You May Have Missed... Links 20/08/08

Yes, I know I'm doing these instead of producing proper content. In my defence I have produced both a column and a proper book review this week, it's just that they haven't appeared yet. So, in the mean time...

• Nebula (meh) and Tiptree (Ooooh) winner Nicola Griffith has a rather interesting reaction piece about genre and queer fiction's relationships with the mainstream.

• Paul Jessup has a quite cool bit about the sword and sorcery subgenre, claiming that "all good S&S is Cthulhu influenced"... I think it's more that they mine a similar set of 'the world is a terrifying place' themes.

• Grasping for the Wind has a roundtable discussion about the next big subgenre and Urban Fantasy in particular. For my money Scott Lynch + Fang Fuckers = Urban Fantasy is the current big thing.

• SF Signal has a new Mind Meld up, this time asking people what they would change about the SF field. Interesting list of contributors too.

• Colleen Mondor has a nice piece on the Franklin Expedition and its treatment at the hands of Dan Simmons in The Terror.

• Martin Lewis reviews Everything is Sinister by David Llewellyn and The Heritage by Will Ashon at Strange Horizons. Are we witnessing the emergence of Barleypunk?

Comments

[Niall]

You're going to put me out of a job with these link round-ups, you know.

[Jonathan M]

It is surprisingly easy content to produce :-)

[Max Cairnduff]

Urban Fantasy is definitely the current big thing, a lot of people just aren't paying attention in my view.

Personally, I see urban fantasy as an essentially YA genre, but then many have said that of SF as a whole so perhaps I'm just a snob or getting old (or an old snob, which arguably is the best kind of snob really).

[Jonathan M]

Well, I think it depends upon what is meant by "Urban Fantasy". It's not a particularly precise piece of nomenclature.

Scott Lynch and Fritz Leiber are urban fantasy. But I think that a lot of people use the term for stuff that's like Buffy (which is odd as Buffy takes place in a small town) and that includes the Vampire Shaggers like Hamilton and Meyer.

Fang Fuckers are definitely for young people, young women in particular and I seem to remember them outselling all of SF in the last set of Locus figures but that could just be due to my horror at the realisation that people really like stories about people shagging werewolves.

[Max Cairnduff]

I'm using it as shorthand for vampire shaggers, or to be fair werewolf shaggers, it's a broad genre after all and encompasses both.

I'm not hugely familiar with Scott Lynch.

Paul Jessup's piece is interesting, I'd argue that S&S embraces existentialism (as did HPL) whereas trad fantasy is still essentially Christian, I tend to think S&S is a profoundly existentialist genre.

[Blue Tyson]

Yes, good S&S will have an element of horror, certainly.

Lin Carter's definition of course is 'stalwart warrior vs supernatural menace'.

[Jonathan M]

I'm not sure about Existentialist vs. Christian but I certainly think there's an element of truth in the comparison, particularly when it comes to Worldbuilding.

S&S eschews world-building. Its writers create the world as they go and as needed. The rest of the world is cloaked in a kind of mist. But because the only thing to ever come lumbering out of the mist is trouble and monsters, the worlds are given an atmosphere of dread. You never know what's out there but you know that it isn't good.

Epic Fantasy, by contrast, LOVES worldbuilding. In fact it loves it both romantically and as a sibling, which is why there are so many fucked-up, retarded and inbred works of fantasy out there. Having a clearly defined world for the characters to live in removes that sense of uncertainty. You have the map in the front of the book... the world is a known place AND it exists for the characters to save.

Existentialism's world is largely indifferent to humans. We die unjustly, we get what we deserve or we become unfairly and immorally rich... the world doesn't care.

Christianity, by contrast, makes the world into a stage upon which is acted out the grand epic of Man's ultimate salvation or Damnation.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Fat Fantasy is christian as there are a lot of Pagans who write it (imagining that it's non-fiction presumably) but Fantasy's world is inherently friendly to humans. Evil is an abomination intruding upon the world in fantasy as in Christianity (at least non-gnostic versions of it) and so there are similarities between the worldviews.

[Max Cairnduff]

To be honest Jonathan, I see modern paganism as essentially Christian in outlook, but I risk getting your blog deluged by outraged pagans. They see the world as essentially benevolent, with evil being in some way a violation of the natural order that right thinking people must oppose, largely by dressing up in robes and lighting scented candles.

I tend to see contemporary paganism as a lifestyle option based on a borrowed philosophical base with the nasty bits left out, in other words. It's just all a bit too obviously recently made up to take entirely seriously.

If I were to say that fat fantasy makes the world into a stage upon which is acted out the grand epic of Man's ultimate salvation or Damnation, would that seem though a wholly unfair statement though?

I agree on the worldbuilding stuff, it's why most fantasy is in fact deeply mundane and not at all fantastical. By the time the whole world is detailed, what room is left for the unknown? And the unknown, the other, is the essence of fantasy.

[Jonathan M]

I can cope with Pagans. People who base their world view upon the D&D Player's Handbook do not scare me ;-)

"If I were to say that fat fantasy makes the world into a stage upon which is acted out the grand epic of Man's ultimate salvation or Damnation, would that seem though a wholly unfair statement though?"

Well obviously not seeing as I just said it. :-/ ???

I think the idea that fantastical = Other is, in fairness but one way of approaching the issue. You can also have fantastical as spectacle... huge cities, battles, rogue gods and all the rest of it. It's not an aspect of the literature that interests me admittedly (I find even action films quite tiresome these days) but it is in there and it has some legitimacy.

[Max Cairnduff]

You said Christianity makes the world into a stage upon which is acted out the grand epic of Man's ultimate salvation or Damnation. I was replacing Christianity with fat fantasy, in my support of its having a fundamentally Christian ethos. Your statement holds good for both.

I have to grant fantasy as spectacle, but I find myself strongly tempted to append the word mere before the word spectacle.

[Jonathan M]

I said that Fantasy was like Christianity in that it set up the world as a stage for... So yeah :-)

John Clute's little book about the Horror genre distinguishes between horror as stuff that makes you jump and horror that properly reveals the truly hideous secret nature of the world. So you could probably make a distinction between the fantastical as "mere spectacle" and the fantastical as genuine weirdness.