If you're a bit-player, I'm a walk-on. I was looking at the Forbes list of wealthiest people in the world, and was startled at how many of the I know personally:

#1 - Bill Gates, #12 Lawrence Ellison, #18 Michael Dell, #19 Steven Ballmer, #262 Steven Jobs, #277 Patrick McGovern, #552 Sergey Brin.

When I say I met them, what I mean, in every case but one, is that I interviewed them. Not like they'd remember me, or anything.

The one exception is Patrick McGovern. I worked for his company, IDG, for two years. Every December, he flew around the world to his company locations and delivered Christmas bonus checks in person. He'd call each employee by name, shake each one's hand, compliment them on some piece of work they'd done recently. It was pretty damn gracious, I thought.

I've been thinking about my politics recently. I'm as anti-big-multinational corporation as a good liberal should be - and yet I have worked for big multinationals for much of my career, and been extremely well treated by them. That doesn't make me a hypocrite though - it makes me say, if my company can do that well for me, why can't all companies do that well for everyone?

Oh, dear, I've hijacked the thread. I also seem to have become Jonathan Vos Post.

Patrick, is the comparison to Harry Potter superficial, or is there a genuine similarity in style between Clarke and Rowling? From the NYT article, it sounds like Clarke is more "literary," but that could be marketing. I haven't read the Starlights yet. (Those who have might add their two cents, if they like.)

The only real similarity between Clarke and Rowling is that Rowling appeals to a zillion people who don't normally read genre fantasy, and Clarke's publishers believe and hope that the same will be true of Clarke.

It could happen. I've heard a fair bit of enthusiasm about Jonathan Strange from people who don't normally care for the genre. Answer hazy, ask again later.

Answer hazy, ask again later. [Outlook good. You may rely on it.]

At 800 pages, perhaps much later, although I bet you read fast. My next question was going to have to do with creeping Anne Rice-ism (I heard she fired her editor), but I'll wait on an answer for that one too. Thanks.

Goodness--I am there, too, a mere mention, nameless. It's a book I have been thinking about purchasing. I did like her three stories in Starlight. (And I TRIED to be in all three myself, but alas, the editor dug in his heels and bounced me out of number 2.)

Jane (the lady with 170 books as mentioned in the article. Though it is now well over 250.)

Good grief that article was puffy. If I hadn't read and enjoyed her in Starlight 1, I'd have been put off trying her.

Jane-- 250 books (!!) Zowie. You must write with both hands.

(Which would be interesting, come to think of it. Would the right hand draft mathematical treatises, and the left spoof Plum Sykes? I have an aunt who can write backward with her left hand-- perfect mirror writing. Blake warned us about folk like her.)

I think your name runs afoul of the NYT house style.

Well now. Would they refer to their own arts correspondent Lawrence Van Gelder as "Gelder"?

[suppresses comment about the common -er form use of Lawrence Van Gelder's last name-segment wrt how artists might feel if he criticized them harshly, more because he couldn't make it work than because it was in such Very Poor Taste]

They could have a rule with a specific exception for those types of names, Patrick. Remember, this is the paper that put the word 'gay' in quotes when it referred to homosexuality until the 90s IIRC; didn't they also refer to Meat Loaf as Mr. Loaf?

In other words, "But that would be stupid" isn't much of a counterargument when it comes to NYT house style rules.

Fran, this is not a good place to spread the word about your free Ipod.

No, I'm not clicking through to your links.

The description of the book sounds more like Chrestomanci than Potter.

This article is yet another piece of heartening evidence that great swathes of the literary establishment are taking sf and fantasy seriously. I observed the same thing in another, recent Times article, comparing Asimov's robot stories and novels with the movie "I, Robot." Neither article gave any hint that sf/fantasy was somehow an unseemly activity for an adult to be engaged in.

Ironic that edgy Salon Magazine doesn't seem get this, while the the stodgy old Times is help to this fact, as is the stuffy New York Review of Books, which recently ran a Michael Chabon article analyzing high fantasy. You may have heard of Michael Chabon; he's written fantasy, and for comic books, spoke at ComicCon a couple of weeks ago, and, oh yeah, won a Pulitzer.

I was so engrossed by the review I was nearly late for the meeting I was supposed to run at Mythcon. I want passionately to read this book. Want want want.

MKK

Patrick wrote:

The only real similarity between Clarke and Rowling is that Rowling appeals to a zillion people who don't normally read genre fantasy, and Clarke's publishers believe and hope that the same will be true of Clarke.

To which I have two major objections:

1. The Harry Potter series is not fantasy (and if it was, it most certainly wouldn't be genre fantasy, which tends to be of a Tolkienist persuasion). The books are boarding school novels cum bildungsromans cum mysteries, set against a fantasy backdrop. With the help of the most elementary search and replace function, one could set the books in space, with Harry discovering that he is an alien, and tell exactly the same story. Whatever X-factor it is that's made the series such a crossover success, it isn't the fantasy setting.

2. Because of the important role that marketing and PR have played in the later phases of the Harry Potter juggernaut, it's easy to forget that the series started out as that elusive, inexplainable artifact - a genuine grassroots phenomenon, fed by word of mouth. If I understand your meaning, Patrick, Clarke's publishers are trying to artificially induce what in Rowling's case was a natural event. Perhaps I'm being paranoid, but that sounds to me like a recipe for backlash before the book is even published. There's something almost crass about the way Bloomsbury announces that the book is 'backed by a huge marketing and publicity campaign', that the foreign language rights have been sold to 19 countries, or their decision to publish 250,000 hardcover copies.

I'm actually quite intrigued by what I've heard about Strange & Norrell, and I look forward to reading it, but I think articles like this are a disservice to both Rowling and Clarke. If nothing else, the comparison to the Potter books served to deeply confuse this potential reader as to the novel's target audience.

Abigail, Patrick never said Potter was genre fantasy. He said it appeals to people who don't normally read genre fantasy (which AFAICT doesn't take a position on whether it "really" is genre fantasy or not). Possibly part of that appeal is that it ISN'T the Tolkein-light stuff that's all over, or sword-and-sorcery. (I suspect that in publishing terms it may still count as genre fantasy, but I'm no expert and cannot say.)

And while it may be true that Bloomsbury is trying to artificially induce a natural phenomenon, Patrick didn't say that, either. He said they were hoping it would appeal to those same people. (I doubt my 12-year-old friends will read it, but a lot of adults read Potter.)

And of course they're trying to market it as effectively as possible. You don't publish something on the sense that "gee, maybe there'll be an unexpected completely natural grass roots phenomenon that will catapult this onto the best-seller list; let's hope so, huh?"

With all due respect, I think this is wrongheaded. Publishers make a point of emphasizing their marketing campaigns, foreign rights sales, and high announced print runs because, frequently enough, it works. It convinces booksellers to take more copies and get them out in front of actual customers. Call it "crass" all you like, but publishers don't do it because they're crazy or vulgar, they do it because it's relatively effective.

Grass-roots success is a fine thing, and to the extent that Harry Potter's popularity started out that way, I'm pretty sure Bloomsbury know it, since they're Potter's UK publishers.

As to whether the Harry Potter books are "really" fantasy, and whether genre fantasy is "Tolkienian," I suspect we're just not on the same page. I certainly don't think you could quite so easily transform the Potter books into some other genre and come up with something that felt the same way to read. Then again, I've never had much patience for fastidiously formalist definitions of any genre. Genres aren't engineering specs, they're collections of effects.

(Xopher slipped in while I was posting. And a big shout-out to "Tolkein", a writer from the same continuum as "Delaney" and "Azimov"...)

(I will add that lots of stuff gets published as genre fantasy that isn't any more Tolkienish than Susanna Clarke's book. I mean, come on.)

AAARRRRGGGH!!! [beats self over the head with leatherbound copy of The Silmarillion]

WHY can't I spell that man's name right?!?!? Not like I haven't spent cumulative years of my life looking at pages with his name on them! My brain just refuses to accept the fact that the obvious spelling is right...I type it correctly, and it looks wrong, so I change it--wrong.

I usually catch myself before posting with 'Neilsen Hayden' in there (I said usually). Damn high-school German. Bless Preview.

Publishers make a point of emphasizing their marketing campaigns, foreign rights sales, and high announced print runs because, frequently enough, it works. It convinces booksellers to take more copies and get them out in front of actual customers.

Do publishers this frequently make so much out of an 800 page, footnote-laden fantasy by an unknown author?

But I take your point, and I didn't mean to suggest that publishers should hide their marketing efforts, or that the publishing business should be held to some higher standard. The reality of the situation might not be crass, but it is the reaction I'm having, as I flash back on several books in recent years that have been marketed first as a product and second as a book. Mostly I'm thinking of The Da Vinci Code. A poorly written, badly researched, unexciting thriller that nevertheless shot to the top of the charts, with the help of a $1M marketing campaign (and a relatively controversial subject). Maybe this is just me being contrary, but when I heard the details of S&N's launch, I immediately connected it with a low-quality, high-yield bestseller (yes, I do recognize that the latter doesn't always imply the former, but I paid money for Da Vinci. I'm scarred.) Not to mention that these marketing campaigns remind me of nothing so much as your standard Hollywood summer action movie ad campaign, which tries to sell each effects-laden film as an 'event' which shouldn't be missed. Somewhere in the shuffle, I think, a deserving book might get buried.

And I'm also worried for Clarke. If S&N is anything less than the biggest genre seller of the year, her career is probably over. Wasn't it right next door that, only a few months ago, commenters were shaking their heads over Jane Austen Doe's willingness to accept a $100,000+ advance on her first book?

Sorry, I forgot to add this:

When I wrote "Bloomsbury announces that the book is 'backed by a huge marketing and publicity campaign', that the foreign language rights have been sold to 19 countries, or their decision to publish 250,000 hardcover copies", I neglected to mention that I only learned the last of those facts from the NYT article. The first two I read on the book's official website, and the first I learned in what looks like a one-page ad available to download from that site. The ad also includes a description of the book's plot - below the line about a huge marketing campaign, which is in letters just a little bit smaller than the title. The text of the plot description, meanwhile, is so small that I could barely make it out on my computer screen.

It's possible that this ad is intended for bookstore buyers. In that case, why is it on the website, which is geared towards potential readers? If the ad is intended for readers, then it seems to be telling them that they ought to buy the book because a lot of other people are going to buy it.

Which is where we get to crass. Instead of telling people 'this book is good, so a lot of people are going to buy it', Bloomsbury seems to be saying 'a lot of people are going to buy this book, so it must be good'.

Since I once wrote a book listing what I considered to be the thematic sub-genres of fantasy, and spent a lot of time defining "fantasy" as well, I have to sound off: sure, the Potters are bildungsromans and mysteries and school stories ... but they're fantasy because magic works in them. Period. The fact that they aren't Tolkien ripoffs is not diagnostic. (And an aside: J.K. Rowling's work does have a resemblance to Tolkien's in one respect: the names. Albus Dumbledore could easily be Bilbo Baggins' next-door-neighbor. She really has the touch).

Regarding Dearly Beloved in the sidebar, it would probably work at least as well as the spam it emulates.

I for one intend to read Clarke's book as soon as I can find time to read an 800-page novel. I was tremendously impressed with her stories in Starlight. At long, long last, a post-Tolkien historically-based fantasy writer who actually has a feel for the historical periods she's writing about. A corrective for the mind addled from reading Lisa Goldstein and Freedom & Necessity.

Xopher: if, as your post seems to imply, you are a veteran of high-school German, then why do you have trouble with Tolkien's name, which is German in origin? I'd have thought graduates of high-school German would know that what's pronounced keen would be spelled "kien" rather than "kein" - or don't you pronounce it that way? I've never heard anyone SAY tol-kine unless they were sarcastically reproducing the misspelling, but maybe I've missed something. After all, Fritz Leiber, which should be pronounced lye-ber, got so wearied of people saying lee-ber that he gave up correcting them.

Patrick: when visiting that alternate continuum, don't forget Frederick Pohl. And L. Sprague de Camp alphabetized by surname under S, which I swear I have seen on bookstore shelves more than once.

The last heavily-hyped big fantasy novel by an unknown (to me) author I bought was Perdido Street Station, although that was Miéville's second novel, not his first (King Rat).

A desultory google doesn't show much surviving hype, but I seem to remember reading at the time of Miéville getting a huge advance and of big print runs in hardback.

Good book, too.

Oh, and Miéville is quite venomous on the subject of Tolkien and the effect his popularity has had on the genre. Abigails comment above: The Harry Potter series is not fantasy (and if it was, it most certainly wouldn't be genre fantasy, which tends to be of a Tolkienist persuasion) is the kind of thing which would make China's head explode.

Because I'm wrong, or because I'm right?

I don't think Tolkienist fantasy is the only way to go - Miéville is a great example of fantasy that isn't merely a shadow of Tolkien, but there's also Peake, Crowley, Gaiman, Pratchett and many others. However, the books most readers think of when they think of the genre are the endless series of Tolkien impersonations, with dragons and scantily-clad women on the cover. As much as I love Tolkien, his influence on the genre is regrettable - he's taught several generations of readers (and writers) that fantasy means something like The Lord of the Rings. In my original comment, I was pointing out that the fantasy elements in Harry Potter aren't the ones you'd expect to find in genre fantasy (or possibly, they are the same elements, but their treatment is very different).

That's interesting about Perdido Street Station. I had no idea there had been so much hype surrounding it. I read it based on recommendations by others, and because I liked King Rat. I wouldn't say that the hype hasn't survived though. We can hardly expect the publishing house to keep pushing the book four years after it came out (they might want to focus on Miéville's newer novels, for one thing) but PSS has become a modern classic of the genre.

Calimac, have you read Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates? It's a great, intelligent fantasy that takes place in early 19th century England.

Wait a minute, which Tolkien books have "scantily clad women" on their covers? I missed those.

I'm also confused about how Harry Potter is "not fantasy," or at any rate not "genre fantasy, which tends to be of a Tolkienist persuasion", and yet Perdido Street Station "has become a modern classic of the genre."

I don't mean to pick on you, but honestly, either "genre fantasy" is a rubric that excludes Harry Potter, Perdido Street Station, and other books that don't fit a narrow "Tolkienist" mold, or (just possibly) it's a category wide-ranging enough to accommodate Perdido Street Station, Harry Potter, Tanith Lee, Neil Gaiman, Ellen Kushner, Robert Holdstock, Gene Wolfe, and bunches of other not terribly "Tolkienist" authors.

I might also go on to observe that either publishers are wicked because they never devote promotional efforts to unknown authors, or they're wicked because they do promote unknown authors thus subjecting those authors to the dreadful risk of being perceived as "overhyped." Bottom line: publishers, wicked, no good can come of it. Best to stay home and watch TV.

Calimac - If Tolkien (hah!) were a German, his pronunciation of his name would indeed clinch the spelling for me. But he was English, and the English AFAICT pronounce two languages correctly: English and French. Sarajevo was sarah-JAY-vough on the BBC; Nicaragua was nick-a-RAG-you-uh. (I personally try to say JAG-you-are for the car, since it really is English, while pronouncing the animal more or less correctly, though not with the correct accent - which should be Nahuatl, not Spanish, and I don't even know what that sounds like, to be honest.)

That said, I'm not sure why. There are lots of "ee" pronunciations that are spelled 'ei' in the Anglophone world. Half of the Schroeders in America are shRAIDers and the other half are shROADers. Maybe my brain just says "German name with English mispronunciation" and "corrects" to the wrong spelling.

But in any case, very few people IME, and in America, say TOLL-keen. They say TOLL-kin, which gives no help at all.

Patrick, I think I've confused both of us in my interpretation of the term 'genre fantasy' as opposed to 'the fantasy genre'. When you spoke of Harry Potter appealing to readers who didn't read genre fantasy, I connected the term to Robert Jordan, Terry Brooks and their ilk. The Harry Potter books, however they might be classified genre-wise, do not treat their fantasy trappings in the same way that these books do, which is why I objected to classifying them as genre fantasy. I see that you might have meant that the books appeal to people who don't read books in the fantasy genre. Either way, I still feel that the fantasy elements in Harry Potter have at best a tertiary importance to the plot - my objection to categorizing them as 'genre fantasy' was only an aside - and that while they could be classified as fantasy novels, it isn't that quality about them that appeals to so many readers.

I might also go on to observe that either publishers are wicked because they never devote promotional efforts to unknown authors, or they're wicked because they do promote unknown authors thus subjecting those authors to the dreadful risk of being perceived as "overhyped."

Clarke's publishers aren't just promoting her. They're selling her as the next J.K. Rowling. And you haven't addressed my point about the difference between promoting a novel - to the reading public - on the basis of its merits and promoting it on the basis of the amount of money its publishers are willing to throw at it. Neither one makes Clarke's publishers wicked (although it wasn't me who complained about publishers not getting behind their books) but the latter makes me uncomfortable.

As for Tolkien's covers, The Lord of the Rings has had some wild covers in its day - I wouldn't be surprised if some of them did feature half-clad women!

"And you haven't addressed my point about the difference between promoting a novel--to the reading public--on the basis of its merits and promoting it on the basis of the amount of money its publishers are willing to throw at it."

I thought I did address this. Perhaps I didn't underscore the fact that a trade book publisher's customers are booksellers, not (at least in a direct sense) "the reading public." I can assure you that those customers, those booksellers, are extremely interested in knowing what kind of resources the publisher plans to "throw at" a book.

Look, I know very well the moral hazards and drawbacks of the system as it exists. I'm trying to get across that it exists for reasons, not because it never occurred to anyone in publishing and bookselling that there might be problems and downsides to these methods and techniques. I also think that when we, as readers, are trying to discern what might be worth our attention, we do ourselves no favors by indulging in indie-rock-hipster habits like deciding that anything that's being heavily promoted must a priori be no good.

Maybe the difference is that I tend to assume people are as likely as not trying to do good work with the resources at hand, within the system in which they're stuck. Call me kooky.

Abigail, your assertion that Potter "most certainly" can't be genre fantasy because it is not Tolkienesque would make China's head explode because it is a complete surrender of the genre to the tide of derivitave crap.

To paraphrase Amis:

"It's all Tolkien!"
They tell us with great scorn.
Bott's Jelly Beans?
Well then, it isn't "genre"!

Maybe the difference is that I tend to assume people are as likely as not trying to do good work with the resources at hand, within the system in which they're stuck. Call me kooky.

Patrick, you're kooky. As am I. More kooky people!

Seriously, this is the flip side of what I've been pointing out to people for years, which is that people will game any system you put them in. It's an argument for making the system carefully designed so that it accomplishes ITS goal when the system-gamers accomplish theirs.

I was thinking of people who game the system to their own selfish advantage. What I forgot to think about until I read your "kooky" statement above is that others will game the system for the general good. I'm ashamed to admit I needed reminding of that.

Abigail: Ah yes, The Anubis Gates. Yes, Powers did grasp the period well. But that book was over 20 years ago now (I haven't read any subsequent historically-set books by Powers), and I'm still reeling from the sheer incompetence of the highly-praised work of intervening years by other authors, such as what I mentioned above. IIRC, Freedom & Necessity was dedicated to TNH as "the ideal reader of this book." I'll say. The TNH who eviscerated American Psycho would have sliced & diced Freedom & Necessity.

Xopher: Ah, I see. Rather the way I keep in mind that the dromedary has only one hump by remembering that Ogden Nash was wrong: it is the other way around.

Calimac: quite. Or to summarize my verbose post on the topic: "I get confooooooozed!"

"I might also go on to observe that either publishers are wicked because they never devote promotional efforts to unknown authors, or they're wicked because they do promote unknown authors thus subjecting those authors to the dreadful risk of being perceived as "overhyped." Bottom line: publishers, wicked, no good can come of it. Best to stay home and watch TV."

Patrick,

There exist several items wrong with publishing today, but your comments are of the straw man sort. Publishing could be considered akin to Hollywood, but with more transparent accounting. The reliable big sellers (King, et alii) help pave the way (grease the skids) for the unknowns, the gambles. But it is the gambles that have the greatest leverage... In addition, I would suggest that publishers have (too easily) forgotten who comprise their true customer. Hint: it is not the Ingrams of the world, nor is it Amazon, B&N, or Borders. (BTW, my goal is not to bust your chops; I think you do a damned fine job -- the little I know and understand of your position. And I admit I am not involved in publishing.)

I enjoy attending the Con panels at which publishers showcase their wares. Although they are, without fail, bullish on every (forthcoming) title, this effort creates excitement, at least for me. I disagree that Clarke's writing career could be stillborn should this novel fail; there are many ways she might try again. (A bold publisher, a nom de plume, etc.) I like the fact that I recently was able to purchase a little known (not SF) novel originally published ~5 years ago. I suppose a publisher would term this book 'catalogue', and only begrudgingly keep it in print. (I would bet it is a steady, albeit not a big, seller.) I only knew about it due to the linkages that occur in life, and read it as soon as it arrived. These 'finds' are equally as enjoyable as awaiting the next blockbuster, hyped or not. Thus, I contend, it is the distribution to your readers that is critical; i.e., for you to get word out that this novel is available, or soon will be.

You guys do a fine job. Yes, I have read some bad novels and wondered "How ever did this get published?" But I then recall the amount of chaff you must sort through to find the wheat. Why should my reading experience be any different? And, of course, not all your publication decisions are based on artistic merit. Business is business, after all.

Sorry about the lengthy riff on the state of publishing as one reader views it. But your comments did encourage me... :-)

David

PS: Perhaps you can do something about the kooky cover art for SF and F novels. Is it solely me that notes the cover art traverses phases: angels one year, characters with levitating light orbs the next.

Abigail, your assertion that Potter "most certainly" can't be genre fantasy because it is not Tolkienesque would make China's head explode because it is a complete surrender of the genre to the tide of derivitave crap.

1. I did not assert that Potter is not fantasy because it isn't Tolkienesque. If you'll go back and read my original comment, or the clarifying comment I wrote just a few hours ago, you'll see that I mentioned that Potter isn't Tolkienesque as an aside. I believe, as I've said at least twice already, that Potter isn't fantasy (or at least not primarily) because the fantasy elements in the books are not as important to the development of the plot as the elements that come from other genres.

2. As I was saying to Patrick. I connect the phrase 'genre fantasy' with the sword and sorcery, buxom women on the cover, endless series of door-stoppers tradition. I've heard that sub-category of fantasy referred to as 'genre fantasy' on more than one occasion. It might very well be that the moniker represents a sad truth about the perception of fantasy, but I think it's also fairly accurate, in terms of percentages. Most of the fantasy I see on the shelves in bookstores, or online on Amazon, falls in the above category. That other, more innovative forms of fantasy exist doesn't change the fact that they are a minority. Miéville's problem is with the reality of the genre, not with its perception.

"As I was saying to Patrick. I connect the phrase 'genre fantasy' with the sword and sorcery, buxom women on the cover, endless series of door-stoppers tradition."

We've already heard from you that the fantasy genre is "Tolkienesque." Now it's "sword and sorcery" with "buxom women on the covers." Which is much like saying that mysteries typically entail wisecracking gumshoes in English country houses on Navajo reservations.

In other words, you're not really paying a whole lot of attention.

"Most of the fantasy I see on the shelves in bookstores, or online on Amazon, falls in the above category."

"I have sublime confidence in my ability to accurately judge books by their covers."

"That other, more innovative forms of fantasy exist doesn't change the fact that they are a minority."

"My sloppy purveying of highly generalized stereotypes is in fact a source of insight, if you look at it right."

David makes an interesting point in his PS. I haven't read too much SF over the last several years, but I never stopped to analyze why. I just assumed that my tastes had changed.

By way of context, back in '95 I got very serious about completing my formal education, completing my BA, and then going on and doing an MBA.

Until then, I had taken only one serious literature class since high school. I suddenly found myself deluged with a pretty standard set of Western classics. Since I was pretty busy with work, while doing a near full-time courseload at night, leisure reading fell by the wayside.

B-school is a meat grinder. It's not hard academically, but the workload, especially in the first year, is insane. Again, very little leisure reading.

Once I graduated, I suddenly found myself reading mainstream upper-middlebrow fiction (think The Corrections and anything by Haruki Murakami) plus lots of non-fiction.

Why no SF? First of all, I didn't know what was worth reading anymore. Secondly, I took a look at the cover art and found it hard to take the genre too seriously. And, finally, I was put off by the libertarian message that I remember being embedded in too much SF. I guess my recessive lit-snob gene had been activated.

Since I've been employment-challenged for the last few months, courtesy of the local library, I've started to delve back into SF. I've gleaned some reading suggestions from the comments here and on Making Light, which is currently making my head spin with the thread on Worldcon.

So, having drifted way off-topic, thanks for reintroducing me to a lost love (but I'm still anxiously awaiting the next Murakami book, regardless.) As far as the cover art goes, I'm thinking book covers might be the way to go... (It's hard to turn off that lit-snob gene! Sorry. I'll just assume that I'm not in the core target market for SF.)

Somewhere up-thread, Xopher said: But in any case, very few people IME, and in America, say TOLL-keen. They say TOLL-kin, which gives no help at all.

Yes, and even though people who I suspect know better than me say it "keen", my mouth just doesn't want to do that.

If it's really truly correct (preferably from the family itself; there are probably people who'd tell you how to pronounce my name from first principles, which is fine and good but isn't necessarily the way *I* say it, and that's what counts for names--witness the Teresa discussion here a bit ago), I'll try to retrain my tongue. But it's going to be hard.

* * *

Also, I want to say a word in defense of _Freedom and Necessity_, one of my very favorite books. I personally can't speak to its historical authenticity, but I have seen people whose opinions I respect say it was basically right (except for the attitude toward distance and travel). It's not universally reviled, is all.

I certainly don't revile it; I was one of its several editors. Quite the contrary, I think it pulls off some effects I've never seen any other novel manage. I realize that some people were driven batty by what seem to me small infelicities, but de gustibus. John Clute liked it, and he has a brain the size of a planet.

But I'm not going to get into a big point-counter-point on Electrolite about a book I worked on.

Kate: I'll try to retrain my tongue. But it's going to be hard.

Until the first Harry Potter movie came out, I had no clue how to pronounce 'Hermione.' In my head, it was coming out hermy-own. After the movie, the adjustment was rapid, so it might not be as painful as you think.

Rowling has said that her own favorite mispronunciation is the superb hermy-ONE.

Lately, my thoughts on the threads of fantasy have had to do with the collection of social concerns that the book deals with. The heirs of Tolkien (Brooks, Jordan, Eddings, et al.) are largely the concerns of medieval Europeans: who's the king? Where's the army? An invader from the southeast who doesn't share our religion must be destroyed!

The emerging class -- I won't say subgenre -- that includes some of Patricia Wrede, Caroline Stevermer, Susanna Clarke, and others, asks: What social role am I to play? What constitutes proper behavior, and what are the consequences of breaking that? Which social class has power, and how do they exercise that power? What are the roles and relations of men and women? This isn't to say that these questions drive the plot, but it's the motivation supplied by these questions that create conflict within the society.

A third thread, as yet disappointingly rare, draws on the concerns of American colonialism. My favorite example of this is Robin Hobb's Liveship Trader series. Here, the quite explicit questions are: should colonies of empires be independent? Is slavery a corrupting institution? Is immigration destroying our society or can we draw strength from it? It's like all the major American conflicts compressed into a few years.

China Miéville does not fit into this system; I haven't figured him out yet. (That's a good thing, and I think that's one reason his stuff reads as so fresh to me.)

Americans did not invent colonialism, and it's very much an issue in China Mieville's latest book, THE IRON COUNCIL.

I don't think the social concerns of fantasy are limited to the three you mention. FREEDOM AND NECESSITY (a brilliant and wonderful novel) is largely about the responsibility of activists in a corrupt society (that's not at all the only thing it's about); so is THE IRON COUNCIL.

You seem to lump gender roles and feminism into the category of what I would call fantasy of manners, but they are addressed in a completely different way and context in books by, say, Lois Bujold, Suzy McKee Charnas, Laurie Marks, or Tamora Pierce.

Where does Philip Pullman fit into your schema? Or Gene Wolfe? What about the social liberalism of many authors of urban fantasy, like Charles de Lint? How about British writers other than China, like Iain Banks or M. John Harrison or Mary Gentle, whose RATS AND GARGOYLES reads much like a precursor to PERDIDO STREET STATION?

Andy: A friend of a friend had the experience of reading a child's chart...the child's name was Onedar. "OH-neh-dar?" she asked. The child's mother became enraged: "That's WONDER," she snarled.

Illiteracy is a deadly scourge. It kills literate people.

Abigail, I have *never* heard "genre fantasy" defined as you do. I would say everything mentioned here has been genre fantasy. I don't read much fantasy, but I'm pleased to see that some of my favorite fantasy writers are mentioned above.

We read FREEDOM AND NECESSITY in my fantasy reading group, of which Calimac is a member. I adored the book which everyone else, especially him, hated. But then I usually dislike the things the rest of them like. I've gotten quite used to being a minority voice. It happened again at the recently passed Mythcon in a discussion of AMERICAN GODS. Everyone else loves it, and while I acknowledge it is interesting and certainly enjoyable in parts, there were things about it I thought emphatically wrong and others which could stand improvement. I seem to have very peculiar reading tastes...

MKK

Xopher, that's cute, but it sounds like it may be urban legend, particularly the "friend of a friend" source. Snopes documented a bunch of very similar examples going back to 1917. That doesn't mean poor Onedar doesn't exist, but it's reason for caution.

"The heirs of Tolkien (Brooks, Jordan, Eddings, et al.) are largely the concerns of medieval Europeans: who's the king? Where's the army? An invader from the southeast who doesn't share our religion must be destroyed!"

I have to admit, I'm struggling to think of the actual work of medieval literature for which this is a fair description. Beowulf? Gawain? St. Thomas Aquinas? Hildegard of Bingen? Okay, yes, there's some preoccupation with "true" kingship in medieval literature, and certainly in Tolkien. But real medievals tended to be just as preoccupied with all the other ramifications of feudalism. Hypertrophied focus on kingship alone is a phenomenon of the Renaissance. This cartoon of "medieval" preoccupations sounds like it comes from that worldview in which "medieval" is a synonym for "dumb rubes we're ever so much smarter than".

Tolkien certainly shares some of the concerns of pre-Norman England, as he'd have been the first to explain. For instance, as Tom Shippey has pointed out, Beowulf gets a lot of its force and flavor from the way it--often uncomfortably--yokes together the fatalistic heroic ideals of Anglo-Saxon paganism with latter-day Christian hopes of redemption beyond the grave. And so does The Lord of the Rings. Neither creation perfectly "works" in the sense of being philosophically or psychologically tidy. They're messy. They're full of powerful emotions that don't entirely resolve. Both of them are artistic responses to historical change.

If The Lord of the Rings is about anything discernably "medieval," it's the question of how one maintains hope and dignity in a darkening world. Which is pretty medieval, but hasn't got a lot to do with "where's the army".

Sorry to be so argumentive, but I've been in these discussions many times, and when you get old and cranky like me you start flailing about with your cane and shouting NO, NOT THAT AGAIN!

From the Encyclopedia of Fantasy's entry on Genre Fantasy:

"GF is almost always high fantasy, heroic fantasy or sword and sorcery, and its main distinguishing characteristic is that, on being confronted by an unread GF book, one recognizes it; one has been here before, and the territory into which the book takes one is familiar--it is Fantasyland....

The hallmark of GF is that it is set in a secondary world (in the broadest sense of the term). In less imaginative works this is just a granted--a Fantasyland derivative of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth."

And the Making Light thread On writing genre fantasy uses the term in a similar way.

Abigail's use of the term seems perfectly reasonable to me.

We've already heard from you that the fantasy genre is "Tolkienesque."

"Genre fantasy" != "the fantasy genre."

That said, I disagree with Abigail's main point about Harry Potter. I agree that it's a school story with fantasy icing, but I don't see how that implies that the fantasy element isn't driving sales; I would think that, if anything, it implies the opposite, unless there's some boom in non-fantastic school stories I'm not aware of.

"'Genre fantasy' != 'the fantasy genre.'"

I'm sorry, but this strikes me as the worst kind of scholastic bollocks.

Are we trying to sensibly discuss real things, actual events in the world, readers and booksellers sorting out the literary choices available to them and deploying rough-but-useful labels for various concatenations while at the same time publishers and authors attempt to define and signal to particular groups of readers? Or are we playing a silly set of word games?

Exactly what purpose is served by this hothouse-flower distinction between "genre fantasy" and "the fantasy genre"? Except insofar as the term "genre fantasy", as now defined, gives us another tool with which to (1) make unsupported generalizations about things whose appeal we don't understand and (2) demonstrate our superiority to those who like those things?

For heaven's sake, that Encyclopedia of Fantasy definition, taken as literally as you're saying we should, excludes Conan the sodding Barbarian from being "genre fantasy," because Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age is certainly no "derivative of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth.

Exactly how does this aburdly precious distinction between "gray cats" and "cats that are gray" tell us what's actually going on? How does it make us smarter?

Abigail, tell me again why I should take you seriously? Harry Potter isn't genre fantasy? It isn't the sort of thing readers are hoping to find when they go looking for genre fantasy? Meanwhile, you say, a "Tolkienist fantasy" is the sort of doorstop that has dragons and scantily-clad women on the covers?

There's an obvious question begging to be asked here: How much of this stuff have you actually read?

Feel free to demonstrate how wrong I am by explaining where the works of Poul Anderson, Fritz Leiber, Lord Dunsany, Zenna Henderson, Keith Roberts, Jack Vance, Tim Powers, Roger Zelazny, Jane Yolen, Terry Pratchett, Steve Brust, and Glen Cook fit into your schema. Extra points will be awarded if you can make your theory cover the Bordertown cluster and the Alvin Maker series.

Meanwhile, David Bratman, I'm afraid the TNH who eviscerated American Psycho was delighted with Freedom & Necessity, in manuscript and in finished version. The closest I came to nitpicking it in detail was to discuss 1849 style, spelling, and usage with the authors. Having thus hopelessly compromised myself, I completed my ruin by picking out its cover art.

Sorry about that.

I'm sorry, but this strikes me as the worst kind of scholastic bollocks.

Tell it to John Clute. I'm just the messenger. "Genre fantasy" may not be the most felicitous term, but it's out there and in common use (as the Making Light link posted demonstrates). If I had to guess, I'd say that he wanted a way to say "generic fantasy" without the pejorative connotations.

For heaven's sake, that Encyclopedia of Fantasy definition, taken as literally as you're saying we should, excludes Conan the sodding Barbarian from being "genre fantasy," because Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age is certainly no "derivative of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth.

I'm pretty sure that Clute intends C.t.s.B. to be excluded, although not for that reason.

Exactly how does this aburdly precious distinction between "gray cats" and "cats that are gray" tell us what's actually going on? How does it make us smarter?

Would you agree that Jordan, Feist, Eddings et al. are part of a recognizable subgenre? If so, what would you call it? The only other term I've heard is "big fat fantasy," but I have a hunch you'd find that even more objectionable.

I have no stake in the term "genre fantasy," except that it's the term I know.

For me John - what was his middle initial again? - Campbell settled this distinction a long time ago - Genre is open to anything that happened from before the big bang or any other creation to after the heat death or other end of this or any other universe and everything in between - see e.g. Tau Zero or Cities in Flight for subsequent times and the three headed monster stories or Tolkien or The Last Question or your choice for earlier/later times and creation stories.

Mainstream is a tiny subset of genre that restricts itself to one planet and only a few species for a brief period.

Then too it seems to me an argument might lie that there are Conan stories with a Pictish setting that have at least some common origins with Tolkien. Be hard for me to find published references to Middle Earth before Lewis and That Hideous Strength but they may exist -

Oh, and Patrick? That piece of medieval literature where they're fretting about the location of the army, and there's an invader from the southeast who doesn't share their religion and must be destroyed, is The Song of Roland -- which I, personally, have always thought the single dreariest major work of medieval fiction. Bleah. Give me Gawain any day.

Are you still feeling Delphic on the Clarke, PNH, or are you game for hard questions like "are all 800 pages more or less contributing literary fruitiness, with time off for good behavior?"

(Assuming you are legally and morally allowed to answer such a question at this time, natch.)

Add me to the list of people who’ve heard “genre fantasy” used as something more specific than “the fantasy genre”. It seemed, from context, to mean something along the lines of Tolkien-derivative swords-and-sorcery, I think the sort of thing Diana Wynne Jones was mocking in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (which I’ve not read, just had enough bits read to me on a long car trip that I was put off getting the thing myself, so if it’s mocking more than just that, well, then I need another example).

The phrase is out there, not something Abigail made up just now. If I were God-Emperor of critical language, it’s not the term I’d have mandated, but nobody voted for me.

Abigail, saying that Harry Potter isn't "genre fantasy" because it's so much more of a mystery/boarding school novel is like saying that the Mallorean isn't genre fantasy because really, it's just a quest story. The fantasy genre isn't a plot style; mysteries, quests, comedies, tragedies, and every conceivable plot in between has been written as a "genre fantasy." If the term "genre fantasy" is to have any useful meaning (or any other genre/sub-genre term for that matter), you can't arbitrarily decide that any plot element X is THE deciding plot element that defines the genre. Otherwise you are going to spend all your time trying to adjudicate the countless genre-benders, and inevitably go stark raving mad.

Harry Potter is a "genre fantasy" AND a mystery AND a boarding school novel. Like PNH said so astutely, "Genres aren't engineering specs, they're collections of effects." It's possible to draw on more than one collection of effects at a time. Witness China Mieville, Neil Gaiman, Susanna Clarke, Terry Pratchett, J.K. Rowling, Bruce Sterling, Lois McMaster Bujold, Gene Wolfe, ad nauseum.

It sounds like the thing that's really concerning you is being identified as someone who reads "genre fantasy," a label you'd rather avoid (based, from what I can gather, on your impressions of the books' covers). You're afraid that if people think Harry Potter is "genre fantasy," you'll get cooties.

I'm glad Tim Walters got that out there, because I was starting to feel alien for understanding what was meant by the term "genre fantasy." Unlike most the people using it, though, I don't think it has especially pejorative or derivative connotations. I'd say that Wolfe's The Knight is genre fantasy, for instance.

Teresa, you didn't ask me, but I feel compelled to answer anyway: Leiber's "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser" stuff is genre fantasy, as is Zelazny's Amber. I haven't read Leiber's other stuff, but at least some of Zelazny's other stuff (Lord of Light) isn't. I'm 95% sure Cook's Black Company is, but haven't read it. Brust's Taltos novels are close, but don't quite fit. I want to say that Dunsany is, but that's clearly insane and unsupportable, so I'll just think it quietly and wrongly. Vance, Powers, Pratchett, Henderson, Bordertown, and Alvin Maker are definitely not genre fantasy -- they're fantastic SF, magic realism, British humor, SF magic-horsey wish-fulfillment, urban fantasy, and historical fantasy, respectively. I haven't read Anderson, Roberts, or enough Yolen to say about them.

Xopher:

Seriously, this is the flip side of what I've been pointing out to people for years, which is that people will game any system you put them in. It's an argument for making the system carefully designed so that it accomplishes ITS goal when the system-gamers accomplish theirs.

The Framers of the U.S. Constitution thought that was a pretty good principle for setting up a government system.

David M. Gordon: So what, specifically, do you think is wrong with the publishing systems? Do you think books cost too much? Are they too hard to find? Are good books not being published? Do you feel you're not hearing about enough good books?

Me, what I see is that there are far, far too many good books for me to ever read. And they're easier to find than ever before. When I was a kid, we got books either from the library, or from one of two B. Daltons or Waldenbooks in the nearby malls. Each of these bookstores was about a 20th of the size of a present-day Barnes & Noble or Borders. Each store had one shelf unit labelled "science fiction," into which was mixed sf, fantasy, and media tie-in novels. You got your books from those places, or you did without.

Now, however, if someone mentions an intriguing book to me, I can generally track it down online within minutes, order it immediately, and have it in my hands within a week. And that's no matter how odd or obscure the book might be.

Xopher: A friend of a friend had the experience of reading a child's chart...the child's name was Onedar. "OH-neh-dar?" she asked. The child's mother became enraged: "That's WONDER," she snarled.

You sure your friend of a friend wasn't pulling your leg? That was a running joke in "That Thing You Do." Excellent movie, by the way. Rush out and see it now.

Teresa: "Feel free to demonstrate how wrong I am by explaining where the works of Poul Anderson, Fritz Leiber, Lord Dunsany, Zenna Henderson, Keith Roberts, Jack Vance, Tim Powers, Roger Zelazny, Jane Yolen, Terry Pratchett, Steve Brust, and Glen Cook fit into your schema. Extra points will be awarded if you can make your theory cover the Bordertown cluster and the Alvin Maker series."

Apropos of nothing, I've read at least one work of each one of the authors and series you cited, and I still consider myself too ignorant to participate meaningfully in this discussion.

But that doesn't stop me! I laugh at danger! Ha ha!

I've always used the phrase "high fantasy" to describe the kinds of books that people here are calling "genre fantasy."

Er, speaking as someone who's read, and loved, and enthusiastically blurbed and supported the Susanna Clarke novel (and waited patiently for it for a decade) I think it'll do just fine, because people will read it and many of them will love it and tell other people about it. It's funny, and smart, and intelligent and tone-perfect, in a way that most fantasy readers will enjoy, and so will people who know they don't like fantasy.

It won't be Harry Potter, primarily because it's not a series of children's books that adults also like. It's one book, written for adults who like books.

The Bloomsbury people bought it for the right reason (they loved it) and they're probably the best publishing house it could have. (They're my children's book publisher in the UK, and the impression I get from her editors is that they would be publishing it if they thought it would sell 5,000 copies.)

I could be wrong, and it could stiff -- not badly or embarrassingly (a month ahead of publication it's at #15 on the Amazon list) but I can't imagine that even if it were a famous flop it would be the end of Susanna's writing career. (I don't think she wrote it to have a writing career. Mostly I think she wrote it to find out what happened next.) And she's a good enough writer that even if her next book doesn't have a first printrun of 250,000 she'll do fine; she'll not want for people who would like to publish her work, and I doubt that Bloomsbury would let her go.

Incidentally, the public site -- the one aimed at readers, rather than the trade -- is http://www.jonathanstrange.com, which is all about the story, the book and the author, and not about printruns.

...

Mary Kay -- I'd not worry about the American Gods thing if I were you. Most people who don't like it really don't like it - so you certainly aren't alone.

I'm going to (once again) bring up the GOOD gene fiction v. BAD genre fiction argument.

Having been a World Fantasy judge last year, I realized (once again) that some stuff that might be considered just genre fiction--if you just look at the covers or the medieval setting or the who-is-the-king kind of plot--can be lifted by its gorgeous writing. See Patricia McKillip or Robin McKinley and their ilk. And of course the reverse is also true. Bizarre and interesting settings may be well let down by the writer's inability to put one word after another in any beautiful or meaningful way. (I refuse to name names here.)

Also, Rowling has captured another kind of children's book as well as the aformentioned--the boy's sport book. Her real contribution to the field, I believe, is the invention of quidditch. All the rest is well borrowed. She herself, in an interview ( which I read or heard on the BBC) said that she never considered the Potter books as fantasy. I thought it disingenuous when she said it, and even more when critics try it on. My God, woman, there are wizards and witches and warlocks and flying brooms and spells and house elves and three-headed dogs and. . .

Jane

I think I have been talking at cross purposes with Abigail, since I have never heard the term genre fantasy used as she does. I certainly agree that Potter, Miéville and Tolkien himself do not belong in the category she describes, which I label (in my head) "comparable to Tolkien at his best", and the denizens of rasff call Extruded Fantasy Product, or EFP.

I do think the term genre fantasy is a really clumsy one to use when the category being discussed is such a narrow and derivative subset of the fantasy genre.

Despite never having heard the term genre fantasy used in the sense Abigail intends, I was able to read and understand Teresa's
piece On writing genre fantasy which Tim refers to above. The point of it is that when writing genre fantasy novels it is not enough to set a bunch of standard genre fantasy characters in a standard genre fantasy setting.

The clear meaning is that it is possible to write a genre fantasy novel which is something else, and indeed the only worthwhile genre fantasy novels are something else.

This is an odd piece to cite as evidence that "genre fantasy" means the standard characters in the standard setting.

...real medievals tended to be just as preoccupied with all the other ramifications of feudalism... This cartoon of "medieval" preoccupations sounds like it comes from that worldview in which "medieval" is a synonym for "dumb rubes we're ever so much smarter than".

Sidenote: Terry Jones' Medieval Lives has been running periodically on the History Channel - it is one pin that pops the "dumb rubes of the Middle Ages" balloon.

LarryB, you are in for a real treat (as it sounds as if you might already have discovered...)! There are some great SF books being written lately. I'm delving into Neal Stephenson right now -- yum! Just finished CRYPTONOMICON, and it was excellent. I also recommend Linda Nagata's work, Nancy Kress's BEGGARS trilogy, Vernor Vinge's A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY. etc etc.

I'm like you, though -- I like the arty covers. But I'm told they definitely have a neg impact in the genre. Go figure.

I also want to see adult books with more interior illustrations.

-l.

Thank you Avram, Neil, Jane.

I also think of "genre fantasy" as something slightly different from "the fantasy genre". To me, "genre fantasy" is "books which fit into that commercial category and packaging style that was broken out in the 1970s-1990s by a number of houses and editors, most notably Judy-Lynn del Rey." The Harry Potter books fall squarely in the middle of that category -- which is to say, you can sell them as genre fantasy without fibbing at all.

Whereas, while I now understand the distinction many people appear to be making between "genre fantasy" and "the fantasy genre," I think it has to take some kind of prize as a distinction that confuses more than it clarifies.

The point of it is that when writing genre fantasy novels it is not enough to set a bunch of standard genre fantasy characters in a standard genre fantasy setting. The clear meaning is that it is possible to write a genre fantasy novel which is something else, and indeed the only worthwhile genre fantasy novels are something else.

That doesn't seem very clear to me. If I said that hitting all the right notes wasn't enough to play Chopin successfully, would you take that to mean that I thought you should play wrong notes?

Clute disavows pejorative intent, and even goes so far as to say "the constraints of GF can bring out the best in some authors," citing Tad Williams as an example. I haven't read Williams; my examples of high-quality GF would be Tigana and the aforementioned The Knight (thanks, Mike).

If I ran the zoo, the term would be a little broader, and used merely to distinguish things that sit comfortably on the "Fantasy" shelf from the wider realm of fantastic literature (magic realism, postmodern fabulation, straight myth and fairy tales, etc.). But for better or worse, that doesn't seem to be the standard meaning.

Tigana. Ah, Tigana is an excellent test-case for my sadly tattered theory. The dominant social question in Tigana -- please note I do not say plot or even theme of the book -- is whether people have a right to self-determination. In my mind, this marks it clearly apart from books that concern themselves with kingship, and as a work that draws on the Enlightenment.

Abigail's original point was a rather subtle one about the differences between reality and stereotyped perception. Too bad her argument was lost in definitional noise, but it seems to be coming back out.

My own thought on it is that she's half-right: Harry Potter's fantasy trappings are not much more than that, and it wouldn't take that much change to remove them. But that doesn't make it extraneous that the books are fantasy: I believe that's a large part of their appeal, however superficial the fantasy elements may be.

I find the same thing in Extruded Fantasy Product (or "Tolclones" as we often call them in the Mythopoeic Society). That their fantasy elements are not integrated into the story was observed by Ursula K. Le Guin in 1973; still, it's clear that their readers love those elements.

Neil Gaiman has answered one of Abigail's points: the website discussed is full of marketing data not because the publishers think the book is about its marketing, but because the site is aimed at booksellers, who need to know this stuff: there's another site aimed at readers which is actually about the book.

Teresa, perhaps you were so delighted with Freedom & Necessity that you were not able to apply your critical faculties to it. This happens, even to the best of us, and you are the best of us. I've taken my detailed creebs to LJ, and anyone who wants to read them can follow the link.

I'd like to assume, before I write any more, that no one on this thread suspects me of being a self-hating fantasy reader any more. I'd also like to assume that everyone now understands that I was simply confused by Patrick's use of the term 'genre fantasy' to encompass the entire fantasy genre, not just the Tolkien-derivative parts of it. Feel free to let me know if I'm wrong in either of these assumptions, although I can't promise to respond.

That said, Calimac opined:

Harry Potter's fantasy trappings are not much more than that, and it wouldn't take that much change to remove them. But that doesn't make it extraneous that the books are fantasy: I believe that's a large part of their appeal, however superficial the fantasy elements may be.

Do you mean to say that the books appeal to people because they're a sort of "weak" fantasy? That's a little like something my mother mentioned to me today. She thinks that the appeal of the books (and the possible appeal of Clarke's Strange & Norrell) has to do with the placement of supernatural elements in a normal contemporary setting, where magic is neither remarkable nor surprising. I'm not so sure how I sit with this idea. There are massive quantities of fantasy novels that posit the same situation - almost all the urban fantasy sub-genre, for starters. Is it possible that the Potter books are a good primer for readers who might be interested in these books? That they contain enough non-fantasy elements to appeal to readers who aren't comfortable in a strictly fantastic setting? It's something to ponder, at any rate.

We could have a long, involved discussion about how (or even whether) to categorize a novel that exhibits strong elements of more than one genre. I still feel that the fantasy elements of Harry Potter are nearly incidental, although I can see how my suggestion that a series which features magic and wizards isn't fantasy might have struck some readers as absurd. I certainly wouldn't try to introduce someone to the genre by giving them Harry Potter, any more than I would give Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon or David Brin's Kiln People to someone who wanted to get into reading detective novels.

Alexander, I like your idea of looking at books through the questions they ask, although I think you may be generalizing with your three questions. China Miéville, I think, seems to be asking questions about the relationship between the individual and society. In both Perdido Street Station and The Scar (I haven't read The Iron Council yet) society is treated almost as a living organism, one which often consumes its inhabitants. The main crux of his novels seems to be, does the very existence of a civilization excuse it from acting morally? Is it better to tolerate an evil society or to live with neither the benefits nor costs of civilization? Armada and New Crobuzon are vicious, destructive societies, and yet the heroes of both novels act with endless self-sacrifice to protect them.

Heresiarch:

It sounds like the thing that's really concerning you is being identified as someone who reads "genre fantasy," a label you'd rather avoid (based, from what I can gather, on your impressions of the books' covers). You're afraid that if people think Harry Potter is "genre fantasy," you'll get cooties.

I'm sorry, I just find it quite funny that someone would assume that I would be embarrassed to be seen reading the Harry Potter books because they are fantasy novels and not, as is more common, because they are children's books (and, by the way, there have been plenty of discussions about their placement in that genre as well). As it so happens, I publicly read books of both genres, although not so much 'genre fantasy' (as I define it. That is, Tolkien-derivative fantasy) because it doesn't appeal to me. I've never been hassled for reading any of them, by the way, although a guy did once exclaim in horror when he saw me pull out a copy of Daniel Deronda.

I suspect that the term "genre fantasy" is an attempt to avoid the rudeness of referring to "generic fantasy" - since 'generic', once simply the adjectival form of 'genre', is now a pejorative meaning not only 'common', but actually 'schlocky'. This usage significantly conflicts with the definition used by professionals in publishing (see TNH's comment above), to the great detriment of communication.

One reason I'll probably never get published is that I believe adding more words is often helpful. If Abigail had said "Harry Potter is hardly the cheapass Tolkien-derivative, sword-and-sorcery, go-get-the-magic-whatsis, thud-and-blunder kind of generic fantasy schlock you see in the racks at the CVS," no one would have contested her statement. (Of course, she may not have wanted to make that strong a statement, or interpreted Patrick's use of the phrase 'genre fantasy' that strongly either. I'm just saying.)

Mitch - bang on on the Constitution. Exactly such a system. I suspect Onedar is an Urban Legend, too, but significantly predates the film you mention.

Heresiarch - forgive me if I ignore your comment in favor of delighting in your name. I'm one too.

I don't understand Calimac's and Abigail's comments about stripping out the fantasy elements in the Harry Potter books. It seems to me that there are some things you can't change without radically altering the books: The parallel-but-different society living among normal society, but invisible to it, with the distinction between the two societies a matter of being born with (or without) the powers. The strange powers and abilities. The weird monsters and plants and devices.

You could turn this into an X-Men-type setting, retaining the boarding school setting, the separate society, and the strange powers, but you'd have to stretch it a bit to get the monsters and devices. You could try a mad scientist setting, but you'd lose the born-with-abilities aspect to it, unless you made it something like Foglio's Girl Genius setting. But then you're faced with the fact that mad scientists are basically just a modernized version of the wizard archetype to begin with.

I think what Abigail might be getting at when she says that Harry Potter could be told as a story without the fantasy elements is that the plot is more similar to the basic boarding school story-- a boy or girl arrives at boarding school, makes friends, plays sports, has a conflict with a teacher and another student, optionally defeats an evil plot or saves someone's life, and then comes back the next year to do it all over again-- than to plots more common in fantasy, such as those structured around a quest or war or revolution.

However, that just makes Harry Potter a cross-genre series, similar to other fantasies which borrow their basic plots from mysteries or Mafia stories or romances. To rewrite it as a non-fantasy boarding school series would require re-plotting the whole story and rewriting almost every single sentence-- as much effort as it would take to remove the boarding school elements and rewrite it as an urban fantasy in which there is no Hogwarts.

Abigail, if I may, I think part of the general objection to your dissection is this: With "fantasy" such a squidgy and mutable term in the first place, many of us tend to define it with an inherently inclusive rather than reductive sentiment.

Once you start to argue that certain books "aren't really fantasy" because they contain elements of other genres or famous series, why stop? Why should "boarding school story" elements disqualify Potter, when there are fantasy nautical adventures, fantasy westerns, fantasy crime novels, fantasy technothrillers, fantasy espionage capers, fantasy psychological thrillers, fantasy Horatio Alger tales, fantasy epistolary novels, and fantasy romances, for example?

The thing about purity testing for aesthetic tastes is that it's arbitrary as all hell (regardless of good intentions!), and riduculous when taken to its logical conclusions. You can argue anything and everything out of any genre if you're persistent and reductivist enough:

"G.R.R. Martin doesn't write fantasy, he's just re-doing the War of the Roses with dragons and zombies."

"Steven Brust doesn't write fantasy, he just does noir thrillers and Dumas romances with swords that eat peoples' souls. "

"Neil Gaiman isn't a fantasy writer; he just writes Clive Barker stories with more talking animals and fewer entrails on the wall."

"Clive Barker doesn't write fantasy, he just writes O. Henry stories where people have sex with insects and die a lot..."

You get the picture.

It might not be as insulting as the old "This can't be fantasy, it's actually good" line of crap, but, with all due respect, it's about as useful.

"Fantasy" is best described the overlapping heart of a literary Venn diagram; if you try to make it one of the exclsion zones on the edges of the diagram, you end up with a few thousand authors and novels left out no matter what you do, and you go stark raving mad trying to parse it all down to a perfect taxonomy.

Just to sort of mildly defend Abigail: I kind of see where she's coming from.

I eagerly grabbed up "Devil's Engine" and "Devil's Tower," by Mark Sumner, because at the time I was watching a lot of Western movies, and the Sumner novels are set in an alternate American Western frontier where magic works. Wizards get into duels like gunslingers. I figured, cool, what's not to like?

But the books didn't quite work for me, and I think part of the reason was that they were too much high fantasy, not enough Western. For one thing, the hero of a Western should be an older warrior--well, older by pop culture standards, in his late 20s at least. He's a seasoned fighter and something of an outcast to the community. His actions cause the community to form around him, but he himself remains an outsider, often--as the saying goes--riding off into the sunset at the end.

The Sumner novels use a standard high fantasy storyline: the callow boy who everyone picks on, who grows up to be the king, or a powerful wizard, or both. He gathers a band of other outcasts with him, and they become a little community, with him as their leader.

Like I said: didn't quite work for me.

On the other hand, I did enjoy the books enough to read both of them, and I'm disappointed that, AFAIK, there haven't been any others.

Just wanted to let you know that when the NYT article appeared, one of my co-workers approached me and asked if I by any chance had an advance copy of the book. I told her I did and she offered my lots and lots if I would give her a copy. I told her it was mine, all mine.

David, please don't excuse me for being so pleased with Freedom and Necessity that I let my judgement lapse. It makes my scales itch.

Abigail, courage and self-esteem are both good things in their own right.

Mitch-

I was recently told that a third Sumner "Devil's" novel will be serialized in the fantasy magazine Black Gate. Don't know if it has a book publisher yet or not.

Scott Lynch has it right, by the way. If the Harry Potter books share elements with boarding school stories, that doesn't mean they aren't fantasy. A murder mystery set at a boarding school would still be a murder mystery. Otherwise you get a system where some publishing categories trump others: being set at a boarding school assigns it to the category of school stories, whereas having wizards, giants, flying broomsticks, spells, charms, divinations, and all manner other fantasy paraphernalia doesn't make it fantasy. Which is obviously nonsense.

If Harry Potter isn't fantasy, then what is Buffy?

One of the characteristics of good, lively stories is that you can jack them up on one side, slide out the original setting, and install a new one. I've seen Shakespeare's plays successfully recast as Nazi power struggles, and as rockets-and-planets science fiction. You could refit the storylines and characters from The Sopranos as far-future skiffy, or dress it out in poniards and doublets, or turn it into mutants and superheroes all in color for a dime, and they'd still work.

Well, except for the dime part.

Abigail: That last paragraph of mine was a low blow, and I apologize. Pure speculation on my part, and totally wrong.

Xopher: Hmm, if I can convince people to ignore what I say because they like my name, then I ought to be well on my way to heresiarchy. After all, cults are all about cool names.

Mitch says (about some fantasy stories I haven't read): The Sumner novels use a standard high fantasy storyline: the callow boy who everyone picks on, who grows up to be the king, or a powerful wizard, or both.

The Kid, The Natural whose gun just leaps from his holster into his hand, is a standard character in westerns, and the hero of more than a few.

I read Louis L'amour westerns where the Kid was the hero, much picked upon until the Plot revealed his innate skills with a six-gun, before there was a "genre fantasy" sub-genre of the fantasy genre.

Niall: I haven't read many westerns. I was discussing western movies.

I can't help but think of the punchline to the story Neil Gaiman tells in the introduction to The Dream-Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft, of artist Dave Carson a little the worse for drink, counterpointing a rather heady and erudite HPL panel discussion: "F**k all that. I love H.P. Lovecraft because I just like drawing monsters."

Bildungsroman and boarding-school tales my pasty geek arse. F**k all that; I read Harry Potter 'cause it's got wizards in it. Now tell me again what the "true" appeal is?

Xopher, nuthin' wrong with words, especially for a writer. ;) And I think you've just seen a lovely and memorable example of how of few extra, well strung together words at the right time could save a whole lot of them later.

I may worship at Avedon's shoes, but Scott Lynch rocks. At least today.

Jane

I'm swear I'm not being contrary here, Teresa, but it never occurred to me to think of Buffy as fantasy. Horror, maybe, but never fantasy.

But I actually think the comparison between Buffy and Harry works in my favor. In both series, the protagonist is born into our world, but possesses strange magical powers which separate them from the rest of us. In Buffy, however, that special power is the point of the series. The one theme that continued to recur throughout the series (long after the 'high-school is hell' metaphor was dropped) was the question of how an abnormal person could live a normal life. Buffy's power separated her from her family, her friends, her lovers and her humanity. Her life was about the struggle to hold on to these things. She only succeeded by changing the world - making her abnormality normal.

Harry's innate ability, on the other hand, is treated by Rowling as downright ordinary. He's one of thousands of wizards, one of hundreds of Hogwarts students. Some of them are more talented than others, but all of them possess magical power, and take it completely for granted. After the first few chapters of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry becomes practically jaded. His magical studies are neither solemn nor of great importance to him - he'd prefer goofing off with his friends to learning how to transform a hedgehog into a pincushion. Harry doesn't strive to be normal because he perceives himself as normal - a normal teenage wizard. The things that make Harry special within the wizard world have very little to do with his magical powers. They are the circumstances of his birth, his ancestry, and most importantly his personality. This was the point A.S. Byatt missed in her infamous takedown of the series in the NYT last summer. The magic in Harry Potter is ordinary! She wailed. Well, yes. What's your complaint?

Scott and Teresa mistake me, however, when they suggest that the very presence of non-fantasy elements such as the boarding school setting causes me to reject categorizing the books as fantasy. It's the importance of those elements, versus the importance of fantasy elements, that leads me to my conclusion. Despite what Avram and Rachel believe, I do think it would be possible to transplant the books outside of their fantasy setting (into an X-Men environment, as Avram suggests). Removing the story from a boarding school, however, would be almost impossible without completely re-plotting the series, as Rachel put it. I just don't see the fantasy elements as being that important to the plot.

Take the two novels I mentioned earlier, Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon and David Brin's Kiln People. Both could easily be categorized as detective novels - they feature futuristic detective investigating a murder. The point of these novels, however, the fundamental question, as Alexander puts it, is definitely a science-fictional one. Brin and Morgan create worlds in which technology has changed the meaning of individuality, personhood, and the connection between mind and body. In order to explore these worlds, they examine the greatest offense one human being can offer another - murder. What does murder mean when the creature you're killing is nothing but a copy of someone else, or when they're moving in someone else's body? The detective plot moves the story along, but the point of both novels is the examination of the effects new technology has on society - the most fundamental question of science fiction. So, while it would be clearly strange to insist that either novel isn't a detective story, it's not the first category I would place them in.

Rachel has a good point when she says that the series straddles several genres. In fact, I suspect that's one of the main reasons for the books' enormous appeal - everyone can find something in them. Dan reads them because they've got wizards in. I prefer the mysteries and Rowling's gentle ribbing of the English school system. I probably shouldn't have used the definitive statement 'Harry Potter isn't fantasy' (Stephanie and Xopher are right when they point out that sometimes ten words are better than one) but instead said 'Harry Potter belongs less to the fantasy genre than it does to other genres' (and how is it that we've managed to get so far into the conversation and have no one point out that the books belong in the children's book genre? If this were a group of Potter fans, it would have been the first response, and probably precipitated a flame war). My original point was that to use Potter as a yardstick for the appeal of fantasy to non-genre readers is an iffy proposition, and I still stand by it.

I suspect there must be an analog to Godwin's Law that says something like in any discussion of categorization, the probability of someone mentioning George Lakoff approaches 1.

So. George Lakoff.

In his book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things he talks about the cognitive linguistic basis for how humans categorize things. And his conclusion is that we emphatically do not always use a classical Aristotelian approach of defining sets based on formal rules of inclusion: if it's blue, then it's a smerp, otherwise not.

Real linguistic categories, just like "the fantasy genre," are based on an amalgam of "a is similar to b is similar to c" chains, analogies, historical changes, associations, prototype effects, idealization, etc. This means that any two elements may actually have nothing in common, but still be in the same category. "A -> B -> C" may not mean "A -> C"; "similar to" is not transitive.

"The Fantasy Genre" is obviously such a case. Historical contingent decisions of how to market a book, where to shelve it, what other currently published book it is most like, what other books has that author written, etc. have defined the genre. And the point of Lakoff is that this sort of category works because our brain is wired to think this way. We can argue Aristotelian definitions forever, but they will never work, because they don't fit either the reality on the ground or the way humans actually think about categories.

I'm also reminded of Chip Delany's argument that we need to stop trying to define science fiction, and instead put in more work on describing it.

Chip's point is that definitional arguments all too frequently wind up focusing on edge cases, dragging us away from what really interested us in the first place.

What I keep coming back to as I read some of the rather formalist arguments some people are making here is that genres aren't about their overt content, they're about their effects.

Of course Buffy is fantasy. And horror. And teen comedy. And tragedy. And several other storytelling genres and marketing categories. The trouble with these content-based schematic taxonomies ("has vampire, must be horror") is that any story worth a dime is going to slop over over the tidy boundaries. The most interesting thing about stories isn't which props and scenery they happen to contain.

Oh, and:

"Removing the story from a boarding school, however, would be almost impossible without completely re-plotting the series, as Rachel put it. I just don't see the fantasy elements as being that important to the plot."

Perhaps not, but similarly, in the Harry Potter books, the "plot" isn't all that important to the story.

Abigail, if I may:

I wonder if you're putting too much emphasis on the Harry Potter plot as the driving force of the books. (Of course you can transpose the plot to other sorts of stories. There ain't but so many of the things.)

You contend upthread that the appeal of Harry Potter is in the non-genre elements. I really don't think that's true - indeed, the point I was trying to make a couple of posts back is that it's the genre stuff people fall in love with and keep coming back for. If I had to make an unsubstantiated claim about Harry Potter's appeal, it would be that it gives its fans an opportunity to explore a world that can't be visited otherwise - and that places it firmly in the camp of fantasy. The plot is secondary, at best. And maybe hippogriffs and Mirrors of Erised are ordinary to the characters (though I don't really buy that), but they're not to us, at all. The recognizable setting may put us at ease, but it's wonder that makes us addicts.

And Harry's desire for ordinariness doesn't make it so. Indeed, I'd argue that one of the important points of the story is that, even among wizards, Harry is unavoidably special (in ways, it should be added, that don't graft well to settings without the elements of fantasy). Like Buffy, he has seven volumes of trouble to deal with before all the implications of what that means settle in. The line "You think you know - what you are, what's to come" could be delivered just as easily to Harry in the context of his story, and we'd get the same frisson of anticipation out of it. And though Harry's world is full of elements you can find across the genres, facing up to myffic destiny is, I think, unique to the realm of the fantastic.

(And of course Buffy isn't fantasy. It's just a soap opera with monsters. Jeez.)

...aaaand of course Patrick came in while I was typing all that and said the same thing with less verbiage. #%&!*$!%#$% editors.

I'd like to take time to respond thoughtfully to both of you, but right now I must dash. I'll just say that I'd like to know what you think the core of the Harry Potter books is, if it isn't the plot (yes, Rowling is trying to deal with questions of choice, bigotry and free will, but it's the plot that illuminates these questions). Dan suggests that readers return to the books to immerse themselves in Rowling's fantasy world. That's possible, but it hasn't been my reaction. Rowling's world is well-crafted, but it's no Middle-Earth, no Bas-Lag or Ambergris. Those are the places I'd return to simply for the pleasure of soaking up their atmosphere, and I don't think Rowling's fantasy world stacks up. Others' mileage may vary.

I'd like to know what you think the core of the Harry Potter books is, if it isn't the plot.

Not to sound too much like Matt Groening's cartoon of the professor for whom one theory explains everything ("He who controls lithium controls the world!"), but I have a thought on this.

The Potter books are about (for some value of "about") neo-Nazism, and how societies deal with people seduced by dark leaders from the past. Earlier, I mentioned Godwin's Law, and it's no accident that the name Hitler has the same emotional gut-check power in our world that Voldemort (as played by Ralph Fiennes, btw) has in Harry's. The worst fear of the good guys in Harry's world is that the institutions of civilization - the Ministry of Magic, most notably - will be taken from within by those whose loyalties are not to civilization, but to its opponent.

I should say, reinforcing my earlier theorizing (and indirectly responding to Patrick's response on LotR); this is not really what the books are about; it is what the world in which the books are set is about. LotR is not mostly about kingship, but Middle Earth is.

Umm, they're about other things, too. They are, after all, big books.

I'll just say that I'd like to know what you think the core of the Harry Potter books is, if it isn't the plot

um, characterization & setting?

"So what, specifically, do you think is wrong with the publishing systems? Do you think books cost too much? Are they too hard to find? Are good books not being published? Do you feel you're not hearing about enough good books?"

Mitch,

Excellent questions, but I must antecede my 'answers' with the caveat (and reminder) that I am not involved with publishing. I am nothing other than an impassioned reader...

I suppose the top of my wish list would be more publicity for authors. Heck, they (the publishers) take a real gamble when publishing an unknown. Why then do they simply thrust them out there sans the star making machinery?

With the advent and growth of Amazon.com, books no longer are difficult to find (and purchase). And more good books are published each day. (This includes everything, not solely SF and F.) But therein lies the rub: there are increasing numbers of books published each year. Unfortunately, it seems that each book is only so much 'product' -- published to meet an available slot. It is the triumph of quantity over quality. No one reader can ever keep up with all these books. I suspect the same applies of editors and publishers.

So it seems (and as Patrick notes) that publishers publish, sell to bookstores and other middle markets, and then leave it to the bookstores to discover methods to alert us, the final (and I contend true) consumer. Thus, each book lies prone on its metaphoric back on bookstore shelves, awaiting a catalyst to spark it into life; a catalyst that rarely occurs, especially to the deserving. This is where a publisher’s efforts could tell the (marketing) tale.

Books cost what they cost; I do not begrudge that charge. I do believe, however, that publishers miss the gravy train when they charge extortionate amounts for childrens' books; e.g., $45 for 25 unpaginated pages. They have an opportunity to create their audience of tomorrow but think only of today. Is it any wonder that their readers grey?

Publicity should occur to get the wares from writer’s mind to reader’s hands, not merely publisher to bookstore. Perhaps a change might be effected here...? For example, a publisher could offer direct sales to its readers (perhaps as Ballantine did in the late-60s and into the 70s). Or tie in with Amazon (or whomever) for a blue plate special: Take a chance on this unknown author and his or her book, and we will pass on the reduced marketing costs as a lesser price to you. That I am not involved with publishing likely means my remarks are innocent of reality; of course, my thinking just as likely could be out of the box.

It gladdens me that Susanna Clarke's publishers make a concerted effort to birth her novel. These pre-publication efforts succeeded in bringing her novel to my attention. I expect that one month from now it will reside on my reading platter.

But that brings us full circle to the beginning, where we started this conversation. Susanna Clarke’s novel and a publisher’s marketing efforts to support its writers.

Best wishes,
David

Patrick:

What I keep coming back to as I read some of the rather formalist arguments some people are making here is that genres aren't about their overt content, they're about their effects.

I don't know if this was intended at me, but I couldn't disagree more, and I had a perfect example of why not long after I finished my previous comment, when my brother and I plopped down in front of an old episode of Farscape.

I've never been able to convince myself that Farscape is science fiction. The same holds true, and even more so in fact, for Babylon 5. The worst episodes of that show were the semi-annual occasions in which Straczynski (I had to search IMDb to see if I spelled that right, and it turns out I only missed one letter!) remembered that his show was set in space and decided to take a crack at a genre story (scientologists in space, anyone?). To paraphrase Dan, these two shows were a soap opera, and a political/military saga that happened to be set in space. Neither one is concerned with questions of technology, the development of society, alien cultures, how technology, the development of society, or encounter with alien cultures affects human life, or any of the other fundamental questions of science fiction. I'd have an easier time accepting both of them as fantasy (I once managed to prove to myself that Babylon was essentially LOTR in space, with no magic ring and the roles of Gandalf, Aragron and Frodo combined into one person) no matter how many science fiction effects they might feature.

By the same token, the fact that Harry Potter features wizards doesn't automatically make it fantasy. What you put into your story isn't as important as what you do with it.

Pericat, of course Harry Potter features characterization and setting, but I wouldn't say that either one is the point of the series. The books aren't a character exploration or an exercise in world-building. Alexander makes a good point when he talks about Nazism. The wizard world in the books is very reminiscent of pre-War England, with the attendant breakdown of aristocratic systems, upheaval in government, and the rising lure of fascism (someone once pointed out to me that the Black sisters, Sirius' cousins, form a direct parallel to the Mitford sisters. One of them was the wife of a prominent right-wing English politician, another married a Nazi and killed herself before the war ended, and a third was a socialist). We could almost call the books an allegory. As Teresa pointed out with regards to Shakespeare, it's a story that could be lifted and transplanted to many other settings, but I don't think it's a fantasy at its core just because it happens to be set in a fantasy setting this time.

Rowling's world is well-crafted, but it's no Middle-Earth, no Bas-Lag or Ambergris.

Does it have to be? My Martin Backpacker's not a thousand-dollar Taylor, but I can play you a tune on it that you'll hum all day.

The trouble with plots is that summarizing them inevitably makes the work sound stupider than it is. Boy finds out he's got magic powers, must defeat evil sorcerer, goes to magic school. Scientist accidentally breeds giant brain-sucking bugs. Tiny people with hairy feet cross half the world to dispose of cursed jewelry.

Plot is not story; plot's just what happens. Stories are the core of things, the place where you can look in and see what (various things) the tale is "about."

Harry Potter is about (for another value of "about") power, and responsibility, and the difference between training and education; about growing up in a world beseiged by darkness; about what it means to be gifted, and what it does not. Note that for "Harry Potter" one can replace Buffy, or Star Wars, or Wheel of Time, or Riddle-Master, or any of a long list of other things. This is a feature, not a bug. That collection of themes is one of the the deep and resonant chords of fantasy, that thrums in accord with something deep in the breast of thousands of fans. Play it right, and you've already got something worth listening to; play it on an instrument made of memorable characters in a compelling setting and you'll do a lot of encores.

Wait. Stop. Go read Ursula K. Le Guin's introduction to The Norton Anthology of Science Fiction, the clearest and most insightful essay I've read on what makes a genre.

One purpose a genre serves is that it provides a vocabulary and grammar of icons, archetypes, plot elements, conventions, as well as a more literal vocabulary. There are plot conventions that, if missing from a noir detective novel, would cripple the book. Those same plot conventions would cause a Regency romance to be thrown across the room (should a reader of Regency romance be so indelicate to do such a thing).

One way to tell that Farscape is science fiction is that it uses the already existing language of the science fiction genre to tell a story. You may not think that that story -- a lost man is trying to get home while hooking up with sexy aliens -- is an appropriate one for science fiction. It's your right to think that, although genre is defined by usage, and the market seems to disagree with you (it airs on the friggin' Sci-Fi channel!). But Farscape tells that story using aliens, blasters, giant living space ships, dimensional travel, and funny fart jokes that involve hydrogen. Not to mention the plot devices it uses are all classical sf tropes: body-switching, trapped in pocket dimensions, the living ship gains a will of its own, etc. That makes it sf.

It can be a soap opera, too, although I think if you plunked a non-sf watching soap opera viewer in front of Farscape, they would be so boggled that you would be still unboggling them when the Farscape miniseries is over.

I'm almost done with Stephenson's Quicksilver, and we could play a fun edge-case game of the sort that Delany and Patrick warn us about. There are clear uses of genre icons, but they are very minor and mostly unimportant to the book. Is it genre? Maybe, maybe not. It doesn't really matter, although I'd be happy to chat with people about the role of magic and high technology in the book.

Your insistence on thematic focus as a definitional aspect is the flip side of the "As Others See Us" bits in Langford's Ansible: "It's set in the future, but it's about people, so it isn't science fiction." Bleah.

Abigail wrote:

Harry's innate ability, on the other hand, is treated by Rowling as downright ordinary. He's one of thousands of wizards, one of hundreds of Hogwarts students. Some of them are more talented than others, but all of them possess magical power, and take it completely for granted. After the first few chapters of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry becomes practically jaded. His magical studies are neither solemn nor of great importance to him - he'd prefer goofing off with his friends to learning how to transform a hedgehog into a pincushion. Harry doesn't strive to be normal because he perceives himself as normal - a normal teenage wizard. The things that make Harry special within the wizard world have very little to do with his magical powers. They are the circumstances of his birth, his ancestry, and most importantly his personality. This was the point A.S. Byatt missed in her infamous takedown of the series in the NYT last summer. The magic in Harry Potter is ordinary! She wailed. Well, yes. What's your complaint?

No, what makes Harry special in the wizard world is not his birth or his ancestry, primarily; it's the fact that he is alive, when anyone else who took the full blast of Voldemort's power would be dead. What makes him special is that he has already defeated the most feared and malevolent wizard in the world once--and he did it when he was a year old.

Harry is not ordinary. The elders who care about him encourage him to think of himself as ordinary, so that he'll have a chance to grow up. They leave him to be fostered by his hideous aunt and uncle so that he'll be overlooked as long as possible; then they put him in a setting where he'll be as "ordinary" as possible. He determinedly shuns reminders that he's not ordinary. In fact, though, he's the least ordinary person in all of wizard society, and every book hinges on that fact, on the reality that both Voldemort's supporters and his opponents know that Harry is the greatest threat to Voldemort that exists.

How you get from that to "boarding school stories" with the fantasy elements slathered on extra, completely escapes me.

When I read SF and fantasy books now, I feel like a tired, middle-aged man. The SF and fantasy of a quarter-century ago made me feel like a bright teenager with a world of possibility ahead of him. Why can't they publish books like that anymore?

Well, I have to chime in here and disagree violently about Farscape. I not only think it's science fiction, I think it's the BEST science fiction that has ever been on television.

(Please don't argue with me about its quality. I'm just expressing the fact that I'm a big fan.)

I wonder: do you think Star Wars is science fiction? I'd call it "space opera," but I think that's a type of science fiction. Are there any movies or TV shows that ARE science fiction in your opinion? Which ones, and why?

While it's not true that all stories are about people, it IS true that all GOOD stories are about people -- and in fantasy and science fiction the term 'people' has to be greatly extended, but even the most coldblooded AI is an imperfect character with actual thoughts - which is what I mean by 'person'. Perfect characters: bad story. No characters: bad story.

IMO, YMMV, all that jazz.

Now, about Farscape, you're calling it a soap opera in space. I'd say you probably haven't watched a lot of soap opera -- or does any drama (or dramedy, in this specific case) with ongoing interactions and relationships (many of them sexual) between characters fit that category? Are there any serial dramas that are NOT soap operas? Name some please. Explain why, for example, Law and Order - Special Victims Unit is or is not a soap opera.

But that aside, Farscape does indeed contain many of the elements you mention. Where the Peacekeepers get their weapon-powering oil dramatically affects the story. Alien beings and technology continually affect the story, and the relationships between characters.

The effect on humans is a little hard to nail down, because for most of the series there's only one human character, John Crighton. He's constantly running up against the profound cultural differences between him and Aeryn Sun. They have different tolerances and intolerances; for example, she comes from a society where sex is just recreation and love is forbidden (it's contrary to military discipline). This makes his reaction to her alleged infidelity incomprehensible to her, and her inability to express her feelings incomprehensible to him.

Most of the tech is biotech in Farscape, but that doesn't make it not tech. And it isn't usually just TECH like in Star Trek ("Captain, the engines are TECH! Another 20 minutes and we're done for!"); the specifics actually matter. (Some of the alien biology is patently absurd, but not as absurd as, say, the linguistics in Stargate SG-1, another show I like.)

Of course, the bottom line is: it feels like science fiction to me, and so it is. But if you insist on typing things (and I can see that you're what my dad used to call a "splitter" as opposed to a "lumper"), please name three TV dramas (or dramedies - outright comedy like Third Rock doesn't count) that are science fiction, and explain how they relevantly differ from Farscape.

Or if you don't think anything on TV is science fiction, that's an interesting data point. One that would make me throw up my hands, if that weren't so painful (the thumbs get caught in your throat).

Books cost what they cost; I do not begrudge that charge. I do believe, however, that publishers miss the gravy train when they charge extortionate amounts for childrens' books; e.g., $45 for 25 unpaginated pages. They have an opportunity to create their audience of tomorrow but think only of today. Is it any wonder that their readers grey?

????

Presumably you have some specific example in mind, here, but I'm not familiar with it, and I have to wonder about its general applicability. Children's and YA hardcovers tend to be noticably cheaper than books aimed at the adult market, and adult books aren't, as a normal thing, close to that kind of prohibitive pricing, not even with the increases in the last few years.

Alexander Cohen, the fact that something airs on the Sci-Fi channel is not by itself evidence of science fiction. They air stupid horror movies a lot. (I'll grant you the giant snakes, mosquitoes, turtles as SF, but not the demonic possessions.)

Other than that I agree with you, as you can see from the post I was writing when you posted. Carry on.

Abigail, do you consider "Passing Through Gethsemane" one of the worst episode of Babylon 5? Most fans list it among the best, and it's undeniably got an SF premise (mind-wiping and personality reconstruction as punishment for crime).

The fact that something airs on the Sci-Fi channel is not by itself evidence of science fiction.

Of course it is! It's not conclusive evidence, but if I were a lawyer trying Farscape in court for the crime of being science-fiction, I sure as hell would introduce into evidence the fact that it not only aired on the Sci-Fi channel for four or five years, it was one of the most popular shows. What does that tell us? People who intended to watch science fiction did so by watching Farscape.

This is exactly my point: genre is defined (for some value of "defined") by a hazy web of connections. Being shown on a channel that self-identifies as science-fiction is a good clue. It isn't the only rule, for there are no rules: remember, no Aristotelian categories allowed.

Other than that, I agree with you, good sir. (Except you spelled Crichton's name wrong.)

Abigail,

When I was a kid, I read and loved psuedo-Tolkien doorstoppers: Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, elfish ripoffs, books with big fat dragons on the cover. I liked them because they presented a world--different from my own--that made sense. Good always conquered evil. Nerdy scholars got hot dates. Girls got to use swords. All of these books were in the fantasy section and I considered myself a fantasy fan.

When I grew older, I picked and devoured other books because they showed me new problems, gave me a sense of wonder, made me think, or made me laugh. Books with spare style that focused on carefully retelling old fairytales in a morally complicated way. Books that used literary tricks, like hiding the gender of the first-person narrator. All of these books were in the fantasy section and I considered myself a fantasy fan.

I think both groups of books really were fantasy and both times I was a fantasy fan. Even though both the books themselves and what I wanted were different.

I am probably going to say this badly. When I walked down the fantasy aisle I wanted a certain kind of book. I didn't have overt rules (must have elves! must have gender-bending voodoo!), but I knew the kind of feel I was looking for. And I think that there's lots of folks out there who are just like me, who buy those books today. And I think those books are fantasy because the people who read them and love them call them fantasy.

I'm trying to explain, I guess, that it isn't one person's individual experience of a book that makes a genre, but a group of people's experience. A sort of shared experience, if you will, that often is echoed in the books themselves.

Fantasy is when most of the people who read it think the bits about wizards are really cool, or feel a sense of wonder, or want to go to Hogwarts and get sorted. You may think the plot is the thing and that J.K.'s worldbuilding isn't as good as J.R.R.'s and you are entitled to your opinion. But I don't think that a dissenting opinion is genre defining.

That probably sounds snobbish and awful and I don't mean to be. I just think that the shared experience, the shared taste, or at least shared tolerance define the limits of genre.

Sometimes that shared tolerance or taste matches shelving/marketing categories, sometimes it doesn't. As far as I'm concerned, the job of the publisher is to get books to the largest group of people who will love them. If that means marketing a fantasy as fantasy (McCaffrey), fiction (Alice Hoffman), or to everybody with access to Amazon (Rowling), then I say go for it. The more people who love a book the better.

If most of the people who love a book call it fantasy, or most of the professionals in the genre label it fantasy, then it's fantasy. I simply do not see the point of trying to exclude works that people love and want to include (even if I think they suck or are missing something).

I meant conclusive evidence; I just blonded the word. You are quite right in pointing out that it is evidence. I'd call it a circumstantial case, really...except that expert and eyewitness testimony would be available, leading to a certain conviction, unless Abigail was on the jury.

As for the mispelling (heh), again, right. I am apparently unable to spell names in this thread.

My previous is addressed to Alexander Cohen.

Oops, I should have known someone would request precision, Lis!

The charge for books is what it is. Mine is not a complaint; in fact, the charge could be more. When there exists book I want (forget need!) I buy it, hesitating nary a moment. Hey, I believe writers engage in one of life's noble professions.

But there is a marked price difference for the adult and YA markets vs. those for children. Allow me a day or two, and I will respond with a specific title -- or ten. It has been too many years since I had homework! ;-)

Best wishes,
David

It's late and I'm tired and there's too much here to address in a drive-by post, so I'll just say a few short things.

Xopher wants to know what shows I consider science-fiction. Futurama (and instead of explaining why, I'll just point you here), certain episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (hell, maybe even Voyager. I never watched it long enough to find out). Most of the genre shows I see on TV aren't what I'd consider SF, at least not primarily.

Despite this, I don't think of myself as a splitter (although, if I were, would that be a bad thing?). I'm trying to make the point, possibly not very well, that the fact that a narrative displays the superficial trappings of a certain genre doesn't exclude it from possessing underlying qualities of several other genres, and that those qualities might be more important to the fundamental meaning of the piece than the superficial plot elements. Cryptonomicon is a good example. It takes place in the present (the past, now) and features no futuristic technology. And yet, I wouldn't call it anything but science fiction, because it deals with the effects that technology has on society. The fact that that technology - computers - exists today is beside the point. It's the same reason that The Handmaid's Tale is science fiction, despite having no technology whatsoever.

Alexander, the Sci Fi channel is where you can watch shows like The Dead Zone and the upcoming miniseries Earthsea. I wouldn't consider placement on that channel to be a definitive proof of anything except an association with SFFH.

Elizabeth, I assume that my writing comes with an invisible rider that attaches 'in my opinion' to everything I say. I'm well aware that I'm expressing minority opinions (and if I hadn't been I think I would have caught on by now) but I don't see how that should affect me. I don't expect Xopher to stop thinking of Farscape as SF just because I argue otherwise (unless I manage to convince him of it). My own perceptions of genre obviously differ from that of most other commenters on this thread, but it doesn't follow that I should abandon those perceptions, except where to use them might confuse others.

Avram, Gethsemane is, I think, the exception that proves the rule. And it might not have been if it weren't for Brad Dourif elevating his character above Straczynski's appalling lines and the general melodrama of the episode.

Xopher - If you listen to the commentary tracks on the Farscape DVDs, you will discover that a lot of the tech on Farscape goes unexplained deliberately. They admit to having allowed fansites to explain things that would otherwise have been discontinuites, such as the communicators which were sometimes always on and sometimes needed to be activated. Very clever of the writers, IMO.

As to the genre of Farscape, I'd vote for Comedy. (Ducking and covering.)

Larry - Hmm. When it matters to the story, it REALLY matters. When it doesn't, they ignore it. Sounds good to me.

As to your second paragraph...[fires heat-seeking Ancient drone at Larry]

Abigail - "certain episodes" of ST:TNG? Which ones? It's the WHY I'm after. What characteristics do those episodes (or Futurama, or DS9) have that make them science fiction, while excluding Farscape? The linked article waxes rhapsodic about Futurama, but never mentions Farscape; not helpful.

I'll just say that I'd like to know what you think the core of the Harry Potter books is, if it isn't the plot

um, characterization & setting?

It should, of course, be noted that this is a highly idiosyncratic thing. Plenty of people say they like the Potter books for the characters and setting, and I believe them when they say that, Personally, though, I find Harry to be more or less a personality-less blank (like many a YA protagonist, actually, which I think is not entirely accidental), and the world has no feeling of depth or even internal consistency.

I'm not saying that the people who like the characters and setting are wrong, or anything. I just want to throw out another reminder that you are unlikely to get anything close to agreement as to why the books are enjoyable, let alone what genre they belong to.

(Personally, I think that the statement "Harry Potter isn't really fantasy" is a wonderful conversation-starter in the classic mode of "Star Wars really isn't SF," but I don't think that there's much point to drawing genre boundaries that narrowly, however interesting the ensuing conversation may be...)

Abigail, yes of course you are entitled to your opinion.

But aren't you trying to define the fantasy genre and at least in part trying to convince others of your definition?

Your criteria for defining the genre depends on story elements (percentage of plot dependent on wizards or mystery or whatever) as far as I can tell. I don't think clear cut story elements are helpful.

My criteria is group experience, how a certain group of people feel or respond to certain works.

So, if you think group agreement matters to the definition, then whether your opinion matches that of the group matters.

I'm still totally baffled about why excluding B5 or Farscape from SF would help. Why do you think such exclusion is good or helpful? What does it accomplish?

If I may ask a dumb question, if most of the genre shows on TV aren't SF then what the heck do you consider SF? What are the qualities of SF if not SF?!?!

I think Abigail is right to this extent: that the "thing" that certain readers are trying to get out of SF, or fantasy, differs so profoundly from the "thing" that other readers are seeking that N mutually exclusive sets of books within a genre are formed. (That's ignoring other books which are not mutually excluded.) And some kind of terminology is helpful.

Speaking as someone who assimilated Tolkien into my hindbrain at an early age, I can say categorically that essentially nothing that is published with "in the tradition of Tolkien" on the cover has in it what I get out of Tolkien. That something, which I think to be the fantasy equivalent of SF's Sense of Wonder, is very hard to find, and not just because I'm older and more jaded.

What I do get out of Fantasy Product, and even from higher-class works like Guy Kay's, is the same thing I get out of non-fantasy historicals. This causes me to think of these books not as fantasy at all, but as historical novels with magic in them. And if I Ran The World, they'd be removed from the fantasy shelves and put with historicals, so that I could find what I was looking for in fantasy. Patrick can sue me for this, but it's the way I feel.

Teresa, sorry, but something's got to explain this, and it sure ain't that the book is historically accurate. The explanations I've gotten so far amount to, "It's alternate history," which as an explanation for accidental historical infelicities is cheating. We haven't even talked about Lisa Goldstein. You think your scales itch ...

Having haunted most of the libraries in San Mateo County, CA for the past couple of months, I've noticed that in most of the libraries, Fantasy and SF are integrated with fiction, whereas Mystery is always its own section.

Why do I mention this? Because I find it hard to take a literary masterpiece like 100 Years of Solitude and not have it overlap into what I think of as fantasy. "Magical Realism"? Well, yes. And having it shelved with books that are fantastic, in the more tradtional F/SF (is that abbreviation used anymore??) way makes good sense to me. Many bookstores don't know where to shelve William Gibson, so he's often in both the Literature and the SF sections.

For what it's worth, I think a lot of Haruki Murakami's work would qualify as fantasy as well. Certainly Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and even The Wind-up Bird Chronicle have strong fantasy components, which doesn't make them any less effective as commentary on modern Japanese (and non-Japanese) post-industrial society. I think anyone who enjoys fantasy with heavy contemporary content and commentary would enjoy either of those books.

There are lots of people out there who think of SF as Robbie the Robot, Princess Leia, and Lost in Space, and not much else. If there's no robots or ray guns, how could it be SF? Likewise, for most, no dragons, wizards or elves implies not fantasy. I'm really enjoying this discussion, which finely dices the genre and reveals personal definitions that are both more and less inclusive.

Pericat, of course Harry Potter features characterization and setting, but I wouldn't say that either one is the point of the series. The books aren't a character exploration or an exercise in world-building.

Why not? The series has gone on for some five installments and no signs of stopping anytime soon, and the plots of each haven't shown near the extension of range and depth that the characters (esp. minor characters) and settings have. When hordes of buyers descended on booksellers for the latest one, it wasn't because they expected or wanted a new plot, it was because they wanted to see what Harry and the rest had been up to, and what new corners of the world had been painted in, and how everyone had been getting on.

Plot's great, no story should be without one or two, but in a series, characters and settings are key. A single story can manage handily with a killer plot, 2D characters and sketchy world, but that won't do for a series. In a series, you have to build the world paying attention to every brick, and the characters who people it have to be interesting enough to be worth inviting back.

Alexander makes a good point when he talks about Nazism.

This may just be me, but I think that when one looks for underlying commentary on Nazism in Potter, one is perhaps seeing more than is there. The plainest political statements I think fair to make are that bureaucracy is everywhere and money talks. I've a history of being far too conservative in such matters, however.

Any definition or description of science fiction that doesn't include Farscape doesn't sound very useful to me.

There are a number of annoying episodes of Farscape that have little in them but slapstick comedy and studies of the lighter side of regurgitation. But the essential core of the show is an examination of the effects of several technologies (wormhole travel, "liveship" warfare) on human, humanoid, and alien races.

It doesn't stop being science fiction just because it's annoying. I'm annoyed by a number of Buffy episodes (I've used up my whuffie exemption certificates on that subject, so I won't elaborate); but that doesn't make me want to kick it out of the fantasy genre. I don't see the usefulness of kicking the Babylon-5 "talking uniforms" drama out of space opera, either -- except to tell yourself that whatever you decide to leave in proves your genre of choice is full of good stuff, not bad stuff.

Teresa, sorry, but something's got to explain this, and it sure ain't that the book is historically accurate. The explanations I've gotten so far amount to, "It's alternate history," which as an explanation for accidental historical infelicities is cheating. We haven't even talked about Lisa Goldstein. You think your scales itch ...

David, do you have any idea how annoying it is to say to someone, you disagree with me therefore you must have put your critical faculties on hold. Perhaps different people value different things in the story under discussion. It sounds almost as if you think your opinion is the One True Way, which I don't think you really want to convey.

MKK

Using my patented system for computing genre as a pseudo-Riemannian manifold in n-dimensional style space, it turns out that Don Quixote by Cervantes and Don Quixote by Menard are either the same book, or completely different.

Children's and YA novels are usually cheaper for two reasons: 1. they are shorter so books cost less to produce and 2. the authors were paid a smaller advance than adult book authors so books cost less to produce.

Jane (who knows whereof she speaks)

David wrote:

But there is a marked price difference for the adult and YA markets vs. those for children. Allow me a day or two, and I will respond with a specific title -- or ten. It has been too many years since I had homework! ;-)

Yes, there is a marked price difference, and it's in the direction of children's and YA novels being significantly cheaper than adult books. You were so specific in your previous remarks (I do believe, however, that publishers miss the gravy train when they charge extortionate amounts for childrens' books; e.g., $45 for 25 unpaginated pages), that I assumed you had some specific example in mind and that no "homework" was necessary.

I'm confident that you can come up with an example, of a "specialty" book not really intended for the normal children's book market. However, I'm highly skeptical that you'll be able to find ten recently-published examples.

Elizabeth, I wasn't aware of trying to help or hinder anything. This a free-form discussion that veered way off its original topic. I expressed an opinion (perhaps a little stridently). Others objected or requested clarification, I obliged, and so on and so forth. We're probably not going to come to a conclusion, and even if I convince anyone we're not going to go to a bookstore and start relabeling all the books. As far as I'm concerned, this debate isn't about how anything should be shelved. Of course you're going to put Harry Potter on the fantasy shelf (even though it really belongs in the children's section, but that's a whole 'noter kettle of fish) and Farscape in the SF aisle. Superficially, they feature elements of those respective genres. I'm trying to make the point that those superficial distinctions are, well, superficial, and of only limited use when discussing the themes and ideas of these works.

I prefer to discuss genre according to themes. You can call this reductionist, but it seems to me that insisting that a narrative that takes place in space has to be science fiction and nothing else is just as reductionist and that, given the paucity of plots and the vast and ever-increasing quantity of physical settings, my approach might be more useful. I'm not sure what you mean when you say that genre should be defined by group experience. That's a good attitude when it comes to shelving things, but how helpful is it in a discussion? I'm not King of the World, and I don't want anyone to stop calling Farscape science fiction, but I would like to raise the possibility that it carries stronger thematic similarities to the fantasy genre. Whether I convince anyone depends on the merit of my argument and on how well I present it, but I don't see doing so as being 'unhelpful'.

Xopher, I went back and took a look at an episode list for TNG. It's been ages since I sat down and thought about that show, and as it turns out I'd call most of it SF. It came before the newfangled fascination with character continuity and multi-episode arcs, so it's essentially an anthology show, and most of the stories are what I'd call science fiction. Two good examples are "Justice" - Picard has to decide whether to save Wesley after the kid breaks the law on an alien planet (did you know that Roddenberry originally planned for Wesley to be Picard's kid? We sure dodged a bullet there) - and "The Inner Light" - a dying civilization comes up with a unique way of preserving their culture. There are plenty of others. I haven't had time to take a serious look at the DS9 episode list, but for most of their later seasons they were telling your standard space war story, so I should probably concentrate on the earlier seasons.

Farscape, meanwhile, can be most accurately described as an "Innocent Abroad" story. This is one of the staples of modern fantasy (Neil Gaiman uses it in Neverwhere, Stardust and even a little in American Gods, China Miéville uses it in King Rat, and it's one of the more important plot threads in John Crowley's Little, Big), and it differs from your basic Joseph Campbell narrative in one important detail. The innocent is a rational, modern human, who is thrust into an irrational world and is taken over by it. The society Crichton enters in Farscape is your basic D&D coterie, complete with a warrior, a mage/healer, a thief and a trader (we could say the same thing about Babylon 5: Crusade, except that they actually went so far as to call them a thief and a mage).

The Farscape episode I watched with my brother yesterday, by the way, involved an immortal vampire who lives on fear, whom the crew had previously vanquished. He pulls himself together from dispersed atoms and places a magic painting in Chiana's possession. The painting tells the future, showing each of the crew members dying in their turn. As they die, they are trapped in the painting, until Zhan can defeat the vampire and get them out. Remind me again how this is SF?

Lenny, I realize this is an easy mistake to make, but I haven't insisted that Farscape isn't SF, or that Harry Potter isn't fantasy, because I don't like them and want to reduce my favorite genres to only good works. I love the Harry Potter books. I love Farscape (can't wait for Peacekeeper Wars). I loved the non-sucky parts of Babylon 5 (most of seasons 2-4). For the nth time, I'm not trying to get anyone to toss these works off their respective shelves, but merely to look a little deeper.

The series has gone on for some five installments and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon

Yes it does, albeit for values of "soon" equal to a few years. (Half-Blood Prince ought to be out next year, and we can expect the seventh and final book 2-3 years after that.)

...Those same plot conventions would cause a Regency romance to be thrown across the room (should a reader of Regency romance be so indelicate to do such a thing).

I read Regencies and I've been known to throw a few volumes in my time when they irritated me. In fact, one of them was a horrible Jane Austen mystery pastiche.

So, Alexander - you have a sample size of at least one. Make of it what you will. ;-)

Mary Kay, this isn't about tastes and opinions, this is about historical facts. Of course it's annoying to be told that one's historical facts are wrong. But that doesn't make them any less wrong. If you want to get into specifics, take it to LJ.

When I told Teresa that perhaps the book had goosed her pimples so much that her critical faculties went on hold, it was a mere speculation (that's what "perhaps" means). Further, I paid her critical faculties an effusive compliment in the same paragraph.

And it does happen to everybody. Dancing Aztecs, my favorite Donald Westlake novel, has a huge gaping factual hole right in the middle of its fundamental premise, and I don't care!

But if someone pointed it out to me (and no one did: I noticed it myself the second or third time I read the book), I'd say "Yep, that's a problem" and explain why I liked the book despite that. There are other things I wouldn't do. One of them might be getting upset at the person who pointed it out.

I prefer to discuss genre according to themes. You can call this reductionist, but it seems to me that insisting that a narrative that takes place in space has to be science fiction and nothing else is just as reductionist...

I've been following this discussion rather avidly, but I must have missed the part where someone said anything about insisting such a thing. I don't think it's even possible to do that. It seems to me that everyone is taking objection to the way you've said that things aren't fantasy or SF just because they cross into other genres.

Re; historical facts wrong. That's what I meant about people valuing different things than you did. To some people the prose or characters or plot may be more important than getting historical details exactly right and they may admire the heck out of it for that and not care about the historical details as in the case you cite of the Westlake book.

MKK

Mary Kay: Fine, I don't care if people value a historical novel for reasons other than its historical veracity. That was the whole point I was making by bringing up the Westlake example: that I'm not insisting that getting it right is the only critical value. But that's not the response that's come, here or elsewhere, to my statement that F&N lacks an accurate feel for its historical period. It's been either to assume I disliked the book in total (I do, but that's because I found it boring - but that, as Patrick says, is simply de gustibus), or to defend its historical accuracy, which is futile.

Abigail, that was a fantasy episode. Are you prepared to claim that all the episodes were fantasy, or is the presence of a single fantasy episode sufficient to kick the entire series out of the SF genre?

Someone above (can't find the comment) mentioned the wormhole travel and liveship warfare. I'm not dismissing the vampire and the magic painting; what do you have to say about those?

(I am SO SICK of space-opera vampires! They're currently the Big Bad on Stargate: Atlantis, and I just hope they can fix that before it's too late.)

I find that most of the time, when spaceships and star travel exist in a story, they trump whatever other things are going on and make the story science fiction.

But the story can be science fiction and other things, too. And there's a long, venerable history of mixing space opera and fantasy, going back to pulp magazines and H.P. Lovecraft.

Shelving is great because it helps a consumer find what they're looking for. But it's bad because it means the consumer who makes a beeline for, say, the science fiction section, might not find other things that he likes.

I, for instance, have a great love for the novels of Richard Russo and William Kennedy, stories set (in Russo's case) in dying small towns in upstate New York, Pennsylvania and Maine, and (in Kennedy's case) the city of Albany, N.Y., a dying steel town in the same geographic region Russo writes about. I find the appeal of Russo and Kennedy to be rather stfnal--they're both building worlds. In Kennedy's case, he's building a world on paper that happens to already exist in real life--Albany, N.Y.--but he's the builder of that city in his novels. And in Russo's case, the worlds he builds are based on memories of the town he grew up in, a small town in upstate New York that depended on a glove factory, and started to die slowly, after World War II, when women gradually started wearing gloves less and less often. Even until the early 60s, a well-dressed and respectable lady--in the sense of the word "lady" as it was used then--wore gloves, even during the day.

I use the word "consumer" intentionally. My relationship with books is complex and runs deep, but when I go into, say, Barnes & Noble (which we do almost every Saturday night), my identity at that moment is primarily that I'm a consumer looking to buy a product.

I would definitely classify both Farscape and Star Wars, for that matter, as Sci-Fi, regardless of the fact that they do not follow Asimov's Law and have more than one implossible-but-convenient bit of technobabble. Just because the writers let their imagination get the better of their scientific knowledge doesn't discount the fact that both series (and many others) are steeped in Sci-Fi iconography. That they are a little too big for their shiny metallic britches is what is so endearing about both.

Using my patented system for computing genre as a pseudo-Riemannian manifold in n-dimensional style space, it turns out that Don Quixote by Cervantes and Don Quixote by Menard are either the same book, or completely different.

I beg to differ, Tim. Even Borges, commenting on the Menard Quixote claims its qualities exceeds the original. They must be seperate books, as one book cannot be better than itself.

I prefer to discuss genre according to themes. You can call this reductionist, but it seems to me that insisting that a narrative that takes place in space has to be science fiction and nothing else is just as reductionist

I'm fairly sure no one is claiming that something as superficial as being set in space instantly makes something sci-fi. In fact, I'm pretty sure that most people are saying just the opposite: that no single element, taken by itself, can determine a story's genre--theme included.

This isn't an argument between to different schools of reductionism. Our counter-examples aren't meant to say "No, THIS is what's important," they're meant to say "This is important too." Theme is admittedly crucial, but it's far from the only thing.

It might help to have a little default thought experiment to discuss positions with, rather than using examples from messy, opinion-laden reality. Here:

Novel n has two main themes: [the effect of technology on life] and [the nature of good/evil]. One stereotypically sci-fi, one stereotypically fantasy. Now let's pretend that these two themes, have, through some coincidence, been given exactly the same weight in the novel. Which genre should it be in, sci-fi, or fantasy? What if the world is overtly swords-and-sorcery fare? What if it's set in a sci-fi world?

Xopher, it's hard for me to think of Farscape episodes in discrete units, since that show was heavily into character continuity and multi-episode arcs. Watching one episode, or catching them sporadically, is a great way to make sure you won't get its attraction (plus, I missed most of the first season). In general I see the way wormholes are treated in Farscape to be tantamount to magic. The knowledge is placed in Crichton's brain without him doing anything to reach it. In order to decipher it, he has to perform the equivalent of a mystical search. When he finally achieves power over wormholes, it is almost as if he's developed a sixth sense about them - he even says the he can smell them.

Most of the rest of Farscape is a space war story, albeit with our heroes on the sidelines. I have a hard time accepting space war as predominantly SF, because it's clearly a case of a writer wanting to tell a story that they can't set on any familiar world, so they need to invent a new one. Why should it matter that they set their war on the planet Arrakis instead of on Middle Earth?

Well, I certainly think the wormhole treatment in Farscape is more scientific than in, say, DS9. The idea that mathematics is involved, and that physical effects occur as a result of wormhole travel, help that. The episode where John encounters a transtemporal being, while similar in some ways to the DS9 exploration of the same material, talks much more about the details of the fragility of time.

DS9 turned into a space war story, too. We're in space opera territory in both cases, but they're both science fiction.

I only read F&N in manuscript, and remember being very irritated that, whenever I had spotted something that Emma and Steve had obviously completely got wrong, it would turn out not to have been made up. I remember giving them an awful time about a (London) Times pastiche which read nothing like any Times article of the period I'd ever read, and I told them so, and they (perhaps a trifle too happily) handed over a photocopy of the article in question, which they had done nothing to except reproduce as it had been written over a hundred years ago.

(I had a similar experience with a Michael Chabon short story he sent me to critique, set in the Uk in the last war, where everything that seemed obviously wrong to me was actually perfectly accurate.)

Of course, just because something's true doesn't make it convincing -- often it means you have to work harder to make it ring true, because life is under no obligation to be likely or appropriate or convincing.

They must be seperate books, as one book cannot be better than itself.

Oh, but it can! The book I read the second time is often better than the book I read the first time, and both are undoubtedly worse than the book the author wrote, even though all are the same book.

I should have said "the same book, completely different, or both."

Like Neil, I read F&N in manuscript, and had the same experience with the vocabulary and to some extent the usage as he had with events and newspaper articles. Almost everything I thought of as "too modern" was perfectly in period; the main exception, which did not survive into the published version, was the word "Hedonist," which has an unusually specific date of coinage. There were also a number of elusive uses of prepositions and adverbs, mostly in Richard's and Kitty's letters, that seemed wrong to me and weren't readily apparent in such documents of the period I had to hand, but were hard to replace, and I can't recall what happened to those.

In the end these allegedly modern bits became part of the charm of the book, like finding out as a child that the Romans had central heating.

Pamela

The problems with F&N that I cited are not those kinds of details. See my LJ for specifics. If you believe that any of them are either true or convincing, I'd be very interested to see evidence.

So far, most of its defenders have been saying that it isn't supposed to be historically accurate. Quite a feat for a book which, except in this one discussion, has been and continues (see above) to be praised for its historical accuracy.

Calimac, why don't you repost the arguments you made in your LJ here, so people can answer them here? It's a pain in the neck to flip back and forth, and confusing to anyone who's only reading here.

So far, most of its defenders have been saying that it isn't supposed to be historically accurate

Translation: Out of the three people who've bothered to reply, two have made that argument (or something like it), and one of those also replied with factual counter-arguments to your assertions of error.

Lis,

I apologize for the tardiness of my reply; life intervened. (As it has a tendency to do.)

I also apologize for not recalling the title or author of the book I so specifically referenced ("$45 for 25 unpaginated pages"). A casual looksee at the bookstore did not reveal the book. (Of course, this does not render as false either the book or my memory.)

The bookstore visit did, however, reveal other expensive titles. Straying away from specialty items (art books, etc), I offer the following as a sample (each unpaginated; so the page count for each is an approximation):

MRS WATSON WANTS YOUR TEETH -- $16 30 pages
LITTLE RABBIT GOES TO SCHOOL -- $16 30 pages
WHOSE GARDEN IS IT? -- $17 30 pages
VERY HUNGRY CATERPILLAR -- $20 30 pages

Apart from the books listed above (and others of its ilk), I must admit I also found many other books whose prices ranged from $5 to $10. So my earlier comment is wrong. At least, in essence.

You see, PAT THE BUNNY, considered a classic, will be one of the first books new parents (and other gift-givers) will reach for, and buy. The $10 charge for its 10 pages is, to me, a poor value. When compared to the $25 or $30 for an adult book, its cost might be less, but its value (cost/page) also is far less.

I believe Jane and Joe Sixpack would agree with this notion as well. Faced with limited amounts of disposable income, their $10 or $20 might have more 'life' as a Pat the Bunny stuffed animal rather than the book. You and I could disagree, but if parents and other gift-givers do not buy the book, then the child is that much poorer. This returns me to my original comment, sans the provocative example.

But I do not want to be like Ruskin and dis Turner, so I acknowledge my error and concede the argument.

Best wishes,
David

The reason the children's book you cite are expensive is because they're picture books. Some of them also have page cut-outs and other non-standard formats. Picture books are more expensive than books without full-color pictures because pictures are more expensive to reproduce than prose. In a sense, they _are_ art books.

As for PAT THE BUNNY, not only is it a picture book, it's a "touch" book, with all sorts of different textures reproduced. Again, this format is more expensive to produce than a book made of nothing but paper, and that's why it's priced the way it is.

Finally, picture books are often good investments in terms of the time spent enjoying them to price ratio, because they're for very young children who, if they like them, will make their parents read them aloud every night for months on end.

Avram: And I replied to those in a follow-up post. Did I give you the impression that the entire fantasy world had already weighed in?

Rachel: I'm not going to bring the full arguments over here because it couldn't be done meaningfully without going on at great length, and I doubt strongly that either Patrick, or readers who aren't interested, would want to page through it.

To counter tales of expensive picture books, I must tell how I brought my kids on a trawl through Charlie Byrne's in Galway last Saturday.

Maeve got an illustrated Giselle, Ian got Room on the Broom, a picture book from the people who brought you The Gruffalo, I picked up the comprehensively illustrated and enormously data-rich The Annotated Wizard of Oz which I'll be reading to them and their little sister for years to come, and I got hardbacks of Issola and Starlight 3, in and out for €35 the lot.

I would have bought most of those full price if I had ever seen them for sale here, but for some reason I first saw them in the remainder piles.

Odd to find a TNH and a PNH edited volume on the same visit...

Rachel has it exactly right. While adults rarely reread a book a second time, even more rarely a twentieth time, a children's beloved picture book may be read tens of times by the parent to the child. The child will add to that by looking at the pictures and "telling" themselves the story tens of times more.

An adult book will rarely change a life.

A good children's book changes hundreds of lives on a daily basis. They turn non-readers into readers. They give shape and dimension to the idea of story, to the idea that there are consequences to actions. They open up hidden worlds. They enlarge vocabularies. Etc.

Worth a tenner? A twenty? You better believe it.

Jane

Jane & Rachel,

You preach to the choir; I agree 100%. Moreover, I like how eloquently you state your case.

Charlie Brown, in the August 2004 issue of LOCUS (page 75; main story, page 11), notes the state of publishing and general readership: an increasing number of books published, a decreasing number of readers... and that readership is aging. Fast. Consult a demographic chart of any first world, Western country to see how its citizens grey. We (Italy, Germany, Japan, US, etc) reproduce at a less than replacement rate; and have for years, for decades. This augurs poorly for pension schemes, etc. Leave alone sheer numbers of readers with disposable time rather than monies. None of these figures are a surprise, nor should they be, as they have been mooted for years.

Name a business or industry that can withstand, profit, even thrive in an environment of increasing supply (of its main product) and decreasing demand. The first change that typically occurs is falling prices (of that product) in an attempt to rekindle the buyer's interest. (Law of Supply & Demand) Unfortunately for the publishing industry, they might do (only) then what instead they could have done now; i.e., act now, and perhaps retain 'control' of the situation rather than do nothing, and probably have the situation control them.

My contention thus remains the same: the publishing industry should (must) do something to increase readership, not merely rearrange deck chairs. (That is, increase the total size of the pie, not attempt merely to reapportion a dwindling pie, to take market share.) If they do nothing, then its primary (sole?) product is in financial peril, having the potential to be the equivalent of buggy whips. I feel confident the publishers both acknowledge and discuss this 'problem' among themselves. Frequently. Then again, perhaps not.

One possible suggestion is to price childrens' books as loss leaders in the attempt to gain a future base of readers (or consumers of its product). At least try it. If it fails, you (the publishers) lose some money for a finite period. If it works, you (the publishers) make more money from increasing volumes (yes, I guess pun intended) for an infinite period.

Please recall, I argue as a reader, albeit one particulary impassioned. I enjoy everything about reading, and want to see it -- writers writing, publishers publishing, and readers reading -- continue. Current trends, however, do not bode well for that future.

Best wishes,
David

David Gordon - I rather doubt that the pricing of children's books has much of an impact on whether or not kids become adult readers. Of course, supply and demand plays a role in how many books make it out of the store and into the home, but I think parental priorities and behavior are a bigger factor. In the face of prohibitive pricing, resourceful parents turn to the local library instead of the bookstore. (I have friends who used the library to break their kids of the re-reading the same book over and over habit.)

I read because I was read to. And I'm of the first generation in my family to consistently finish high school on the traditional track. My mother may not have graduated high school as a teenager, but she read for her own pleasure, and she read to her kids, and she made sure we could all read well before the school system got their hands on us.

Another factor in reading as an adult comes from learning being valued in the home. (This was less the case in my home, but was for many of my friends, who are mostly avid readers.) This is the springboard for many children of immigrants, whose parents may be reluctant to read to them in a second language, but nonetheless nudge their children towards learning, making them readers in the process.

Looking at the demographic trends, it's not surprising to see a smaller base of readers consuming more books per capita. On the whole, Western culture is moving towards greater enthusiasms for narrower specialties. While I don't have the data, I'd expect that fewer kids skateboard (for instance) but those that do spend more time doing it. Reading is leisure activity for those through with school and outside of publishing, so I'd expect the same dynamic to be at play.

Is publishing doomed? Probably not, but it may not be recognizable 20 or 40 years from now. Who knows what non-book publishing methods might become both popular and profitable?

Calimac, I went to your livejournal to see what you didn't like about Freedom and Necessity... and there learned that you stopped reading it on page 90 of the paperback edition.

Well, there are some authors whose work I might set aside after so slight a sampling, but surely Emma and Steve should not be in that company. They know their craft, and can generally be trusted to be up to something deliberate, so that an odd or jarring detail is in fact not a mistake but rather a clue to the world -- which, let me tell you, is not in the least what you seem to have assumed it to be.

If you decided you weren't going to enjoy the world they appeared to be building up, well, putting the book down is always your right as a reader. But to then imply that you, with your fragmentary experience, were in a position to tell TNH that "you were not able to apply your critical faculties to it...."!

Clearly, since you still live, you are much favored by the gods.

Since children's books are pretty consistently the part of any major pubishing company that makes money year after year, I expect they will not want to make them "loss leaders."

But as children's books also consistently pay their authors less, perhaps adult publishers will begin to pay smaller advances to their writers. To fewer celebrities.

Ooouf--morphing into another discussion.

Jane

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was reviewed, effusively, in the latest issue of TIME.

However, the TIME review also used the words "to rival Tolkien", a phrase which tends to make me take a strong leap backwards, gibbering shrilly.

Sylvia, as the defenders of F&N seem split, even within individual persons, as to whether the apparently erroneous details are actually factually accurate or are a clue that it's an alternate universe, then if it is indeed the latter, it isn't a very effective way of conveying it.

I am also skeptical of the wisdom of creating an alternate universe that looks exactly like the non-alternate universe of a lousy author. One needs a very deft satirical talent indeed to pull something like that off without telegraphing it.

The best explanation I can think of is that the documents turn out to be fake - as indeed they are, having been written by Brust & Bull. If that's the case, for my part all the errors are excused.

But in the meantime, as you'll know if you read my LJ post, I am quite aware of the implications of not having read the entire book, and I was waiting for someone to give a good explanation. I'm still waiting.

In response to your last comment, I guess I need to repeat what I said earlier:

When I told Teresa that perhaps the book had goosed her pimples so much that her critical faculties went on hold, it was a mere speculation (that's what "perhaps" means). Further, I paid her critical faculties an effusive compliment in the same paragraph.

Yes, David, and everyone who knows you completely believes you have absolutely no idea how condescending you were.

This is in fact a compliment to you, albeit different at the end. Honest. Pinky swear.

David M Gordon, how many industries do you think could be persuaded to sell something as a "loss leader" in hopes of an increased return a decade or more down the line? I'm not going to make up numbers and try to crunch them, but I suspect that at any reasonable interest rate, you'd have to be pretty certain of a pretty huge boost down the road to justify even a moderate loss today.

Furthermore, your argument about low reproduction rates in developed countries ignores the effect of immigration from places with higher reproductive rates. And since those immigrants missed being exposed to your "loss leader" childrens' books, the loss leader approach is even less effective at increasing the adult reading rate than it would be in the absence of immigration.

I'm strongly in favor of getting kids to read, and I'd love to see more inexpensive kids' books (and adult books, too!), I just don't see how any publisher could be expected to buy into your argument.

Patrick, there's an old saying, "Even Homer nods." It's not condescending to point out that this might have happened, or to compare Teresa with Homer. She is equally outstanding in her field.

If it didn't happen, I still await the evidence.

I also went on, when I said this the first time, to give an example of how my critical faculties were short-circuited when I was sufficiently goosed by a book.

You're absolutely right: I have no idea what's condescending about saying such things.

With all due respect I think that there is a fundamental error in defining genres as if they were nouns; they aren't, they're adjectives. It is incorrect to say a book IS "science fiction" or "fantasy" or "mystery" or "romance." It has characteristics of SF or F or M or R, and the characteristics of many genres can be present in a single book (I remember a novel from the late '70s whose cover described it as a "science fiction western motorcycle grail quest epic," and, by gum, it was).

It also helps to think of genre definitions as fuzzy in the logical sense (and so not so much definitions as descriptions). You can list a bunch of characteristics and say that the more of these characteristics the book has, the more likely it is that a reader will call the book "fantasy" (or SF or R or M or whathaveya), but there is no single characteristic or set of characteristics that are required for to call it "fantasy" (or etc.) I have known people who thought if it didn't have space travel, or didn't take place in the future, it wasn't SF. I know people today who think if it doesn't have magic in it it isn't fantasy. A LOT of people think that if it doesn't have a murder and a detective, it isn't a mystery. Etc. And, of course, all these people are wrong ... except, of course, that they're right, because (the definitions being fuzzy) they mean what each person means when that person uses them.

Cheers.

Calimac - You seem to be under the impression that historical fiction is under some obligation to be historically accurate. That seems to be your only objection to "Freedom & Necessity"--that it's not realistic.

Moreover, some of what you see as anachronistic doesn't strike me that way at all. In particular, in the matter of sexual mores, it's nearly impossible to tell what they REALLY were at any time in the historic past. All we can know is what people SAID they were doing, which may or may not be what they actually did. I find it quite believable that a person in any period of history might appear chaste, but might actually be promiscuous.

Mitch - no, I have no problem with stories that play fast & loose with history. I read alternate histories and comic works. My concern here is with a work that looks like it's trying to be documentarily accurate, but appears to me to contain the kind of inaccuracies that look more like sloppiness than playfulness. Especially when (and this may not be necessarily the authors' fault) it is advertised as, and defended by its defenders as, historically accurate down to the last detail.

And as this is a documentary novel, i.e. the text consists of letters, diaries, etc., the question of accuracy IS about what people said they were doing rather than what they actually might have done. Though the question of simple plausibility, apart from mores, also comes up.

Well, I for one have never meant to imply I find F&N historically accurate. I know I've never said that and if I have implied it, I was sloppy. I'm not quite sure why being an epistolary novel holds it to a higher standard. I'm not at all sure I'd take what real people say in real letters without a grain of salt; it's easier to lie when you don't have to look your interlocutor in the face. I enjoyed the book because it told a story I liked reading. Introduced me to people I enjoyed spending time with. I don't give a fig for it's historical accuracy.

MKK

Personally, gross historical inaccuracies drive me crazy -- when I notice them, which I generally don't.

I was a big Mary Renault fan in high school. (Gay boys! Novels about gay boys!) While I feel that it's important to realize that Alexander (frex) probably didn't act exactly like an exemplar of a 19th Century Englishman, knowing this doesn't decrease my enjoyment of the books at all.

Mary Kay -

While I'm not sure that an epistolary historic novel needs to be held to a "higher" standard, it does need to be held to a fairly specific standard - one of style.

For the letters to remain plausible, the thoughts expressed, and the words and styles used to express them, need to be thoughts, words and styles that persons living in the time and place in question might reasonably have had/used. (This is true of dialogue in historic novels anyway; it's jsut that making the novel epistolary makes the whole thing, in a sense, dialogue.)

This doesn't mean that they have to speak in the dialects of their time. I would not be particularly entertained if, say, Wolfe's Soldier in the Mist, which is essentially epistolary, ere written in Koiné Greek. There's a kind of convention that allows us to assume that the work has been "translated" into modern English.

But it does mean that if the thoughts, words, or style become anachronistic in a way that can't be attributed to this sort of "translation," then I find myself snorting, going, "Yeah, right," and making another dent in the far wall of my office with the book's spine. It jolts me out of the fictional dream, snaps my suspenders of disbelief, however you want to metaphorize it.

To take a gross example, in a novel set in the 18th century, the character whose diary the book was started talking a bunch of mid-twentieth-century existentialism about the burden of freedom and so on, and I found myself unable to continue believing in the character, or the story.

I understand that some people may not be bothered by this sort of thing. But then, some people aren't bothered by Piers Anthony's alleged writing style, either.

Some gross historical inaccuracies bother me (so do some mathematical, physical, biological... inaccuracies). Others don't. But I can't imagine saying "these particular inaccuracies bother me, and should bother everyone else, and anyone who isn't bothered by them is somehow lacking, or not paying attention."

And, calimac, am I correct in summarizing the objections you list in your livejournal as:

1. A particular character behaves in ways that you feel are extremely uncharacteristic of people of his social class of that time, and other characters are unperturbed by this.

2. It's not clear to me how strenuous your objections to the capitalization pattern of one letter are.

To me, those aren't particularly strong objections to a book. #1 might or might not put me off, depending on the details, but your description of it is not enough to convince me that the book is in fact historically inaccurate. Perhaps that character's behavior is simply different than the norm. Or perhaps if I read the book, I'd agree with you that it's so absurd that it spoils the book for me.

But I fail to understand why you think those details should turn everyone off, or why you think it isn't condescending to say "if you were paying attention, these particular details that turned me off would turn you off too."

For all I know (not being very aware of "Freedom & Necessity" until now), maybe part of the book's appeal is watching how a character with very modern sexuality interacts in an otherwise very historically accurate setting.

First of all, I would a thousand times more have a beautifully written and convincing novel that isn't actually historically accurate or which is but raises the hackles of some readers by going against their preconceptions of what a time was really like, than one which is less well written but sticks grimly to what is widely believed to be true about the period.

It's fine if you don't like F & N or you don't think it's accurate, but it's ridiculous and insulting to say that no one can like it with their critical faculties intact.

I don't know much about England per se at the time period that F& N is set in, but I've read literally shelf-fulls of memoirs and diaries and letters by English people in India at or around that time, and nothing in F & N set off my "historically inaccurate" alarms. The style is very congruent with my own reading.

In fact, while it may be implausible for people to recount extremely detailed conversations in letters and diaries _as they actually occurred_, I assure you that diarists often did recreate dialogue from memory. At least, in India they did.

Regarding James, it is essential to James' character and to the plot that he is a member of a radical political group, and therefore it is quite plausible that he would have radical opinions.

As to the objections to him a) having sex with women outside of marriage, and b) writing about it, I don't find either of those to be implausible. Just because birth control was, at the very least, unreliable does not mean that nobody had sex outside of marriage, or affairs while married. Indeed, marriage is a perfect cover for getting pregnant.

Yes, sex could have serious consequences, and in many countries it still does. Does that stop people from having unprotected sex? Not at all. Is it possible to have sex without doing the sort of thing that could cause a pregnancy? Absolutely.

As for his (non-explicit) letter about it, Sherwood's point about people having their letters burned after their death also suggests to me that people might write about such things, and that such letters would be unlikely to ever circulate beyond their recipient. In addition, I think her point about Byron is perfectly valid; at any rate, the fact that James mentioned having sex, and wrote of it in a manner which struck me as period-appropriate, didn't cause my suspension of disbelief to so much as quiver.

It's actually a vitally important part of Soldier of the Mist that it was "originally" written in Latin by a native speaker of Latin trying to understand Greek. The fact that it was translated into English isn't merely a convention, it's presented as a fact within the fictional context of the book.

None of the puns (frex calling Delphi "Dolphins") make sense otherwise.

On a related note, if anyone's planning on reading the Soldier books (available from Orb as Latro in the Mist), I strongly urge you to read Herodotus' History first. It will add significantly to your enjoyment and comprehension of Wolfe's books.

Mary Kay, Rachel, Jeremy - Thanks for the thoughtful replies, but everything each of you says (as well as Mitch's post of yesterday) was already addressed by things I've said in LJ, or in my previous posts. Or at any rate I thought it was. I can try, briefly, to repeat myself: Mary Kay, what sturgeonslawyer said: the objection isn't to what people did, it's to what they said. Jeremy, I very specifically did not say what you're paraphrasing me as condescendingly saying. Rachel, the question is, where and how did James come by these radical opinions?

Apart from that: since I'm obviously not making myself clear, let's just drop it.

James was a member of the Chartists, a radical political group, and that's where he came by his radical opinions. I'm not sure how much this comes up in the first 90 pages, but it's of crucial importance to the plot by the halfway point, at least.

The Chartists were a real group, by the way.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/society_culture/protest_reform/chartist_01.shtml

A friend suggested Emma and I visit this thread to see what was being said about Freedom & Necessity. I've advised Emma to keep working on her ever-growing work in progress instead, though I'm sure she'd be pleased by the kind things said about what she and Steve wrote.

But this did inspire two comments:

1. Sometimes authors fail to meet a reader's' expectation. Sometimes readers fail to meet an author's expectation. Don't be too quick to assume one or the other; you may discover in five or ten years that you were wrong.

2. Good writers don't write the same book twice. Emma and Steve are good writers. If you don't like one, try another. (For the many voices of Steve Brust, I'd suggest Agyar, The Phoenix Guard, and one of the Vlad series--maybe Teckla--before you decide whether you like his work. For Emma, try Finder and Bone Dance, at the very least.)

And now I'll return to my own ever-growing effort--

Will

If you don't like one, try another.

This is very true, especially for Brust. Just last night, a friend told me that she had liked Jhereg (the only Brust she had read) well enough, but was put off by the modern language. "Ahh," I said. "I think we have a solution for you."

Hmm. A very dangerous process. A friend of mine was duped into reading almost the entire canon of Michael Moorcock by a friend who kept saying "Well, maybe that one wasn't the best example...here, this one's different, try it."

Since as far as I can tell Michael Moorcock has only one plot, and every book of his I've read (with the exception of Gloriana) reads like he can't stand to read it himself, this was a complete lie.

Moorcock's sort of the Brancusi of skiffy; he's got a small handful of themes that obsess him, which the great body of his work is involved in ringing small changes and variations on. This isn't a bad thing, but it does require a willingness to look at the same heads and torsos over and over again.

I work in the computer industry, and I am used to seeing TV shows and movies Get Everything Wrong. Often, I like the TV show or movie anyway.

Dan, I'm talking about recycling the same plot. Guy is in charge of defending a people from another people. Guy discovers other people are really the good guys. Guy also discovers he's the Eternal Champion. Guy fights his former peeps, wins, and dies. Sometimes his soul gets eaten (ooo, variation!).

The plots are so formulaic that there's one chapter that appears word for word in four different books. This goes way beyond thematic obsession. I mean, Delany uses the symbolism of someone losing a shoe to mean losing their mind, and has emotionally troubled nail-biting blond boys in more than a few of his books, but no two of his books can be reasonably said to have the same plot.

Weren't most of the Eternal Champion books written in three days each to raise emergency money for New Worlds? In any case, I would read Stormbringer and The War Hound And The World's Pain and blow off the rest.

But his non-EC books are often very worthwhile, e.g., Gloriana, The Brothel In Rosenstrasse, Mother London, Byzantium Endures.

Moorcock deserves a place in the s-f canon for two other books that are atypical of the rest of his work: "Behold The Man" and "Breakfast in the Ruins."

Moorcock was the first sf writer to explore what newer readers would now label s-f cliche number #nnnn: "The invention of time travel makes a historian curious about what really happened at the Crucifixion, so he travels back to investigate -- with surprising results."

Yes, I should have included those, as well as The Dancers At The End Of Time.

While I haven't read enough of the major Eternal Champion books for the repeated plotline to grate, I did enjoy Elric a whole lot. And The War Hound and the World's Pain, while having much in common with, say, Weird of the White Wolf, is in no real danger of being mistaken for it.

And Dancers at the End of Time (a delight and a favorite of mine) is in no real danger of being mistaken for anything else.

(In Moorcock's defense, I'd suggest that the formulaic nature of his repeated plot is very much the point he's trying to make. Still, de gustibus.)

Tim, my friend Dave would shout at you, in mock-panic tones, "IT'S NOT GOING TO WORK!!!!"

Dan, you're right about de gustibus (though why we're not allowed to argue that the public transit is too drafty is beyond me). I pretty much hated DET. And I detected more than a whiff of EC in Gloriana.

And it's a good point, about him making a good point (sitting down now, I'll be OK). For me (by which I mean for me, explicitly denying any more universal statement), however, that doesn't make the books interesting to read.

Xopher, you should probably pay me no mind in any case; my threshhold for appreciation of things that hit my Cool Stuff buttons even a little is dangerously low.

(I've never managed to work up a proper hate for Robert Jordan, or The Phantom Menace, despite being told repeatedly and with great enthusiasm all the reasons I should.)

Xopher, I quite understand. For me it's Lou Reed solo albums. For a while there, every album he put out was touted as his return to Velvets-era form, and I would dutifully troop down to the store and buy it, and it would be half-decent at best. Eventually I gave up, and I doubt I'll ever listen to solo Lou again (with the possible exception of Metal Machine Music).

http://www.livejournal.com/users/calimac/21339.html#cutid1

First off, I'm not trying to force you to like F & N. You obviously don't. I'm only pointing out that people can legitimately disagree about the matters which you seem to feel that no reasonable person can reasonably disagree with you on.

Regarding capitalization, conversations, and discussions of sex, it's fine to agree to disagree, but you cannot claim that no one has answered your objections when both I and Sherwood Smith have offered extensive evidence to the contrary. You can say that you continue to disagree, but you can't say that no one has answered them.

Regarding James' politics, I still don't see why you think it's so implausible that a member of the upper class could be a Chartist. A character in a novel does not have to be an average representative of his social group, he just has to be _possible_.

As for the claim that if anything is unusual about a character, it should be explained early and often, I disagree. James is clearly an unusual person from the get-go, so if he has unusual politics, I do not need the author to immediately tell me why. I would assume that there will be an explanation when one would come up naturally, and in fact, there is. Also, what specific political positions does James hold which strike you as implausible for a Chartist?

Regarding the use of first names among friends who are not close relatives, I quote from LAHORE TO LUCKNOW: THE INDIAN MUTINY JOURNAL OF ARTHUR MOFFAT LANG, selected for being the closest to my reach and for no other reason.

"15 February, Jalalabad. Yesterday morning I walked with Taylor and Elliot Brownlow from Bani to Alam Bagh. We found the Engineers encamped on the right near Jalalabad. I found myself again amonst the jolly old set of Engineer officers. Immediately after breakfast Elliot and I walked over to Outram's headquarters and found Walter who was delighted to see us and came out to show us the front."

Elliot and Walter are Lang's friends, so he calls them by their first names. Taylor's just a fellow officer, so he's called by his last name.

Lenny Bailes: Moorcock was the first sf writer to explore what newer readers would now label s-f cliche number #nnnn: "The invention of time travel makes a historian curious about what really happened at the Crucifixion, so he travels back to investigate -- with surprising results."

Hilarity ensues.

Sorry. I've been reading fark lately.

For the many voices of Steve Brust, I'd suggest Agyar, The Phoenix Guard, and one of the Vlad series--maybe Teckla--before you decide whether you like his work.

I would not recommend Teckla as the place to start reading the Vlad books. I think either Jhereg or Taltos would be better, or perhaps Yendi.

I would also add The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars to the list of Brust to try before you give up.

Alex Cohen writes: It's actually a vitally important part of Soldier of the Mist that it was "originally" written in Latin by a native speaker of Latin trying to understand Greek.

Which is true, and my memory flubbed that. But it's also irrelevant to the point; I'm just as happy that it isn't actually written in Latin as I am that it isn't in Koiné.

That it is translated into English is a convention. Wolfe plays with the convention, as he does with so many conventions in his work, but it's still a convention.

If you don't like one, try another.

It was following this dangerous maxim that got me reading more than one book by Jonathan Carrol and Jeffrey Ford. I've learned my lesson. I almost never give up on a book while I'm reading it, but I see very little reason to give an author who's disappointed me once another chance, when there are so many other authors out there waiting for their first chance.

A comment about Freedom and Necessity:

One of my biggest peeves in many books is that the author feels the need to explain *everything* right from the get go. Rather than having backstory fit in as it would be with real people, a bit at a time as it's relevant, it's all lumped at the front. I have read reviews that complain when it isn't all front-loaded, so obviously this isn't a universal taste. But it drives me batty. I'd rather let the answers simmer and develop as they ought than see them dragged out "early and often".

As for the "often"... the single weakest Diana Wynne Jones novel I read was the first book she wrote expressly for adults. The reason being, by her own admission, she believed (Based on the parents of some of her fans) that she needed to explain things to adults three times over that she'd explain once in her children's books. {The reasoning being, children are aware they still have things to learn, and therefore assume they won't know everything the first time through}. This meant the book was grossly overpadded.

Then again, I also refuse to bash romance novels or Robert Jordan, or their fans, in any earnest, because I haven't read enough of either. (I admit I can appreciate seeing others dissect such things, but only because the best grinching is hilarious regardless of target ... I've enjoyed good grinches of books I adore!) Generally, it's undesirable to dismiss something entirely from a position of far less knowledge than your opponent.

Okay, I haven't gone away yet. Soon!

Abigail, I often practice that principle. But it's dangerous. Try Titus Andronicus and give up on Shakespeare? Try Cup of Gold and give up on Steinbeck? Try Mansfield Park and give up on Austin?

The greatest hitters strike out often. If you don't fail now and then, you're not trying very hard.

Oh, I do think the three works above have interesting things in them. But on the "try once and quit" theory, I would stop if those happened to be my first tries.

One thing that fascinates me about Diana Wynne Jones is that her fans love her dearly and rarely agree on which are the best books. That's true to a degree with the fans of most good writers, but it's extreme with Diana.

Anyone who doesn't think FIRE AND HEMLOCK, THE HOMEWARD BOUNDERS, WITCH WEEK, and CHARMED LIFE are among the best fantasy novels ever written, not to mention Diana Wynne Jones' best, has clearly lost their critical faculties. ;)

Abigail, I second Will on this. There's another trap on the other side, as usual. If your first Phillip K. Dick novel was The Zap Gun, chances are you'd never read another.

I seem to have a talent for reading an author's worst, or at any rate least accessible, work first. Joanna Russ? And Chaos Died. Samuel R. Delany? Dhalgren. (I enjoyed both, but didn't pick up any more Russ for years because it was so much work. I kept looking for more explicit sex in Delany (I was 16 when I first read Dhalgren), but didn't find any for a long time...

Rachel, again you are saying things that I either already responded to, or are off-point in some manner. But rather than wearying the gentry any more, I'm taking it to e-mail.

Oh, and I really enjoyed being treated as if I needed to be told who the Chartists were.

I did not know who the Chartists were until a few years ago. From your difficulty believing in James' political views, I assumed that it was because you were not aware that there was a real historical group that held similar ones. Sorry about that. I didn't mean it as an insult, and it never occurred to me that you would take it as one.

Also, I'm assuming lots of people are following this discussion, and that they do not all know about the Chartists. Others have been commenting on it, and some of them haven't read the book. I don't assume that they all know about a fairly obscure, depending on your nationality, historical political movement. Hence, the link.

Calimac, you tell Teresa that she shouldn't take offense at your suggestion that her critical faculties failed her with Freedom & Necessity, and then you get upset when Rachel offers you information about the Chartists? You might consider the possibility that other people may be as quick to take umbrage as you, and might even be more so. Tone on the internet's a damned difficult thing to master. Trust me as one who has failed; I've offended thousands in my time. It's best to make few assumptions in these forums. Few are more dangerous than the assumption that your taste is shared by all discerning people. In my experience, even the most discerning people have their quirks. Perhaps the respect of Patrick, Teresa, Neil, Sylvia, Rachel, Sherwood, and others for Freedom & Necessity is their failure. But, in your place, I'm not sure that I would be so brave as to insist that they are wrong and I am right. Then again, it may be that you share another of my traits, the love of lost causes.

De gustibus is a fine motto, but you need to change subjects after you utter it.

And since I haven't gone away yet:

Dan, you're right that Teckla's a poor choice for a first try of the Vlad series. It's just that it's one of my favorite Brust books. Taltos or Yendi would be better. I think both are more tightly written than Jhereg, which was Steve's first, after all. And, yep, The Sun, The Moon, And The Stars should be on the list, too.

Will, I am reacting to the standards for being upset that have been previously established here. If Teresa can take offense at the mere suggestion that she let her enthusiasms run away with her - something that we all do, so it's not condescending to point it out - I can do likewise at what Rachel has now clarified was the assumption that if I knew about the Chartists I'd have agreed with her, ergo I must not have known about the Chartists. People wanna talk about condescension, and how one can be obviously and blatantly condescending without intending it. I didn't bring the subject up, but it's there now. Well, there ya go.

And the question still remains: where did James get his highly-advanced philosophical ideas from? Not "from the Chartists"; why did he join them in the first place? It's not impossible, but it's highly unusual for a person of his class and background to have joined what was primarily a workingmen's movement. Since Chartist principles are taken for granted by many people of that background and class now, but were highly unusual then, the cautious reader will immediately wonder if we don't have here that extremely common flaw of historical novels, the modern person in the historical setting. If that's not what we have, some explanation as to how that unusual person got so unusual should be provided.

Instead, I'm getting tautologies: James held Chartist principles because he was a Chartist. (Never mind that the principles I was referring to are 20th-century secular humanist philosophy, not 19th-century Chartist politics at all.)

By the way, Will, I do have - as you put it - the bravery to insist that I am right and others are wrong when the "others" are such renowned and esteemed critics as Edmund Wilson and Harold Bloom, and the subject is a certain novel that they unhesitatingly condemn and that Patrick, Teresa, Neil, Sherwood, and I are all outspoken admirers of. I expect you and probably the others you list are admirers of it too. I think you know its name.

Should I be cowed by the mighty literary reputations of Wilson and Bloom? Would you be cowed by them? What if they posted on this blog?

And that dispute is a matter of literary taste. I haven't tried to defend my literary distaste for F&N at all: that is de gustibus. I found it boring, but I've liked other work by Emma and Steve. I adored The Sun, The Moon & the Stars, which just about everybody else I talked to hated. So it goes. This is not about literary taste, this is about factual plausibility, a much more objective subject, to whcih I attach more objective standards. When I read these holes, I thought of the holes Teresa found in American Psycho: not impossibilities, not actual inaccuracies, just implausibilities that insulted the reader's intelligence.

I'm willing to listen to defenses. On a couple subjects (18th-century capitalization, and the use of first names) I've heard good ones. On others, not. And to have some argue that these things are indeed historically plausible, while others say they implausibilities are because characters are lying, and yet others say the implausibilities are an indication of an alternate history, and Sylvia says there's some secret explanation which she hasn't revealed - these contradictory responses don't increase my faith in any of them.

Calimac, people cross class and race lines often for causes that they think just. The charter had, if I remember correctly, six million signers. Among the leaders and supporters of the Chartists were members of the upper class, as well as middle and lower.

No shame in ignorance, mind you. I didn't know a thing about the Chartists until Emma and Steve seized upon them.

I say this for the sake of other people reading this thread. You've made up your mind, "De gustibus" has been said, and I can be dreadful bore.

But because I hate seeing people make errors I've made, I'll try to help you understand why you gave offense, unknowingly or otherwise. You told Teresa, "...perhaps you were so delighted with Freedom & Necessity that you were not able to apply your critical faculties to it." The "perhaps" does not disguise your meaning, especially since you fail to offer any other reason why she might have liked F&N, such as a gentlemanly lie that perhaps you were in error and she was right.

Teresa took your words at face value when she said, "...please don't excuse me for being so pleased with Freedom and Necessity that I let my judgement lapse." A gentleman would have immediately said, lying or no, that he could not imagine Teresa letting her judgement lapse. (That would be easy for me to say. I'm no gentleman, but I know Teresa, and I could never imagine that she had let her judgement lapse. I may not always agree with her taste, but I always respect it and never dismiss it. If she says something is of worth, you may wager all you love that the failure to appreciate it lies in you.)

Instead, you said, "I paid her critical faculties an effusive compliment in the same paragraph." Unfortunately for you, a kiss is remarkably ineffective when it follows a slap.

After that, you offered, "Patrick, there's an old saying, "Even Homer nods." It's not condescending to point out that this might have happened, or to compare Teresa with Homer." Alas, you were not comparing Teresa with Homer. You were comparing Teresa with someone who was asleep, and you pointed to Homer, but you could as easily have pointed to any unconscious creature. Sleep is sleep, and a claim that Teresa has failed to do what she does well is nothing but that.

In short, if you think you have anything of the gentleman in you, you owe her an apology. You needn't say anything about your opinion of Freedom & Necessity; its defenders and detractors have lined up, and those who do not know the work may judge by what each side has said. But you would do well to apologize for the way in which you have been defending your attack.

"I am reacting to the standards for being upset that have been previously established here. If Teresa can take offense at the mere suggestion that she let her enthusiasms run away with her--"

David, Teresa's only comment on this entire dustup was nine days ago, when she said, in total:

"David, please don't excuse me for being so pleased with Freedom and Necessity that I let my judgement lapse. It makes my scales itch."

This is a remarkably soft answer to a performance on your part so remarkable that it dropped jaws on multiple continents.

Now you're using it to justify getting huffy at Rachel Brown, evidently on the theory that if you start behaving like an even bigger dick everybody will suddenly realize how mistreated you really are.

Tell me, do you find this strategy works in other areas of your life?

Thanks, Will. Thanks, Patrick. I am surely fallible; but the ability to leave your judgement up and running in TiVO-mode while you wallow in the initial enjoyment of a work is one of those basic editorial skills.

Bad things happen when you fib to yourself about what you like, and why.

Will, no, I don't have the gentlemanly arts, and I'm sorry about that. But my goal here was not to dance a polite dance with Teresa, nor was it to be impolite either. It was to find out whether an explanation could be presented for what I perceived as the badness of a book so remarkable the question has been burning a hole in my pocket ever since the book came out. I've never gotten much of an answer, and I still haven't gotten one.

Patrick, and how big a dick are you? Do you find such dressing-downs as this one to be effective in other areas of your life?

Actually, my reaction was not so much to Teresa's comment but to all the other people who jumped in to say I was being condescending, only Will of whom has provided any explanation of what that might mean. And I do apologize for not making that clear.

Subsequent flailings have been the result of raw frustration at not getting decent answers to my questions. I can't make Teresa write one of her long essays to explain her judgment of F&N, and I have no right to expect her to, but I sure wish she would. I have no doubt that she would provide a definitive response.

But if anything I said before Teresa's comment caused multiple jaws to drop, those people must be walking around with permanently dropped jaws, because denunciations of books that everybody else seems to love, and implications that judgments on both sides are terminally faulty, are so common in the SF community as not to be remarkable at all.

"Instead, I'm getting tautologies: James held Chartist principles because he was a Chartist. (Never mind that the principles I was referring to are 20th-century secular humanist philosophy, not 19th-century Chartist politics at all.)"

Actually, you've been told by at minimum two different people that there is an explanation for the above (either one) IF you read the rest of the book. Your assertion in reply seems to be that "if it isn't in the first 90 pages it isn't there", or that somehow, those who say there is one later but don't give the details are lying.

I can't speak for others, but I'm not giving details because while I remember some of them, enough to know they are present, it's been about two years since I read it last, and I don't trust my memory enough not to make my own mistakes - mistakes which you would immediately use, if the previous bits of the conversation are anything to go by, as definitive proof that the explanations don't exist at all.

I'm not suggesting you go look for them yourself - if some of the things James says early on irk you, some of Susan's later letters will make you throw the book across the room and retrieve it just so you can throw it again.

Incidentally, aren't most of those speculating on alternate history people who've read even less of the book than you? While most of the people who've asserted historical plausibility have read the book and appear to have knowledge of the time. Yet you seem to be giving their arguments equal weight, at least insofar as allowing the contradiction between them to support your view.

Will:

I'll merrily debate with anyone which are Diana's best and worst books, to be sure (Although I have a rough list of about five books that so far seem to have gleaned the most votes for best, I've rarely heard anyone talk about which they thought were her worst).

But my point this time wasn't that the given book was her worst, it was that this was the book whose particular flaw she has actually discussed as being based on {her interpretation of} audience expectations. And my point in mentioning it here was about those same aspects of audience expectation: the desire to have explanation delivered "early and often", whether it's good for the book in question or not.

In a roundabout way, I was saying that Freedom and Necessity would probably be worse harmed by insisting on front-loading the explanation instead of pacing it out, especially as the one reader present desiring that they do so is the a reader who already dislikes the book for unrelated reasons.

Calimac, you consistently fall back on the argument that "Freedom & Necessity" is implausible, therefore it's bad. But there is no requirement that works of sf and fantasy be plausible.

It may be implausible that a gentleman of the 19th Century should believe in the principles of 20th/21st Century secular humanism. But it's even MORE implausible that races of hobbits, dwarfs, elves and men lived and warred in distant prehistory. Or that many seemingly ordinary Enlish children attend schools for wizards.

Ask a bunch of fans why they read sf and fantasy, and I guarantee you NONE of them will say, "I'm looking for good, plausible literature."

Full disclosure: I didn't care for "F&N" either.

Not having read the book, I have no opinion on F&N, but I have to disagree with your general statement, Mitch. Most of us compartmentalize our disbelief when we read. Suspending disbelief in magic, aliens, superhuman powers, or any other SFF trope is easy, if only because we've grown accustomed to it. Suspending disbelief in bad characterization, anachronisms, and characters who hold political views far too progressive for their eras is a different, and far more difficult matter. A book doesn't have to have a plausible premise, but it does have to be internally consistent - without that consistency, the narrative spell is broken, and the reader can't connect to the text. I think most readers, regardless of genre preference, are looking for that kind of plausibility.

Upon further reflection, I'll go even further and say that it isn't just SFF readers who are capable - and willing - to suspend disbelief in implausible premises. After all, there are any number of mainstream novels with highly implausible premises - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or Possession, for example. What matters is that the author proceed from that premise in a plausible manner.

I'll also point out that forgiving anachronisms or bad characterization on the grounds that a book is SFF comes dangerously close to the 'a wizard did it' defense.

Mitch Wagner writes: Calimac, you consistently fall back on the argument that "Freedom & Necessity" is implausible, therefore it's bad. But there is no requirement that works of sf and fantasy be plausible.

Now, not having read F&N I'm arguing general principles here - but - this is nonsense. Any given work of SF or fantasy needs to be plausible in the context of the universe[s]-of-discourse in which the story is set. Otherwise disbelief is not, as I once heard Gardner Dozois put it, suspended, but hanged by the neck until dead.

In the case of a historical fantasy, which I gather F&N is, there are two basic "families" - the "open" historical fantasy, in which the story takes place in a world which is clearly divergent from ours; and the "secret" historical fantasy, in which the fantastic element is part of a "secret history," which, if true, would not change our history books because the historians wouldn't know about it.

Again, not having read F&N I don't know which class it falls into. But if it's the latter, then historical plausibility becomes part of the larger universe-of-discourse plausibility. If it's the former, then it is held to the lower standard of internal plausibility...

What Abigail said. Mitch, that's a silly argument. There's a basic level of if-that-then-this plausibility that just about all SF and fantasy fans look for amidst the audacious, outrageous, or plainly silly matter of our favored literature. Pointing to hobbits as if they justify intellectual sloppiness is way off the beam.

David, yes, I find that sticking up for my spouse when people are misbehaving themselves toward her is generally a pretty good thing to do, thanks for asking.

Teresa dealt with the original remark quite graciously, and I probably would have left it at that if you hadn't insisted on mischaracterizing her response--in defense of your own bad behavior toward an innocent third party, of all things.

"...denunciations of books that everybody else seems to love, and implications that judgments on both sides are terminally faulty, are so common in the SF community as not to be remarkable at all."

Yeah, I hear that most women in the SF community just love having men tell them "you're full of shit but it's okay because probably your little head is all confused." Let us know how this works out for you.

Leonora, my apologies for making it look as if I was quibbling with your point. I agree entirely that some readers want to have things explained up front and some readers want to figure things out as they go along. F&N is a very bad choice for readers of the first sort.

I suspect that since you used Diana as an illustration, I seized her also when I wanted to note that writers' fans do not need to agree. (I always have the most perverse reaction when someone compliments a book of mine that I consider a failure. I want to say, "Good god, that sucked! Please try (one of the three that make me feel as if I know something about writing)!" But, at the same time, I'm delighted that something that didn't work for me still resonated with a reader.)

Calimac, if it's true that you only read 90 pages of F&N, you should be aware that you sound much like those people who read the first part of Huckleberry Finn and refuse to consider the possibility that it's not racist. Endings matter, and so does subtext, and while it's perfectly fine to say that you didn't choose to finish a book, there's something intellectually suspect about claiming you needn't know a thing to damn it. You should also be aware that you do not sound like someone who wants to be shown what he missed. You sound like someone who wants everyone to admit that he's right. That may not be your intention; it's why I've suggested an apology is in order. And, at this point, I suggest you reread your part of the entire conversation and consider how you would feel if someone had blithely assumed you had failed to do your job in a most egregious manner. And, really, don't be afraid to resort to "de gustibus." It's a wonderful escape. It'll be my final word on this: De gustibus.

Will - In the realm of over the net misinterpretation, let me just make it clear my response was meant to be read in a friendly tone. Not that you seemed to miss it, but I was recently badly stung by not making that clear, so now I'm being over-paranoid.

"(I always have the most perverse reaction when someone compliments a book of mine that I consider a failure. I want to say, "Good god, that sucked! Please try (one of the three that make me feel as if I know something about writing)!" But, at the same time, I'm delighted that something that didn't work for me still resonated with a reader.)"

It probably resonated with you, too, as you were working on it. Everything you've written, even Never Never which was half rewritten prior work, reads like you both had fun doing it and sweated blood trying to get it right. (And as for Never Never, I read it before I read the source stories, or even registered that there were previously published bits - I got into Bordertown via the novels - and I thought the structure odd but successful. I was actually looking at the Fast Forwards at one point while trying to figure out how to do a good quick "time passes" scene).

Lenora, glad for the clarification about the Diana citations. I also try very hard not to give unintentional offense (which can lead to an over-qualified style that gives unintentional offense, but there you are).

I'm glad you liked the Fast Forwards! I was rather proud of 'em, though some readers found them extremely annoying. I like to think that a good book is going to really annoy some readers. But it seems to be a nearly universal phenomenon among writers that if you hear ninety-nine people loved what you did and one had a few reservations, you'll walk around thinking, "What's wrong with my work? Why didn't that jerk like it? Shouldn't my work be good enough that even a jerk would like it? I should get a job writing software." Most of us soon get back to "you can't please everyone" and press on.

Calimac: Subsequent flailings have been the result of raw frustration at not getting decent answers to my questions.

You need to ask better questions.

Over on your LiveJournal, the points you bring up seem to be a mix of (1) alleged inaccuracies of historical manner, (2) complaints about certain writing clichés, and (3) offenses against your personal taste. You’ve actually got a good minor point or two, like the bit where you complain about Susan defending herself in her own ciphered journal against some hypothetical future reader’s disbelief in her ability to accurately recall long conversations.

But then there’s your complaint about James describing his sexual escapades in a personal letter. You cite two period pieces — Wuthering Heights and the letters of Lord Byron. The first is irrelevant — a work written by for publication could obviously not be as raunchy as a private letter.

The second you seem to have brought up only as an example of where you thought the furthest edge was of what might get written in that period (for a very broad value of “that period”, since Byron died decades before the period in which Freedom & Necessity is set); in your follow-up you dismiss Byron as “neither Victorian nor a gentleman”, which means you’ve provided zero points of actual evidence to buttress your claim. Meanwhile, Sartorais has pointed out that you’ve underestimated the amount of detail Byron actually included in his letters, further undermining your argument by demonstrating that your grasp on your subject matter isn’t as firm as you’d thought.

Do you see why you’re not attracting good replies?

Xopher writes of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion books:
The plots are so formulaic that there's one chapter that appears word for word in four different books.

This sounds like you're talking about the "Sailor on the Seas of Fate" bit? That's kind of unfair: it wasn't a result of applying plot formula, it was the result of doing a crossover! Four different heroes all met and adventured together. Which of them should omit the incident from their books and thus confuse readers who haven't read the other series?

Nor is the chapter repeated word-for-word in all of them. The narration is different, and each version of the chapter has some bits of dialogue that aren't in the others. There is dialogue that is repeated word-for-word, yes, but after all it is the same scene in each, just from different points of view.

There's nothing wrong with disliking Moorcock's heroic fantasy, and certainly there are plenty of valid complaints to be made against his books. I don't see any reason to go and make invalid ones.

(Oh, and it's three books rather than four.)

I'm boggled at arguments over the plausibility of a character with ideas too advanced for their era, or too radical for their class, and a sex life too unregulated for either, in a discussion of a book that has, as another character, Frederick Engels.

There's certainly that.

Hmm, David, I have a memory of sitting down and comparing the (you're probably right it was only) three books -- but then I have memories of things that could not possibly have happened. It makes a huge difference, too, because doing a crossover to save writing a chapter is one thing, and doing a crossover from different POVs is a different, and much better thing.

I don't suppose it's possible he rewrote the scenes in two of the books after I read them...thought of this, then said "Rewrote them? Moorcock?!?" So I'm forced into the uncomfortable position of deciding that I must be Just Plain Wrong.

Happens a lot really. Nothing to see here. Move along.

BTW I used to be a Moorcock fan too. Considered writing a 12-tone opera about Elric; got as far as a row, set his famous cry to Arioch, then realized "An opera? I couldn't finish the simplest cloth-eared art-song, and I think I can write an opera? On what planet?" and gave up.

Will, the Fast Forwards are indeed quite well done. (I just reread Elsewhere, Nevernever, and "Danceland" this weekend, so it's fresh in my head.) The parentheticals, however, annoyed me somewhat, as much because they weren't part of Ron's style in the first book as anything. Something about the "you can skip this" disingenuosity didn't quite sound on tune, to my ear.

---L.

Ken, I read your comment to Emma, who said, "Thank you, Ken!" and then reminded me of a few of the highlights of Engel's life. (The only other bit from this thread that I passed on to her was Neil's, 'cause it was funny.) I do wonder if someone has already done an essay titled, "Everything you know about the Victorians is wrong."

L.H., I'm already feeling a bit gauche for having mentioned my own work, so I'll just say that there's no higher compliment than being reread--heck, even if it's by someone who hates the work so much that it's purely for the sake of evisceration, having someone give you their time twice is a great honor.

And I do take your point. What bothers me about the two books is that Yeats' American publisher insisted on being paid a royalty for the use of the quotations, and I was so pissed that I decided not to put any in the second book. Which, I think, led me to the subconscious conclusion that the Ron who wrote the second book had changed from the one who wrote the first. When Harcourt republished Elsewhere this year, they asked me to pay Yeats' publisher again, and I started trying to decide whether to simply cut the Yeats' quotes or try to find someone in the public domain to replace 'em. And then, happy day, the Harcourt folks found that the American copyrights had finally expired. So I'm thinking of doing a third Ron book someday, partly just to address the little differences in voice between the two books.

Enough about me!

So ... does this discussion of "reader contract" and "reader expectations" (http://www.livejournal.com/users/sartorias/34198.html)
have any relevancy to anything anyone is saying here...?

I think Calimac's problems with F&N are part of a thing I call the Tiffany problem.

Tiffany is a legitimate medieval name, an Anglicization of Theophania. It's recorded as early as the thirteenth century, and it's reasonable to assume that Theophanias in the twelfth century were probably called Tiffany at home.

Nevertheless, any alert and astute twenty-first century reader of a novel set in England in the thirteenth century is going to throw it across the room if they run across the limpid blue-eyes and tripping feet of Tiffany, because they know it's a really dumb anachronism. The fact that they're wrong doesn't matter a hoot -- they know it, and all the footnotes and scholarly tomes in the world won't make them pick the book up again. They're never going to forgive such a stupid and obvious error, even if it's their own.

It's hard enough to be authentic, without worrying about current perceptions, though it is a good idea to keep a wary eye out for wild Tiffanies.

If not for Greer Gilman I'd have used "scampering" in a play purporting to be Elizabethan English, and "scampering" (who know?) is actually an eighteenth century word.

OTOH, people use the name Fiona even in the SCA, but it's a 19th Century invention.

And Jessica was Shakespeare's invention....

---L.

Ms Walton: I question very much whether calimac's problems are related to the "tiffany problem." I am aware of the problem (though I'd never heard it called by this elegant name, nor heard this particular example, before), but, yes, there is this tension between real historical accuracy and accuracy to the received version of history. (Quinn Yarbro plays with this very nicely, at times, looking for modern-seeming details of historical venues and featuring them in her St-Germain novels.)

Anyway, there's a fairly good reason to doubt that this is the issue here: Calimac is a historian. A librarian by profession, but he majored in history in college, and still reads copious amounts of history, particularly British and American.

I've known him for ... well, for slightly longer than he's been in fandom. Time measured in decades rather than years. And I've discovered two things about him.

First, when he's convinced of his rightness, he will not back down; he has a kind of recklessness about this that I've never been sure whether it was a failure to perceive that he's costing himself, or simple refusal to count the cost (which is one definition of "courage").

The other is that when he's convinced of his rightness in a matter of facts, he generally is. In multiple decades I can count on one hand the times I've caught him in an error when he's made a flat statement of fact.

I've not read F&N and for all I know it may be a very good book indeed. Nonetheless, I suggest that Calimac's reasons for disliking it so much that he could not even finish reading it are probably factually valid ... whether or not they would be reasons for anyone else is another question, one of taste.

Hm. It looks to me like Calimac will back down, but not admit to having done so. Look at this exchange (snippets for brevity's sake; context here and here):

Calimac: Maybe Lord Byron - who was a cad - might have written a decorous "Rose granted me her favors last night" in a letter [...]
Sartorias: Have you read Byron's letters? I have--I reread them every two or three years. He says some pretty down and dirty stuff [...]
Calimac: She cites Byron. But Byron was neither Victorian nor a gentleman, which is what we're supposed to have here.

In other words:
Cal: Even Byron wouldn't have been this undecorous.
Sar: I've read Byron. He was even more undecorous.
Cal: Um, but Byron's a bad example!

Sturgeonslawyer -- I'm not unfamiliar with history myself, and I have read F&N without seeing the problems with it that Calimac does. I do have some problems with the characters' American sense of the size of Britain and the ease of moving about in it, which is something no US author but John M. Ford has ever got right. I also have some issues with the end, which is outside of what Calimac has read. What Calimac's been saying -- well, as Ken MacLeod pointed out, James is a friend of Engels. Consider Engels's life.

It isn't possible to write an authentic Victorian novel now. There isn't even any point in trying. Anything written now is modern and postmodern by definition, it's written outside that world and looking at it from our perspective. It's still possible to be true to the period, and I think Brust and Bull did their best to do that and generally succeeded.

Calimac has a perfect right not to like the book, though not to deride other people's intellect for liking it, but do I think however many times he has been right in the past and however much history he knows, I still think he's suffering from the Tiffany problem here.

Jo Walton: I do have some problems with the characters' American sense of the size of Britain and the ease of moving about in it....

How so? Do the authors make Britain too big? Too small?

Do the authors make Britain too big? Too small?

I assume she is referring to the proverbial difference between Britain and the USA: Over here, we think that 100 years ago is a long time; and over there, they think that 100 miles away is a long way. Without having read F&N, I assume that she feels the characters move about the country — or contemplate the notion of moving about the country — more casually than they ought to have.

If I recall Jo correctly from conversations, Ray is right.

Ah.

I recall noticing that myself in F&N. I didn't think of it as un-British, though I did think it was anachronistic. Even here in the U.S., in the 19th Century, people didn't move around that much.

I thought of the characters of F&N as being remarkable people for their place and time. They were forerunners of 20th and 21st Century people. Unlike Mr. "I Notice These Things Because I Have A Brain The Size Of A Planet And You Don't" Calimac, I did not view these elements as flaws--I thought they were one of the themes of the novel.

Mitch -- Yes. If you're setting anything in Britain, assume it's the same size as the US, with huge invisible psychological gulfs between places. Britain's only six hundred miles long, but people tend to have the attitude that going twenty miles in a direction they don't go all the time is actually a long way and to be thought about. Living in Lancaster, I'd go down to South Wales all the time, to see my aunt. But if you asked me to go to Newcastle (which is probably a hundred miles, I don't even know, maybe less) but possible on regular and reliable trains with only one change (in Carlisle) and which I could probably reach in two or three hours -- well, I'd hesitate, because I've never been there, and it would seem as far away as the moon.

As for being C.20 people -- there's a lovely comment in John Fowles _The French Lieutenant's Woman_ (one of the best Victorian novels written in the C.20 in my opinion) in which he says words to the effect of "It's sometimes possible to recognize a face or an expression from a previous age, but never, of course, from a future one." He's saying Sarah is like a C.20 woman, and acting for the same reasons, because people in the end are in fact people. I've thought about that "expressions from a future age" thing a lot with reference to SF. We know -- or think we know, don't forget Tiffany -- the expressions, the range of expressions, that we'd expect to see from previous centuries. What will the future think ours are -- and what might theirs be?

Even here in the U.S., in the 19th Century, people didn't move around that much Hamlin Garland, Mark Twain, The Virginian, the settled lifestyle of Little House on the Prairie? The Santa Fe trail ran through my grandfather's farm but the family mostly followed the Oregon Trail.

For scale I am reminded of friends of mine, she's from Appenzell, he speaks fluent German. They can easily walk from where he speaks the same language as the folks around him to where she has to write it down for him - speaking German all the way. I've heard tales of foks from the ~shire being as hard to understand in English.

Clark E. Meyers - Are you just nitpicking, or are you saying that people in the 19th Century were as mobile as we are today?

Sure, some people in the 19th Century did travel, but not as many or as easily as today. I commute several times a year between California and New York, I doublt many--or maybe even ANY--19th Century Americans would do the same. I'm unusual, but my travel patterns certainly aren't rare.

I've avoided saying anything specifically about F&N since Steve's one of my favorite people and Emma's my very most favorite person of all. But I must point out that this is not a book about typical people doing typical things in the 19th century, and if that's what you expect, you will be disappointed.

Nobody in history, including us a few years ago, is so mobile as we are today in terms of total mileage - of going to and fro in the world if you will.

On the other hand time was when in Georgia gone to Texas amounted to a legal divorce/abandonment - in terms of psychological distance immeasurably greater. People did say good bye more or less forever and do silly things - consider the hand cart traffic to Utah.

I intend to contradict the statement that in the area of the United States in the 19th Century people didn't move around that much presuming no abstract standard but by contrast to a European model (where the big move if any may have been to North America).

It's not my field and I don't have lots of references to hand so feel free to explain that most people stayed put and few moved.

It's possible that by head many people stayed in the cities - certainly by area the greater part of the area was filled by people who moved in and moved on - all in the 19 century.

I'll still argue that the fraction who moved was much much greater in the country than in Europe - the Appenzell family mentioned above gets a state (Cantonal) subsidy to keep their 400 year old farmhouse in shape - my family's farms have all been developed.

Certainly taking Turner and the end of the frontier the whole country was populated and backfilled in the 19th Century. Consider for another example the life and career of Billy the Kid from life as Harry on the streets of New York to the proverbial lone prairie. Of course some Europeans have always traveled - Captain John Smith of Pocahontas fame had travelled extensively, including the middle east (log cabins were from Anatolia?) IIRC, before landing in North America.

Clark: "I intend to contradict the statement that in the area of the United States in the 19th Century people didn't move around that much presuming no abstract standard but by contrast to a European model (where the big move if any may have been to North America).

I don't understand the preceding paragraph. Paraphrase, please?

Yes, people certainly were mobile in the 19th Century--previous centuries too. But they did not typically undertake journeys as large as the ones we casually undertake today--and the ones that the characters of F&N undertake. Travel was a Big Deal then, in a way that it's not today.

In that respect, F&N is unrealistic. That's not a flaw in F&N, though.

Transportation technology was just a part of it. Communications technology helps you keep in touch with the folks back home in a way it was harder to do back then. You can read your hometown newspaper on the Internet.

My brother-in-law and sister-in-law live in a college town a couple of hundred miles outside of Bangkok, Thailand. Takes them three days to travel from there to the U.S., or vice-versa: one day by car to Bangkok, stay there overnight, then fly to Hong Kong, stay overnight again, then the long flight from Hong Kong to either LA or Newark. If they go to LA they'll often make a side-trip to visit my wife and me in San Diego, adding at least one more night to the trip.

And yet my sister-in-law phoned Julie the other day and they talked as casually as you please. More than that--my b-i-l was getting his license renewed at the Thai offices of the motor vehicle bureau over there--his wife was sitting in chairs, waiting for him to be done, and pulled out the cell phone and called Julie--literally on the other side of the world--to kill time, the same as I might do with a friend who lived just a few miles away. I did similar things in Britain many times. I remember at one point calling my Dad from a pub in ... well, I don't recall where in Britain it was ... to wish him a happy birthday.

That kind of thing NEVER fails to give me a big jolt of sensawunda.

Paraphrase - Not knowing of any numbers to check that much against - that is being totally unable to say whether total miles or total miles per head or total heads traveling is above or below some agreed upon value nevertheless I will use examples to suggest that compared to common practice in Western Europe folks in the greater part of the United States during the greater part of the 19th Century traveled a great deal. Journey into the unknown is as large as a journey gets.

At the beginning of the 19th Century the North West Territory was east of the Mississippi - see e.g. Ohio University, Athens Ohio the first university in the NW Territory.

At the end of the 19th Century the NW was Seattle and everything in between had been settled and plowed. Substantially all those folks had traveled including folks just moving or being moved to reservations. Moreover the American language had been pretty much nationalized. See Johnny Carson as the epitome of the national dialect or cf telemarketing dialect.

Compare this to an island where travel was so restrained that pockets of mutually unintellgible dialect all called English persist to this day (leaving the Celtic entirely aside ) - bearing in mind that continuing with literary references travel from London to Gretna Green for marriage was an easy trip indeed - Land's End to John O'Groats is as noted an easy trip.

I am not talking about any novels here I am talking about travel in 19th Century America. Everybody in my family traveled and all their friends and neighbors did too.

I see examples of ease of travel/comunications today which is certainly true. Indeed I have long argued/lamented that big cities today have more in common with each other than they do with their own hinterlands. I haven't seen any statements about ease or volume of travel in North America in the 19th century - at the beginning of the 19th Century it was the War of 1812 - at the end it was the Spanish American War and the occupation of the Phillapines - we traveled.

Clark: I intend to contradict the statement that in the area of the United States in the 19th Century people didn't move around that much presuming no abstract standard but by contrast to a European model (where the big move if any may have been to North America).

I can't quite figure out why you're bothering to contradict that statement, since Mitch's posts have made it clear that he was comparing the travelling habits of 19th-century Americans to those of modern Americans, not of 19th-century Europeans. Note how, in the original post of his that you were quoting, he wrote "I didn't think of it as un-British, though I did think it was anachronistic" -- a distinction of time, not of place.

My apologies as appropriate - I understood a statement that even in the United States people did not travel all that much in the 19th century and I took exception to that statement. I suggest that in the United States people did travel that much in the 19th century and in Western Europe people didn't - much as the condition continued. Folks who set out to cross the continental divide with handcarts were not likely to walk back to visit friends left behind but many were still alive when the railroads came.

Yes, Clark, I did say that people in the United States in the 19th Century did not travel all that much--compared with people in the United States today, and compared with the characters in F&N. And I'll stand by it.

People like Mark Twain were exceptional, and immigrants were making a life-altering decision, and neither Mark Twain nor immigrants could pop from one coast to the other for a business meeting or a family visit, and back home again without so much as having to do a load of laundry while away from home.

Of course, people are completely free to decide after 90 pages that they just don't like a book, and to have reasons for it that other people disagree with.

But after rereading the problems Calimac has with Freedom and Necessity (one of mypet peeves is turning everything into initials. Too often, I come in late to a dsicussion and it takes an archaeologist's diligence to figuree out what everybody's talking about -- less often, but still too damned often for me, the full title never was mentioned in the first place, and I'm forced to ask in a wee shy voice what the hell everybody's talking about) --

Where was I? Okay, right. Objections: (1)Women wouldn't be that forward. (2) Gentlemanly gentlemen wouldn't have told the tale in a letter. (3) Epistolary novels shouldn't have extensive direct quotations from conversations because real people can't remember that much. (4) No gentleman could have been a Chartist.

Well, okay, we've got Frederick Engels for a mighty counterexample to #4, right in the book, and boy, did I ever love Engels in this book. And for #3, can I suggest a counterexample -- my favorite epistolary novel, the only good one ever written by Bram Stoker -- Dracula, in which many conversations are directly quoted? And for #2 and #1, I think it's just silly to say that because there was a well-publicized ideal of reticence, that therefore nobody ever hopped in the sack with strangers and nobody ever spoke frankly of it. British folksongs are full of this kind of thing.

Okay, I come clean too: I adored Freedom and Necessity. I had some troubles with some of it -- apparently not the same that some others had -- but it was tremendous fun, in general. I have a proper noun problem at the moment -- I want to say that the psychic young woman's entries irritated me, but I can't remember her name. I tried skipping parts of them, but generally had to go back and read them -- fortunately they got easier to read as time went on. And everybody else was lots of fun to read.

But -- I think any book that can trot out Engels as a straight-talking Yoda has got my vote.

Lucy Kemnitzer: hey. Its you. Cool.

Jonathan Strange is out. It's a very pretty book. You have a choice of two covers. One is dark on light, and the other is light on dark.

For some reason, the books come shrink-wrapped. Does anyone know why Bloomsbury does this? I had to bring a copy to the information desk to have it unwrapped. The poor man tore at the stuff until his jaw ached, and he so wanted to use his teeth. I felt for him.

"The poor man tore at the stuff until his jaw ached, and he so wanted to use his teeth. "

Of course, the first half of this sentence had me thinking he was using his teeth, and wondering if the shrink wrap was that tough.

Looking forward to it - but not for about 3 weeks as I promised I wouldn't rush back to the bookstore and splurge until my special order came in. I did just buy one more sturdy bookcase, though.

I just have to say that if Susanna sells movie rights to Jojnathan Strange, she had better sell them to Merchant Ivory. The sense of historical period in the novel is excellent, and the magic to mores ratio is just about right.

The last book of historic fiction that I enjoyed this much was Neil Stephensons' "Quicksilver".

Not a big "Quicksilver" fan, me. It has too much ... everything. I got about halfway through it and put it aside a few days ago to read something (literally and figuratively) lighter. I have to admit I may never come back.

Of course, the first half of this sentence had me thinking he was using his teeth, and wondering if the shrink wrap was that tough.

It was—he used a letter opener in the end. I was trying to capture the expression induced by tugging on the shrink-wrap, but I missed the mark.

Spotted paperback copies of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell on the shelves during Thursday Night Shopping this week. I tried to lift one up, but gave up in case I dropped, damaged, & had to buy it.
They are thicker than my index finger is long.
Maybe that's why those were shrinkwrapped (the ones I saw here weren't). If someone tried to pick up part of one, the rest might tear the cover, and they are quite awkward to heft.

I've carried "Quicksilver," which is 1,000+ pages hardcover, across the United States three time since July, and every time I do I wish I'd bought the e-book.