Act 1
I tend to binge read fantasy. Until age 16 I couldn’t get
enough of the stuff—from the gateway grub of David Eddings and Dragonlance to
higher-grade fare from LeGuin, Kurtz, Leiber and Zimmer Bradley. I read
countless Tolkein clones, until Tad Williams’ excellent Memory, Sorrow and
Thorn had the last word in that conversation. I even read six or seven Wheel of
Time books, ultimately concluding that it should have been a trilogy.
Then I discovered literary fiction.
I credit/blame a forward-thinking high school English
program for my conversion from fantasy. We read Raymond Carver and William
Faulker, Toni Morrison and Tim O’Brien. We even read
Jesus’ Son by Denis
Johnson—the one about heroin addicts. These books were beautiful, powerful and
unflinching, the kind of books that grab you by the shirt and say: “look around
you, this is the world you live in.” Fantasy seemed childish, trite and
unsophisticated in comparison.
My genre consumption shifted towards science fiction, which
seemed (as it often does) the more serious half of SFF. I dove into the
mind-altering depths of the New Wave, devouring the work of J. G. Ballard,
Thomas M. Disch, Samuel Delany and Philip K. Dick. Ursula LeGuin was a carryover, of course, though by now I'd graduated from Earthsea to Hainish. I returned to the classic science fiction I'd first discoverded as a child,
finding that some (e.g. The Stars My Destination) stood up to the test of time
while others (e.g. Foundation) did not. I continued to avoid fantasy like the
plague.
Enter Jemmy, now a fellow Nerd of a Feather but at the time
a friend and co-worker. At lunch we’d head off to one of the many bookstores in
walking distance from our office, gravitating to the science fiction and
fantasy aisles. Inevitably our conversation would turn to the tragic fact that
I’d never read anything by Octavia Butler or George R. R. Martin, and how this
needed to be corrected as soon as humanly possible. I bought copies of Parable
of the Talent/Sower and Lilith’s Brood, and loved them all. But I couldn’t bring myself to do the
same for A Game of Thrones--it was fantasy, after all.
Then one day, Jemmy up and bought me a copy, casually
informing me that I no longer had any excuse for not reading it. Still I hemmed;
I hawed; I resisted. Until one night I just sort of picked the damned thing
up—and never looked back.
 |
| Complete with cheesy 90s-style cover |
A Game of Thrones wasn’t a perfect book, but it was a gripping political thriller high
on intrigue and low on magic. I blasted through the even better sequels, A
Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords, eventually moving on to the not-good
fourth and fifth volumes. Again I concluded that an overlong fantasy series
should have been a trilogy, though it didn’t bother me much this time. The
bleak perspective resonated with many of the things I saw going in our world—a
feeling punctuated by the early 2000s zeitgeist of ethnic cleansing, terrorism
and “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
From there I moved on to the other luminaries of gritty
fantasy: Joe Abercrombie, Glen Cook, KJ Parker, Gene Wolfe. I ate the stuff up,
and reveled in the visceral thrills of fantasy that walked in the shadows and
probed the darkest recesses of the human soul.
Only, after a while, the gritty stuff started to get
repetitive too. Formulaic, even.
My frustrations with fantasy resurfaced. I’d already had it
with pig farmers fulfilling prophesies, “noble savage” elves and all the other
clichés and tropes of the neo-Tolkein canon. I make an exception for Andrzej
Sapkowski, because he, well, subverts everything. But exceptions—or more
accurately, the fact that they are
exceptions—can prove the rule, so to speak.
But now even gritty fantasy, once a refuge from
the neo-Tolkeinic morass, proved equally capable of being cheap, generic and
derivative. Worse, there appeared to be
an arms race of sorts in the works. I still wanted my fantasy to explore the darker recesses of the human experiences, but I wanted it to mean something. I
certainly didn’t want or need anyone to amp up the grit-
tay just to out-do the last guy. And I'd had it with offhand rapeyness and tortureporn serving no purpose
other than to announce the grimmmmmm darrrrrkess of a fantasy world.
I began to think about the things I wanted to see more of in
fantasy. First on the list was more fantasy that, like recent work by
Elizabeth Bear, NK Jemisin, Saladin Ahmed, Scott Lynch, Doug Hulick and Django Wexler, leaves
the crowded shores of pseudo-medieval Europe (or more accurately,
pseudo-medieval Britain and Ireland) for different spatial, cultural and
temporal planes. The world was a big place and history is full of rich veins of
inspiration. I didn't want anyone to be lame and appropriative, but I did want
more fantasy authors to discover the rest of the world, and to explore time
periods on either side of the Middle Ages.
I wanted novel geographies, topographies and physical environments.
I wanted
more experimentation with (or at least problematizing of) social relations. And I wanted authors to spend more time exploring consequences, intended
and unintended, of human action arising from relatable, understandable
motivations. The best fantasy already does at least some of these things, but
there’s still so much ground to cover.
I began to wish authors would go back to the actual medieval
and Renaissance periods in order to develop more sophisticated models of
religion. Religion in fantasy, after all, tends to come in two flavors: literal
and cynical. Gods are either actually walking the land and doing things (mostly
bad) or are totems every intelligent character understands to be superstition
and little else. But religion is often experienced as a lived reality: no gods
walking the earth, but life lived as if they might as well be. This idea was very
interesting to me—and another under-tapped vein that could be utilized to great effect.
I grew certain that new and better ideas could save fantasy.
I really wanted to love Glenda Larke’s new book, The
Lascar’s Dagger, because it hits on so many of these things. It draws
inspiration from the mercantilist period, when the Dutch and British East India
Companies competed for spices and slowly committed resources to colonial
ventures they couldn’t afford (which enticed the Dutch and British governments
to intervene and outright conquer much of Asia, the beginning of a much more
expansive and destructive phase of international colonialism).
It features a novel, polar geography, where the overland
route to the Va-Cherished lands (i.e. alt-Christendom) pass through the North Pole.
Trade is dominated by the Pashali, who have mastodons, but the enterprising
merchants of Lowmeer would like very much to cut out the middle man. Discovery
of the sea-route to the Spicerie (i.e. the alt-Malay Archipelago) also uncovers
magical riches to be exploited. Larke thus invites us to consider the history
of colonialism as it might have played out if magic had been involved—a
fascinating idea that she makes good use of throughout the book.
On a personal level, I absolutely love that Larke develops
characters based on the Malay world (an area near and dear to my heart) and
does so in a generally classy and respectful way. Oh, and did I mention that religion
is embedded into the very fabric of everyday life—even for the educated elites?
Yes, The Lascar’s Dagger is certainly full of good ideas.
Yet as sophisticated as the book can be on an ideals level,
it is let down by the kind of cardboard characterization outsiders, with some
justification, associate with the fantasy genre. There is never any doubt who
is good and who is “evil.” There is never any internal conflict, really, even
when we are told there is. Everyone simply does the right thing, or the wrong
thing, because they are the type of person who does the right thing or the
wrong thing.
And for a novel written by a woman whose characters
explicitly question the patriarchy of their social environments, the female
characters are surprisingly unlikable—from the narcissistic and shallow
Princess Mathilda to the always-grumpy Sorrel Redwing and annoyingly coy Pontifect. This struck me as odd.
Act 3
Reading The Lascar’s Dagger reminded me of a conversation
script that most science fiction fans have witnessed or been a part of at some
point in their lives. You know the one:
Science fiction
aficionado gets into conversation with nose-thumbing type. Nose-thumbing type
thumbs nose at science fiction, at which point science fiction aficionado
convinces nose-thumbing type to read a cherished classic. Nose-thumbing type
comes back to science fiction aficionado and says: “I’m sorry, but I just
couldn’t get past the stilted dialogue, poor characterization and so forth.”
Science fiction aficionado then pleads with nose-thumbing type—“yes, but it’s
the ideas that make this book special.”
This is a common approach to genre—that bad writing is
tolerable as long as the concepts are good. And most people just accept it--not only fans and readers, but authors and critics as well. Too often, when we discuss, debate and argue a book's merits, we fixate on the conceptual matter. Did it say something meaningful? Did it try something new? Did it meet or fail to meet a bar of acceptability as far as philosophy and social vision go?
These are important questions--important to me as well as to others. But fixating on ideas can overshadow equally important questions on fundamentals. Ideas, simply put, are just not enough—no matter how thought provoking they are. And by defining SF/F as "ideas fiction," we conspire to keep it in its literary ghetto. Really good SF/F, and by "good" I mean something of cultural impact and lasting value, is not born of vision alone,
but through the execution of that vision.
In the end, this is what makes T
he Lascar’s Dagger so frustrating to me. I wanted to love this book—I still want to love
this book, and in some respects I do love this book. After all, the ideas
really are really, really good. Unfortunately, the fundamentals aren't.
Look, not all authors are Pynchon and not every book needs to be
Gravity's Rainbow. But as much as we, the consumers, could have asked for more, someone on the production side could have recognized
the seed of a great novel in this passable one, and nurtured it so it could
flower into the thing it clearly wants to be. Justin Landon has
recently called attention to this as a general problem facing genre publishing—and the
experience of
The Lascar’s Dagger really put that into perspective. There are a
lot of writers out there with one half of the equation down pat, but who need
more and better guidance to unlock their full potential. This is what traditional publishing is supposed to bring to the table.
Why isn't this happening? Like most problems in a capitalist economy, it boils down to issues of supply and demand. The business model of traditional publishing, you could say, is like diamond mining: you extract as much carbon as you can and hope you get enough diamonds in the process to make the venture worthwhile. Cash-strapped publishers just aren't
going to invest the time and money raising the diamonds to carbon ratio unless they feel it's either: a)
necessary to their survival; or b) a conduit to greater revenue and
profitability. Because the crisis in publishing is long-term, incentives to boost revenue by bringing more quantity to market faster wins out over incentives to raise quality--a slower process with less-certain results.
Now, you may ask yourself why I'm being so negative. Here's why: I have dedicated a lot of time and emotional commitment
to fantasy, science fiction and traditional publishing. I believe in
fantasy and science fiction, just as I believe in traditional
publishing. It is my firmly-held opinion that traditional publishing is, and will remain, the most
consistent and efficient route to quality product. I've come to know
good, hardworking people at Orbit, Tor/Forge, Solaris, Jo Fletcher and
the rest of the specialty imprints. I think they are awesome and do
awesome things. And I've read a lot of really high-quality books they've
brought to market.
But this isn't the '90s anymore, and even if the crisis is long-term, it's very real. If traditional genre publishers are going to hold position and even grow in this
era of crowdfunding, self-publishing and the return of the small press, they
will need to assert their role as developers of talent--mentors and coaches who
can consistently turn promising into good, and good into great. They will need to take potentially diamondiferous material like The Lascar's Dagger and turn them into brilliant gemstones. This is how traditional genre publishing will survive, and even prosper, in the new literary economy. That's good for everyone.
Batman Eternal #3 - As I said last week, I am glad that this series is coming out each week. Things aren't looking up for Gotham (are they really ever?) as Falcone wastes no time usurping power and establishing his order. Corruption seems to breed in Gotham and this tale is no different. Once again the police force is targeting Batman while he is trying to prevent a civil war amongst the villains at large. Throw in a new origin story for the New 52 and we have quite the exciting book.
[Orbit, 2014].
[2014, Angry Robot]
