"Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud."
Theodore Sturgeon
"Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud."
Theodore Sturgeon
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So just what the hell is this lunatic on about, eh? What's his angle? It would be a bit of a misstatement to say that I despise what's going on in fantasy and science fiction literature right now. A shot fired in the general direction of the truth, yes, but still not quite illuminating. So here's the skinny, ugly opinions first and rational proposals second: I am indeed tired of most of what passes for speculative fiction in the here and now, particularly when it comes to fantasy. I am tired of Tolkien with the serial numbers filed off. I am tired of Conan clones and Conan pastiches and Conan resurrections. I am tired of perpetual medievalism, of a fan and creator culture that praises the perfect aping of The Way Things Were and frowns on The Way Things Might Have Been a Bit More Fucking Exciting. I am mildly upset by the sheer number of Volume Sevens and Volume Eights coming out every month in every flavor of puerile. Do you like your Swords of Destiny with or without Cryptic Woodland Elves? Whoops, sorry, they've all got Cryptic Wooden Elves this month. Wooden Elves, did I say? Looks like that old cigar-sucker Freud was onto something. In a literary form supposedly characterized by a liberating lack of rules, why is the Acme Heroic Quest for Object of Power Factory churning out product twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week? Escapism is a grand thing, but why are we stuck on this static, polite, formula escapism? My fervent and admittedly futile hope is to see the genre fantasy iceberg shatter into a thousand jagged shards and embrace the morphology of magic as well as its outward flourishes. Why continue praising literary necrophilia? Why continue re-writing the Arthurian cycles, the Robin Hood tales, the Eddas, the Grimms' tales, and the Silma-fucking-rillion, if you can't improve or expand on them in any fashion other than the trivial? The time has come to stop rim-jobbing all the old dead gods and to start making some new ones to mess around with. Tradition? Tradition's a good start, but what about evolution? What about Upward and Onward?. Get on with the Making Up of Shit! New things, weird things, twists and turns and bright colors and crammed prose. Eyeball kicks and the fantasies that wait under concrete, under asphalt, under blood and skin. Slavish adherence to the Olde Forms and Venerable Traditions deadens the beating heart of human artifice. It's like the silvery touch of anesthetic. It's like breathing the mist of the River Lethe. Enough with worlds where powerful magic exists for ten thousand years yet never manages to duplicate the simplest comforts of the technological world, like the refrigerator. Or the Stridex pad. Nuke the damn places until they glow. Enough of rightful heirs to the throne. Up against the wall with the lot of 'em. Enough of Chosen Ones and Quests for Power. We're told that these structures exist for our own good, that They Sing The Primate Electric, that we are hard-wired to grok them over and over again. The flock receives sermons from The Hero With a Thousand Facesand all the Wee Folk of Fandom toddle off to add Reluctant Heroes and Aged Mentors to their Star Trek/Dragonball Zcrossover fanfic. Of course, if you're not a Dalek it's pretty clear that Campbell's archetypes are meant as a loving guide to the common themes of human mythology and not as inflexible coloring-book lines waiting to be filled in by robots. In short, show me Weird, show me Powerful, show me death and sex and creepy closet hallucinations and the human condition on a little sliver of flattened wood pulp. Weave new epics for the delight of our changing species. Plot fantasies in three dimensions, in the cold dawnlight of the twenty-first century. There's a whole world out there to twist and play with. You want to put poor dead King Arthur on Dr. Frankenstein's table and resurrect him for another go? You're making me cry.
An earlier version of this rant (which I'm not going to let you see, because I like you) said pretty much the same thing, with an energetic but shallow caterwauling tone, and not a lot of signal to spice up the noise. I meant what I wrote, but there's more to the problem and more to my point. Without a little reflection, my lovely little manifesto above is really nothing more than, "Everything that I don't like is crap and shouldn't be read!" In addition to being a big fat lie, that also doesn't help anyone at all. So let's get constructive. What I'm fighting for is plain good writing, and I like to think that I can push others to explore the boundaries of their reading habits without genuinely despising anyone involved in producing or consuming Ye Olde Standard Speculative Fiction. After all, is there anything more subrational than sneering at someone for having different taste in entertainment? So let's be clear- I have yet to read anything by, say, Kevin J. Anderson or Robert Jordan that appears to have been composed with more skill and insight than that possessed by the average American sixth-grader. That doesn't make them bad people. In fact, I admire Kevin J. Anderson as a human being despite the fact that I consider him the single worst science fiction writer currently breathing oxygen. Life's too damn short to take abstract elitism and turn it into real venom. Jordan and Anderson entertain hundreds of thousands of happy readers across the globe, and they make their livings writing. More power to them! More power to the fans who enjoy their works! Second, can we please dismiss the thought of any "Massive Conspiracy Involving the Editors and the Publishers to Keep Speculative Fiction Dumb?" Cripes. On a very basic level, book publishers exist to sell books and their editors exist to screen, select, and transform manuscripts into salable books. It is both ridiculous and childish to whine about how "commercialism overpowers art!" Well, duh, future Nobel Prize winners. Everyone, from publishing company executives and editors on down to bookstore owners and employees likes to get paid. If books don't sell, then a whole chain of economically related folks are going to have to cinch their belts and pray for deliverance. So what I'm advocating is not so much a cut in the market shares of the Jordans, Goodkinds, Eddings, and Andersons of this world ("Avast, ye bloated mainstream tree-killers! Offer up yer percentage points or walk the plank of the literati!"), but the thought that those market shares can remain healthy and undiminished (at least until they drop due to their own bland sameness, which would be Darwinistically acceptable) while the market share of neater, keener, sharper, and more lively stuff gets healthier at the same time. Provided, of course, that the pool of overall fantasy readers is receiving regular infusions of fresh blood rather than chasing its own tail endlessly. Paul T. Riddell has a few things to say on the subject of shrinking buyer/reader pools here, and if you give a rat's ass about any aspect of speculative literature, give him a few moments of your time. The relationship between art and commerce is not a zero-sum game. You can have it both ways, sharp writing + sharp marketing, and get a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Sometimes you get one or the other, and sometimes you get neither, but aren't we all here and reading this stuff because of those Grand Slams, those one-in-a-thousand books that are both Good and Popular? At diatribe's end, I'm basically offering myself up as a fringe provocateur (and it goes without saying that my fringe ain't your fringe, but this is about good writing and not about who was punk back before punk was cool, so shut up), pointing in an often-overlooked direction and occasionally gibbering or faking an epileptic seizure to garner attention. The so-called mainstream is a great place to start, and a great place to return to, and if you find the fringe not to your taste, who the hell is anyone to tell you what to read and enjoy? It's your life. Star Treknovelizations, Dragonlancebooks, Heroic Quest stories, and even (shudder) Sci-Fi celebrity ghostwriter "novels" (and I do use that term loosely in this case) all serve a purpose. They make money for the folks who produce them, and they satisfy a craving in the audience. If that's all you ever want, then take this rant and shove it, and we'll part with a smile. But if all those things, all those leper books and unicorn books and Volume Sevens and Eights have whet your appetite for something very different, stay awhile and let me show you a thing or two. |
"An endless stream of Dune books, leper books, Riverworld books, 2010-and-counting books, Majipoor books, magic blue horse books.... help me, Jesus, I can't do it by myself. It can't be the books. Most are unreadable, some merely boring, and a few achieve the exalted status of a well-prepared cheeseburger. SF used to be solely the province of the visionary and/or deranged. Its writers could count on, at best, a living wage -- along with, of course, the warm admiration of thousands of the isomorphically visionary/deranged, for whatever it was worth. This was not a good thing. Philip Dick ate pet food; others committed suicide, said the hell with it, or lived lives of constant despair. Name your poison. But the crazed were allowed to flourish in their own peculiar way, and the results were, now and then, amazing. So by all means bring SF onto center stage and give it a shot at the Big Time: New York Times Best Seller Lists, mighty advances, fancy covers, seven-piece supermarket dump bins. But don't take a razor to the hamstrings and then say, "Go on, get out there, buddy, and run with the best." Don't, in short, isolate the Dune-leper-magic blue horse&c. books as quintessential SF and ignore everything else. But this is, of course, precisely what mainstream corporate publishing does." That's right. 1985.
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David Brin is a forward-thinking, rationally optimistic astrophysicist whose stories occasionally feature Forward Thinking, Rationally Optimistic Scientists staring down a Crisis That Can Only Be Overcome by the Indomitable Human Spirit. And I love him for it. I started reading Brin (when I was 14) with Startide Rising. Yep, it's wholesome. Yep, it's got cute critters and nasty slithering alien baddies. It also invites the reader to explore a beautiful and eerie alien water world, and it has a knock-down, drag-out super-orbital atomic psionic relativistic starship battle. And it won the Hugo and Nebula awards. And I even like the title. Consider it the Rolls-Royce of latter-day space opera.
Brin is an amusing, enlightened, and eclectic science-fiction writer who loves his job and all of the questions raised by the technology of this age and the ages to come. I'm also happy to say that his prose has surged in quality over the course of his career, from the dry Sundiverto the sublime Brightness Reefand sequels. Here's a link to Brin's home page, a modest but sincere little workhorse with sample chapters of his work and links to dozens of essays and interviews. Here's a sample chapter from his newest novel, Kiln People. Did I mention that David Brin is also the sort of guy who answers fan e-mail personally and politely, when he has the time? |
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If wholesome isn't your thing, here's the polar opposite of wholesome. I can't even begin to imagine the life Burroughs led until he was twice my current age... I mean, I thought Philip K. Dick was one crazy drug-addled sonuvabitch, but Burroughs takes the gold medal for Putting Shit Into Veins. William S. Burroughs once said that writing Naked Lunchinvolved "shitting out my educated Middlewest background once and for all. It's a matter of catharsis, where I say the most horrible things I can think of. Realize that--the most horrible dirty smily awful niggardliest posture possible. . . ."
Burroughs' prose hits right between the eyes with the force of a 747 in a power dive. It's mad, bad, and dangerous to know- serious as cancer, ass-kicking to the last drop. Start with Naked Lunchand keep going. What you thought was risky, wasn't. What you think is dirty, isn't. What you think is dark and gritty and cutting-edge in fantasy fiction is a sunlit romp with cuddly snugglebunnies compared to what's waiting on the end of that long newspaper spoon.
The William S. Burroughs Files |
| A Christian apologist and contemporary of C.S. Lewis, Chesterton also wrote allegorical fantasies with adventurous wit and unusual prose clarity. Someone whose opinions I otherwise respected once dismissed Chesterton as a lowly "writer of detective stories." Well, as should be clear to anyone who has dug a little deeper into his catalog, he more than atoned for that alleged "sin." Pshaw. The Club of Queer Trades,although more lightweight and merely amusing than the other two Chesterton works in my collection, contains a story called "The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown" which should be read by anyone interested in live-action roleplaying games in the here and now. |
| "To wound the autumnal city..." wait! Don't run away. Yes, I read Dhalgren for pleasure. So shoot me. Delaney is one of those inscrutable, inveterate geniuses that leave the rest of us mere primates throwing bones at the Monolith in puzzled frustration. Every time I feel tempted to dance in homage to my own greatness, I remember that Delaney won the Nebula four times before he was 26. His work is rich in theme, prose gymnastics, and frank sexuality that must be quite a shock for those used to stories about chaste rocket engineers and virginal warrior princesses. And the first sentence is the last sentence. "For I have come..." |
| Hot diggity damn. Prolific, paranoid, sensitive, paranoid, eclectic, and paranoid... Philip K. Dick was one hell of an author for a fifteen year-old Minnesota nerd to stumble upon. Here's a guy who did enough amphetamines to maintain an output of sixty pages a day. And that was just to make enough money to stay alive! Yet almost all of that work is still pretty goddamn good. Paranoid. But good. Reading a Dick novel (especially the superlative The Man in the High Castle) always leaves me feeling like the world has spun around me while I've been flipping the pages. The shadows lengthen, time slows down, strangers reveal their hidden faces. And the kipple redoubles, in the dark corners of the room. RIP PKD, 1928-1982. |
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Pretty much everything I have to say about Harlan Ellison can be found here and here. Almost all the writers enshrined here make me want to write well. Harlan Ellison makes me want to live well, as a human being in a civilization full of other human beings at a stupendously crazy point in time.
Why the hell is it that as the years go by and sensation piles upon sensation and entertainment media chases its own ass in a constant effort to heap it all on in every flavor of sex and violence, I have to go read something like Ellison's work from thirty years ago to get real shocks and real tingles?
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The work of Raymond E. Feist is the first "epic fantasy" I ever really read, quite by accident. When I was junior in high school, a younger participant in my live-action roleplaying game approached me without warning, thrust a paperback into my hands and said, "Dude, read this. Just read it." I scoffed (being a science fiction twit, at that point, somewhat disdaining most fantasy) and put the book aside for a few days. Then, during a boring interlude in English class (official topic Ethan Frome)I grudgingly started to read a few pages.
I finished A Darkness at Sethanon, the fourth volume of Feist's so-called "Riftwar Saga," about three weeks later. Yep. It's true. I read and loved Feist before I read and enjoyed Tolkien. Ha. Ha. Ha. Feist ain't no perfect writer. His prose is adequate-plus and he has an annoying tendency (a trademark habit, in fact) to constantly restate certain attributes and abilities of his characters as though the reader might have forgotten them between chapters. But Feist is, in my eyes, the modest king of contemporary epic fantasy, delivering steady, reliable, well-reasoned tales that are occasionally spiced up by genuine tastes of wonder, exoticism, and effective horror. Most endearingly, his stories have a strong human element even in the midst of interdimensional wars and the intrigues of immortal wizards, gods, and all the usual suspects. In fact, Feist's work suffers a bit when gods, demons, and other fragments of ultra-super-mega cosmic power are on stage. The ordinary human beings are his real stars, with their ambitions, their duties, their politics, their spirituality, and their failings. The Kingdom of Isles, the Empire of Great Kesh, the Empire of Tsuranuanni, and all of their lesser neighbors have the gritty feel of real places that are evolving socially, economically, and militarily as the pages fly by. Skip Brooks. Piss on Jordan. Check this guy out. |
O seeker after enlightenment! Enrich your bookshelf, and some minuscule shavings from your purchase may find their way into my pocket, probably long after the sun has grown dark and cold.