The Leaden Rule

#11 in the series, following ‘Campbell’s Cream of Fantasy’. This is the last piece in the series as originally written; an earlier version appeared on LiveJournal in June, 2006.


The process that replaces winged Pegasus with plodding Dobbin, and Tolkien’s ‘Soup’ of myth and legend with ‘Campbell’s Cream of Fantasy’, does not stop with debasing settings and motifs. It debases themes as well. The old folktales, among many other things, were wisdom literature, a thing that does not exist in any thoroughly modern society. We have a number of authors nowadays who want to create a substitute for wisdom literature; what they actually do is write books with titles like ‘The Rules of X’ or ‘Chicken Soup for the Y’. Not having much in the way of wisdom themselves, they substitute pop psychology and bumper-sticker slogans.

This is bad enough in the modern world; it is doubly bad in fantasy, for it is false to the whole atmosphere of Faërie. [Read more…]

Campbell’s Cream of Fantasy

#10 in a series, following ‘A song of gore and slaughter’. An earlier version appeared on LiveJournal in June, 2006.


By its nature, fantasy is supposed to be the literature of the unbridled imagination; all too often, the imagination is not only bridled, but blinkered and hobbled and confined to its stall in the barn. It is fairly usual for critics to call this process ‘commercialization’; which is very odd, because the most commercially successful fantasies of all time have not been tamed or broken in this way. Rather, the breaking of fantasy is a consequence of its commercialization. Winged Pegasus will bear you with joy to the remotest reaches of Elfland, but he does not always come when you whistle for him. Poor old Dobbin, bridled, blinkered, hobbled, stabled, and without so much as a wish for wings of his own, can only take you for a weary plod round the paddock, but he is always at home and always pathetically grateful to be taken out for a ride. Pegasus is a rare beast, born of inspiration; Dobbins can be mass-produced.

Publishers will gladly commercialize a Tolkien, a Howard, or a Rowling if they can get one; if not, they will settle for anything that looks like fantasy, that exploits some of the same tropes and offers to scratch the same itch. The shop must remain open for business, come what may; and if the shelves are stocked with shoddy goods, that is better than no goods at all. [Read more…]

A song of gore and slaughter

#9 in a series, following ‘Sock Puppet, son of Sock Puppet’. An earlier version appeared on LiveJournal in May, 2006.


Prigs, by and large, are euphemists. Although it was Heinlein who invented (or at least publicized) the term speculative fiction, it was the prigs of the field who fastened upon it as their preferred substitute for the indecently descriptive name science fiction. Thirty or forty years later, the prigs of another field, shrinking from the straightforwardness of the word horror, cast about for a suitably pretty substitute and came up with dark fantasy.

Millions of ordinary readers like stories about science, or stories about things that frighten them; they seek them out. To a prig, this will not do; and so he must demonstrate his superiority to the rabble (as Ted Nelson put it) by calling a spade a muscle-powered terrain disequilibration system. Both terms, thankfully, have gone rather out of fashion since their first vogue. ‘Speculative fiction’ was simply too ugly for anyone but a prig to use, and in any case it clashed violently with the older and more useful term ‘writing on speculation’, or ‘on spec’, meaning the nearly universal practice of writing a story before it is sold.

‘Dark fantasy’ was eclipsed for a less encouraging reason: the adjective no longer draws a distinction.  [Read more…]

Sock Puppet, son of Sock Puppet

The eighth essai in a series, following ‘All hats are grey in the dark’. A slightly different version appeared on LiveJournal in May, 2006.


 

Besides the villainous hero, there are several other ways to make a protagonist so unheroic that you rob him of his power to carry the plot. A frequent flaw is the so-called hero who has no character of his own, but exists as a mouth through which the author can make polemical speeches. John Galt’s 70-page speech in Atlas Shrugged is the most infamous example, but sadly, far from unique. The hero as mouthpiece is a recurring phenomenon in science fiction and fantasy; and this sad phenomenon goes back to the very point at which the earlier forms of satire and romance first contributed their genes to that newfangled form, the novel.

We can find that point in the works of Jonathan Swift. [Read more…]

All hats are grey in the dark

The seventh essai in a series, following ‘Zeno’s mountains’. It first appeared in a slightly different form on LiveJournal in May, 2006.


 

So far in this series, I have dealt chiefly with points of style and technique. Now I propose to change tack and take up some points of subject matter. And first, because Sherwood Smith was good enough to remind me of it, I shall deal first with a very common fault that is all but guaranteed to knock me right out of a book: the villainous hero.

Now, I have no trouble with flawed heroes; I expect them, and rejoice to see them overcome their flaws, or find ways to succeed in spite of them. I can even find much to admire in anti-heroes. And I have patience with ironic protagonists, the Yossarians and Babbitts and Humbert Humberts, who are never represented as heroic in any way, and whose authors are well content to portray them as the schnooks, schnorrers, and schlemiels that they are. (How did we ever insult one another before Yiddish came along?) What offends me violently is when a character is represented as a Good and Upright and Virtuous Hero, when almost his every act betrays him as a villain of the most heinous kind. [Read more…]

Zeno’s mountains

A new essai to follow ‘Death carries a camcorder’. The meme that gave rise to my original LiveJournal pieces asked for ‘ten things I hate in a book’; but being under no obligation to stick to the original terms, I add to the list ad libitum.


According to local legend, one of the first tourists to visit Calgary (then a Northwest Mounted Police fort with a few civilian outbuildings) was an Englishman of energetic habits but not, it seems, with any wide experience of the world. One morning, having rested from the rigours of his journey, he decided to take his morning constitutional by walking to the Rocky Mountains and back.

In those days you could see the mountains easily from the N.W.M.P. fort, small but sharp and clear on the western horizon. In England, of course, nothing looks sharp and clear more than a few miles away. In that mild and humid air, every distant object is more or less obscured and coloured by haze: minor English poets can always eke out their verses with facile rubbish about ‘blue remembered hills’. In the dry cold highlands of Alberta, there is no such haze; objects on the horizon, on a sunny day, are very nearly as clear as those immediately at hand. But our English tourist knew nothing of this, and set out with the idea of visiting the mountains and getting back to the fort in time for breakfast.

Five or six miles out, the Englishman, who must already have been rather footsore and perplexed, clambered up the long ridge that would later be called Signal Hill. Cresting the ridge, he would have been appalled to discover a wide plain sloping gently down for several miles before him. Beyond that rose the first tumbled range of the true foothills, towards which, disappointed but not daunted, he plodded on. Behind that range is the Kananaskis valley, and then the last range of foothills before the beginning of the actual mountains — some fifty miles west of Fort Calgary as the crow flies.

Several days later, a searching party found the Englishman and brought him back to the fort to recuperate.

Something rather similar happens to writers who visit Elfland; even today, when the map of that country has been scribbled over with marked trails and motorways, the lesson of distance is one that every traveller must discover for himself. [Read more…]

Death carries a camcorder

The fifth essai in a series, following ‘Teaching Pegasus to crawl’. The original appeared on LiveJournal in May, 2006.


 

Fiction is, among many other things, a game between writer and reader, a kind of mental strip-tease in which the writer slowly reveals the details of the story, and the reader tries to guess at their significance. Mystery stories exhibit the game in its purest form, of course; but the element of guessing ‘whodunit’ turns up in every kind of fiction.

As stories have grown more complex, and the telling more elliptical and compressed, guessing out the storyteller’s meaning has become a difficult and demanding skill. Usually we don’t think of it in those terms, because as readers, we began to develop that skill early in childhood; it was fun to do, and after all, children can take delight in the most fiendishly elaborate games. Generally speaking, we don’t notice the skill involved until it stops working — that is, until the writer breaks the rules of the game. [Read more…]

The rhetoric of Middle-earth

This essay is included in my collection, Writing Down the Dragon. It has previously appeared on LiveJournal.


 

Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story — the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths — which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country.

The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, no. 131 (to Milton Waldman)

The business of finding and resolving cruxes, of course, is not the only trick in the philologist’s bag, or the only one that Tolkien brought to his imaginative writing. A philologist, in the nature of things, must have a keen nose for style, for the sounds and usages of words. A genuine document is always rooted in the dialect of a particular time and place, modified by the author’s choice of words, rhythms, and turns of phrase. [Read more…]

Teaching Pegasus to crawl

The fourth essai in a series, following ‘Tyrion 13:4’. The original appeared on LiveJournal in May, 2006.


 

As I said earlier, the choice of an appropriate prose style for a fantasy tale is a decision fraught with peril. We are tempted to choose a style that will convey the proper sense of wonder and adventure, and the air of old times and alien cultures; or would, if we only had the skill to pull it off. If we lack that skill, our stories will sound rather like an untrained singer trying to do the lead in Rigoletto — ambitious, but inept. And this will get us laughed at.

It is safe to say that none of us enjoy being laughed at. So for perhaps forty years past, there has been a reaction in the opposite direction; and I am afraid that is an even worse error. The sensible reaction would be to learn how to produce the effects that we wanted; the real reaction, for far too many writers, has been simply to give up trying and settle for a bland quotidian style. Their stories are inept without being ambitious. And this is worse, for unless they are very lucky, it gets them ignored and forgotten. They may truly be hearing the horns of Elfland in their heads; but they cannot play that music. What they do play is a tuneless mishmash compounded of slovenly description, spin-doctoring, and rhetorical fog. [Read more…]

Tyrion 13:4

The third part of the series, following ‘Quakers in Spain’ and ‘Gwladys and the Ghraem’lan’. As with those two, an earlier and shorter version appeared on LiveJournal in May, 2006.


 

Most readers like formed stories; I have this taste to an unusual degree. I have never lost, or as the sophisticates would call it, ‘outgrown’ the taste for a well-turned plot that I drank in — not with my mother’s milk, for I was raised on cheap commercial substitutes — but at any rate with the oldest stratum of my father’s teaching, with the earliest books (after Dr. Seuss) that he gave me to read. A child is not subtle; a child likes stories to be marked by clear signposts, and would rather have five spoilers than one ambiguity.

Partly this is because a child has not formed a pattern of expectations about stories. Grown people dislike spoilers, I suspect, largely because they have read (or watched) so much fiction that they generally know what to expect: a real surprise, to them, is a rare and precious thing, and if you deprive them of one, you do them a real injury. Every turn in a story is a surprise to a child, and the suspense can become too hard to bear. It was a master-stroke when William Goldman, in the film version of The Princess Bride, had the grandfather interrupt his telling of the tale to reassure his grandson that Buttercup ‘does not get eaten by eels at this time’. To an experienced reader, any peril that threatens to kill off the heroine a third of the way through the book is an obvious bluff. A very young reader has to find out the hard way.

Nowadays, even the average six-year-old has imbibed enough stories, chiefly through the medium of television, to be wise to the obvious tricks; in sad consequence, even a six-year-old may be angry at spoilers. But there are less naked ways to signal the phases of a story, ways that can be made subtle enough (and misleading enough) to please the palate even of a very old and sophisticated reader. One of the best devices for this purpose is the chapter break, with or without a title. [Read more…]