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?
I've very little regard for the quality of Ryamond E. Feist's writing these days (although he was one of the first fantasy writers I ever read, and therefore a pretty major influence on me), but his Rise of a Merchant Prince is one of my favourite books, topic-wise. And the Empire series he co-wrote with Janny Wurts is very much about a political/trade rise to power, rather than magically saving the world.
Posted by: Drew Shiel | July 25, 2007 at 12:58 PM
Hi Drew :-)
Feist is an interesting writer. I'm not a huge fan (though I haven't read the books you suggest) but I think he is one of those people that has the SFnal instinct when it comes to fantasy (as Patrick pointed out upstream, it's common among people approaching fantasy from an RPG perspective and Feist is very much involved in the RPG world).
I'm thinking in particular of the Riftwars books that he co-wrote with someone who was a grad student in strategic studies. You don't need that level of expertise in most fantasy and Feist by that stage had written stuff on his own anyway so it's not as though he really needed a writing partner.
I think that the desire to be "realistic" in fantasy is what underpins my talk of economic fantasy but a book that's all about the economic world rather than the realities of a military world (like the Riftwars stuff) would be quite different.
Posted by: Jonathan McCalmont | July 25, 2007 at 01:25 PM
I've experimented with realistic-economic stuff in my fantasy campaign world, but most of my players aren't all that interested - and it's one area of creative work in which you really do have to work with the audience you have. :)
I do keep on wishing that an MMO in the line of a fantasy EVE Online would appear. EVE is all about the economy.
Posted by: Drew Shiel | July 25, 2007 at 02:20 PM
Yes, EVE, much like the Elite games that influenced it, is all about supply and demand economics and running a business.
To a certain extent that's true of all MMORPGs though. On a cynical level you have gold farmers who pick up a natural resource and sell it but even at a more acceptable level, adventuring is about an economic cycle.
You adventure in order to become more powerful. In order to become more powerful you need money. In order to get money you have to farm not just XP but also money and objects.
The difference between the gold farmer and the legitimate MMORPG user at the end of the day is that the gold farmer does it for cash and the gamer does it for in-game prestige and "fun".
This is one of the most interesting things about RPGs. Despite borrowing the language of epic fantasy with its good and evil and ancient gods and prophecies, it's mostly (particularly dungeon crawling) about cash and power.
This is why I think of most RPGs as exponents of bareknuckle objectivism where the truely special are willing to take big risks and reap those big rewards. The average RPG adventuring party is, much like a corporation, psychopathic if you look at the way it behaves. If you don't believe me, you try inserting a town council full of village elders into your game and have them try to take 40% of what the adventurers earn in tax and see how far it gets you :-)
Enron's board of directors have NOTHING on your average adventuring party.
Posted by: Jonathan McCalmont | July 25, 2007 at 02:42 PM
I'm coming late to this party but I did want to stick in a few cents.
I recently finished a fantasy novel of my own, and one of the first things I tried to do was do away with what I felt were a lot of the garbage trappings of other fantasy novels. The whole thing is not about finding a scroll or an amulet, but about someone finding himself, within himself (and also finding someone else that character had lost some time ago). Whenever the standard fantasy tropes like magic and glorified violence reared their heads, I tried to take those things and turn them around and make them about the characters and not the setting.
I don't know if I succeeded, but I'd like to think I'm at least aware of he way these issues can manifest and not write just another boring dungeon crawl.
Posted by: Serdar | July 25, 2007 at 04:47 PM