Guest Post: “Freedom to Name” by Max Gladstone (Three Parts Dead)
Somewhere in Thailand, a mind-controlled ant climbs a tree. She moves in jerks and starts, her body no longer her own. Alone, she staggers to the underside of a leaf, and bites the thick central stem. Her jaw locks. Her chitin bulges and bursts. A long gray tendril rises from within, unfurls to three times her length, and pops to release a cloud of spores. Away on the breeze the spores float, to possess any other ants unlucky enough to remain within the blast radius. The fungus is called Ophiocordyceps camponoti-balzani. The fungus infects an ant, takes over the victim’s brain, forces it to move to a high place near other ants–a place where spores will spread–and explodes. That’s real. If you work for a corporation or a non-profit, you’re part of a functionally immortal entity whose life is governed by laws more theological than biological—a being that draws strength from desire, faith, and sacrifice. When corporations emerged in the High Middle Ages, jurists compared them to angels: immortal, immaterial, mighty. And every angel is terrifying. That’s real, too. You read these words on a screen lit by lightning, which we harnessed either by burning hundred-million-year-old plants and plankton (and a few dinosaurs), by wrestling rivers like Achilles, by binding the wind or the shifting tide or sunlight or subterranean fire. Building your screen required labors that would make Hercules blanch. How can we tell stories about that kind of world? A world that’s not straightforward, a world with diversities of wonder, justice, injustice, horror, majesty, and sheer scale to beggar the wildest opium dreams? We can tell some stories by zooming in. The earth seems flat to most human beings, most of the time. Newtonian physics works fine for objects about the size of people, moving at people speeds. A character who calls her former lover to console him after his father’s death doesn’t need to think about cellular towers, satellites, digital audio, or call routing, let alone the Chinese mine that produced the rare earths used to make the phone (and the people who worked there). By focusing on dramatic structures of everyday life and emotional politics that haven’t changed much since Murasaki wrote Genji, a storyteller can avoid much of reality’s weirdness. Or the teller can embrace the strange. Break open the common surface of our lives and expose the machinery beneath. Show characters who engage with the mad mess of their setting, who are elevated by it or ground to dust or both. Pull out elements of our daily weird, hold them to the light, and watch them spark. Some people accuse fantastic literature–science fiction, fantasy, horror, and all their permutations–of escapism. And sure, some of us come to genre tales for the rich fantasy lives, for the grand open vistas and the capital-E Evils which Must Be Stopped. But I think the richness of the genre lies in confrontationalism, not escapism: its ability to address the fundamental strangeness of the natural world, and the world we’ve built, and the world being built around us. The freedom to tell stories out of this world can offer the freedom to name more precisely the world where we live. And that world is wild, and needs naming. ——————————————————- About the Author: MAX GLADSTONE went to Yale, where he wrote a short story that became a finalist in the Writers of the Future competition. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts. About the Book: A god has died, and it’s up to Tara, first-year associate in the international necromantic firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, to bring Him back to life before His city falls apart. Her client is Kos, recently deceased fire god of the city of Alt Coulumb. Without Him, the metropolis’s steam generators will shut down, its trains will cease running, and its four million citizens will riot. Tara’s job: resurrect Kos before chaos sets in. Her only help: Abelard, a chain-smoking priest of the dead god, who’s having an understandable crisis of faith. When Tara and Abelard discover that Kos was murdered, they have to make a case in Alt Coulumb’s courts—and their quest for the truth endangers their partnership, their lives, and Alt Coulumb’s slim hope of survival.
Guest Post: “The Palest of Copies: History, Culture, Empire, and Fiction” by Daniel A. Rabuzzi (The Indigo Pheasant)
(Details about The Indigo Pheasant, Mr. Rabuzzi, and his blog tour can be found below the post. Go buy the book!) Historians of medieval Europe would be surprised at the pallid, static and simplistic depictions of their subject in the work of many modern fantasy writers. In the past fifty years, medievalists have overturned Western Renaissance and Enlightenment assertions that the “middle time” was an opaque, undifferentiated hiatus endured between the glittering peaks of Rome and Modernity. Equipped with digital tools, platoons of medievalists today are able to mine, compile, sort, and index more data about medieval people and places than any prior generation.[i] Advances in aerial archaeology surveys, underwater excavations, and isotope analysis — to name but three– have dramatically expanded our knowledge of daily life (everything from how bricks were made to how bread was baked), migration and settlement patterns, trade routes, funerary practices, and much more.[ii] A willingness to use methods from anthropology, geographical studies, and other social sciences — epitomized by the widely influential Annales school in France, the Cambridge Group for the History of Population & Social Structure in the U.K., and the Quaderni storici in Italy — has buttressed our new interpretations of the era.[iii] Above all, medieval studies has — to great advantage — wedded its traditional strengths in manuscript analysis and paleography with modern literary critical approaches and semiotics, framing our questions in entirely new ways and forming new understandings from materials previously neglected or ignored.[iv] I hope we might see more variety, more dynamism and more nuance in the pseudo-medieval settings adopted by many fantasy authors. Transposing modern analogues, or what we perceive as similarities, won’t work. We need to rasp, file, chisel and mallet ourselves back to another reality, before we can use it for our modern fabulistic purposes. We must translate ourselves, in the word’s literal Latin sense of carrying over, of removing from one place to another. And then the real work begins. Even medieval concepts we think we know, after having laboriously scrubbed off the verdigris, will betray us because the context is gone. For instance, where is a modern fantasy novel based on Saint Maurice, one of the most widely venerated in the European Middle Ages, bearer of the holy “Spear of Destiny,” and the patron saint of the Holy Roman Empire? He is routinely depicted as an African in full knight’s armor — the oldest image we have of St. Maurice is an imposing 13th-century statue in the Cathedral of Magdeburg, right beside the tomb of Emperor Otto I. He is portrayed elsewhere conversing as an equal with the Pope. Bridging the centuries and the Middle Passage (and surviving Katrina), there is a St. Maurice Church in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. I want fantastical epics that take as their point of departure the life of the Jewish community documented by the Geniza repository in Cairo, or of Muslim merchants in Aleppo and Damascus establishing a foundation or school via waqf deeds.[v] I seek spec fic based on the adventures of Malian mathematicians and astronomers, and on the exploits of sastra of jyotisa practitioners in India.[vi] How about using as a setting the embassy King Harsa of Kanauj in India sent to the T’ang emperor T’ai Tsung or the mission King Pulakesin II of Badami dispatched to the Sassanian emperor Khusru II?[vii] Imagine riding with the spec fic counterpart of the great Muslim admiral Zheng He on his seven epic voyages for the Chinese emperor in the early 15th century, reaching as far as East Africa — focusing on the common sailors. Delve into fictional versions of Sundiata’s empire, or the adventures of Oranyan, a prince of Ile-Ife, who followed a serpent as was foretold and thereby founded the Yoruba Empire. Or explore Cambay in Gujarat and Calicut on the Malabar, and Aden, which 10th-century traveler al-Muqaddasi described as “the anteroom of China, entrepot of Yemen, treasury of the West, and mother lode of trade wares.” Why indeed limit ourselves to medieval Europe (and a truncated Europe at that) when crafting the backdrops for fabulistic literature? Feminist perspectives, postcolonialist approaches, and frameworks established by scholars from within the African Diaspora have each revolutionized literary, historical and cultural studies in the United States. [viii] Insights gained from the study of modern history are helping us identify the thorns in the romance of the rose.[ix] For instance, Sharon Kinoshita observes that “many of the best-known works of medieval French literature take place on or beyond the borders of ‘France’ or even the French-speaking world,” and argues that the origins of vernacular French writing is “inextricably linked to historical situations of contact between French-speaking nobles and peoples they perceived as their linguistic, religious and cultural others.”[x] Geraldine Heng makes a similar point: “Allowing fantasies of race and nation to surface with remarkable freedom, and to flex themselves with astonishing ease and mobility, medieval romance becomes a medium that conduces with exceptional facility to the creation of races, and the production of a prioritizing discourse of essential differences among peoples in the Middle Ages.”[xi] From essentializing the Other to erasing the Other altogether is all too often a small step in the medieval European tradition, and in the later scholarship about the Middle Ages. Erasure is sometimes a part of creating the canon upon which — unknowingly or not — the modern fantasy genre rests. (I am reminded of how medieval scribes would use pumice stones “ad radenda pergamena,” i.e., “for scraping parchment.”) Maria Rosa Menocal gives a classic example when she notes that the root word for the quintessential medieval figure of the troubadour may be Arabic, not Latin, and that until recently the Arabic possibility was mostly ignored or obscured.[xii] Ananya Jahanara Kabir discusses how nostalgia can similarly erase and reorder the past to justify current power dynamics, using as her example 19th-century Britons building a history that showed medieval England inheriting leadership from Rome and in turn bequeathing the right to