The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by cija:

Fanficcers are wannabes.

What do you think they want to be?

Just because you want to practice your writing with an audience doesn't mean you deserve one--especially one that someone else has assembled.

I don't read fiction to reward the deserving, I do it to reward me.

It isn't truly fair to the original author--even if it doesn't damage him.

Joss Whedon has said, I believe, that people not only can but should write Buffy fanfic. Perhaps he is being terribly unfair to himself, but I think maybe he knows what he's doing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.)

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

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.

Teresa - I accept that I am easily offended by not very offensive things, and anyway I was bothered by what are really extremely minor points considering the context of the thread. I would only continue to be bothered by Fran's remark if I didn't realize it was a joke, and I do, now, so I've stopped.

I overreact to the whole Americans pretending to be Canadians thing - even though I have no idea how many people, if any, really do it - because either I, as an American, share some small part of responsibility for my nation's outrages, in which case I shouldn't hide from it, or else as an individual I'm not representative of my nationality, in which case I shouldn't be ashamed to admit to it. Or both.

FranW: So I've started telling people I'm from Southern Canada.

Graydon: I really wish you wouldn't do that. It creates a pattern of assumptions that gets people who are from Southern Ontario beat up when the travel.

I don't know which of these comments is more offensive.

Although the first may be a bitter joke, there are of course plenty of Americans who claim to be Canadians abroad, and I think that actually doing it is not cute and is, furthermore, wrong. If, that is, you consider contributing to a worldwide perception that decent Americans are harder and harder these days to be a problem. It's cowardly and indefensible unless perhaps you believe your life to be in immediate danger.

Graydon - what do you think FranW is doing abroad that would make people want to beat up her supposed compatriots? Or was that a joke too?

Of all the repellent things about this, one that's struck me most strongly is the apparent need for reporters to explain in painstaking, condescending detail how this kind of degradation is humiliating -- to Arabs. Even in the Seymour Hersh article:

Bernard Haykel, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at New York University, explained. “Being put on top of each other and forced to masturbate, being naked in front of each other—it’s all a form of torture,” Haykel said.

Gee golly, you don't say! Because if I, a modern American woman, were to be stripped and blindfolded and sexually abused by male guards, why, I wouldn't mind a bit!

I know that some of the 'explaining' is just designed to make Americans understand how bad it is, but it comes across as if not liking to be threatened with rape and death were a quaint cultural quirk, along the lines of an obscure dietary restriction.

Kevin Andrew Murphy wrote:


a guy went to a bar, got drunk, danced with and kissed three girls, got a blowjob from one, then ended up vomiting in the bushes once it was revealed they were pre-op transsexuals.

and: ...someone puking because they had someone violate one of their personal taboos.


In my world, when you get sloppy drunk and make out with strangers, you don't get to complain that they 'violated' one of your personal taboos because you failed to ascertain whether they had dyed hair, unshaven legs, a penis, or a mastectomy scar before you put your genitals in their mouth.

If one is so fragile and pathetic a human being as to risk vomiting when one of these horrors is revealed, perhaps one should learn to ask about them before having sex, just as people with rare, potentially fatal allergies have to check the content of anything they eat. Of course, it's harder to take responsibility for one's own personal problems than to blame others for not catering to them. Still, it's the adult thing to do.

For instance, if I found out at a later date that I'd slept with a transphobic jerk, I might end up puking in the bushes, too. But I'd have no one to blame but myself.

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