M. John Harrison’s “All the Roary Night”
Another great post from Harrison, that you must check out.
In part:
Substitute imagination for exhaustiveness, and inventiveness for research. As a reader I’m not interested in a “fully worked out” world. I’m not interested in “self consistency”. I don’t care what kind of underpants Iberian troops wore in 1812, or if I do I can find out about it for myself. I don’t want the facts about the Silk Road or the collapse of the Greenland Colony, sugared up & presented in three-volumes as an imaginary world. I don’t want to be talked through your enthusiasm for costume. I don’t want be talked through anything.
I especially like the bit about strangeness later on because that’s what I’m not getting enough of lately. I’ve never really bought into China Mieville’s ideas on escapism…until now, when I feel like that’s 90 percent of what we’re getting at the moment–a new conservatism.
Jeff
October 6, 2007 at 11:45 am
Thanks for the link. Good advice about Kenneth Patchen, a poet who’s nearly forgotten at this point.
I think Google has been the great enabler of pragmatic fantasy. Authenticity comes cheap nowadays.
October 6, 2007 at 3:28 pm
I’m not sure. I understand what Harrison is saying, but in a sense that itself is a recipe. And everyone needs to find their own recipe. At the end of the day, it only matters what you have in your hands. Whether you researched the hell out of it, or wrote it in 24 hours on speed. I can cite great books written with both methods. But what about writing books that outlast trends and theory?
October 6, 2007 at 3:47 pm
I’m not saying it’s the One True Way. I just thought it was a good post.
October 6, 2007 at 4:18 pm
Yeah, it is. Makes one think.
October 7, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Seems like innovation in fantasy is a hot topic at the moment.
Mark Chadbourn has recently written about the challenge that rpgs present to fantasy literature: “We all know how magic works, as clearly as the laws of physics - it’s defined in a thousand rule books. […] They are defined as clearly as the world you might search for in Wikipaedia or the Encyclopaedia Britannica. This is not fantasy. This is reality, living, breathing and evolving all around.” He feels that literature is loosing ground. His answer to this is: “I’m not convinced that simply ‘doing it better’ will work. Fantasy authors need to find a new unique selling point. If they want to maintain their reputation as the elite of this field, they need to work their imaginations harder, start defining new territories, go to places that the gamers wouldn’t (yet) dare to go.”
(http://community.livejournal.com/writefantastic/26044.html)
Joe Abercrombie thinks otherwise: “To me this both patronises and misses the point in equal measure. The majority of readers of any genre have little interest in innovation. They want to read/play/see something that’s just like the last thing they liked. That’s what a genre is. That’s what a popular market is.” – “The fact is, for the vast majority of readers (and I think I probably count myself among them), too much innovation is boring. Too much innovation is pretentious. Too much innovation is … wank.”
(http://www.joeabercrombie.com/2007/10/fantasy-rpgs-innovation-and-bile.html)
Oliver
October 8, 2007 at 8:24 am
Well, in an attempt to prevent myself coming over like a shrill madman, I didn’t say that in response to Mark Chadbourn, more in reply to Jonathan McCalmont’s assertion that fantasy readers are more or less allergic to innovation, and that their tastes somehow need altering so that they like ‘better’ stuff:
http://www.sfdiplomat.net/sf_diplomat/2007/10/is-fantasy-kill.html
I’m not anti innovation or imagination. I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with what MJH is saying, he’s got very good points about exhaustive worldbuilding. I just think that if you want to hit the kind of popular markets Mark Chadbourn is talking about, you need to find ways of combining the innovative with the familiar. Authors, critics, and editors often love entirely new ways of doing things. Readers usually don’t.
October 8, 2007 at 11:36 am
Joe:
I like your work a lot, but gotta disagree with this: “If you want to hit the kind of popular markets” and the whole idea of Chadbourne’s “selling points”. We shouldn’t think of fiction as product. You can still think of your readers while you’re writing, without thinking of what you’re doing in the same terms as you would a can of baked beans.
Jeff
October 8, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Jeff,
Absolutely. I’d never say that it SHOULD be an author’s first aim to hit the biggest possible market. That way lies the mediocre, and the mediocre rarely succeeds, even on a commercial level. I guess my original point was that you can still find ways to be innovative within a well established and popular form. I wouldn’t want to be the voice of rampant commercialism here.
Unless someone were to pay me, of course.
October 8, 2007 at 6:17 pm
LOL! No, I totally see your point, though. Since the “in” thing seems to be to talk about books as product, it makes me wary and to go in the opposite direction just be careful–especially since I do so much PR work and consultation work for authors, etc. But neither did I link to the Harrison as the end-all be-all statement. Most days, most weeks, I find my brain going back and forth on the issue of world-building, on the issue of the writer’s relationship to the work and to the reader, etc., etc.
Cheers,
Jeff