Towards a different kind of Immersion : The Economic Fantasy Genre

As I have said before on this blog, I am not a great fan of the fantasy genre.  Setting aside my problems with the genre's political and aesthetic conservatism, I genuinely find it quite difficult to get excited about stories of people running off to fight things, find things and generally doing all the stuff that charitably gets referred to as epic but I like to think constitutes little more than "falling down wells" as a forum poster so brilliantly putting it to me.

However, despite not being a fantasy fan, I am what is often referred to as a "fantasy role-player".  This evening I was thinking about what aspects of SFF novels I enjoyed, what aspects of roleplaying I enjoy and I realised that part of the problem might well be that the immersive aspect of the fantasy novel is distasteful to me.  By this I don't mean that I have some philosophical problem with immersing myself in a novel, rather that the kind of things that go on in a fantasy novel are not the kind of things that interest me.

I don't particularly like traveling.  I don't enjoy exploring new places.  I don't see the world in black and white terms.  I don't want to save the world.  I don't dream of being able to beat the crap out of the people that I don't like and I really have no specific desire to be a hero.

So if we are to see the fantasy genre a means for people to immerse themselves in a world where they can vicariously live out their fantasies, I have to ask...

 

What about my fantasies?  where are the books that allow me to vicariously live through something that interests me?

I roleplay pretty much every single monday night.  I never used to roleplay this often as I would frequently burn out or run one game and then get fed up after I'd done all the preparation work and writing.  However, over the last eighteen months I have discovered that I can enjoy fantasy settings.  The key is what I get to do there.  And before you get any ideas, I'm not talking about kinky sex stuff, I'm talking about something more mundane than that... I'm talking about outsourcing.

Most RPGs (and even if you've never played one, you'll recognise the ingredients from console and PC games) takes their cues from a blend of epic fantasy and the more viscerally violent elements of the kind of sword and sorcery pulps that were once written by the likes of Robert E. Howard or Michael Moorcock during his more... um... stimulated years.  As a result, most RPGs, regardless of genre or setting tend to boil down to what I have in the past referred to as a crypto-objectivist bare-knuckle capitalist fantasy in which the peasants spend their lives with their feet in shit while the "elite" go around collecting huge mountains of gold, killing anyone that stands in their way and covering themselves in magical bling.  However, while the realpolitik of most games boils down to this, the more sentimental reading of what most RPGs and the literature that influences them are about is being heroic and saving the world by defeating evil.  The games I play in are not really much like that.

Regardless of the setting, regardless of the genre, the two questions my group tends to ask itself when it starts playing are A) can we hire someone to do it for us and B) can we exploit this and turn it into a business.  Indeed, rather than running around killing things, most of our games seem to focus on avoiding combat and hiring people to do the more tiring and dangerous tasks while our characters bask in the pleasures of what can only be compared to an executive or managerial lifestyle.  In one particularly memorable game the characters were given a load of old business ledgers to sort through and their first response was to go out and hire a company of accountants to do the work for them.  In our games, everyone is rational, everyone is interested in making a bit of money and conflicts arise mostly not from ancients evils awakening in dark caverns but different interest groups trying a find to find a way to keep their business plans afloat in the face of new competition... and you know what?  I love this kind of stuff.  Leave killing dragons to the hirelings and let Aragorn and Gandalf keep their battles with smelly orcs and Balrogs.  I'll be the guy bidding on the contract to rebuild The Shire.

Interestingly, I think that I am really quite badly served when it comes to fantasy that caters to the kind of immersion that I am looking for.

The most obvious and recent example of an alternate approach to the fantasy formula would be Scott Lynch's interesting attempt at putting the books of China Mieville and Fritz Leiber in the same room as the films of David Mamet.  Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora and the more recent Red Sails Under Red Skies.  Interestingly, Lynch shares my interest in gaming as well as an interest in non-traditional fantasy plots.  Indeed, Lynch's principal protagonist Locke is so weak that he can barely lift a sword, left alone fight effectively with one.  However, despite Lynch's interest in fantasy that isn't about "falling down wells" he is not quite David Mamet and frequently falls back into magic and violence as a means of conflict generation and resolution.  In fact, when we meet the Gentlemen Bastards (the gang that give their name to the series of books) they have unlimited resources with which to con people.  So the books are not really about using your wits to make money... they are more traditional than that even if they do fall within the boundaries of urban and gritty alt-fantasy as laid down by China Mieville in his Bas-Lag books.

The other series of fantasy-style books that come close to what I am looking for are Charlie Stross' Merchant Princes books, even if Stross admitted to me in a recent interview that they are not really fantasy at all.  In fact, Rick Kleffel at the agony touched on these ideas in his interview with Stross last year (the MP3 of it is here and it's well worth a listen as it gets Charlie at his free-flowing best).  Stross is an interesting writer as unlike many other SF writers, his speculation is not fueled by hard, theoretical sciences such as physics or even biology, but by softer more practical science such as that found in Computer Science and Political Economy.  Indeed, aside from being a world-walking fantasy novel in the tradition of Roger Zelazny's Amber, The Merchant Princes series features discussions of economic ideas such as the relationship between the freedom of individuals and freedom of capital and part of the book features a character from contemporary Earth trying to set up a business exporting old Earth technologies to a parallel world stuck broadly in the victorian era and from there technologies that might be useful in a third parallel world similar to our high medieval period.  Indeed, much like me, Stross is someone who can't really be bothered with violence as a way of resolving conflicts.  In Glasshouse he has the protagonist go off and do something else while the fighting happens and in The Jennifer Morgue he has the protagonist's girlfriend turn up with a magic violin.  However, while the Merchant Princes series is full of books that is about economic matters, it is not really a book mainly concerned with the cut and thrust of business.  Indeed, the book's protagonist spends most of her time trying to work contrary to the wishes of other characters and the bulk of the conflict comes from there.

One recent genre work that is mostly concerned with business is David Louis Edelman's Infoquake.  A fascinating, if not entirely convincing story of one man's attempts to land a killer idea and make a fortune out of it, Infoquake goes some way to scratching the itch I am talking about.  Its central protagonist is a driven business man and a gifted programmer who spends the book initially competing against other companies but then against the conservative institutions that keep order on his futuristic version of the Earth.  Infoquake's tale of politics and corporate espionage has also invited comparisons with Cyril M. Kornbluth's 1953 novel The Space Merchants that features an advertising executive caught up in the plots of multi-national corporations.  However, what is interesting about both of these stories is that neither of them derives their chief conflict from the conflict inherent in capitalism.  Both are books that take place in the grey area between top-level business and politics.

 

So what is it that I'm actually looking for?

A link that is all too rarely made when examining the literature of the fantastic is the one between immersion and aspiration.  People want to immerse themselves in tales of epic fantasy because they want to experience the ins and outs of a hero's life.  They want to be there when good triumphs over evil or when the goodie finally gets his revenge on the bad guy.  However, what is interesting is that while the nature of aspiration has evolved since genre first emerged, the kind of immersion afforded by genre literature has not.

 

Why is modern fantasy literature not more closely attuned to the aspirations of modern people?

The kind of aspiration that I am talking about can be frequently found on television.  The two best examples of this kind of vicarious living are The Apprentice and Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares.

The Apprentice in both its UK and US guises is a series in which contestants compete in a series of vignettes designed to show off some of the skills you need to effectively run a business.  At the end of every episode, the team that made the least money must account for its failings and the guilty party is sacked and sent home.  While nothing is ever really accomplished in the series, the programme does a great job of showing off the kind of skills you need to be a successful entrepreneur and it invites the viewer at home to consider the skill-sets of the different contestants and consider the personality conflicts.  In essence, the viewer is invited to sit in on one hugely long series of interviews.

Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares is not so much about interviewing as it is about being a consultant.  Every week, renowned restauranteur and chef Gordon Ramsay is invited into a failing restaurant in order to identify the problems with food, management, staff or logistics that are preventing that restaurant from being successful.  Some weeks the programme deals with a terrible chef, other weeks the problem is not the food but the relationships between the staff and at other times the problem can be with the nature of the menu or even the actual physical set-up of the restaurant.  Through watching the programme viewers get an idea of the suite of skills needed to be run a good restaurant.

While aspirational TV takes many different forms, one of its more interesting manifestations lies in the aspiration of running one's own business and making it a success.  In watching something that you have constructed grow and improve and to live through solving all of the problems that are holding you back and stopping you from being a success.  These are conflicts grounded in reality and which require skill, cunning and nous to overcome.  Why does fantasy prefer to dwell on saving a morally simple world instead of making the best one can in a more realistic one?

 

So what you're saying is that you want a real job?

 

One of the barriers to this type of writing is the belief that economic fantasy would be "Your Shitty Job 2.0" but this is to ignore the fact that work can be spiritually satisfying if it takes place in the right environment and you do well.  This is where the fantastical element would come in as rather than working the check-out at Tesco, the books would deal with the realities of running a mercenary company stationed on the borderlands of the Orc Sultanate or the ordeals posed by attempting to run a college for wizards.  The possibilities are endless.  I can even think of a successful example of how to do genre business right... Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon nails exactly the kind of writing that I am talking about.  In the sections focussing on Randy Waterhouse's computer business, Stephenson takes what could be a shitty IT job and imbues it with mystery, adventure and panache by bringing out what makes business fun and conveniently glossing over Randy filling in his Income Tax return and having an argument with HR.

Am I alone in wanting to immerse myself in white collar action rather than blue collar tales of crawling through caves and fighting people for the money in their pockets?

Comments

[A.R.Yngve]

"Why is modern fantasy literature not more closely attuned to the aspirations of modern people?"

Fantastic lit about fantastic jobs?

An intriguing challenge! Let me get back to you when I've figured out what to write along those lines...

During the while (to quote Monty Python), I'd suggest you read Harry Harrison's DEATHWORLD books... in one of them, I recall, the protagonist is stranded on a primitive planet, and is forced to engineer a "modern" society out of the tribalistic brutes. Quite entertaining.
:)

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Sounds like fun... I'll keep an eye out for it.

[mhayinde]

I think there's something inherent in us as a species that craves violence, or at least is fascinated by it. I suppose the more unacceptable violence becomes in society, the more we will be forced to live out that side of our psyche vicariously.

I think a lot of fantasy fans read to get away from the white collar routine of their real lives. The more we are removed from adventure and combat, the more it will appeal to [some] people. I am less inclined to read a story that seems too similar to my own life because I can experience that myself – I think that’s why I read SF and fantasy in the first place. And some people crave the moral simplicity of these fantasy worlds.

Whilst I agree that a lot of fantasy is formulaic, I think this is true of all genres and is in some respects a reflection on the publishing industry. For me, the most important thing is that a story is well written, even if it does happen to feature elves and quests…

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Well, you can't please all of the people all of the time. I agree with you that people want escapism from their lives and so go for something completely non-realistic but I think reality TV shows that one can also escape far more locally.

I wasn't trying to suggest that epic fantasy should become the kind of stuff I'm advocating, merely that I think there'd be a market and an aesthetically interesting one, for an escapism grounded in a different form of aspiration.

[mhayinde]

I think there's definitely a market for more diverse forms of fantasy... but it seems the publishing houses are determined the play it safe (for the most part.)

[Ben]

Reading through this post I kept thinking 'you need to read Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle'--great minds, etc.

Have you read Tom Holt's comic fantasy books set in a fictional/fantastical corporation, J.W. Wells & Co.? They are not exactly the type of thing you seem to be wishing for, but they are funny, even sometimes hilarious.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Great minds indeed Ben :-) Baroque Cycle less so but the contemporary sections of Cryptonomicon are great examples of what I'm talking about.

I have read the J.W. Wells books... I gave up on them after two or three though because I could not stand the passivity of the protagonist being lead around a largely structureless series of set pieces and vignettes.

Good thinking though.

[Patrick H]

If I'm reading you right, you're asking for fantasy to be more like science fiction. Which is an odd sort of request.

For myself, I think that the best fantasy is built around surrealism or derangement - it's something that keeps cropping up again and again, even when it gets run into the ground by over-analysis. It's in Machen and Dunsany and Clark Ashton Smith, it's what Lovecraft constantly strived for but only occasionally achieved, and it's something that Howard and Lieber were quite good at. Jack Vance's first Dying Earth novel positively drips with strange, decadent prog-rock album wierdness, and it was this dreamlike element of The Lord of the Rings that made it such a hit in the 60s.

However, LotR is much more rigorous than the flights of fancy that came before it, and had an almost scientific approach to language and folklore that changed the nature of the genre (although it's arguable whether JRRT was ever part of the genre, per se). I think LotR introduced EXACTLY the elements the ask for: the semi-rural market-town economy of the Shire is one that would have still been within living memory when JRRT was writing, and the Gandalf draft to carry the ring has a direct parallel in the call to arms in 1914, which JRRT was part of. So I think one can say with some certainty that is DID address the aspirations and experiences of JRRT's generation, as well as a bunch of other less interesting stuff about Icelandic sagas.

The New Worlds fantasists (Moorcock, Harrison et al) who reacted against JRRT brought back the Surrealistic decadance of the early genre, and it's re-surfaced again with the "New Weird" writers, although heavily filtered through a post-Tolkien epic fantasy D&D mind set.

The things I hate in fantasy novels are fake history, scientific magic and psuedo anthropolgical foo-daddy (plus bad writing, soapy time-wasting and wonky plotting, but I hate that in all books). When I do read fantasy - and science fiction too, to a certain extent - what I'm looking for are mystery and wonder. I don't want a reasoned magical economy, I want magic that connects with the psychological or philosophical nature of the work, not an "emulation" of a real world with alternative natural laws.

IME, this is very hard to achieve in the enormous majority of RPGs, because most RPGs (necessarily) have codified magic which encourages you to think in terms of power growth, resource management and cost/benefit of a Fireball versus Mordankien's Sphere of Puissant Harm. This is why FRP games go in the directions they do, although there are other reasons centred on the difference between a protagonist in a book and the PC, which you are probably aware of and I don't have time to go into in detail here. Essentially, I think a business-type model (which I've FRPed myself) works quite well as it gives players more control ovewr events than a heavily authored/railroaded "epic quest" does.

I think the mechanics of FRP fantasy has encouraged the audience to think of the fantastic in this mechanistic way, which entirely misses one of the genres great strengths, the ability to dart past the rational mind and into the realm of pure symbolism. So, I think what you are asking for is already well-represented in the D&D-style epic fantasy, but perhaps is dissatifying because (most obviously) a lot of it is objectively bad, mendacious shit whatever genre it purports to be, and (maybe less obviously) the practitioners are looking in the wrong place for the cool stuff that makes fantasy different.

P

[Jonathan McCalmont]

I think that that's an interesting idea.

You're quite correct in thinking that I want fantasy to be more like SF. The modernist philosophy behind much of SF suits me down to the ground but the pre-modernism of fantasy leaves me alienated and depressed. Some people find a sense of wonder and escapism in such worlds, I find only the distasteful whiff of the reactionary in fantasy's glorification both of a pre-modern never changing society (indeed, aside from Pratchett, no fantasist presents change as a positive force... only as an evil one) and a superstitious world-view without systematic rules and laws.

Essentially, what I want is modernist fantasy and the only examples of that I can think of off the top of my head are China Mieville and Charlie Stross, whom I both adore.

However, philosophical issues aside I wasn't so much calling for a systematisation of the bits in fantasy that aren't systematic. What I'm calling for is for fantasy grounded less in Messianic tales of great battles and prophecies and more stories about people leading interesting lives in fantasy settings. In particular, stories about people building things whether it's a business or a political dominion.

Tavern Realism if you will.

If you look at examples of SFnal fantasy such as China Mieville's work and that of Charlie Stross and even that of Scott Lynch you'll see a willingness to go part of the way towards running a business but in the end, the authors' attentions seem to wonder and we get a return to the more normal fantasy level of resolution that deals in big impressive things rather than little intriguing things.

[Patrick H]

Surealism is a distinctly modernist genre. At it's best, fantasy is the same mix of psychiatry and folklore that informs the art of Max Ernst or all those harlequins so beloved of the cubists. The "superstitious worldview" is the world of the unconscious, unsystematised and frightening.

I think it returns to epic and messianic forms, because the subject is the change of the self, and in many ways the self is the entire world for every one of us. The kinds of self-examination present in fantasy books don't really lend themselves to the quotidian: I'm reminded of the Monty Python fairy tale where to win the hand of the Princess Mitzi Gaynor, the prince has to go down to the newsagent and buy a packet of twenty Rothmans.

That said, there's plenty of non-messianic fantasy: Vance, Lieber, Michael Shea, Clark Ashton Smith and hefty chunks of Howard.

Not sure who's doing that these days, as I don't read much contemporary fantasy. I do agree it's in a parlous state, but perhaps for different reasons than you.

Patrick H

[A.R.Yngve]

OK, this discussion highlights two different directions in "fantastic literature":

1. Rationalism

2. Surrealism, symbolism, myth

Even as I prefer SF, I can see the need for surrealism in literature.

Fantasy, as it is published now, seems torn in two directions. On the one hand, role-playing games (and Tolkien's Long Shadow) are exerting a strong influence on the genre toward systems, rules and rationalism (of sorts).

And on the other hand, there's the mythic impulse.

Which shall it be...?
:-S

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Surrealism is a modernist genre in as far as it is the conscious and systematic rejection of modernism. It takes the principles of modernism and tips them upside down.

This explains why contemporary attempts at surrealism (such as the comedy of the Might Boosh) seem tired and intellectually vacant... they're not reacting to anything and even if they were those things would no more be representative of society than surrealism itself.

I disagree with you that self-examination is not compatible with the quotidian. US Indie film and TV is still obsessed with the idea of self-improvement (look at Six Feet Under for example) and that is almost exclusively about the quotidian. The incompatible lies in the nature of the forces that impel the change.

If it's falling out with your brother or needing cigarettes then obviously that seems like a strange reason for a grand re-organisation of who one is. However, one can be struck and changed by grand and Other forces even when doing a job.

This is something Cryptonomicon does really well. You have an IT geek who is doing his job and his job takes him through Nazi Gold, south east asian prisons, the investment wing of the chinese army and by the end of it he has changed.

Normal job, extraordinary circumstances.

I think fantasy is completely compatible with that, it's just that out of laziness and conservatism, that kind of story seldom gets told.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

That's the other thing A.R. - Can anyone seriously say that the bulk of contemporary fantasy is surrealist?

It seems to me that most of it comes from the bloodless manipulation and application of familiar tropes.

The desire to shock and surprise present in surrealism is as far away as you can possibly get from the conservative impulses of most fantasy.

[Patrick H]

"I disagree with you that self-examination is not compatible with the quotidian. US Indie film and TV is still obsessed with the idea of self-improvement (look at Six Feet Under for example) and that is almost exclusively about the quotidian. The incompatible lies in the nature of the forces that impel the change."

Well, that's not quite what I'm trying to say. After all, every story features a protagonist who is changed by their experiences, it's one of the definitions of fiction. It's not about the forces that compel change, but the symbolic language used to express them. The symbolic language of fantasy doesn't deal well the the twenty Rothmans quest - that way lies bathos.

"Can anyone seriously say that the bulk of contemporary fantasy is surrealist?"

Well, no. That's the problem, as I see it. Most contemporary fantasy is a kind of lazy pretend historical novel. I think the idea of small, rationalist fantasy takes it further down that line.

As a side note, I'd say that there's always a danger in these online debates of reducing one's subject to a very limited range of discussion points, so it's worth pointing out that I don't think fantasy is in quite the same as Alfred Jarry or Andre Breton. It's a popular genre, after all, and thus has a responsibility to readers that a fine artist can ignore. I just point this out before I find myself argued into corner: I dangle this escape root now as a fore-shadowing for a later "and with one bound, he was free!"

P

[Patrick H]

What I'm trying to get at, in a more general sense, is that Contemporary mainstream fantasy lacks mystery and wonder. I think SF can deal well with facts and likely scenarios, but fantasy is uniquely placed to hint and suggest without needing to fully explain itself.

I like my magic to be magical, and not just a alternative version of physics.

P

[Jonathan McCalmont]

I get that.

Personally, I can't stand that type of thing as in general in plot terms it tends to boil down to magic being a black box in the lot that allows anything to happen regardless of the rules of logic, narrative or aesthetics.

Pratchett uses that kind of thing quite a bit when somehow a trip through a magical landscape solves all outstanding plot difficulties... somehow.

Also, an an adjunct to your point about frames of references, I'm actually struggling to think of any work of fantasy that I've ever read that was surrealist. I mean, El Topo is surrealist, Un Chien Andalou is surrealist... Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance aren't anything like that.

In fact, I imagine a surrealist novel would be practically unreadable, like The Illuminatus Trilogy only even less coherent.

[Patrick H]

"I can't stand that type of thing as in general in plot terms it tends to boil down to magic being a black box in the lot that allows anything to happen regardless of the rules of logic, narrative or aesthetics."

I would say that narrative and aesthetics are precisely the rules it does obey. Vance's Lyonesse is a good example of the sort of magic I think works really well.

"I mean, El Topo is surrealist, Un Chien Andalou is surrealist... Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance aren't anything like that."

Well, howabout the nightmare sequence from Vertigo? Sure, none of these guys ever signed a manifesto, or anything, but all these writers knew what surrealism is and understood the power of imagery over logic. It has a different kind of expression in the popular genres.

If you want a concrete example, I'd say go and re-read Stormbringer by MM (him again!) where the world is ending, and everything's becoming messy, or the bits of... Corum, is it? where the EC has to travel through the various levels of hell. Hell, re-read the Viroconium stories - it's pretty explicit towards the end - or, more recently, Cities of Saints & Madmen.

... and with one bound, he was free!

P

[Jonathan McCalmont]

I've never read Lyonesse though I hear the D&D magic system comes from there.

The world-hopping bits in Corum and the Count Brass and other later eternal Champion stories are kind of trippy. They lack the intellectual substance for them to be surreal... they're just.. weird. Like bad Philip K. dick.

You might be right but that's definitely not something I enjoy as a reader because I always feel that it's used as a means of pulling the wool over the reader's eyes.

[A.R.Yngve]

Most popular piece of Surrealist Fantasy evar: the 1933 version of KING KONG.

Runner-up: The original GODZILLA.

Utterly impossible giant monsters spring from dreams.

[Max Cairnduff]

Interesting stuff Jonathan, more thoughts later.

But one that does strike me is that for many sf and fantasy authors I suspect if they ever worked in business in any capacity, it was most likely not at a high level and not something they enjoyed (because people operating at a high level or who are enjoying their work tend not to quit to become writers). Many I suspect will never have worked in that capacity at all.

Which would mean that some writers would have no personal experience of business from which to draw, and some would only have an experience at the margins or doing work they did not enjoy in which case it would not be surprising that they chose not to write about it.

Part of this issue in my view is likely to be simply a mix of aversion to business on the part of the literary world generally and frequently a profound ignorance of what the business world is actually like.

I'd happily make similar comments for literary fiction come to think of it, where the ignorance of business realities is frequently even more profound.

[Patrick H]

"I've never read Lyonesse though I hear the D&D magic system comes from there."

You're thinking of the Dying Earth. Things are a bit different in Lyonesse.

In fact, the move from the system in The Dying Earth novels - which is built around the needs of the plot and then given a psuedo academic gloss (mostly as a joke) - to the highly structured magic system in D&D is kind of indicative of what I'm talking about. I think too many modern fantasy authors make up their world and system, and then lay a story on top of it, rather than the opposite. It's a bit like Mornington Crescent - if there were rules and they were actually written down, it'd be a crashing bore and not funny at all.

P

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Max -- I'm not sure what Neal Stephenson's edge in this area is then. The academic stuff in Cryptonomicon clearly come from his own university days but I'm not sure if he had a career in business before becoming a professional writer.

You're right though that I think many literary types see this kind of thing as terminally bourgeois and as such completely devoid of any interest and probably quite distasteful to write about. So class and politics come into it too.

There are times when a sheep gets through though. The Wire, for example, is not only great in terms of the procedural elements of building a case and the politics of policing, it goes on these huge riffs about the economics of running a drug empire from manpower on the street to what you do with the money once you've made it.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Patrick -- I know exactly what you mean. "Clomping foot of nerdism" and all.

However, personally I can't stand that type of "making it up as we go along" stuff as it invariably leads to "I have just to right spell to solve THIS problem!"

For example, I went to see The Ring 2 in the cinema ages ago and the ghost in that seemingly has no limits either conceptual or quantitative on her powers. She just conjured up these various "frightening" vignettes.

I found this profoundly non-frightening compared to a monster with wishes and abilities that were largely transparent. This is why The Ring 2 is not as good a film as Jeepers Creepers 2 (an under-rated classic in my opinion) whose monster has clear aims and abilities that limit it and that the protagonists have to learn and work around.

I can't imagine a situation in which unlimited fantastical elements would not result in poor plotting. They're just begging for abuse by lazy authors trying to write themselves out of a corner.

[Max Cairnduff]

Neal wrote about a field he has a long interest in, computing, not about for example accountancy. Also, he is not a man afraid of research, which many eschew.

I think also there is a huge element of the old English issue with being in trade. Business is a form of trade, and thus not really done by people of discernment.

And that's the thing, Frederick Raphael (a writer of no small pretension) once said in an interview "business is bad and banking is disgusting" which is all too often the attitude of the literary classes. Neal Stephenson gets past that and it is an extreme in any event but I think for many it is a real issue.

Class and politics, a dislike for the business world, a lack of understanding of how it actually operates, I think all these things combine to make literature generally avoid the business world. Television less so, in part because television is a business so requires of its participants at least some basic familiarity with some forms of the field. Crime fiction less so, but that's another post, but fantasy and sf particularly avoid it partly due to distaste and partly due to ignorance and partly to be blunt due to the utter stultification of the fantasy genre as a literary form.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

The "Trade" thing is more British than American though surely? American literature has a long tradition of idolising the working man and writing about the realities and not so realistic romantic fictions surrounding blue collar labour.

But I think you're ultimately right. I think that a lot of people choose to become writers largely as a response to the horrors of the "real world" and that loads of other prejudices feed into this to make economic fiction a much unloved genre.

Weirdly though, I really am the complete opposite. When I ran Te Deum Pour Un Massacre I adored going off and reading articles about the process of economic reform and the way the economy and political hierarchy worked. It was probably more fun for me than it was for you but at least I managed to make our resident economics lecturer squeal in horror :-)