Weirding Genre - M. John Harrison returns to the clomping foot

       

In his most gracious response to my post, Ariel points in the direction of the latest M. John Harrison broadside aimed at the gunnels of the good ship fantasy.

Rather than simply state that I agree with Harrison's position and continue to take pot shots at the fantasy audience (a technique that has won me page views if not friends) I will point out something that occurred to me about Harrison's writing and the position that Harrison is currently arguing for.  Harrison is, in many ways, the godfather of a rather disjointed and poorly lit corner of the genre spectrum, namely the genuinely original and downright weird fantasy that doesn't so much anchor itself in the familiar as go out and embrace the weird, the strange and the unorthodox.  Or, as Harrison himself puts it :

"When I read fantasy, I read for the bizarre, the wrenched, the undertone of difference & weirdness that defamiliarises the world I know. I want the taste of the writer’s mind, I want to feel I'm walking about in the edges of the individual personality."

Harrison's track record in producing this kind of fiction is second to none.  While his current blog might feature tirades against mapped-out and systematic Tolkien-style fantasy, or the "clomping foot of nerdism" as he so famously put it, he was actually writing fantasy that was criticising this tendency as far back as the 70's and 80's.  In fact, I'd argue (not particularly controversially either) that a lot of the New Weird (in particular the works of China Mieville) and the works that have followed on from that "movement" are nothing more than attempts to recapture what Harrison did with his Viriconium works.

However, rather than suck up to Harrison I wanted to talk about one particular aspect of Harrison's more recent works Light (2002) and Nova Swing (2007).  Namely The Kefahuchi Tract.

The Kefahuchi Tract is a naked singularity, a black hole without an event horizon and a source of distilled Otherness.  At the end of Light, a piece of the Tract fell to Earth, further warping and changing the city of Saudade that grew up near the Tract.  This becomes known as The Site and is a source of numerous weird goings on.  In plot terms, it is, in effect, an Otherness generator and a means for Harrison to not only subject his characters to contact with the Other and define them by virtue of their relationship with the Other but to actually physically thrust them into the Other.  Some critics have argued that Science Fiction tends to flummox mainstream critics because our symbolism is concrete rather than abstract and you can't get a more concrete example of characters interacting with The Other than in Harrison's work.  Or can you?

Back in March 2007, I reviewed Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's superlative Roadside Picnic for Strange Horizons.  In that review, I suggested that The Site and Kefahuchi Tract are, in fact, homages to the Strugatskys' Zone, which plays a very similar symbollic and structural part in Roadside Picnic as the Site does in Nova Swing (though Nova Swing does develop the ideas off in a different direction somewhat).  What struck me as I was reading Ariel's response to me was not only that Harrison was in fact arguing for more books like the kind he writes, but also more fantasy novels in the style of SF novels written by him and the likes of the Strugatskys.

So, one has to wonder... why is it fantasy's job to be weird and different?  isn't the problem, from Harrison's perspective, that there aren't enough genre publications in general that aren't all that interested in The Other?

After all, if you're looking for the clomping foot of nerdism then look no further than most science fiction.  Setting aside the Fantasy in SF clothing issue, a lot of the best SF has been all about reading up what the latest thinking is in science and writing futuristic stories in which that thinking turns out to be correct.  Admittedly, some hard SF writers use this approach to lay some distressing and uncomfortable ideas upon us such as those about free-will and the nature of the self in Peter Watts' Blindsight but one of the chief goals of a lot of SF is joined up, coherent, thinking and that, it seems to me, is what Harrison is complaining about.

So why place the burden on the fantasy writer?  is it simply because fantasy writers are more popular and make more money writing decidedly non-weird populist fiction?  Or is the Weird already sufficiently represented in SF thanks to Harrison, the Strugatskys, Fredrik Pohl and Algys Budry?

Comments

[Serdar]

I think the problem is that there aren't enough publications, period, that are interested in "the Other", so it falls to fantasy to fill in the cracks. Fantasy can afford to be weird because it's generally hemmed in by less of the kinds of rules that dictate how things unfold or even what kind of story we get.

As far as SF/fantasy giving mainstream critics a hard time, I think a big part of it is that even after all this time they treat those things with a grain of contempt -- probably for the same reason there are plenty of people out there who won't touch something explicitly SF-ish and even wrinkle their noses a bit when something "conventional" gets a dash of that thrown in to make things interesting.

I wonder how much of this is a quiet, or not-so-quiet, anti-intellectualism. "Oh, look at these silly writers of scientifiction or whatever you call it, thinking they know what's going to happen to us all in twenty years." (Never mind that it's not about predicting anything, but as soon as you mention a date, people think that's what you're talking about.)

[M John Harrison]

Hi Jonathan. My intention in Nova Swing was, indeed, to move the "zone" in another direction.

It's my experience--and my understanding from my familiarity with the history of mountain exploration--that extreme zones don't stay extreme forever. Instead, they become, over a couple of generations, playgrounds. The absolute discoveries of the pioneers (or entradistas) give way to the "personal bests" of sportsmen & then the bored gaze of the tourist. If you want to understand this normalisation, look at the recent history of Everest.

I wanted to make an act of conscious homage (signalled by the epigraph to the novel) by applying that irony--or if you like, that corrective vision to--the Strugatskys' zone.

To me, the very word "fantasy" is what's at issue here, & my rant really asks the question, How do we bring the fantastic back to fantasy ? Science fiction is a form which solves & demystifies (that's why Nova Swing isn't really sf but a Gothic disguised as sf). We expect sf to elucidate, even to normalise, the strange. Science precisely does not have truck with an inexplicable universe.

But surely that's not the aim of a form which alludes to the fantastic, or claims to have some relationship to the fantastic, in its very job-description ? ("What kind of novel is this ?" we might ask. If the answer is, "It is a fantasy novel", I take that to mean not a three-decker historical with a little added exoticism, but a novel in which fantastic events are presented.)

It's as if you were to write a "thriller" in which there were no thrills.

It's my contention that, by normalising and rationalising "myth" and "magic" the sub-genre you call "non-weird populist" fantasy has become actually anti-fantastic. As a result, the appetite for the genuinely fantastic is less well served.

My "All the Roary Night" post (the title is a reference to a 12-line poem by Kenneth Patchen, one of the best nano-fantasies I've ever read) was a dramatisation, based on the advice I gave to the last half dozen or so writers who've asked me how to make their fantasies different. My advice is always, "Take your time. Let your unconscious do the work. Look for the debatable zone between life & reading. And mean something: don't just write for the sake of it"

Note that this is not career advice, but only advice on one way to make your fantasy fantastic.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Ah... speak of the proverbial. It's a pleasure having you drop by :-)

I think ultimately that you're talking about THE central question in art; how does one innovate?

The answer, as you say, is to take your time, trust your unconscious and hope that it comes to you. there's nothing more you can say because the methods that worked in the past can't hope to work now.

So I guess when you show the commodification of the site, you're ultimately talking about the shifting sands of fantastical innovation. What was ground-breaking in the 70's and 80's is a familiar trope now.

The Zone was created by thinking of a space in which the laws of physics didn't quite work. Where everything was possible and one's predictive powers were incredibly limited. A pocket Hume-world.

But now that's been done... is it even strange any more?

Given all of this, would it be fair to say that you don't see the Fefahuchi tract and the site as proper encounters with the weird? they're bracketed by familiarity and you're deploying them to make a point... they're a trope-weapon in your creative arsenal and therefore compromised.

[Ariel]

I may be having a memory-lapse or misinterprative episode episode here, but wasn't the original 'clomping foot of nerdism' piece a shout out against excessively apparent world-building in science fiction specifcally (I quote: "Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.") which was then taken largely out of context (and with extreme umbrage) by a number of mainstream fantasy fans as an attack on their own cherished institutions?

[Jonathan McCalmont]

I speak with experience when I say that a lot of fantasy fans are very very tetchy when it comes to people complaining about the books they like :-)

Weirdly though, I've just finished a discussion on an RPG website about Chadbourn's original post and the consensus there amongst fantasy fans is that originality is over-rated and that fantasy operates on a different set of aesthetics that does not require or even welcome an idea being "new" or "challenging". Which is a fascinating admission in many ways and not necessarily one that a lot of fantasy fans would be willing to make even though I think it's entirely true... fantasy is best enjoyed without thinking about how derivative everything is and instead concentrating on stuff like quality of writing and characterisation. The consensus over there is that this is what explains GRR Martin's success... he's not reinventing the wheel, he's not asking any questions of the genre but he is a competent writer telling a story that people like.

This is where my lack of tact lets me down as I'm pretty sure that this is close to being "conservative", the word that annoyed so many people last time around.

I took the Clomping Foot to be a complaint about world-building in general but you could well be right.

[M John Harrison]

Hi Jonathan. Nice argument to recursion :-) Certainly applicable to the cyclic nature of the Saudade ecology.

Overall, I'd be trying to talk about difference rather than, specifically, newness. There are all these other ways of doing fantasy--some of which are very exciting & odd & have a powerfully destabilising, a powerfully fantastic effect--& the fantasy genre isn't using any of them: indeed it seems to specifically rule them out. (I'm not sure I believe in innovation, except as some Blakean accident along the axis invention/imagination. Of course difference might bring about the conditions neccessary for innovation.) I think, in a way, I'm asking for fantasy written not out of professionalism but out of the personal core of the writer. You don't read HP Lovecraft because he was a pro. You read him because he was HP Lovecraft, ie genuinely off his trolley.

Hi Ariel. Yes. Nothing wrong with your memory.

My posts at Uncle Zip tend to be compressed. I'm not apologising for that but it does mean that a quick read--or a read of someone else's quick read--won't do it. In a post of 200 words or so, you're going to need to read all of them. I also think fantasy fans are a little hair-trigger, a little aggressive-defensive. I don't mind a controversy. Polemic is supposed to get people going. But I'm rather surprised they didn't just grin & go: "Trollpost. Yawn yawn." I think the original post might even have been tagged "provocation". You can't say fairer than that...

[Jonathan McCalmont]

No Recursion here... just wondering how far you wanted to take the idea :-)

You're right... difference is probably a more useful way forward as there are pathways to the kind of fiction you're looking for. It's just that they're slightly overgrown and don't compare to the vast circular M25 of systematicity.

The difference between trolling and provocation is entirely within the intentions of the author I'd suggest. From the provokee's perspective, one man's Socratic gadfly is another malicious shit-stirrer.