Some people can't deal with fantasy. I don't know why. They're occasionally the same people who can't deal with reality if it's outside their sphere of experience, in which case I suppose what they want is a fiction less strange than truth.

Like a holiday resort, maybe.

It's the people who don't like fantasy or fantastic elements who *aren't* like that that I find trickier to understand, the ones for whom it isn't xenophobia but some sort of principle about facts, except that they draw the line somewhere I wouldn't draw it, and I don't get their criteria.

Posted August 13, 2005 10:58 AM by Vassilissa

I've notticed that reviewers that are used to dealing with the transparency of Serious Fiction have trouble accepting the reality of metaphores in genre fiction. These are the same people who are baffled, just baffled, that Harry Potter is so popular among adults as well as children. It's as if they can't grasp a story unlss the author tells them the theme outright.

Posted August 13, 2005 10:59 AM by Keith

I've noticed that reviewers that are used to dealing with the transparency of Serious Fiction have trouble accepting the reality of metaphors in genre fiction.

I dunno. I don't read that much Serious Fiction, but a good chunk of what I do read doesn't exactly count as "transparent." If you look through the Serious Fiction section at your local big-box store, you'll find plenty of well-reviewed novels featuring ghosts, and angels, and mystical occurances, and narrative structures so convoluted as to make Kelly Link's stories look like a shopping list.

I'd prefer to just say that some reviewers are boneheads, and leave it at that.

Posted August 13, 2005 11:16 AM by Chad Orzel

Geez. You'd think a NYT reviewer could at least judge a book by its cover. Didn't the Gothgirl with Ferret give him the tiniest clue?

Posted August 13, 2005 11:35 AM by TexAnne

There seems to be a desire to keep fantasy at a safe distance by treating it as metaphoric.

Ummmmm...does that make sense?

Posted August 13, 2005 11:49 AM by Randolph Fritz

I got into a rather heated argument a few months back with someone who was insisting that Tooth and Claw was good because "it isn't really about dragons." I said that it was too really about dragons, and that it would have been a much worse novel if it had not been really about dragons. "But I mean, really about dragons," said the other person. And I said yes, really about dragons. It didn't matter how many kinds of typographical emphasis she attempted to vocalize: Tooth and Claw is about dragons.

It also does other things, but if every little thing in it was a metaphor for man's inhumanity to radishes or some damn thing, it would suck.

Posted August 13, 2005 11:55 AM by Mris

When I'm in a particularly bitchy mood, I tend to suspect that the sort of reader/reviewer who has trouble understanding that zombies in sf and fantasy are meant to be actual, real, materially present zombies in addition to whatever freight of meaning and metaphor they may be dragging in their shuffling wake is the sort of reader who is unwilling to step backwards toward childhood long enough to play a wholehearted game of Let's Pretend.

When I'm feeling even bitchier than that, I tend to suspect that the people who worry most about being forced to relinquish their Grownup Society Membership Cards are the very ones who are the least secure in their possession of same.

Posted August 13, 2005 12:27 PM by Debra Doyle

Hehe... Sometimes, a zombie is just a zombie.

... and sometimes IT WANTS TO EAT YOUR BRAINS!!

Posted August 13, 2005 12:46 PM by Jacob Lefton

John Clute and Gary Wolfe gave a great Intersection panel on the paradigm shift (in the precise Kuhnian sense) underway in Science Fiction. It involves precisely this change in the protocol of reading Science Fiction, in terms of literal versus metaphoric, historical versus ahistorical, ironic versus straight, and in whether or not one believes in progress and the Enlightenment program. I found their brilliant presentation to be deeply disturbing, so much so that I subsequently dreamed of follow-up questions beyond those that I actually asked, and the panelists dreamed replies.

Posted August 13, 2005 1:29 PM by Jonathan Vos Post

I'd say all fiction is something like metaphor. Why then doubly emphasize the level of abstraction? To say that dragons are a metaphor of something already metaphoric? There's something very odd in the reasoning there.

Posted August 13, 2005 1:31 PM by Randolph Fritz

I'm a huge fan of Diana Wynne Jones, and try to push her books onto anyone I meet who hasn't heard of her. I lent "Fire and Hemlock" to a friend, and looked forward to hearing the inevitable rapturous response. But she frowned as she returned my book, and said that she thought the magical stuff hadn't really worked as a way of explaining the parents' divorce. I thought she was just a lone oddbod, but I see now that this is a fairly common thing.

Posted August 13, 2005 2:15 PM by Madeline Kelly

But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent. And that is not surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be only another view of adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar. The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both.

J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories

It seems to me possible that this split between the zombie entirely metaphorical and the zombie leaving tooth-scrapes on the green bone of your skull is much the same thing as Beowulf's dragon and a great many other ancestors in disbelief.

I think it has something to do with the incantory power of the adjective -- do you trust that you shall know what is, and what is not, of material possibility, or do you maintain so well as you are able the map as the territory of the material, and seek not to stray?

Posted August 13, 2005 2:15 PM by Graydon

But it doesn't fit into the Little Genre Boxes!

And let's face it, an awful lot of lit'rary types simply don't want to dabble in what they consider to be inferior forms of literature. Confronted with a speculative fiction story or novel they enjoyed, they dub the fantastical elements 'metaphorical', or simply call the work hard to categorize. Mustn't admit one actually liked ess-ef, darling.

Posted August 13, 2005 2:28 PM by mythago

It looks to me like the Revolution of the 12th Century, turned backwards and inside-out. Knight and his ilk seem distressed at the idea of something being real within an imagined world that is not also real within ours, which could be taken as a sort of inverted Platonism: "I've never seen a shadow that shape, so there cannot possibly exist an object that would cast such a shadow; don't waste my time telling stories about it." Meanwhile, we Aristotelians stand around scratching our heads and wondering why Those People can't follow a simple statement in the language of modal logic.

Posted August 13, 2005 2:34 PM by Metal Fatigue

I don't think that readers who don't get what fantasy is doing are defensive, or distressed about genre, or snobby, or anything: I think they're unversed in the conventions of the genre and unused to the sensations that fantasy readers enjoy.

I think it's probably dangerous to impute more than that to those readers, in the same way that it is dangerous to read fantasy with nonfantasy eyes.

Posted August 13, 2005 2:51 PM by Lucy Kemnitzer

I've got one: only one person on my LJ friends-list (that I know of) did not like Batman Begins. She's a fan, and she was feeling a bit left out of the squee exploding right across LJ because of it. And she and I talked about it, and it turned out that what she liked about the other Batman movies (her introduction to Batman - she's not up on the comics) was the irony, the camp. And that that's an essential part of the fun for her.

And the lack of irony was what I and a lot of other people *did* like about Batman Begins. It took the story seriously. It was still funny, and it still acknowledged how much crack the whole idea is on, but it didn't keep turning around and winking. It was prepared to let the story stand on its own. I found myself quoting W.S. Gilbert at her and saying "The essence of the burlesque is absolute seriousness."

Anyway, my point is: I think irony functioned for my friend the way metaphor may for Michael Knight or anyone else who won't let zombies be zombies: a set of tongs for handling the story. Or a snorkel and mask so you don't have to be completely submerged in story.

Why people want those tools, I don't know - I should think it'd vary from person to person. Debra Doyle's point about childhood would be one reason; I think another might be fear - imagination and zombies are scary.

Posted August 13, 2005 3:02 PM by Vassilissa

Madeline: The parents get divorced? (I will carefully not wonder what my having missed it says about me. I am, after all, the Episcopalian child who didn't know Narnia was an allegory until well into high school.)

Posted August 13, 2005 4:43 PM by TexAnne

Ok - This is relevant to some things I was thinking about recently, and I want to run some of it by you. I wrote an introduction for my book club about fantasy recently. I wanted to give them an idea of the mindset that a F & SF reader brings with them to the experience. I've been reading science fiction and fantasy since before I was born, but have no background in literary criticism, so I could be all wet or reinventing the red pencil.

"In my view, a fantasy stands or falls on the authors' ability to set the scene. As with science fiction, this is much more important to fantasy than to contemporary literature, where our expectations establish most of the background for the author."

"the world-building itself: creating a complete and self-consistent universe, in which contradictions to our contemporary expectations of how the world works have an explanation known to the author, if not yet to the reader."

"What makes a book live, however, are the characters. Do they live in my mind afterwards like out-of-town friends and relatives? Do I desperately want to visit them again soon? .... [or] two weeks after reading the book are they completely forgotten?
And are the characters people I'd want to know, or duck into the nearest alley to avoid? ..... is the world one I'd want to visit?"

"In reading fantasy, the classic attitude of the reader is supposed to be 'suspension of disbelief'. We don't stop believing in the law of gravity, but for the length of the book, we accept the worldview, and the 'fantastic premise' of the author. That's why they have to be so complete,well-worked out, and internally consistent. After we finish the fiction, we may remember and enjoy an expanded view of the universe, if the writer is good. But we don't stop believing in in the law of gravity,or evolution, or start believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden, or spiritualism, or satanists, or codes in great works of art.
Well one hopes that adults would have better sense.Perhaps it's harder for readers of mainstream fiction, supposedly set in the real world, to keep the difference straight. Read fantasy, learn to separate it from the real world, stay sane."

[What I can't get is 'magical realism': Isabelle Allende, Carlos Castenada. I want my fantasy separate from reality, not all confused with it. I don't know what I'm supposed to believe in that stuff.]

Posted August 13, 2005 4:50 PM by Mina W

(shrug) I get fantasy, love fantasy, deal with fantasy just fine, and choose it over most other reading when give a choice -- and I think of it as largely metaphor, too.

Posted August 13, 2005 4:56 PM by Janni

(given, not give. tyops r us)

Posted August 13, 2005 5:00 PM by Janni

Is "metaphor" quite the right word to use to describe the problem?

The problem seems tio have a lot to do with what Tolkien had to say about the difference between applicability and allegory. You can take the idea of the zombie and apply it to some features of modern life, but that doesn't make the plot an allegory or the zombie a metaphor.

I still haven't worked out what Magic Realism is. It may just be a label for some part of a story that we agree not to examine closely, such as a Naval Captain escaping the French in the disguise of a dancing bear.

I wonder if they'd call Kill Bill magic realism?

Posted August 13, 2005 5:38 PM by Dave Bell

Dave,
I'd say that the word isn't "metaphor" but "vehicle." The two words go together because the vehicle (zombies) can be separated from its more ambiguous metaphorical content (consumerism etc.). SF, Fantasy, Fiction Speculative (the more usual translation for Fiction Scientifique), whatever, tends to liberate the vehicles from referentiality and let them out to play. And eat people.

Posted August 13, 2005 5:59 PM by Jackmormon

But it doesn't fit into the Little Genre Boxes!

Except, that was what the reviewer was praising it for. (I don't see that the observation that Link is a "hard writer to put your finger on" is in any way a complaint.) And people have been brushing that off as backhanded praise, proof that he Didn't Get It and that well-known genre tropes are new to him, and claiming that yes, it does fit perfectly well into the fantasy box, and yes, the zombies are real material brain-eating zombies. (Even though zombies don't appear in unambiguous material form in the story in question, as they do in The Hortlak - never mind that.)

Confronted with a speculative fiction story or novel they enjoyed, they dub the fantastical elements 'metaphorical', or simply call the work hard to categorize. Mustn't admit one actually liked ess-ef, darling.

As it happens, the reviewer didn't say the zombies were metaphorical. He didn't say it wasn't a fantasy story or wasn't a horror story. He didn't say he didn't like fantasy or SF or anything else. He said he _didn't get it._ He said he _didn't know._

It's really great that admitting in print that you don't quite get something but like it anyway inspires such a terrific sense of superiority in everyone who does get it, and by great I actually mean problematic and off-putting.

I adore Kelly Link's work. Kelly Link is smarter than me, and it shows in every line she writes. Sometimes I think I understand her stories perfectly, sometimes I think my not understanding all of it is part of the point, and sometimes there are parts that remain persistently obscure in spite of many attentive readings. I don't know if there are "real zombies," whatever that may mean, in "Some Zombie Contingency Plans." This may make me a careless reader. It doesn't actually have a bearing on my ability to 'get' fantastic fiction.

I do, however, agree with everything in the original post that was not about that particular reviewer.

Posted August 13, 2005 6:42 PM by cija

Come on, folks. We all know that Michael Knight can't keep his hair combed without William Daniels's voice coming from the car radio.

Whoops, wrong metaphorical irruption.

Posted August 13, 2005 6:48 PM by John M. Ford

I think magic realism is partly to blame for this problem. In magic realism, the Angel who falls to earth and is kept in the chicken shed by the callous humans is a symbol, and the point of the story is that (in my reading, anyway) (1) humans suck and (2) we no longer are impressed or inspired by miracles. The business of magic realism is to take extraordinary creatures or events and drag them into the harsh light of the ordinary world, so that reality may be examined with the aid of these particular symbols.

The business of fantasy, on the other hand, is to take ordinary personalities and events and place them in an extraordinary world. Readers who are accustomed to magic realism will recognize their favorite symbols, and be confused by any story which uses those elements in a literal way. But, you know, too bad for them; we got here first.

Posted August 13, 2005 7:01 PM by Mary Dell

SF, Fantasy, Fiction Speculative (the more usual translation for Fiction Scientifique), whatever, tends to liberate the vehicles from referentiality and let them out to play. And eat people.

So why can't they come out to play (and eat people) and also be referential?

In a fantasy (unlike, perhaps, magic realism) the world and the things in it are real. But that doesn't mean they're not also metaphors.

I mean, most of us don't take any fantasy we read as literal. It's a way to explore various things that we couldn't explore in a literal setting, and see how people react and cope and live when put there.

We don't (okay, I don't) write about zombies because we think "hey, wouldn't zombies be cool?" I write about zombies (would write about zombies, if I did) because I think "hey, wouldn't it be cool to see how human beings cope with zombies?"

But (to simplify hugely) whatever insights I get about how humans cope with zombies are interesting in large part because I take those insights back with me to this world, where there aren't zombies. The zombies represent certain types of things that humans have to cope with. In that sense, they're metaphorical.

The fact that I also enjoy watching the zombie chew the scenery--and the fact that in the context of the story, I'm not supposed to doubt that they're actually present--doesn't change this.

Posted August 13, 2005 7:27 PM by Janni

Janni: On the one hand, what you like to read, and what you write, are as fantastic as any other kind of fantasy, and I agree that the genre does not exclude and is enriched by work whose purpose is to comment on the human condition and to provide new and startling angles from which to view said condition. On the other hand -

I mean, most of us don't take any fantasy we read as literal. It's a way to explore various things that we couldn't explore in a literal setting, and see how people react and cope and live when put there.

-unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by literal, I have to say, yes, most of us certainly do. I read & write fantasy for the beautiful, the strange, and uncanny, and when these things are deployed, ultimately, merely to cast light on yet another facet of human nature, it makes me tired. I actually do prefer my fantasy to have people in it, but the people do not need to be the point. They can be the device, the excuse for the greater point, just as zombies may be for you.

As I quoted not long ago in another discussion:

"I suddenly looked round on my career and thought, 'Good God, I've been understanding the human heart all these decades.' Bother the human heart, I'm tired of the human heart. I want to write about something entirely different."

--Silvia Townsend Warner

Posted August 13, 2005 8:02 PM by cija

Mary Dell, you're wrong about Magic Realism, on both counts -- first, that the magic in magic realism isn't real, and second, that the Magic Realism genre is to blame for people who are not used to reading the fantasy genre not getting its conventions and assumptions.

In Magic Realism the magic is real. The world is bursting with magical things. The realism is that the world in the stories is the real world -- this is not an alternate reality in which there is magic: there is magic in this world, right here. Yes, things express other things and have a symbolic life, but that's a characteristic of fiction in general and does not detract from the realness of the magical things.

On the other point -- Magic Realism is what, forty years old? Fifty, maybe? And there's been a culture gap between sf readers and non-sf readers for longer than that.

It's not, I don't think, as big a deal as all that, anyway. There's lots of things to read, and lots of readers, and lots of common ground to be found, without everybody being converted to and coached in the fantasy convention.

Posted August 13, 2005 8:22 PM by Lucy Kemnitzer

Vassilissa:I think irony functioned for my friend the way metaphor may for Michael Knight or anyone else who won't let zombies be zombies: a set of tongs for handling the story. Or a snorkel and mask so you don't have to be completely submerged in story.

If I may offer an alternative perspective: For some of us, the irony and the metaphor and the assorted not-story bits are what we enjoy chewing on. Just as Jack Spratt and his wife had vastly different criteria for judging the quality of a steak, so do (let's call us) story-positive and story-neutral people have differient criteria by which we evaluate a work of fiction.

Speaking solely for myself, the story element, no matter how cracking, rarely satisfies. Nifty non-story bits attached to an unstriking story, though, can really prod my pleasure centers. Metaphor'n'such, at least for me, isn't a security blanket or a reassuring tether to reality, it's the prize in the Cracker Jacks.

(Two food analogies in two paragraphs? Must be time for dinner.)

Also, like cija I fail to see the dismissiveness or lack of understanding in Knight's review, but I've yet to read the book in question.

Posted August 13, 2005 8:27 PM by Matt P

I read Stranger Things Happen, which I bought because of the title and just fell in love with the author. Thanks for mentioning Magic for Beginners, I'm already trying to get it. Incidentally, I don't find the writer "hard to put your finger on" at all - are there really people out there who don't get fantasy?

Living so far, the internet is a blessing in finding new books to read.

Posted August 13, 2005 8:50 PM by Georgia

TexAnne, I didn't know Narnia was allegory until I was in college and read it on Usenet. I was stunned. You're not alone. :)

-Catie

Posted August 13, 2005 10:10 PM by C.E. Murphy

I haven't read the Kelly Link story, yet. But I have an immediate negative reaction to the idea that if a story has zombies in it, their main purpose must be "to follow genre conventions, to play with and expand the Zombie Rules." That might be the point of *some* stories that have zombies in them. But other stories might want them in there for some other reason:

"Honor among zombies."
"Zombie! But it sure can dance."
"Zombies! Just like me/ CNN News/ that panel audience."

Or something else without a primary focus on Zombie Rules.

I agree with the other point: that zombies in a story are more likely to achieve their narrative purpose if they're "real" (vivid and plausible to the reader). A zombie screen extra that walks on and gives speeches about zombitude is probably going to be an unsuccessful narrative device.

This comment in the discussion thread at Coalescent's Livejournal may be pertinent:

"So I'd say that Michael Knight does get it, in a way. And in a way, Scott Westerfield doesn't. Yes, zombies in 'Some Zombie Contingency Plans' are plain old literal zombies. But that's not the only thing they are. They are metaphors too. Not as well as being literal zombies, but in direct contradiction to that reading. The literal and metaphorical readings are incompatible and both present at the same time. Fucking wonderful."

So yeah, I'd say that Knight's confusion constitutes getting it, in some sense. What he hasn't grasped is how to properly appreciate that sense of confusion and uncertainty."

One of my beefs with a number of BTVS episodes is that they don't give me a consistent sense of whether vampires (excepting Angel and Spike) are a catastrophic event or actually characters with plausible motivations. I get a sense of arbitrariness about writers manipulating events to evoke viewer emotions. But, it may be the case that, like Knight, I'm unable to appreciate the sense of confusion and uncertainty.

Posted August 13, 2005 10:59 PM by Lenny Bailes

Um, Lenny, you and that LJ commenter might want to actually read Westerfield's essay, or even just the bits PNH quoted up there. Those bits about how zombies are both metaphors and literal story objects. I mean, how many times does somebody have to say "Yes, they make excellent symbols, and metaphors, and have kick-ass mythopoeic resonance to boot" before people will notice that he's saying "Yes, they make excellent symbols, and metaphors, and have kick-ass mythopoeic resonance to boot"?

Posted August 14, 2005 12:07 AM by Avram

The copy of Westerfield's The Risen Empire which has been languishing in the middle of my to-read stack for several months has just popped to the top.

Posted August 14, 2005 12:10 AM by Avram

Lucy, what I find striking about Knight's comments is the unwillingness to read what's on the page, as it's written. Children have no problem with this, far as I know, but adults? Link writes about zombies. For the purpose of the story, why not? Zombies don't exist? True, I think. But no fictional character exists. Why allow Link her imagined reality when those are human characters, but deny that reality when those are non-human? What's the reasoning?

Posted August 14, 2005 12:18 AM by Randolph Fritz

I deconstructed a zombie and all I got were these dusty bandages.

Posted August 14, 2005 12:56 AM by TomB

Avram - the problem is that Westerfeld's essay is inspiring and full of truths, but startlingly, it attaches those truths to a sloppy and ungenerous reading of the review, and it is hard for me to see what they are supposed to have to do with it. Knight did not say, gosh, what do zombies mean, what are they an archetype of, what do they symbolize in general. He asked what "those zombies" are supposed to be - a metaphor, or what - the particular zombies in "Some Zombie Contingency Plans." The fact that he did not ask the same question about the zombies in "The Hortlak" (or the witches in "Catskin") ought to be a huge screaming clue to the fact that he's not the kind of idiot Westerfeld patronizes him for being.

Not being certain of how to interpret a very wonderful and rather ambiguous story does not mean that you "see the operations of language and storytelling in, quite frankly, a sophomoric English-class sort of way." I know what he means, but this is a really bad example of it. You can't generalize a specific, reasonable point about a specific story into a reading-protocols declaration that way. And his assumption that because it's a dim-witted review he can assume that it's written by a non sf-reader - How would he know?

(Of course, I have no real idea who Michael Knight is. Maybe his reading preferences are known. But not from this review, they're not.)

Posted August 14, 2005 1:07 AM by cija

Mary Dell wrote: Readers who are accustomed to magic realism will recognize their favorite symbols, and be confused by any story which uses those elements in a literal way. But, you know, too bad for them; we got here first.

-------

You go, girl!

Posted August 14, 2005 1:20 AM by Andrew W

"Life is like a metaphor."
"No, life is a simile!"

Posted August 14, 2005 2:02 AM by Tom Whitmore

Avram, the sentence in Westerfeld's text that follows what you quoted says: But their main job is to follow genre conventions, to play with and expand the Zombie Rules, to make us begin to see the world as a place colored by our own zombie contingency plans. That's the statement I'm questioning: that the main job of a trope in a story is to follow or play with established genre protocols for the trope.

If you want to read the main point of Scott Westerfeld's statement as: zombies in a story are no good as a metaphorical device unless the reader sees them as being real; and then the metaphorical value can also be real -- I have no argument with that.

The important point, to me, in Geneva Melzac's comment is: The literal and metaphorical readings are incompatible and both present at the same time. [....] So yeah, I'd say that Knight's confusion constitutes getting it, in some sense. What he hasn't grasped is how to properly appreciate that sense of confusion and uncertainty.

She offers an explanation for the critic's confusion that sounds plausible to me (as someone who hasn't yet read the story).

Geneva Melzac's observation also makes me wonder whether the BTVS script writers were deliberately trying to contrast literal and metaphorical readings for their stories. I've always seen a lot of their plotting as arbitrary -- designed to push buttons in viewers at the expense of poetic consistency in the story. But maybe, like Knight, I'm just not appreciating the contradictory ambiance of confusion.

This thread has started me thinking about the use of zombies and vampires in stories as characters versus their use as catastrophic forces. They're used both ways. The inanimate becomes animated. Why? What's the point? Horror? Metaphor? Comedy?

Posted August 14, 2005 2:19 AM by Lenny Bailes

Folks, I just talked to Patience, and her smile's starting to turn into rictus.

Posted August 14, 2005 2:51 AM by John M. Ford

Maybe all fiction should be viewed as inventing a new universe, with different laws. It's just that some writers are much less imaginative than others, or much less honest in making their worldview explicit.

What would be some of the alternative assumptions of various mainstream writers?
-nothing is more important than money
-everyone is out for what they can get
-sex with strangers is exciting, with a familiar partner, not
-science is bunk

Too depressing to go on. But it would be interesting to look at the implicit assumptions in the books we read.

And I would like to hold all writers to a standard of honesty; similarly to the way mystery writers are expected to put in all the clues, so the reader has a chance to solve the puzzle, let all writers make explicit their assumptions about how the world works.[Well, I guess unless the point is deliberate ambiguity.]

Of course, in order to do that, they have to figure them out first. I'll bet lots of writers don't have a clue to most of their preconceptions, since they apply them to the world around themselves, as well as to their writing. So there's a big advantage to being a fantasy or science fiction writer - you have to explicitly create a self-consistent worldview. The unexamined novel is not worth reading? Maybe that's why some of us enjoy this type of writing so much - we enjoy the novelty of understanding what's going on.

Posted August 14, 2005 3:08 AM by Mina W

Matt P: thank you, that's very helpful. For me it's character rather than story that I need most, but it still works. And explains my friend.

Posted August 14, 2005 5:42 AM by Vassilissa

Disclaimer: I haven't yet read "Some Zombie Contigency Plans" but I've read Stranger Things Happen and other Link stories. I think it's quite fair for a reviewer to bring up the question of metaphoric meaning when Link's stories can be so explicitly meta-fictional. Not that all her stories are: "The Specialist's Hat" and "The Faery Handbag" can be read as straight narratives. But, in, say, "Travels with the Snow Queen" or "The Girl Detective," the meta-fictional level cannot be ignored. Knight even recognizes this in his review, and says -- as I admit I have done myself -- "uh, I don't quite get this story. " It should be no sin to admit that you don't fully get a Kelly Link (Gene Wolfe, John Crowley...) story.

Re The Risen Empire: Scott Westerfeld is a man who knows zombies.

Posted August 14, 2005 8:24 AM by Alex Cohen

Episcopal is the adjective. Episcopalian is the noun.

No blame to TexAnne, 49 out of 50 writers get this wrong. It's totally counterintuitive.

*button release*

Posted August 14, 2005 9:12 AM by Mark D.

Having finally gotten around to reading the original review, add me to the list of people who don't quite see what the fuss is about. That didn't strike me as a condescending or dismissive review at all.

It's ultimately sort of inconclusive, but you know what? I don't understand what the hell happened at the end of "Stone Animals," either, and I've been reading SF for years.

Posted August 14, 2005 9:57 AM by Chad Orzel

More coherent comments. Here's the context of the Knight fragment:

KELLY LINK'S new collection of stories, ''Magic for Beginners,'' is a potent blend of horror and magic realism and postmodern absurdism, but it's also not any of those things exactly -- she's a hard writer to put your finger on.

Turning to Scott Westerfeld's reaction, I wonder how much it's informed by people asking if the risen dead in "The Risen Empire" are metaphoric. They are, of course, for the emergence of a persistent monied overclass in our society, but they're also pretty cool risen-from-the-dead zombies that rule an empire and fight space battles. I can imagine that perhaps he's gotten tired of fielding this question, and so is oversensitive to the issue of zombie metaphordom.

Posted August 14, 2005 10:20 AM by Alex Cohen

Mary, I don't think the angel is just a symbol: it's hard to keep pure metaphor confined to the chicken shed.

Posted August 14, 2005 10:50 AM by Cassandra

Can you identify a scifi movie from the 1950's, I believe? The movie was shown during an episode of Science Fiction Theater / Sammy Terry during the 1960's.

The movie is identified as a black / white film, in an outdoor, secluded area, mainly rocky area. There were two young teen couples driving to this area and one male encounters, unknowingly, a different dimension. He walked into this darkened area (different dimension). The area around his eyes became blackened and he became "Zombie like". The others could not
figure out what was wrong with him. The tv screen obviously showed a lighter / darker split were this "different dimension started. I'm thinking the movie may have been called "4th Dimension". It might have been a Twilight Zone segment, but don't think so. Pretty sure it was one of those low budget scifi's of the 50's.

-- Glen Akles

Posted August 14, 2005 11:58 AM by Jonathan Vos Post

Andrew W: I am accustomed to Magic Realism, and I've read what some of its practitioners have to say about what they're doing, and they do insist on the reality of the magic in their realism.

I'm also accustomed to fantasy, and as far as I can tell the big differences between the two are antecedents and worldview, and what world we're viewing.

Posted August 14, 2005 1:29 PM by Lucy Kemnitzer

It should be no sin to admit that you don't fully get a Kelly Link (Gene Wolfe, John Crowley...) story.

Speaking as probably the only person in the world who thought "Water off a Black Dog's Back" sucked, I'd agree. I don't think anybody is complaining the reviewer found some of the stories shifty or hard to understand; it's that tone of blaming the stories for being, like, difficult that is peeve-inducing, as if "I didn't get it" is always the writer's fault.

Posted August 14, 2005 1:45 PM by mythago

Chad Orzel: "Having finally gotten around to reading the original review, add me to the list of people who don't quite see what the fuss is about. That didn't strike me as a condescending or dismissive review at all."

Having just now read this whole thread in one go, I want to ask you what you're talking about. When did the subject (or "fuss", as you so generously characterize the conversation) become whether Knight's review was "condescending or dismissive"? Feel free to use the "find" function of your browser in compiling evidence for your characterization.

Posted August 14, 2005 4:12 PM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Mythago, I'm with you, and with this review; about half the stories in Stranger Things Happen worked for me, while about half of them left me totally unmoved (often for reasons like the ones the reviewer describes). "Like Water off a Black Dog's Back" was one of the ones I simply got nothing out of.

Posted August 14, 2005 4:33 PM by Marie Brennan

All I've read of magical realism is One Hundred Years of Solitude (which, as I understand it, is the one magical realism story to read if you're reading only one), and it seemed to me that the main difference from the fantasy I'm used to was not literalism but systematism. The kind of fantasy I'm used to -- the stuff that shows up on the same shelves as science fiction in most bookstores, the stuff people talk about at SF cons, I currently think of it as the fantasy branch of Nerd Lit -- has magical creatures and events that are designed to withstand the examination of rationalists used to extrapolating a coherent picture of a fictional world.

In magical realism, the fantasy elements are more random, more tied into emotions and abstract notions of justice, less distant from their folk origins, less amenable to having a role-playing game made of them.

Uh-oh. Now I'm suffering the impulse to tie this into Gamist-Simulationist-Narritivist RPG theory ('cause you could probably work up a Narritivist rules set for magical realism), but that way lies madness.

Posted August 14, 2005 4:57 PM by Avram

I had a dream about zombies last night. First thing I thought was, "Oh shit, not again..."

Posted August 14, 2005 5:47 PM by John Farrell

Hm. "This is the best expression I’ve seen lately of the gap between people who get fantastic fiction and people who don’t."

But Patrick, does Knight really have to get it. To my mind, if a story never leaves you, if you can't forget it, then the writer got you. And that's a good review. For all of Knight's slightly patronizing grappling with "what is it," in the end, as he says, "But even when I didn't know what to make of her stories, I couldn't put them out of my mind. That sort of resonance, that lingering, haunting effect, is the product of real magic, and Kelly Link is no doubt a sorceress to be reckoned with."

I'd go out to the bar and by everyone a round if I got that review!

Posted August 14, 2005 6:02 PM by John Farrell

Avram -- don't do that. Please. I'd have to bust out my academic hat and set off on my Standard Rant on GNS. And that just wouldn't be pretty. ^_^

Posted August 14, 2005 6:12 PM by Marie Brennan

TexAnne: Don't they get divorced? I last read "Fire and Hemlock" a couple of hundred books ago, so my memory is a little hazy.

With the Narnia books, I did notice, when I was a child, that Aslan was supposed to be God. But I fairly quickly decided that Aslan was much better and more interesting than the God who appeared in my Children's Illustrated Bible (he was a talking lion, and a lamb too! he did magic! they could see him! he was fun! he was a talking lion! he was a talking lion!) and continued to read the series as if there was no subtext at all. The allegory aspect of it neither enhanced nor detracted from my enjoyment of the books: that's one of the reasons why they're so good.

Posted August 14, 2005 6:44 PM by Madeline Kelly

cija says:

-unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by literal, I have to say, yes, most of us certainly do. I read & write fantasy for the beautiful, the strange, and uncanny,

I read fantasy for all of this too, actually. But it's not the only thing I'm reading for.

and when these things are deployed, ultimately, merely to cast light on yet another facet of human nature, it makes me tired.

Hmm... I'd question the merely--human nature is actually interesting stuff--but I'd also question the implied "only." A story can be beautiful, strange, and uncanny, and also cast light on how human beings interact with the beautiful, the strange, and the uncanny, and on how we interact with beautiful, strange, uncanny things in our world.

These things are not exclusive. I can immerse myself in a fantasy story and take things back from there to my world, and even expect to do so.

I actually do prefer my fantasy to have people in it, but the people do not need to be the point. They can be the device, the excuse for the greater point, just as zombies may be for you.

Interesting. For me, if the people fail to convince, if the ways in which they're changed by the story aren't convincing and compelling--then there's no point. When genre work fails for me (and I read mostly genre work--I'm not coming at this from a literary background) it often fails because the author cared more about about the cool ideas of the story than about how some sentient being interacted for them.

Posted August 14, 2005 6:45 PM by Janni

Between Chad Orzel and John Farrell, I'm once again getting that sense that I'm typing in an alternate universe from them. Over here on Earth-1, I was pretty sure this discussion hadn't actually been primarily about whether Michael Knight's review was nice enough to Kelly Link or not.

I dunno, maybe if I'd referred to Knight's review as "generally positive" in the first sentence of my post, I could have forestalled their confusion. Oh, wait.

Posted August 14, 2005 7:11 PM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Avram wrote: "The kind of fantasy I'm used to -- the stuff that shows up on the same shelves as science fiction in most bookstores, the stuff people talk about at SF cons, I currently think of it as the fantasy branch of Nerd Lit -- has magical creatures and events that are designed to withstand the examination of rationalists used to extrapolating a coherent picture of a fictional world.

I wonder if part of the issue is that this is what the zombies-are-metaphor crowd recognizes as fantasy. Stories like the ones Kelly Link writes don't fit into that model and therefore "must" be some other kind of literature. A great deal of fantasy is being written these days that's deliberately evading a rationalist approach, that isn't producing "a coherent picture of a fictional world".

But what does that have to do with whether it's literal? You can have a literal zombie that touches down in the story just long enough to do the work you need from it--dance really well, say--and not explain. That doesn't mean it's a metaphor.

Posted August 14, 2005 7:36 PM by JessieSS

The specific words "condescending" and "dismissive" haven't been used to describe the review, but I don't think that's an entirely unfair summary of, for example, the review mythago is thinking of in this comment:

But it doesn't fit into the Little Genre Boxes!

And let's face it, an awful lot of lit'rary types simply don't want to dabble in what they consider to be inferior forms of literature. Confronted with a speculative fiction story or novel they enjoyed, they dub the fantastical elements 'metaphorical', or simply call the work hard to categorize. Mustn't admit one actually liked ess-ef, darling.

That sort of approach to a genre book is certainly bad. It's not how I read the review that kicked this off, though, and that's the attitude I was responding to. That comment is the most extreme example I saw in a quick skim back through the discussion, but there are similar sentiments being expressed throughout the comment thread.

(To be fair, I have an allergy to "fans are slans" in all its many guises, so I may be too quick to read that attitude into other comments, in much the same way that I think other are too quick to condemn mainstream critics reviewing SF.)

Posted August 14, 2005 7:39 PM by Chad Orzel

Well, I have an allergy to SF triumphalism, too; also to the odious practice of representing the "literary" tendency with lisping abbreviations like "lit'rary" or "lit'ry", the plain message of which is that being "literary" is contemptibly effete and epicene and worse. If I never again see that particular device deployed in an otherwise interesting conversation it'll be too soon.

However, I think you're being a touch quick to read the whole conversation as a big Trash Michael Knight session. When I talk about "the gap between people who get fantastic fiction and people who don’t", I assure you that I'm not consigning "people who don't" to the outer darkness. I'm a lot more interested in figuring out the mechanics of the misunderstanding than I am in playing Yay For Our Side. Excuse me for not policing every instance of pro-SF chauvinism in the thread, but I still think your trivialization of an actually rather wide-ranging and constructive discussion as merely "fuss" is pretty insulting. Yes, really.

Posted August 14, 2005 8:15 PM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

I understand, that, Patrick. But my question is, does he have to "get fantastic fiction" in general to appreciate it? And if so, why? What's so special about fantastic fiction?

If it sucks, it sucks for the same reason mainstream fiction sucks: poor execution, cliche-ridden prose, etc.

If it rocks--if it grabs you and makes you remember it, I'm thinking that's also for the reason the best mainstream fiction does. There is a case to be made for tiresome critics not "getting it" about SF, I do appreciate that. I'm just not convinced that Mr. Knight is the best example.

Harold Bloom and Edmund Wilson come more to mind (for what it's worth).

Posted August 14, 2005 8:20 PM by John Farrell

Patrick: I didn't think people were perceiving the review as condescending and dismissive, but rather that they were being condescending and dismissive of it themselves:

(Some people can't deal with fantasy...It's as if they can't grasp a story unless the author tells them the theme outright... You'd think a NYT reviewer could at least judge a book by its cover... Mustn't admit one actually liked ess-ef, darling... Knight and his ilk seem distressed at the idea of something being real within an imagined world that is not also real within ours. (quoted from several different people.)

Obviously this is not the whole of the discussion, and I don't claim that it is. It's just the part that bothers me. As JessieSS touched on, the "zombies-as-metaphor crowd" includes plenty of sf readers.

I didn't have any difficulty understanding that you (and Westerfeld) knew it was a positive review; I just thought that you characterized its tone, and the reviewer's powers of understanding, unfairly, most particularly in the assumption that we can tell from that review that its writer isn't a sf reader or doesn't get the fantastic. I realize that your main point was elsewhere.

Janni:

I read fantasy for all of this too, actually.

Then I probably did misunderstand your comment about metaphor and literalism. Or perhaps I've assumed a too restrictive idea of what is meant by metaphor here - when people talk about symbolism in fantasy, for instance, I tend to think they've got it backwards: fantasy archetypes are what other things in the real world are symbolic of. As long as we agree that things mean themselves, I'll readily admit that they mean other things too. (How vague of me.)

I can immerse myself in a fantasy story and take things back from there to my world, and even expect to do so.

Well, yes... I guess. I think maybe it's not so much a question of different approaches to fantasy as different approaches to reading altogether. (Or maybe I just can't cope with language that implies a useful purpose for literature, which is my own seething ball of issues. Since it's not as if I don't think literature is useful.) Which is not to insult your approach at all. All I can really say is that I don't read books for just one thing either, or the same thing every time & I didn't mean to imply that I did. Again, this is very vague. (I like vague books, too.)

Posted August 14, 2005 8:34 PM by cija

"I didn't have any difficulty understanding that you (and Westerfeld) knew it was a positive review; I just thought that you characterized its tone, and the reviewer's powers of understanding, unfairly"

Not to put too fine a point on it, fuck you. On what basis do you accuse me of any such characterization?

Posted August 14, 2005 8:45 PM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

However, I think you're being a touch quick to read the whole conversation as a big Trash Michael Knight session. When I talk about "the gap between people who get fantastic fiction and people who don’t", I assure you that I'm not consigning "people who don't" to the outer darkness. I'm a lot more interested in figuring out the mechanics of the misunderstanding than I am in playing Yay For Our Side.

In my mind, I was responding to the Trash Michael Knight (or Literary Critics In General) parts, and not so much the rest of it. That failed to be adequately conveyed through what I wrote (specifically, the word "fuss")-- I guess the MT-Telepathy plugin hasn't arrived yet...

On looking at the review, I'm not clear to what degree there is a real misunderstanding, though, at least on Knight's part. At the risk of forfeiting my "Get It" card, my own reaction to some of the stories was not all that different from what he describes (or, at least, from what I read in what he wrote). So I would take more polite issue with the whole concept.

I'll try to say something more coherent, or at least more detailed later, but I need to not be at the computer for a while first.

Posted August 14, 2005 8:47 PM by Chad Orzel

John Clute and Gary Wolfe's Intersection panel on the paradigm shift in Science Fiction and Fantasy had examples -- I can't recall if Kelly Link was one -- but they agreed in this respect with Patrick: SF triumphalism is obsolete.

They suggested that, just as one cannot today read E. E. "Doc" Smith without reacting to its Engineering triumphalism, sexism, imperialism, and subliterary language, so also one cannot read "literally" the Heinlein juveniles. But Heinlein is a definition canonical author. So we're in deep.

They explained why "straight" remakes of Heinlein juveniles are necessarily failures (although I think that they thus under-rate John Varley's recent novels). They put forth a sophisticated counterexample: Jay Lake's "Rocket Science." See the Clute review on Sci Fi Weekly (I'm having trouble getting the hotlink) which has to be read BOTH straight and ironically. Clute also had a recent Kelly Link review which clearly "got it" and was in the context of his new meta-theory.

In my dream, I asked: "if what you say is true, then you've put yourselves out of business, because in the new paradigm, the very terminology of the old is incommeasurable, and iconic works are excluded from the universe of discourse, while anomalous works from the old system are now canonical."

In the dream, Clute agreed, but quoted Shelley "... unacknowledged legislators..."

In reality, I spoke with both Big Name SF Critics about their premise. "How then," I asked, "can we deal with the new paradigm?"

"Because," Clute said, Literature is superior to Science, as Literature can embrace contradictions, keeping two incompatible paradigms in mind simultaneously

I am not satisfied with his valorization of Literature. It produces a critical paradox in the case of Science Fiction, where (I believe) neither the science nor the literature can be taken without the flavoring of the other.

Kelly Link, and Susanna Clarke, and Gene Wolfe, and Charles Stross, and others, seem to be writing some Fantasy that is written, and to be read, from the other side of the paradigm shift.

Posted August 14, 2005 9:00 PM by Jonathan Vos Post

Not to put too fine a point on it, fuck you. On what basis do you accuse me of any such characterization?

You said Knight "complains" etcetera. I said upthread somewhere that I didn't think it was a complaint at all. And then when you described Scott Westerfeld's essay as "the best expression I’ve seen lately of the gap between people who get fantastic fiction and people who don’t," I thought that the reviewer was supposed to be an example of a person who doesn't get it.

That's all.

It was not intended as an accusation. I thought you misread Knight; I've evidently misread you. I didn't think that was a rude thing to say, and I was not being deliberately rude.

I apologize for giving offense. If this is a case of what I thought was a mild tone coming out as rampant bitchery, I'm sorry. If it's to do with the content of what I wrote, please let me know so that I can not do it again.

Posted August 14, 2005 9:00 PM by cija

Yes, and I also characterized Scott Westerfeld as "shooting flames from the top of his head".

I regard the synaptic gap between people who get genre fantasy/SF protocols and those who don't as an interesting thing. I regard with sympathetic amusement our own subcultural immune response to such expressions. (I note that Scott himself displays a sense of humor about his own flammiferousness, over in the comments to the post to which I linked.) I don't know how much more I could have done to avert the variety of put-down you and Chad Orzel are evidently determined to accomplish. If you're trying to convince me that there's no percentage in being sympathetic to multiple points of view on these issues, you're doing a good job.

Posted August 14, 2005 9:11 PM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Goodness, it's hot. Eighty-eight degrees out there. That matches the record for this date. Hot, hot, hot.

Posted August 14, 2005 9:12 PM by Michael Falcon-Gates

Okay. Everybody's going to slow down and play nice while I figure out what happened to this formerly pleasant and interesting thread. Now:

(breathe in)

Benefit of the doubt.

(breathe out)

Good.

(breathe in again, slowly)

Statements, not motives.

(and ... out)

(now do it again)

Appropriate latitude of interpretation.

(and again)

Good manners are better than gold.

(Good. Continue deep-breathing exercises until serenity is achieved.)

Posted August 14, 2005 9:17 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

I know it's not an insult to say that somebody doesn't get fantasy. I thought you were being somewhat inaccurate, not mean or humorless - I'm not oblivious to tone, or to other people's tone, at least. That was the extent of my disagreement with your post.

Right now all I'm trying to convince you of is that I'm not being obnoxious on purpose, and I'm clearly doing a very bad job of it. Again, I apologize.

Posted August 14, 2005 9:24 PM by cija

Chad has uncharacteristically misinterpreted Patrick's position. Cija has also misinterpreted it, in her case somewhat less uncharacteristically. Avram is spot-on. And I see Jonathan Vos Post has a new ISP address.

I need to think a while before essaying an explanation of where I think the discussion went astray. I thought Patrick's original post was clear and straightforward, but explaining what happened in the subsequent thread seems dauntingly intricate.

While I'm mulling this over, can anyone who undertakes to further characterize Patrick's critical position please recall that before he achieved a measure of conventional respectability working for a science fiction publishing house, he was a literary criticism reference series editor? He's not unfamiliar with the standard run of critical approaches and errors.

Posted August 14, 2005 10:25 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Cija has also misinterpreted it, in her case somewhat less uncharacteristically.

If I am known for my misinterpretations, I suppose it is a good thing for me to be aware of, and I'll try to work on it. That, and being more polite. With respect to this discussion, I apologize for my contributions to its derailment. I hope that my previous apologies didn't come off as justifications.

The only other thing I want to say is that I posted my inflammatory comment before seeing Patrick's comment above it. If I had read that first, I would not have posted anything to try to further explain what had already been clarified. I'm stopping, now.

Posted August 14, 2005 10:56 PM by cija

Mark wrote:

Episcopal is the adjective. Episcopalian is the noun.

No blame to TexAnne, 49 out of 50 writers get this wrong. It's totally counterintuitive.

Check again; Episocopalian, like most Modern English words ending in an -ian suffix is both noun and adjective.

And yeah, I bet TexAnne, who knows English lifted the -ian suffix from Old French, and likely is also aware of the Latin cognate suffix -ianus, knows that Episcopalian is both noun and adjective.

And I'm now going to go look up what the heck Magic Realism is, because I know I should know, and I haven't a clue.

Posted August 14, 2005 10:58 PM by Lisa Spangenberg

Lisa: instead of, or in addition to, looking it up, here's some titles and authors that are pretty well self-explanatory:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude and probably Love in the Time of Cholera but I haven't read that one

Isabel Allende (niece to Salvador Allende), The House of the Spirits, The Infinite Plan (which is less fun than the other)

Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees, and probably The Poisonwood Bible but I haven't had it in my hand yet -- I need to nag my stepmom for it

Rodolfo Anaya, Bless Me Ultima

Laura Esquivel, LIke Water for Chocolate

There's a Peruvian and an Argentinan I want to reference but it's dinner time. I'll come back to it if you like.

Posted August 14, 2005 11:37 PM by Lucy Kemnitzer

Episcopalian is the noun. Episcopal is the adjective. Pepsi-Cola is the anagram.

Posted August 15, 2005 12:04 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

I need to think a while before essaying an explanation of where I think the discussion went astray.

I thought it went astray right here:

Not to put too fine a point on it, fuck you. On what basis do you accuse me of any such characterization?

That was really beyond the pale. Especially since the person who was told "fuck you" apologized three times after that, with no response.

Good manners are better than gold.

Indeed.

Posted August 15, 2005 12:07 AM by Moi

Some various definitions of magical realism

"Magical Realism--We recognize the world, although now--not only because we have emerged from a dream--we look on it with new eyes. We are offered a new style that is thoroughly of this world, that celebrates the mundane. This new world of objects is still alien to the current idea of Realism. It employs various techniques that endow all things with a deeper meaning and reveal mysteries that always threaten the secure tranquility of simple and ingenuous things. This [art offers a] calm admiration of the magic of being, of the discovery that things already have their own faces, [this] means that the ground in which the most diverse ideas in the world can take root has been reconquered--albeit in new ways. For the new art it is a question of representing before our eyes, in an intuitive way, the fact, the interior figure, of the exterior world. (Franz Roh, Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism (1925).Magical Realism. Ed. L. P. Zamora and W. B. Faris. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. p. 15-32.)...."

Hmmmm. "celebrates the mundane," as in the Mundane SF Manifesto?

See also:

The Magical Realism Page, by Evelyn C. Leeper

"... Gene Wolfe's definition: 'Magical Realism is Fantasy written in Spanish.'"

"John Clute and John Grant have a broader category--fabulation--which includes Absurdist SF, Fictionality, Magical Realism, Slipstream, and Surfiction. In Clute's words: 'a Fabulation is any story which challenges the two main assumptions of genre SF: that the world can be seen; and that it can be told.'"

There are some good book lists on this page, and comments by folks such as Suzy Charnas and Nancy Lebovitz.

Posted August 15, 2005 12:14 AM by Jonathan Vos Post

I don't know if Avram is right about systematism being one of the distinguishing elements that lets us seperate genre fantasy from magic realism. But I can see how it might.

If part of magic realism is a combination of magic with the real world, this could explain why elves in Minneapolis aren't magic realism.

Not that systematism is limited to any one genre. It is, after all, a key aspect of the classic style of puzzle-solving murder mystery.

Posted August 15, 2005 1:03 AM by Dave Bell

No, Jonathan, "celebrating the mundane" has nothign to do with the Mundane Manifesto, but you knew that. It's mundane as in everyday, oridnary, quotidian. It's magic in the chicken coop and kitchen and street.

I'm assuming "systematism" in this case means systems of magic, with rules and conventions. I'd agree that Magic Realism is not about that. The magic in Magic Realism is untamed, wild, unpredictable, uncontrollable: it bursts out of and grows rankly within the everyday.

But Magic Realism isn't the only kind of fantasy that does that. The thing that really sets it apart is its own history.

Posted August 15, 2005 2:49 AM by Lucy Kemnitzer

Marie: please enlighten me! Feel free to do so in email, if you don't want to derail this thread even further.

Posted August 15, 2005 4:48 AM by cd

Chad has uncharacteristically misinterpreted Patrick's position.

I'm not sure how uncharacteristic it really is, as I manage to do something roughly equivalent every couple of months... I managed to stay out of the "Crooked Timbre" thread, so I guess I was due.

At this point, I'm thoroughly confused as to who isn't getting what (other than that I'm obviously not getting the intended point). If the point is just to praise Scott Westerfeld's description of "the gap between people who get fantastic fiction and people who don’t," completely independent of which camp Michael Knight and his review fall into, I didn't get that from what was written. In particular, Westerfeld seems to believe that Knight is one of those who don't get it, and putting the review quote and his comments together in the original post suggests some agreement with that position. The "generally positive" line didn't really change my reading, as I've read lots of comments of the form "The review is generally positive, but on this specific point, the reviewer is dumber than a sack of wet mice..."

And I don't agree that the review in question is an example of Mr. Knight not getting fantastic fiction, certainly not to the degree that Scott Westerfeld appears to. (I should note that I haven't read the comments over at his site, so I don't know if he's said anything further.) As I've said a couple of times, his written reaction is close to my own.

(Though both Knight and Westerfeld are worried about the wrong story-- "The Hortlak" is the story with the confusing actual zombies, while "Some Zombie Contingency Plans" doesn't have any real zombies in it, just a bunch of talk about zombies.)

If the point is just to praise Westerfeld's description, leaving the Knight piece that it refers to completely aside, well, I don't have any problem with that. It's a nice bit of writing about stories.

If the point isn't either to agree with Westerfeld about Knight, or to praise Westerfeld independent of Knight, then I'm just hopelessly lost. This is what I get for trying to learn group theory out of a book.

Can we at least all agree to condemn puppy-blood-drinking Republicans?

Posted August 15, 2005 7:34 AM by Chad Orzel

We do indeed condemn puppy-blood drinking Republicans. <volokh>Not that we're saying all Republicans drink puppy blood</volokh>, but a cursory web search shows that such practices are not unknown among the rank and file, if not often mentioned in mixed company. When will the Republican leadership face up to its obligation to clearly repudiate puppy-blood drinking once and for all? America deserves answers.

The point was to look at the gap between people who (imho) get fantastic fiction and people who don't. I don't think, and never said, that people who don't are "dumber than a sack of wet mice." I don't get modern dance, but I don't feel particularly stupid about this fact, nor do I think the people who do enjoy it are somehow faking it. I think there's something they understand, some language they've learned, that I don't know about. It's not a moral issue or an issue of relative intelligence. It may, like many such things, be an issue of sensibility, which is interesting in and of itself.

I have many faults, including a tendency to pop off when I feel like things I didn't say are being repeatedly attributed to me. I shouldn't have snarled at cija and I apologize to her (I think I have the gender right; further apologies if not). Frankly, my temperature started going up at when Chad dropped the "I don't quite see what the fuss is about" trope into what had been up until then an interesting and multivalent discussion. I hate that gambit; to me, it comes off as a dose of rhetorical toxin that can be inserted into any conversation in which people are being lively, animated, earnest, or otherwise engaged. Every conversation worth having is a species of "fuss." It's incredibly easy to make people feel embarrassed about having been enthusiastic about something, and "I don't see what the fuss is about" is an effective tool with which to accomplish that task and shut a conversation down.

No, I don't think this is something Chad was actually trying to do, and yeah, I overreacted. Chad is a first-class good guy, and sometimes I'm a volatile asshole. I'm post-morteming the event, not arguing that my every reaction was smart or proportionate.

Posted August 15, 2005 9:21 AM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

"We do indeed condemn puppy-blood drinking Republicans. Not that we're saying all Republicans drink puppy blood..."

Whew. For a second, I was getting worried there.

:D

Posted August 15, 2005 9:37 AM by John Farrell

What Is Magical Realism, Really?
by Bruce Holland Rogers

"Magical realism is not speculative and does not conduct thought experiments. Instead, it tells its stories from the perspective of people who live in our world and experience a different reality from the one we call objective. If there is a ghost in a story of magical realism, the ghost is not a fantasy element but a manifestation of the reality of people who believe in and have 'real' experiences of ghosts."

Lucy Kemnitzer:

"No, Jonathan, 'celebrating the mundane' has nothign to do with the Mundane Manifesto, but you knew that."

Thanks, Lucy. I thought that I knew that, but as I get older, I realize each year that what I thought I knew is riddled with outcropings of misunderstanding and ignorance. And what if we underestimate what we know that we don't know? Science Fiction, Fantasy, Magic Realism, Horror ... these all get at that inkling.

"It's mundane as in everyday, oridnary, quotidian. It's magic in the chicken coop and kitchen and street."

Of course, some Magical Realism that I've read is set in places such as prison or bordello, which are just over the horizon of my everyday, but taken as Realism as they are quotidian to many people I meet every day.

At first I suspected magic in our chicken coop; yet finally figured out that raccoons were opening the latches.

Patrick:

I suspect, and would be happy to have this either confirmed or disconfirmed, that if you were commissioned to be in the Rock group playing for a Modern Dance troupe, that much would be revealed unto you, that can only be learned through participation.

That's my impression from Feynman telling me about being commissioned to write and perform percussion for a ballet, even though he insisted that he knew nothing of dance. Similarly, as Secretary of Euterpe Opera Theatre, I was involved in a baroque concert with baroque dance, although I insisted that I knew nothing of baroque dance. It took me to an alternate world where Baroque substituted for Regency dancing at SF cons.

"Popping off" and "snarling" indicate to me that this thread includes matters dear to your heart, where it is appropriate to be emotional.

Posted August 15, 2005 9:53 AM by Jonathan Vos Post

JvP quoted thus: "If there is a ghost in a story of magical realism, the ghost is not a fantasy element but a manifestation of the reality of people who believe in and have 'real' experiences of ghosts."

It seems like it'd be productive, then, to distinguish between "'real' experiences of ghosts" and literal, actual zombies. Or elves. Whatever. "Anyone can tell" the difference between a traditional fantasy novel and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, right? But I haven't figured out yet how we can describe that distinction without backing off on "of course our zombies are literally real". Or, on the other hand, why people on the other side of the fence draw their line to include magical realism. I'd like to, though; this kind of breakdown of categories is always where the good questions are.

Posted August 15, 2005 10:39 AM by JessieSS

It seems to me that much of the gulf between "magic realism" and traditional genre fantasy is exactly analogous to the synaptic gap that Patrick mentioned separating genre readers from non-genre readers.

Each genre uses a different set of story conventions, brings a different set of reader expectations to the table, has a different symbol table, and draws on an entirely distinct set of precursors.

No genre fantasy can be written, or read, without implicit (knowingly or not) reference to the thousands of genre fantasy stories that came before. And so with magic realism, but the stories that MR draws upon are not the same, and so the stories have very different meanings.

And just for one tiny but important detail: magic realism stories are often "realism" in the sense of the quotidian, of daily life. They are rarely about Quests to the Far Kingdom to Defeat the Dark Lord. Likewise, genre fantasies are very rarely about having to raise your kids while you work enough to buy food while worry about the magic lima bean plant in the garden.

And to bring this all full circle: Kelly Link is a hard writer to put one's finger on -- urr, sorry, I mean her work is hard to put one's finger on -- because she doesn't draw so cleanly from the genre fantasy (or horror, or magic realism) tradition, and so it's hard to know which protocol to use to understand her stories. I think of myself as a fairly sophisticated reader of genre fiction, but I acknowledge that my toolset is not broad enough to parse her work. My take on Knight's review is that this is the point he was trying to make.

I agree with Patrick that there's a synaptic gap, but I think the gap in question is not between fantasy readers and non-fantasy readers, it's between, well, most people and Kelly Link. (I think this is a good thing, and maybe this has something to do with "slipstream" but I'm not sure.)

Posted August 15, 2005 11:13 AM by Alex Cohen

(Advance request for mercy for the following bit of self-quoting, O Contentious Ones! And don't look too unkindly on the metaphors I cranked out on the spur of the moment.)

Reviewing Stranger Things Happen back in Locus #486,I said the darker stuff in there is worth reading even if it might produce "mental aches and bruises", but Link's real forte is "gathering great heaps of fantastic material (myths, fairy tales, legends), dumping them into the dreamstuff like some kind of psychic yeast, and seeing what develops." That's still what I like best about her work.

Posted August 15, 2005 11:28 AM by Faren Miller

Jessie, it's not a question of whether the zombies are literally real, it's more a question of whether the author believes in (or is writing as if he believes in) the existence of zombies in the real world.

And there's more to it than that, of course. One can (depending on one's attitude towards defining sub-genres and schools of writing) say that magical realism is the product of a particular group of authors working at a particular time, and that nothing written by anyone else at any other time is properly magical realism, though it can be said to be like magical realism. Sort of like how no current painter can be a Pre-Raphaelite, no matter how much he paints like a Pre-Raphaelite.

Posted August 15, 2005 11:52 AM by Avram

Madeline: I too read Fire and Hemlock several hundred books ago, so I guess we'll both have to reread it and then compare notes. (Gee, what a hardship.)

Lisa, Teresa, Mark: Suppose I rephrase. "I'm the cradle Episcopalian." Or "je suis l'enfant épiscopalienne." It's probably my French adjective endings interfering with my English. Disconcerting, to be sure, but for a French teacher not such a horrible fate. Or I could just stand by my native-speaker intuition; "Episcopalian child" sounds right and "Episcopal child" doesn't. Or I could bow out of the discussion because my natural contentiousness is aggravated by the impending start of the semester, and I'm famous for not playing well with others at this time of year. Or I could agree that Teresa and Mark are right, because I just this second remembered that my mother always got on me when I was a kid for just this mistake. (sigh)

Posted August 15, 2005 11:55 AM by TexAnne

TA - Pas grave. I'm touchy about usage, like your mom. Lisa is, of course, technically correct (as is the AHD), but too often we read "Episcopalian Church" or other barbarisms and, well....

Enjoy your semester!

Posted August 15, 2005 12:28 PM by Mark D.

See below for another reading-in-metaphors-that-might-not-fit review, this being of the Iron Giant.

http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/205/Iron%20Giant.htm

(It is an interesting obscure fact that the animated movie The Iron Giant is based on a children's book by Ted Hughes, of all people.)

Posted August 15, 2005 12:54 PM by Erik Nelson

I shouldn't have snarled at cija and I apologize to her (I think I have the gender right; further apologies if not).

You do, and thank you.

Posted August 15, 2005 2:23 PM by cija

'Episcopal' is always an adjective. It is either part of a name ("Episcopal Church") or refers to the duties of a bishop...in this second sense, Roman Catholic Bishops have episcopal duties. With the capital 'E', however, as far as I know it refers strictly to the sonamed church or portions thereof, down to the individual: Episcopal Church, Episcopal Diocese, Episcopal priest.

'Episcopalian' is always a noun. Its form is adjectival because it refers to the characteristics of members of the Episcopal Church. As a noun it means such a member; but like all nouns in English, especially names, it can be used attributively if it refers to the way the members typically behave: "After the motet, the congregation sat in Episcopalian silence."

To give a minimal pair, "We attended an Episcopalian brunch" means we went to brunch with a bunch of Episcopal parishioners, whereas "We attended an episcopal brunch" means we went to brunch with a number of bishops, who may or may not be Episcopal bishops. "We attended an Episcopal brunch" should be corrected, either by decapitalizing (I so want to write 'decapitating'!) the 'E', or by adding '-ian' to the end of the key word.

Posted August 15, 2005 2:43 PM by Xopher (Christopher Hatton)

"Episcopalian child" sounds right and "Episcopal child" doesn't.

Hey, there's nothing wrong with 'Episcopal child'. It just means a child who's a bishop!

Or perhaps the child OF a bishop, but that would be stretching a bit.

Posted August 15, 2005 2:46 PM by Xopher (Christopher Hatton)

Mris: Real dragons. If they weren't solidly real dragons with parsons who have the right to eat the eyes of the dead it wouldn't have been worth doing.

Avram: I sometimes think it's useful to think of post-Tolkien genre fantasy, the stuff that's amenable to having a RPG made out of it, as realist magicism. It's magic, but it's real enough to bite, it has an ecology of magic. In magic realism, and also in things like some Sean Stewart, the numinous things happen because the world ought to work like that. Someone cries when making wedding cake, and everyone who eats the cake cries. It isn't remarkable, it would be remarkable if it didn't happen, if it didn't happen you'd have to say "Everyone should have cried..." It isn't literalising metaphor, it's doing a different thing. I think this is really interesting. I think post-Tolkien genre fantasy is largely really detailed feigned histories, and it appeals to people who like doing that and reading about that. But fantasy in the broadest sense, as I said in my review of _Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell_ (brilliant book, so glad it won a Hugo), is about approaching the numinous. There are a whole pile of interesting ways of doing that.

Posted August 15, 2005 3:43 PM by Jo Walton