SF/F Commentary

(Or the Problem of Absolutes in Fantasy Literature) Good vs. evil.  It forms the basis of our religions and fills the narratives of our stories, myths, legends, and day-to-day conversations.  But the more I look at the world, the more I get the sense that such a simple dichotomy never existed.  Nothing is ever so simple as “good vs. evil.”  There are always tugs and pulls from other parties, some of which are so torn between the good and evil spectrums that they seem to reflect a strange and un-containable neutralism. Some people, however, aren’t interested in those tugs and pulls.  They want to see the world in absolutes.  A recent discussion I had with an older man on Facebook (we’ll call him Bob) bears this reality out.  When talking about U.S. involvement in imperialist projects around the world, I pointed out that the U.S. often does great wrong, and that very few “pure” good acts exist.  Bob took this to mean that the I was saying that the U.S. is always wrong, and that the rest of the world is always right.  When I tried to explain that I was actually pointing out the problem of trying to talk about U.S. involvement in absolutes, he shrunk away and left the conversation.  He didn’t know how to handle the fact that the world isn’t actually a pure dichotomy; he wanted to think of the U.S. as occasionally incorrect, but more often than not very much right in its military and economic involvement in the rest of the world.  The fact that doing “good” elsewhere often hurts people didn’t occur to him (when I said as much, he accused me of wanting the people of Libya to be murdered by Gaddafi, which couldn’t be farther from the truth). Bob is obviously not alone (though perhaps the particulars of his viewpoint make him a minority).  In the fantasy literature community, there is a whole segment of readers who clamber for the opportunity to read the next fantasy novel where the good guys and the bad guys are clearly laid out.  I suspect this group is small, in part because some of these individuals demonstrate an underlying or explicit sexism/racism in their calls for more Tolkien or C. S. Lewis (again, this group may be a minority even among those who like “good vs. evil).  Fantasy literature hasn’t moved completely away from these simple notions; there have always been people who desire such a simple view of the world.  But the overall feel of fantasy to me is like a gray-ing up of the medieval model.  George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones is not The Princess Bride (William Goldman) or The Never-ending Story (Michael Ende).  Even the proliferation of the new fantasy anti-hero suggests that the genre has been moving away from simple worlds for a good while. But moving away doesn’t change the world we live in or the people who are readers, leaders, and so on.  In the U.S., we’ve seen more and more people who see the world in black and white getting their fair share of air time, rejecting the notion of grays outright.  Politicians routinely use the “good vs. evil” model to wage cultural wars in the country.  Paying close attention to the last election makes it clear that partisan logic is one which holds to that simple world view. But what makes us desire “good vs. evil?”  Is it the sheer simplicity of it?  Thinking in terms of hard dichotomies might mean that we don’t have to think about the subtle nuances of our lives.  We can look at single actions and say “they are good” and “they are evil” without having to wade through the complexities of history, culture, and so on.  Maybe it’s because the more we realize that the world is gray, the more we also realize that any decision we make has consequences somewhere else — that is that our actions reverberate elsewhere like socio-economic earthquakes.  Because the world never was a simple one (at least, not in recorded history; perhaps the “good vs. evil” dichotomy is a part of our primitive, pre-civilization hangups). Why do you think we are so attached to “good vs. evil?”  Why are you attached to it, and do you think fantasy is moving away from such dichotomies? ——————————————————————- Notes: I’ve tried to refrain from talking about the United Kingdom because I don’t feel as though I can adequately talk about the people who live there.  If anyone from the U.K. would like to chime in on this topic, feel free to do so in the comments. I don’t want to suggest that the fantasy works I’ve mentioned above do not contain areas of grey.  They do, but the overwhelming sense in Tolkien or The Princess Bride or The Never-ending Story seems to confirm the absolutist “good vs. evil” narrative.

If you haven’t seen the blogosphere throwing a fit yet about this New York Times review of the TV adaptation of “A Game of Thrones,” then prepare yourself.  It was bound to happen that some hack of that lovely “literary” culture would come along to talk about something they barely understand:  this time A Game of Thrones and fantasy in general.  Some choice quotes, though, are: The bigger question, though, is: What is “Game of Thrones” doing on HBO? The series claims as one of its executive producers the screenwriter and best-selling author David Benioff, whose excellent script for Spike Lee’s post-9/11 meditation, “25th Hour,” did not suggest a writer with Middle Earth proclivities. Five years ago, however, Mr. Benioff began reading George R. R. Martin’s series of books, “A Song of Ice and Fire,” fell in love and sought to adapt “Game of Thrones,” one of the installments. (Because we all know that no non-genre writer could possibly fall in love with a genre property and suddenly want to be involved in genre things, right?) And: The imagined historical universe of “Game of Thrones” gives license for unhindered bed-jumping — here sibling intimacy is hardly confined to emotional exchange. (Because there was no unhindered bed-jumping in realistic feudal societies…) And: The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half. (Because women don’t like swords and medieval sex parties and dragons and other things like that…) And, finally: If you are not averse to the Dungeons & Dragons aesthetic, the series might be worth the effort. If you are nearly anyone else, you will hunger for HBO to get back to the business of languages for which we already have a dictionary. (Because the only people who enjoy fantasy are people who like D&D…) Read the review on your own to get a better sense of the biases and absurdities of the author, which I’m not going to refute here. Instead, I want to talk about the responsibility of editorial departments and the reviewer.  Aidan of A Dribble of Ink has already responded to the NYT review, the body of which I take some issues with.  He wrote: There’s an argument out there that the NYT should have handed the television show to a reviewer with a taste for and a history with Fantasy literature and cinema. I don’t fully agree with this, however. One assumes that the early viewership of the show will primarily be made up of fans of Martin’s series, an already established audience, but as the show moves on (and garners more critical acclaim, as it has everywhere besides the NYT), that audience will continue to grow and reach outside the typical circle of core Fantasy consumers. Does one need to be immersed in 60′s corporate politicking to enjoy Mad Men? No. Does one have to understand the Tudor dynasty to enjoy The Tudors? Aidan does eventually argue that Bellafante, who wrote the NYT review, should have been open-minded enough to immerse herself in the medium (fantasy), and that she shouldn’t have been selected for the job, but I still take issue with the criticism over proper reviewer selection.  This is because it seems absurd to me to select anyone who demonstrates a clear bias against a particular genre, or who has no familiarity with it.  It is difficult to expect someone to write a fair review of something they are not familiar with.  I certainly could not write anything remotely fair about a book on Swedish politics, in part because I don’t know anything about the topic, but also because non-fiction books are not my specialty.  My review would be unfair to the source material. In the case of Bellafante, though, her credibility as a genre review is questionable at best.  On the New York Times alone, only seven of her last two-hundred articles deal with television shows we might call speculative fiction (Flash Forward, Warehouse 13, Virtuality, The Event, Supernatural, and Spartacus:  Gods of the Arena).  Of those seven, one is on a fantasy show (Supernatural) and one is on a show that might be called fantasy depending on how much liberty one has to take with a historical period to make it unreal enough to qualify as alternate history (Spartacus:  Gods of the Arena).  Can you guess which works Bellafante dislikes most? If you guessed the two fantasy properties (roughly defined), then you should give yourself a cookie.  Bellafante’s reviews of fantasy TV contains such a clear level of bias that it’s a wonder anyone is handing her fantasy properties to begin with.  About Supernatural, she had this to say: Asking anyone to explain the story line succinctly is like demanding a 15-second account of the Hundred Years’ War. “Supernatural” is intricately plot intensive, and perhaps you need the flower-bud brain cells of youth really to keep up. And: If you are neither 15 years old nor the sort of person for whom the term fan fiction has an ounce of resonance, then chances are that ”Supernatural” is not in your DVR queue or even in your frame of reference. It seems to me that the issue here is with the editor who selected Bellafante for the review (or selected her review, in the event that the NYT is run by submission).  What would compel an editor to select a reviewer who a) does not have a track record as a fantasy