had to sit, patiently, and say nothing, at the same time every day, while the fox looked at me out of the corner of its eye and slowly let me get a little bit closer. And finally the woman whose story it was spoke to me. “I’m Sutty,” she said. “Follow me.” So I followed her; and she led me up into the high mountains; she gave me the book.

I had a good idea; but I did not have a story. The story had to make itself, find its center, find its voice—Sutty’s voice. Then, because I was waiting for it, it could give itself to me. Or put it this way: I had a lot of stuff in my head, but I couldn’t pull it together, I couldn’t dance that dance because I hadn’t waited to catch the beat. I didn’t have the rhythm.

She also talks about the difficulty of translating ideas from brain to paper:

Earlier, I used a sentence from a letter from Virginia Woolf to her friend Vita Sackville-West. Sackville-West had been pontificating about finding the right word, Flaubert’s mot juste, and agonizing very Frenchly about style; and Woolf wrote back, very Englishly:

As for the mot juste, you are quite wrong. Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it: But no doubt I shall think differently next year.

Woolf wrote that seventy-five years ago; if she did think differently next year, she didn’t tell anybody. She says it lightly, but she means it: this is very profound. I have not found anything more profound, or more useful, about the source of story—where the ideas come from.

Beneath memory and experience, beneath imagination and invention—beneath words, as she says—there are rhythms to which memory and imagination and words all move. The writer’s job is to go down deep enough to begin to feel that rhythm, find it, move to it, be moved by it, and let it move memory and imagination to find words.

She’s full of ideas but she can’t dislodge them, she says, because she can’t find their rhythm—can’t find the beat that will unlock them, set them moving forward into a story, get them telling themselves. A “wave in the mind,” she calls it; and says that a sight or an emotion may create it, like a stone dropped into still water, and the circles go out from the center in silence, in perfect rhythm, and the mind follows those circles outward and outward till they turn to words. But her image is greater: her wave is a sea wave, traveling smooth and silent a thousand miles across the ocean till it strikes the shore and crashes, breaks, and flies up in a foam of words. But the wave, the rhythmic impulse, is before words and “has nothing to do with words.” So the writer’s job is to recognize the wave, the silent swell way out at sea, way out in the ocean of the mind, and follow it to shore, where it can turn or be turned into words, unload its story, throw out its imagery, pour out its secrets. And ebb back into the ocean of story.

What is it that prevents the ideas and visions from finding their necessary underlying rhythm, why couldn’t Woolf “dislodge” them that morning? It could be a thousand things, distractions, worries; but very often I think what keeps a writer from finding the words is that she grasps at them too soon, hurries, grabs. She doesn’t wait for the wave to come in and break. She wants to write because she’s a writer; she wants to say this, and tell people that, and show people something else—things she knows, her ideas, her opinions, her beliefs, important things—but she doesn’t wait for the wave to come and carry her beyond all the ideas and opinions, to where you cannot use the wrong word. None of us is Virginia Woolf, but I hope every writer has had at least a moment when they rode the wave, and all the words were right.

Ursula Le Guin is one of my favorite writers. This is for many reasons. One of them is that, as this talk shows (and there is more at the link that I have not excerpted), she is an astute observer and a deep thinker about the process of writing.

Le Guin on Reading vs Viewing Stories

In the same transcript of a talk by Ursula Le Guin that I talked about yesterday (“Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?”; see my discussion here), Le Guin also has a lot to say about the differences between reading fiction, and the experience of watching TV or movie adaptations of that same material.

In it, she says, following on from her discussion of fantasy existing in a literary ghetto:

Another way we show our distrust of the imagination, our puritanical lust to control it, is in the way we tell stories on TV and in video or online games.

Reading is active. To read a story is to participate actively in the story; to read is to tell the story to yourself by reliving it and rewriting it with the author, word by word, sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter. If you want proof, just watch an eight-year-old reading a story she likes. She is concentratedly, tensely, fiercely alive. She is as intense as a hunting cat.

Reading is a mysterious act. It absolutely has not and cannot be replaced by any kind of viewing, because viewing is an entirely different undertaking, with different stakes and rewards. Viewing is passive. A reader reading makes the book, brings it into meaning, by translating the arbitrary symbols, printed letters, into an inward, private reality. A viewer watching a film does not make the film. To watch a film is to be taken into it—to participate in it—be made part of it. Absorbed by it. Readers eat books, but film eats viewers. This is fine. It’s wonderful to be eaten by a good movie, to let your eyes and ears take your mind into a reality you could never otherwise know. However, passivity means vulnerability, and that’s what a great deal of media storytelling exploits.

Reading is an active transaction between the text and the reader. The text is under the control of the reader—she can skip, linger, interpret, misinterpret, return, ponder, go along with the story or refuse to go along with it, make judgments, revise her judgments— she has time and room to genuinely interact with it. A novel is an active, ongoing collaboration between the writer and the reader.

Viewing is not a transaction. It isn’t collaborative. The viewer, consenting to participate, hands over control to the filmmaker or programmer. Psychically there is no time or room outside an audiovisual narrative for anything but the program. For the viewer, the monitor screen temporarily becomes the universe. There’s very little leeway, and no way to control the constant stream of information and imagery unless one refuses to accept it and detaches oneself emotionally and intellectually, in which case it appears essentially meaningless. Or one can turn the program off.

Although there’s a lot of talk about transactional viewing and “interactive” is a favorite word of programmers, electronic media are a paradise of control for programmers and a paradise of passivity for viewers. There is nothing in so-called interactive programs except what the programmer put in them; the so-called choices lead only to subprograms chosen by the programmer, no more a choice than a footnote is—do you read it or don’t you. The roles in role-playing games are fixed and conventional; there are no characters, only personae. (That’s why teenagers love them; teenagers need personae. But they have to shed those personae eventually, if they’re going to become persons.) Hypertext offers the storyteller a wonderful complexity, but so far hypertext fiction seems to be like Borges’s garden of forking paths that lead only to other forking paths—fascinating, like fractals, and ultimately nightmarish. Interactivity in the sense of the viewer controlling the text is also nightmarish, when interpreted to mean that the viewer can rewrite the novel. If you don’t like the end of Moby-Dick you can change it. You can make it happy. Ahab kills the whale. Ooowee.

Readers can’t kill the whale. They can only reread until they understand why Ahab made it kill him. Readers don’t control the text: they genuinely interact with it. Viewers are either controlled by the program or try to control it. Different ballgames. Different universes.

A 3-D animated version of Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, narrated by Kenneth Branagh, appeared this year and was presented as offering “more than just the story of the Little Prince. You can, for example, catch an orbiting planet in the Little Prince’s universe and learn all about the planet’s secrets and its inhabitants.” But in the book, doesn’t the prince visit several planets, with extremely interesting inhabitants, and doesn’t his own tiny planet have an immense secret—a rose—the rose he loves? Do the makers of this version feel that Saint-Exupéry was stingy with his planets? Or are they convinced that stuffing irrelevant information into a work of art enriches it? Maybe they’ll give us a version of The Tempest, and when Miranda says, “O brave new world, that has such creatures in it!” the viewer can press a button and on the screen there will be information about a genuine virtual new world with all kinds of weird creatures in it.

We are told that the viewer can interact with the animated version of The Little Prince. You can “enter the Fox Training Game and after you’ve ‘tamed’ the fox that the Little Prince meets, he will give you a gift.”

Do you remember the fox in The Little Prince? He insists that the little prince tame him. Why? the prince asks, and the fox says that if he is tamed he will always love the wheat fields, because they’re the color of the little prince’s hair. The little prince asks how to tame him, and the fox says by being very patient, sitting down “at a little distance from me . . . in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day . . .” And it should be at the same time every day, so that the fox will “know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you . . . One must observe the proper rites.” And so the fox is tamed, and when the little prince is about to leave, “‘Ah,’ said the fox, ‘I shall cry.’” So the little prince laments that being tamed “has done you no good at all!” but the fox says, “It has done me good . . . because of the color of the wheat fields.” And when they part, the fox says, “I will make you a present of a secret . . . It is the time you wasted for your rose that makes your rose important. . . . You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”

So, then, the child viewing the program “tames” the fox by pressing buttons until the food pellet drops into the food dish—no, no, sorry, that’s how we train rats. We train children by teaching them to select the “right” choice from the choices offered until the program tells them that the fox is “tamed.” Somehow this doesn’t seem the same as imagining doing what the book describes: coming back every day at the same time and sitting silently while a fox looks at you out of the corner of its eye. Something essential has been short-circuited, falsified. What do you think the fox’s “gift” to the child viewer will be? I don’t know, but I don’t really see how it can top the fox’s gift in the book: just the words “you become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”

The “gift” The Little Prince gives its readers is itself. It offers them absolutely nothing but a charming story with a few charming pictures, and the chance to face fear, grief, tenderness, and loss.

Which is why that story, written in the middle of a war by a man about to die in that war, is honored by children, adults, and even literary critics. Maybe the animated version isn’t as ghastly as it sounds; but it’s hard not to see it as an effort to exploit, to tame something that, like a real fox, must be left wild: the imagination of an artist.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry did crash-land in the desert once, in the thirties, and nearly died; that is a fact. He did not meet a little prince from another planet there. He met terror, thirst, despair, and salvation. He wrote a splendid factual account of that experience in Wind, Sand and Stars. But later it got composted, transmuted, transfigured into a story of a little prince. Imagination working on experience. Invention springing like a flower, a rose, out of the desert sands of fact.

I thought these were interesting views, and her references to The Little Prince were spot on. However, it is interesting to note that some of the more popular video games available today (like Minecraft) are popular because they allow for the player to express their individuality. Even those games based on movies tend to allow the player to depart from the script of the movie, and so express their own imagination (albeit within the limits of the game).

Le Guin On Fantasy as a Literary Ghetto

The website tinhouse.com recently published the transcript of a talk by Ursula Le Guin from 2000 entitled “Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?” in which she discussed a number of things about writing fantasy. I'll come back to some of them later, but for now I want to focus on her thoughts on fantasy (and genre fiction more generally) as being placed in a literary"ghetto".

This is a theme that arises repeatedly when talking to both fans and authors of genre writing. In earlier posts, I have discussed reactions to this phenomenon by C.S. Lewis and Terry Pratchett, and so it is interesting to see how Le Guin compares.

The relevant (lengthy) except from her talk:

I wrote a piece years ago called “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” In it I talked about how so many Americans distrust and despise not only the obviously imaginative kind of fiction we call fantasy, but also all fiction, often rationalizing their fear and contempt with financial or religious arguments: reading novels is a waste of valuable time, the only true book is the Bible, etc. I said that many Americans have been taught “to repress their imagination, to reject it as something childish or effeminate, unprofitable, and probably sinful. . . . They have learned to fear [the imagination]. But they have never learned to discipline it at all.”

I wrote that in 1974. The millennium has come and we still fear dragons. Our fear has taken some forms I’d like to talk about.

One is the tactic of infantilizing fantasy. Fantasy is for children. It’s kiddilit. It’s cute. But fantasy also has shown that it can make money. Gotta take that seriously. So the Harry Potter books—amiable, conventional children’s fantasies—were praised for their originality by reviewers utterly ignorant of the tradition they derive from: a tradition that descends from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the One Thousand and One Nights and Beowulf and the Tale of Monkey and medieval romance and Renaissance epic, through Kipling and Borges and Calvino and Rushdie: a form of literature that is not well described as cute, not to be dismissed as “entertainment,” “great fun for the kiddies,” or “well, at least they’re reading something.” The Potter phenomenon was a godsend to those who want fantasy to be childish, not to be taken seriously.

American critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury one of the great works of twentieth-century fiction, The Lord of the Rings. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it, because they’re afraid of it. They’re afraid of dragons. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they’ll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they’ll have to redefine what literature is.

What American critics and teachers call “literature” is still almost wholly restricted to realism. All other forms of fiction—westerns, mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, romance, historical, regional, you name it—are dismissed as “genre.” Sent to the ghetto. That the ghetto is about twelve times larger than the city, and currently a great deal livelier, doesn’t bother those who live in ivory towers. Magic realism, though—that does bother them; they hear Gabriel García Márquez gnawing quietly at the foundations of the ivory tower, they hear all these crazy Indians dancing up in the attic, and they think maybe they should do something about it. Perhaps they should give that fellow who teaches the science fiction course tenure? Oh, surely not.

To say that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to imply that imitation is superior to invention. I have wondered if this unstated but widely accepted (and, incidentally, very puritanical) proposition is related to the recent popularity of the memoir and the personal essay. This has been a genuine popularity, not a matter of academic canonizing. People really do want to read memoir and personal essay, and writers want to write it. I’ve felt rather out of step. I like history and biography fine, but when family and personal memoir seems to be the most popular—the dominant narrative form—well, I have searched my soul for prejudice and found it. I prefer invention to imitation. I love novels. I love made-up stuff.

To put a high value on story drawn directly from personal experience is a logical extension of our high value for realism in fiction. If fiction is expected to cling to actual experience, if faithful imitation of reality is its great virtue, then memoir is far more virtuous than fiction. The memoir writer’s imagination is subordinated to the hard facts. It may connect them aesthetically and draw from them a moral or intellectual lesson but is understood to be forbidden to invent. If there’s nothing in the story outside familiar experience, emotion may certainly be roused but imagination may scarcely be called upon. Recognition, rather than discovery, is the reward.

True recognition is a true reward. The personal essay is a noble and difficult discipline. I’m not knocking it. I admire it with considerable awe. But I’m not at home in it.

I keep looking for dragons in this country, and not finding any. Or only finding them in disguise.

Some of the most praised recent memoirs have been about growing up in hopeless poverty, cruel fathers, incompetent mothers, abused children, misery, fear, and loneliness. But is all this the property of nonfiction? Poverty, cruelty, incompetence, dysfunctional families, injustice, degradation—that is the very stuff of the fireside tale, the folk tale, stories of ghosts and vengeance beyond the grave—and of Jane Eyre, and David Copperfield, Huckleberry Finn, and Cien años de soledad. The ground of our experience is dark, and all our inventions start in that darkness. From it, some of them leap forth in fire.

The imagination can transfigure the dark matter of life. And in too many personal essays and autobiographies, that’s what I begin to miss, to crave: transfiguration. To recognize our shared, familiar misery is not enough. I want to recognize something I never saw before. I want something terrible and blazing to leap out at me. I want the fire of the transfiguring imagination. I want the true dragons.

Experience is where ideas come from. But a story isn’t a mirror of what happened. Fiction is experience translated by, transformed by, transfigured by the imagination. Truth includes but is not coextensive with fact. Truth in art is not imitation, but reincarnation.

To be valuable in a factual history, the raw material of experience has to be selected, arranged, and shaped. In a novel, the process is even more radical: the raw materials are not only selected and shaped but also fused, composted, recombined, reworked, reconfigured, reborn, and at the same time allowed to find their own forms and shapes, which may be only indirectly related to rational thinking—so that the whole thing may seem to be pure invention. A girl chained to a rock as a sacrifice to a monster. A mad captain and a white whale. A ring that confers absolute power. A dragon.

But there’s no such thing as pure invention. Invention is recombination. We can work only with what we have. It all starts with experience. There are monsters and leviathans and chimeras in the human mind; they are psychic facts. Dragons are one of the truths about us. The only way we may be able to express that particular truth is by writing about dragons—admitting their existence. People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

The idea that fantasy and science fiction are harder to write than literature because the require greater feats of imagination has come up before. Le Guin gives a very eloquent take on it.

Le Guin also has some interesting things to say about imagination and the stakes in fantasy novels:

But many fantasies, works of so-called imaginative fiction, suffer from the same thing: imaginative poverty. The writers haven’t actually used their imaginations, they don’t make up anything—they just move archetypes around in a game of wish fulfillment..

In fantasy, since the fictionality of the fiction—the inventions, the dragons—are all right out in front, it’s easy to assume that the story has no relation at all to experience, that everything in a fantasy can be just the way the writer wants. No rules, all cards wild. All the ideas in fantasy are just wishful thinking—right? Well, no. Wrong. It may be that the further a story gets away from common experience and accepted reality, the less wishful thinking it can do, and the more firmly its essential ideas must be grounded in common experience and accepted reality..

Serious fantasy goes into regions of the psyche that may be very strange territory to the reader, dangerous ground; and for that reason, serious fantasy is usually both conservative and realistic about human nature. Its mode is usually comic, not tragic; that is, it has a more-or-less happy ending but, just as the tragic hero brings his tragedy on himself, the happy outcome in fantasy is earned by the behavior of the protagonist. Serious fantasy invites the reader on a wild journey of invention, through wonders and marvels, through mortal risks and dangers—all the time hanging on to a common, everyday, realistic morality. Generosity, reliability, compassion, and courage: in fantasy these moral qualities are seldom questioned. They are accepted, and they are tested—often to the limit, and beyond..

The people who write the stuff on the book covers obsessively describe fantasy as “a battle between good and evil,” but in commercial fantasy the battle is all it is; the white wizards and the black magicians are both mindlessly violent. It’s not a moral struggle, just a power struggle. This is about as far from Tolkien as you can get..

But why should moral seriousness matter, why do probability and consistency matter, when it’s “all just made up”? Well, moral seriousness is exactly what makes a fantasy matter. The made-up story is inevitably trivial if nothing real is at stake. That’s my problem with Harry Potter; the powerful people are divided into good ones and bad ones, all of whom use their power for mere infighting and have nothing to do with people without power. Such easy wish fulfillment has a great appeal to children, who are genuinely powerless, but it worries me when adults fall for it. In the same way, the purer the invention, the more important is its credibility, consistency, and coherence. The rules of the invented realm must be followed to the letter. All wizards, including writers, are extremely careful about their spells. Every word must be the right word. A sloppy wizard is a dead wizard. Serious fantasists delight in invention, in the freedom to invent, but they know that careless invention kills magic. Fantasy happily flouts fact, but it is just as concerned with truth as the direst realism.

I think the whole talk is fascinating and I will have more to say on it tomorrow. Nevertheless, the article got under the skin of some people, particularly its depiction of academic study of Tolkien. Robin Anne Reid over at file770.com write a stirring response Praising or Burying Tolkien. In essence, she argues:

Le Guin isn’t wrong that a lot of critics and academics want to dismiss Tolkien: what leaves me frustrated by her comments is that she completely glosses over and ignores the forty or more years during which *some* academics and critics have been resisting that tendency.

and is frustrated by

Le Guin’s ongoing dismissal of “academics and critics”

Reid then goes on to illustrate both the paucity of academic study of Tolkien in the period after its publication until 1975, and how it has grown since. Compiling data from the Modern Languages International Bibliography, she find that

If I limit the search for publications on Tolkien’s work to only those publications appearing during the years 1950-1975 (the final date being chosen because it was 40 years ago) on Tolkien, I get:.

177 publications during those in 25 years.

I’ve read quite a few of them, and there are some interesting patterns to discuss, including the fact that the earliest academic anthologies on Tolkien’s work tended to try to “dismiss the fans,” and explain how Tolkien’s work was really GOOD despite its popularity, and to hope that the popularity diminished so “real” scholarship could be done..

So clearly those early academics’ hopes that popularity would diminish have failed miserably!.

A subject search on Tolkien criticism and scholarship from 1976-2015:.

2,242 results (these include periodical articles, peer-reviewed articles, anthology chapters, books by single authors, and dissertations in the United States at least)..

I’d say the last forty years shows a spirited attempt by scholars and critics in multiple disciplinary areas to *bring Tolkien into the canon of literary works.*.

By canon, I mean those works that are discussed by academics and critics, in a variety of cultural spaces, including peer-reviewed journals, and those works that are taught in schools.

I am not sure how much to make of these numbers. Yes, there have been many more works about Tolkien since 1975, but there has been an explosion of scholarship of all sorts, and a proliferation of publication outlets. Nonetheless, I am quite confident that Reid is correct that there has been growth in Tolkien scholarship above what we might have otherwise expected.

In sum, I don't think Reid really disagrees with Le Guin on anything of importance. Fantasy and genre fiction are still in a ghetto, but perhaps the walls of the ghetto are starting to crumble a little bit.