Literary Explorations: Epic Fantasy = Crushingly Conservative? (A Sorta Response to Liz Bourke)
First, read this. Have you read it now? Good. I want to start by briefly talking about two of the central problems that Ms. Bourke rightly struggles with throughout her post (and which many readers had issues developing or agreeing to on their own) — definitions and the perception of their application. For the sake of space and time — you should read the actual thread anyway — I’m going break this down into little, methodical sections. I. Definitions The two main terms at work here are “conservative” and “epic fantasy.” The latter is somewhat impossible to define, in part because subgenres are, in effect, convenient marketing categories. There might be something called “epic fantasy,” but I don’t think anyone can approach a satisfactory definition. I tend to imagine “epic fantasy” as a matter of scale. In most works in this class, what is at stake is not the individual so much as the entire world (or the world as the characters know it). Thus, any actions the heroes take is in an attempt to save the world from destruction, whether literally through some kind of magic or figuratively through some sort of violent conquest. Thus, Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire share something in common with Karen Miller’s Kingmaker, Kingbreaker series. What is crucial, for me, is that the stakes are greater than a single, isolated community. “Conservative,” however, is a far simpler term to define. While some arguments about its supposed meaning are interesting, they tend to rely on isolated meanings within individual communities, which themselves are often reductive and meaningless. Saying that “conservative” means “smaller government” is to fall prey to a particular narrative about the term, one which itself is often self-contradictory. “Conservative,” then, must be taken not for what people say it is, but what it does. It ultimately comes down to roots. If conservative is both “restrained” and “protective,” then it follows suit that the term refers to a wide range of possibilities: from traditional cultural movements to general conservation, and so on and so forth. This is partly why we identify “conservative” most often in opposition to “progressive,” as the latter actively seeks change (not always “good” change), where the other frequently wants to prevent or slow it down (not always a “bad” thing). II. The Perception of the Definitions’ Application There’s no point debating “epic fantasy” and trying to find an adequate definition to apply to this scenario. In other words, I’m skipping it here for the more interesting questions related to conservatism. If we take as given that “conservative” rests in opposition to “progressive,” I think it becomes clear that much of what falls under the “epic fantasy” category is neither wholly one or the other — with exception, of course. Take Lord of the Rings as an example. From the start, the major conflict of the novel centers around the ring and preventing some other force (the progressive change) from using it to take over. This is an inherently conservative idea: maintaining the status quo. And that’s not a bad thing in this case. Sauron, after all, would likely change the world of Middle Earth so drastically as to render the limited freedoms of such a world void, thus plunging everyone into “darkness” (a melodrama that rests on an assumption). Avoiding that problem is naturally conserving the present because it is simply the better option. But the narrative is not wholly conservative, for one of the subplots is the “Return of the King,” which assumes that one man will return to his rightful place among his people, thus bringing back a lost ideal and taking the world of Middle Earth into its next mythic phase: the Age of Man. Thus, the ending of Lord of the Rings offers a progressive shift away from the status quo. We can assume that certain things will always remain the same (conserved), but other things will change (progressed) — hopefully for the better. This is true for many other epic fantasies too. Karen Miller’s Kingmaker, Kingbreaker series follows a similar conservative/progressive structure. The narrative opens with the ascension of a previously “crippled” (non-magic) son, who must protect the kingdom against the faltering “dome” that protects everyone from the dark forces beyond (forces connected to the goddess who made magic possible — it’s complicated). But because he has no true magic himself, he must rely on a “commoner” (Asher) to do the work for him. Thus, Asher, the protagonist, gets caught up in the court politics of a world where only certain people are allowed magic, ensuring a certain degree of “slavery” among certain classes, and untold freedoms among others. The narrative is, more negatively than in LOTR, about conserving the present — protecting it from what will undoubtedly look a lot worse. But the end of the duology posits an entirely different future: one where Asher ascends to power, upending the entire social system of this isolated “continent” and taking the people there to the next stage in their cultural development. These are good things, we assume, because it means granting certain freedoms to everyone (progressing) while maintaining certain privileges for others (conserving). All of this is to suggest that there are simply no easy dichotomies when it comes to conservative and progressive. The two work against and with one another for the betterment of the whole. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. In a great deal of fantasy, it works wonderfully. In real life? Well, you just have to look at the U.S. Congress for your answer… Thoughts?
Rethinking Superhero Ethics and Myke Cole’s Shadow Ops Series
On the recent Skiffy and Fanty Show podcast, my friend Jen and I interviewed author Myke Cole about Shadow Ops: Fortress Frontier, the sequel to his 2012 hit, Shadow Ops: Control Point (which we interviewed him about here). During the discussion, we (Jen and I) sidetracked from asking Myke direct questions to actually considering the world he had actually created — specifically, the ethics of that world and how it might actually happen in the real world. I’d like to continue some of that discussion here (on top of this post by Myke on a similar subject). For those that are unfamiliar with Myke’s work, you’ll need to know that Shadow Ops takes place in an alternate present where “magic powers” (a.k.a. superhero powers) are monitored and “controlled” by the various world governments. In the case of the U.S., they have sought to control these powers and the people who have them by banning their use in the general populace and forcing people who discover that they are “latent” to join the military (or some related agency, depending on the need). Much of the “forcing” isn’t publicly acknowledged, which becomes apparent in this brilliant book trailer for Fortress Frontier: One of the questions I’ve always asked myself when looking at any superhero universe (whether it’s Myke’s or the X-Men universe or whatever) is “What would we actually do?” Myke’s universe is not that different from popular comics like X-Men. In a way, the narrative of government control, often using violent force, is a staple of superhero narratives. And rightly so. It’s possibly the most important issue in any superhero world still populated by “normies.” Magneto recognized this when he waged a personal war against humanity, assuming that mutants would become the dominant lifeforms on the planet (the evolutionary model is more important to X-Men than Shadow Ops); thus, what seems like a fit of genocidal thinking turns into a vendetta that is both biologically and personally-oriented (Magneto’s heritage is crucial to his motivations, however problematic). Of course, his actions also fueled the very things he had hoped to prevent. No idea how he has an 8-pack…not likehe actually lifts anything. In Myke’s world, however, the the only rational answer the officials can come up with is “CONTROL” (hence the name Control Point for his first book — one of many meanings). Not surprisingly, this is a painfully repetitive human response. For example, the current debate over gun control is largely an emotional response to something we don’t quite understand — mass shootings (this is not intended as a 1-to-1 analogy). When bad things happen, the human response is often to control that thing, because to control “evil” is to secure the “good” (or something like that). We jump on “mental health” and “fewer guns or stricter laws” because they are the simple answers to problems which, on the surface, appear simple, but, underneath, are complicated. The same thing has happened throughout history, with some noticeable spurts of reasoned progress.* The Shadow Ops series is a great example of this knee-jerk response at work, but based on an actionable threat. If random people gain extraordinary powers, wouldn’t it make sense to launch at campaign to control those powers? Certainly. In the face of a presumed evil (I use this word lightly — the “other” might be a more appropriate term), we can only conceive the arrival, the moment when we know something new and terrifying has arrived, and we must take whatever action we can to prevent that change from overwhelming civilization itself. Some superhero universes use mutant registration, incarceration, extermination, indentured servitude (such as military service in Shadow Ops), or some other method of control that inevitably punishes the “mutant” for having abilities they didn’t ask for. George Clooney, Howard E. Rollins, Jr., and Aamir Khan walk into a bar… Mutant punishments, then, are easy analogues for the real world. People like to make grand comparisons between gay rights, race, and so on and so forth when talking about superheroes. They are fair comparisons when you treat the issue simplistically. I, however, don’t see the validity in such comparisons, in part because there is something tangibly different about a superhero. Arguments against the inclusion of LGBT people in contemporary society are, in my honest opinion, based not on rational determinations of “social damage,” but rather on unfounded accusations that such damage occurs and that it is exclusively the fault of LGBT people. I have seen a few studies which suggest that children raised by gay parents may suffer as a result, but these studies are always a reflection of how social conditions influence children and marginalized groups. In other words, if you raise kids in a homophobic culture, it shouldn’t surprise us that kids of LGBT parents develop social relationships that appear “damaged” in comparison to kids of heterosexual parents; there’s no way to know what effect LGBT parents have on their children without having those results tainted by the culture around us (woe be to sociology!). Similar arguments were made about people of color and so on and so forth — the wheel keeps turning. The older I get, the harder it is for these arguments to remain palatable for me… And then they made it into a movie… But some of those same arguments are actually valid when it comes to superheroes. For example, there are tangible social and physical impacts on the nation when unusual and seemingly supernatural powers are involved. If you think school shootings are terrible, imagine a world with superheroes. Someone who can control the earth around us could easily smash thousands of houses beneath a landslide. A person with fire on his fingertips could burn cities to the ground. Someone with a variation on teleportation (a la Jumper; porting in Myke’s universe) could steal untold amounts from banks or infiltrate secure areas (and, therefore, threaten national security — see the second X-Men movie). Whether we like it or not, superheroes are a potential threat to social stability, since their
Distracting the Internet with Frankenstein, Dionne Brand, and Belated MLK Day!
Wouldn’t it make the world a better place if we all randomly searched through our grandparents’ stuff and one day discovered some super important antique book signed by the author? We could all share our magic book stories with one another, hold hands, and frolic in fields of emerald grass… Or we could just sell them to one another and make hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is what this guy did when he discovered a copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in his grandfather’s house (one of two inscribed by the author to have survived the evils of time). We don’t know how much he sold the book for because the final auction price has been kept private (it exceeded his asking price of £350,000 ($567,000)). That’s a lot of money, no? This guy is way cuter than I am, but it’s all the book. Honest. The question, for me, is whether I would have sold the book if it had appeared on my grandmother’s shelf. I’m not sure I would, to be honest. A good chunk of my book collection is, well, collectible. I’ve got some 100+-year-old books, lots of signed and personalized ones, and so on and so forth. I even have a 1st Edition of the U.S. edition of the Silmarillion floating around in this apartment of mine (I think that’s important, but it’s probably not). But no Frankenstein. In fact, the most exciting discovery I recently had was realizing that my copy of Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return had been signed by the author. See? This is me trying my best creepy stalker / seductress pose. Any tips? In any case, we now have two sexy copies of Frankenstein to hoo and haa over. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to see one of them before I die… And on a completely random note, this: It’s now Thursday, but Monday was kind of an important holiday for us American people — Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. MLK, I think it’s fair to say, is one of the world’s greatest heroes — I still tear up when I hear his “I Have a Dream” speech. He also has a unique connection to the genre community through Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura on the original Star Trek. You can hear her talk about her brief interactions with MLK Star Trek on this repeat episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk podcast. I just thought it was worth mentioning on this blog, even if the day is over. What nifty stuff has been going on in your worlds?
“Best Of” Lists: A Game of Gap-ology?
If you head on over to The OF Blog, you’ll find this post containing links to over a dozen “Best of 2012” lists. Larry wants us to look at them and take note of the commonalities and the differences. Some of those lists are varied, unique, and fascinating; I found a lot of new reads through them. Others? Let’s just say that Larry is right to identify a lot of similarities. What many of these lists show is a serious lack of depth in reading interest. Whether that is an intentional choice — i.e., that someone does not want to read outside of their comfort zone — or otherwise is impossible to say. But when you look over the lists, you’ll find the same novels repeating over and over. I don’t doubt that these works are good (some of them are my favorites this year); the problem seems to be that they are themselves repetitions. Epic fantasy, urban fantasy, epic fantasy, urban fantasy, big name science fiction novel, and so on. Many of them are painfully safe, too. Where is the variety? Where are the challenging works? Maybe I’ve simply become a pretentious genre reader, but I really thought there would be more variety in terms of content among these lists. It makes me wonder whether I’ve simply been blind to all of this over the years, or if something has changed with the way I view literature. Am I more willing to challenge myself as a reader? Or do I find books in different ways from others? What do you think?
This Post is About Asian Americans (or, I Have No Proper Title)
I am currently taking a graduate-level course on Asian-American literature, which includes a considerable amount of theory, criticism, historical documents, and so on. While reading the preface to Aiiieeeee!, an anthology of Asian-American writers edited by Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Hsu Wong, I came across the following quote: Seven generations of suppression under legislative racism and euphemized white racist love have left today’s Asian-Americans in a state of self-contempt, self-rejection, and disintegration. We have been encouraged to believe that we have no cultural integrity as Chinese or Japanese-Americans, that we are either Asian (Chinese or Japanese) or American (white), or are measurably both. This myth of being either/or and the equally goofy concept of the dual personality haunted our lobes while our rejection by both Asia and white America proved we were neither one nor the other. Nor were we half and half or more than one than the other. Neither Asian culture nor American culture was equipped to define us except in the most superficial terms. (viii) What interests me about this quote is how relevant it is to all the stuff going on in my little world. For example, in my Introduction to Literature course, I had my students read Trying to Find Chinatown by David Henry Hwang. The play deals with two young men, a Chinese man living near Chinatown and a white man trying to find his father’s childhood home somewhere nearby (he was adopted by Chinese parents). Ronnie, the first man, takes issue with Benjamin’s, the second, take on ethnic identity, calling Benjamin out for what he perceives to be racist stereotyping of Asian-Americans. In many senses, Ronnie is right, but what he perhaps fails to realize is that he isn’t talking to an everyday white man, but rather a white man raised by Chinese parents who feels a deep affinity to the legacy of his Chinese heritage. Both characters misunderstand one another to a certain degree, which is really the point of the play: to question our notions of ethnic identity. Likewise, the news that Ken Liu won a Hugo Award for his short story, “The Paper Menagerie,” links up with these very questions. I recommend reading the story, because is is quite good. At its most basic, “The Paper Menagerie” is about the troubled relationship between a young, interracial male (Chinese, I think, but please correct me on this) raised in America and his Chinese mother who married an American and moved from her home country, but never fully integrated into American culture. The tension, then, lines up with the quote above, with all the emotional resonance you would expect. I won’t say anything else about it, though. There are some clever uses of magical realism and the fantastic, and the development of the characters is worth exploring. In fact, the more I think about this story, the more I love it, and the more I’m glad to see it win a Hugo. And that’s really all I have to say. Hopefully you all will take something from this…
Hugo Awards Stream Shut Down / Worldcon Banned (or, Dear #Ustream: Fuck you, Signed Fandom)
If you haven’t heard already, Ustream, the serviced used by Worldcon to live stream the Hugo Awards ceremony, pulled the stream and banned Worldcon from its site for terms of service violation. What violation would that be? Apparently an awards ceremony is not allowed to play short clips (a la fair use policy) from nominees in film categories. Doing so in the middle of your ceremony will result in a mid-sentence suspension of the feed and an apparent permanent ban (as of writing this, the folks at Chicon have indicated the Ustream will not bring back the feed, despite mounting public pressure). One would think pissing off a sea of geeks would be pretty low on one’s list. Not for Ustream. Apparently it’s right at the top of their list of “Things To Do When We’re Bored,” which is to say they secretly desire what all slightly deranged institutions desire: a slow, painful death (by crap PR). And they’ve got it. Twitter users have been Tweeting on and off since the take-down of the Worldcon Hugo Awards live stream about the service’s pathetic performance (using the #ustream hashtag). Others have indicated that Cory Doctorow will likely blog about this very moment at Boing Boing, reminding us all that this is what copyright has done to the world: you can’t even host a teeny little awards ceremony without some disembodied suit cracking the whip (well, the Hugos aren’t actually teeny or little, but you get my meaning). And that, for me, is the crux of the issue. If an awards ceremony is not an appropriate place to show short clips from films, then what is? If this is what copyright has come to, then isn’t it about time we all stopped and said, “You know what, this is dumb”? Can you imagine this happening at the Oscars? Probably not, but imagine if it did. Imagine the furor. Imagine all those industry CEOs and suits getting lambasted by celebrities. Okay, I’m dreaming here. Point is: this is a complete failure on the part of copyright and on the part of service providers to do the right thing in the right moment. There’s no logical reason to take down the Worldcon feed. None. The refusal to put the feed back up just makes matters worse. It’s pure dickery to the highest order, and a perfect example of the utter idiocy behind our copyright laws and the people trying to push for further control of the online environment. I’m not happy. A lot of Hugo Awards watchers aren’t happy. And I’m sure the folks behind Worldcon aren’t happy either. Meh. Edit: io9’s take can be found here.