Archives for January 2013

The Leaden Rule

31 January 2013 by Tom Simon 12 Comments

#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…]

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: aesop, fantasy, g. k. chesterton, james branch cabell, philosophy, richard bach, terry goodkind, william blake, wisdom literature, writing

Campbell’s Cream of Fantasy

30 January 2013 by Tom Simon 9 Comments

#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…]

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: criticism, david eddings, diana wynne jones, dungeons & dragons, ed greenwood, fantasy, terry goodkind, ursula k. le guin, writing

A slight delay

29 January 2013 by Tom Simon 4 Comments

No progress tonight on either fiction or essais, as I had to take my mother to hospital and wait with her in the ER for several hours. If no further emergencies occur, I hope to resume work tomorrow.

EDIT, 08:07: The hospital called shortly after 5 a.m. to say that my mother was being discharged. She was, however, sound asleep when I arrived. By the time she was waked, dressed, and discharged, and I delivered her home and got home myself, the round trip had taken two hours at a time when my body had serious expectations of being asleep; and in blizzard conditions, too.

Fortunately, she is essentially all right. She had been extremely constipated for several weeks, and had reached the point of evacuating traces of blood — and nothing else. We feared a structural blockage, a tumour or intussusception, which could be extremely serious at her age (and in her generally frail condition). But there was no such condition, and they have helped her to get things moving again. I am not impressed, however, with the nursing staff at her assisted-living facility, for allowing her to get into such a state to begin with.

Filed Under: The Superversive Tagged With: personal

A song of gore and slaughter

28 January 2013 by Tom Simon 61 Comments

#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…]

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: criticism, fantasy, george orwell, george r. r. martin, harlan ellison, joe abercrombie, stephen r. donaldson, terry goodkind

Sock Puppet, son of Sock Puppet

27 January 2013 by Tom Simon 10 Comments

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…]

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: criticism, fantasy, jonathan swift, robert a. heinlein, science fiction, writing

Robert Muchamore’s 10-Minute Guide to Becoming a Literary Genius

26 January 2013 by Tom Simon Leave a Comment

Thanks to Barbara Morgenroth and The Passive Voice.

Filed Under: Resources Tagged With: robert muchamore, video, writing

All hats are grey in the dark

26 January 2013 by Tom Simon 24 Comments

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…]

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: criticism, david eddings, fantasy, mercedes lackey, writing

Font trouble

25 January 2013 by Tom Simon Leave a Comment

Upgraded today to WordPress 3.5.1. This broke the WebINK plugin, so my custom fonts no longer display correctly. (Oddly, they do appear on the site admin pages; just not on the site itself.)

I have issued a cry for help to the folks at WebINK, and may follow up with an APB on the WordPress forums. If anybody reading this has any ideas how to fix the plugin, please do let me know.

Meanwhile, I apologize to you all for the clumsiness of the default fonts. The design is still the same; only the typefaces have been changed to protect the innocent — or, in this case, the howlingly guilty.

Update, 18:10: My WebINK fonts display correctly in the default WP theme, and (for the most part) in the default theme for the Genesis framework. Genesis substitutes its own header fonts for mine; Prose substitutes header and body fonts.

More as events develop (or not).

Update, 18:13: Italics and bold type are displaying in Arno Pro, as they ought. Plain text is displaying in Palatino, as it definitely ought not. This bug has hidden depths.

Filed Under: The Superversive

Zeno’s mountains

25 January 2013 by Tom Simon 53 Comments

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…]