Stories, Reality, and the Breakage Thereof

by Tyler, aged 27.

I've been thinking about this issue for some time; I'd guess at least four years, really, possibly longer. I kept telling myself someone had covered this already, that if I wrote it I'd be getting spammed with links to a much better essay by someone with nicer hair and sit here feeling sad about myself. But today I decided, what the hell.

(Warning: Scholarly bitching follows.)

So, it's no big secret I have a huge hate on for a lot of speculative fiction, especially the urban fantasy subculture I am arrogant enough to consider myself a part of. I've spoken out here or nearby about Charmed, and Jeff Van Der Meer, and whoever it was that wrote the Women of the Otherworld series. But I've never been wholly clear why.

It's very simple, or it will be: their treatment of their break with reality, and their use of breaks in place of human condition.

It is my belief that there is one core concept which every speculative fiction piece revolves around: its breaks from reality, "breaks" for short. Every piece has to define, within a varied but reasonable timeframe (usually somewhere near the beginning) how it differs from reality as we understand it. Some pieces make a near-total break from our reality—the main characters aren't recognizably human, or they live in a world entirely made out of marzipan, or something far less inane. Urban fantasy and historical fantasy have more specific breaks—our modern day Chicago, or Victorian Era Paris, or number of other places we recognize and know well, with the exception of those fantastic additions and the alterations they wreak.

This in and of itself is not a problem; really, without some commonality between the author's world and the reader's experience, the book is more or less impossible to understand anyway. The problem is that these breaks in reality are all too often where a writer stops.

These are the urban fantasy novels with two-dimensional protagonists, the ones with paragraph-long explanations of how their vampires work, the ones where the entire plot resolution hinges upon some incredibly lateral interpretation of the wording of the main monster's weakness. These books break with reality in whatever way they choose to do, and do not spend any energy on things like enjoyable plot or character development. All their creativity is caught up in their world-building, which would be impressive if it wasn't so clearly made of cardboard.

Even worse than this are the people who insist on breaking from reality multiple times over the course of their story or stories. By this I mean stories in which every major plot revelation hinges upon twitching aside some other part of the curtain hanging over the supernatural parts of the world, usually in the form of showing us how awesomely powerful or totally rare their newest antagonist or supporting character is. Stories in which the first book is about the main character learning about magic, and the second is about them learning about vampires, and the third werewolves, etc. etc. TVTropes calls this the Fantasy Kitchen Sink, and it's about as exciting as one.

About here is where you've started raising objections. About here is where you're citing the examples of great works I have professed to love that do just this. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for instance. Or The X-Files. Or anything by Terry Pratchett. And you're not entirely wrong, they do those things; but the difference is that those shows do something else: tell a god-damn story.

Pratchett and Whedon have some of the most interesting and, generally speaking, well-developed characters in modern speculative fiction (though it's supremely easy to just outright hate Buffy); Carter's Mulder and Scully have become bywords for characters of their type within the medium. All three of them had distinct character and narrative arcs, based on but not entirely dependent on the supernatural themes they brought to the table, and played heavily with the media employed to tell them. Their dialog was generally polished, their editing tight, their stories riveting. They were well-written in addition to having interesting supernatural things happen. And I think that's what most speculative fiction authors miss.

I'm not saying I've never done this. I'm not saying only stupid people do it. It's easy, when writing something that breaks with reality, to get so caught up in the world-building and minutiae that the things happening in that world fall by the wayside. It's easy to feel that so much energy went into plotting out how your vampires work that you can stop there. But that's not a novel; that's a roleplaying supplement. And if your world-building relies mostly upon telling us how insanely powerful and an exception to every rule your grab-bag of monsters is (see the Nightside novels for what I mean), the lack of plot and character is just going to help us see that your world-building is bad.

That's why I hate on so much speculative fiction. I want ideas. I want creativity. But I come to the page and the screen looking for a story, and if all I get is a cryptobiology lesson, I'm going to feel gypped. Break from reality; build a new world; but make sure it's a world where something happens.

End rant.

In Defense of Dollhouse

Earlier this year, I was a bit of a sheep. I heard from others, others I trust and love, that Dollhouse, Joss Whedon's newest addition to his long television resume, was distinctly Not Very Good. And so, not having television, I did not bother to seek it out. I dodged viewings at friends' houses and chances to use Hulu and generally stayed uninformed. The one episode I caught was already half over, and so more than a wee bit confusing, which did not help things.

However, these sorts of ignorance do not last in my world; a visit to a friend's house birthed a chance to see the first and second episodes, and so watch I did. And I saw enough there that I had to wonder: Was I misinformed? Were my tastes so different? So I ordered the DVD set when it came out, and returned from vacation to find a telltale package sitting on my doorstep.

That was Thursday. I finished Season One of Dollhouse last night.

Those who know me well, know that this is a prodigious event. Much as I love the television medium I am not a person who can sit and watch for more than a handful of hours at a time. So when I say I spent all of Friday either writing or watching Dollhouse, you know how riveted I was. I was not willing to believe for a long time; but now I'm pretty sure I think this is the best show Joss Whedon has yet produced—which is only natural, given that it's born of experience.

Now, I'm not saying those who didn't like it are wrong; I'm not going to try to account for taste just because I have a blog. And I'll admit, I am a drooling Whedon fanboy, so a certain amount of this could be me playing the apologist. But, for those who are interested in what I think, I present a defense of, and primer for, Joss Whedon's Dollhouse...and in the process, hope to explicate what might be bugging the Whedonites about this one.

First, and I cannot stress this enough: Dollhouse is not Buffy. It will never be Buffy, and it doesn't want to be. This is, I think, at the root of a lot of why this show bothers so many; there are fundamental differences between this show and Whedon's previous work that may seem disruptive, or cause false assumptions. Most of the rest of this entry is taken up on what makes it different, so if that doesn't interest you I'll understand if you stop reading.

Dollhouse is darker than Buffy. This is the most important break from tradition: Joss has painted this story a shade darker than his previous ones. That's not to say that the Buffyverse never dealt with adult topics...but when the closest thing to a comic relief episode starts with a man beating himself to death on a windowpane, you know you're in for a different sort of ride.

Dollhouseis more adult than Buffy. This is separate from "darker", but similar. The themes of the Buffyverse shows were maturation and responsibility—learning to deal with the multifarious burdens of life, first as a teenager becoming an adult and then later as an adult who has not learned nearly as much as they think they have. The themes of Firefly were family and the conflict between security and freedom. The themes of Dollhouse are not more important or better, but they are more complicated—the nature of humanity, memory vs. personality, and the massive political conflict between what the Dollhouse can do and what it is trying to do. The story also leaves a lot more gray areas than the previous shows have, and it doesn't seem interested in giving us definite answers.

Dollhouse's ensemble is not where you think it is. Much noise has been made about the problem of Echo as the main character, and the lack of connection the audience feels with her due to her overall dearth of character growth. But while there is plenty of plot surrounding Echo and the nature of the dolls, and while Eliza Dushku's face graces our DVD boxed set...she is not part of the Whedon-trademark "ensemble cast". For that, look to Topher, and Boyd, and DeWitt, and the rest of the crew working behind the scenes at the Dollhouse (further information withheld to avoid avoid possible spoilers). The Actives are ciphers, mirrors that reflect the growth and change within the "normal" human characters; they are not there to be loved in and of themselves, except perhaps in the way pets are loved, they are there to show us what to love and hate about everyone else.

Dollhouse moves slower, but steadier. I love the first season of Dollhouse partially because it is such a taut, well-paced show, as compared to the longer and occasionally more sprawling Buffy seasons. Every episode of this show has a little bit more plot, even if it's just a tidbit; you wouldn't necessarily notice if you watched the season out of order (with the exception of a couple key episodes, which is fairly common in Joss's works). Buffy, with its 22-episode seasons, had a little more room to wiggle; with Dollhouse, thirteen episodes means it has to pack a little plot into everything. But it still peels slowly, like an onion, and for that I love it.

Dollhouse isn't funny, but Dollhouse is witty. This is a very important distinction. Joss is an excellent writer of banter, and he encourages that in his writers; but just because he's not being funny doesn't mean he isn't writing banter. The exchanges between the characters here are fast and sharp and witty, and they deliver a surprising amount of information without the annoying reveal-dumps that stud so many Mutant Enemy imitators. Enjoy the wit. Steep in the wit. Recognize it's clever. Don't wait for a punchline, and the few they do have will shine that much brighter.

That's all I have to say in its defense. I genuinely think the first season of Dollhouse is a masterpiece—witty, taut, and masterfully executed—and I hope that with this primer, you might see it that way, too. If you don't, I hope you at least enjoyed Buffy.

Kill Bill vs. Moby Dick

So.

I've been promising for months.

Here it is.

Why in God's name do I think it's acceptable to apply serious critical thought to Transformers?

I will be kind, and not assume indignation or objection on your part; that's a style of rhetoric I can do without. But I will be addressing the sea of sneers I saw in college, and during my work at the bookstore, and everywhere else; usually sneers associated with trendy beards and carefully unkempt haircuts. The people who will snidely embrace irony but reject Joss Whedon because "He wrote Buffy".

I will keep this simple (and possibly let people down in the process). I believe I can discuss Transformers because I agree, on precisely one, very basic, level, with the deconstructionists: I believe everything is potentially a text.

More precisely, I believe that there are no cultural labels that automatically invalidate something as a valid cultural experience, and that no genre or author or director automatically invalidates the possibility for deeper analysis. I do believe that individual works can turn out to be cultural and critical voids; but I enter every book or film with my critical eye wide and searching, and I try to find what it is people enjoy about any piece of media.

This is, of course, because I am a crusader for speculative fiction. Well, crusader is unfair; crusader implies a level of force of arms that I fail to rally. Maybe "rabble-rouser". I've read sci-fi books that had something worthy to say about the social condition; I've read mainstream fiction with limp prose and all the depth of spun sugar.

Even the most deliberately shallow experience can have depth. Take, for instance, this weekend's experience: Kill Bill. I watched both 1 and 2 this weekend, and I can see, all at once, why people loved it and hated it. I love it for its mythic level of formulaic plot, its cinematography, its contents play and juxtaposition of viewer experience. Without cinematography, the shots go on forever, the dialog is baroque and stilted, and Tarantino has an unreasonable love of surf music. But I enjoy his use of soundtrack and visual quoting and misè-en-scene, and for that, I love it. It has a lot more to say than, oh, Bride Wars.

For all that, I have to risk hypocrisy and point out that, sometimes, there is such a thing as trying to analyze something too carefully. There is a classic horror movie--you may have heard of it--called The Cat People. The final scene involves a black waitress offering a white man some gumbo, which rejects in favor of apple pie. This obvious bit of symbolism triggered a long discussion on the symbolic content of gumbo, spawning the term "gumbo territory". Likewise, there is no excusing an empty movie--I don't care how much money they spent on the CGI dragons. This is why I do not self-identify as a deconstructionist--they fail to differentiate between that that which is mainstream but fascinating and that which is artsy but vapid.

I could go on for a long while about this subject, but it would inevitably turn into one of Those Rants, where I prove just how arrogant and judgmental I can really be, and I don't think any of us need that. The bottom line is, I do not care if the subject is American Revolutionaries, or cancer patients, or clockwork assassins from Mars; if the prose/acting/dialog/cinematography is strong, and if there is metaphor to decipher, I will give it a chance.

And that, folks, is why I won't shut up about Transformers.

P.S. Thanks to the ever-lovely Liz Lacy for inspiring me to finally get off my digital keister and write this post. Read the first post, folks; it's well worth the time.

Oliver Postgate, Transformers, and the Need for A Show with a Plot

It's sad that it takes a death to make me post something less than scathing. I like to think it's a microcosmic indictment of the world's condition.

As some of you may have already noticed, Oliver Postgate recently passed away. I did not have the privilege of knowing Mr. Postgate's work; I did not grow up with it, nor even discover it with any depth except via news about his demise. His work seems fantastic, and it strikes me that people of the proper upbringing are reacting to him much the way I (and basically the entire rest of the world) reacted to the death of Jim Henson.

Not to subvert a man's death for my own blogging purposes (metanarrative equals absolution), but the part about Mr. Postgate's death that struck me the hardest was this snippet from the Guardian: "He thought the youngsters were getting a penny-pinching deal, especially in the matter of storytelling."

All death is a tragedy. The death of a creative person is a tragedy. But the death of someone who held this belief and did something about it is a travesty.

As a child of the Eighties, I am spoiled when it comes to children's programming. I used to be a Saturday morning cartoon junkie; I'd wake up early, toast and butter a bagel, pour a glass of juice, and sit down on the floor with my eyes searingly close to the TV so I could enjoy some quality time with my narratives of choice. Then the mid-Nineties rolled through, and I started learning about the joy and heat of late-night gaming sessions, and I started seeing a lot fewer dawns and a lot more half-dead mornings. I had never before experienced waking up from sleeping too much. And while I can easily blame Dungeons & Dragons or the Super Nintendo for this effect, some of it is just this: children's television programming had really, really started to suck.

There are and were exceptions, of course. But everyone seems to think that children are not only eight, but eight, not very bright, and riddled with the most cartoonish version of ADHD. TV shows seemed to focus on hammering home a moral (the environment was really quite popular, with Captain Planet as the nadir) or else just flashing bright colors and fart jokes until the half-hour's up and the kids go home. The Eighties had some of that, but the Eighties also had some shows that I can rewatch as an adult and manage to maintain my lunch, which I cannot say for anything I remember from the Nineties.

So, what was it about the Eighties that was so great? Was it the strong animation? The variety of studios involved in the competition? Maybe both of those helped. But coming at it as an adult, I have to say that Mr. Postgate hit on it—it was the storytelling.

As an example, allow me to hit on the cartoon I've been alluding to for two posts now. If you are someone I converse with on a regular basis, you might have heard some of this. Yes, that's right.

It's time to talk about Transformers.
Nota Bene: Here there be spoilers.



I am one of Those Kids; the ones who were just the right age in 1986 to be seriously damaged when Optimus Prime died. I have the image of orange smoke pouring out of Prowl's mouth burned onto my optic nerve. I got obsessed with reliving this childhood nostalgia recently, and started watching old episodes through DVDs and other more dubious sources; culminating in watching the real Transformers movie this weekend, with a fellow Literature student. Naturally, like any geek, I had to complain; and so here, it was about plot holes. But then I examined them, partially with prodding on my friend's part; and I realized that there was something about Transformers that I had not previously appreciated: it had consistency.

Consider the aforementioned scene with the death of Prowl (as well as, to be fair, Brawn, Ratchet, and Ironhide—raise your hand if that sentence made you wince). These deaths are delivered via the weapons of (who else?) Megatron, Soundwave, and Starscream. Which wouldn't be a problem, except that at least one of the decedents had taken a blast from at least one of the aggressors during the first two seasons of the series, and had come through just needing some repairs. I was annoyed by this, of course; my status as one of Those Kids also means I have the God-given right to carp about how the movie was working hard to sell toys. But making a comment aloud about "Megatron's variable-power arm-cannon" made me really consider those words—and, call me an apologist, but what if those words are actually true?

(The discussion that ensues here is nerdy enough to potentially cause you to develop vision problems, pimples, and possibly virginity. You have been warned.)

The first two seasons of the show take place in the eighties. The Autobots and Decepticons awaken after a crash landing on Earth, and renew an internecine conflict mostly focused around control of Cybertron. Having re-watched the episodes now, there are two issues that constantly come up in that series: power supplies, and parts for repairs. The need for power is in fact most of the driving motivation for the Decepticon plots that form the bulk of the narrative, even though that's just one hurdle in Megatron's ultimate plan—total control of Cybertron. Go back and watch the show, and note how often battles between the Autobots and Decepticons end when one side or the other orders a retreat. I believe the words you want are "a lot". This behavior is never entirely explicated in the series, but it is not difficult to conclude that the Transformers are doing this to conserve resources—and that the deaths in the movie are the result of a twenty-year shift from a battle of resources and attrition to an all-out war.

This consistency within the mythology is, miraculously, further reinforced by some of the spinoffs: Beast Wars and Transformers Animated both make reference to the events of Generation 1, with Animated even using a clip from the first Generation 1 episode when they discuss the history of the Transformers. Animated does casually ignore certain elements, of course—there are clear ways in which the series is a bit of a franchise reboot—but the point is, this sort of consistency is deliberate. The example I gave above is not all that far-fetched.

I could fill a book with examples of how the Transformers universe manages to maintain internal consistency (though it has its continuity errors—notably the Dinobots), but that might bore even me. I will end by getting back to my point, which is that the few series nowadays that seem to have this kind of consistency are deliberately building upon other works--Transformers, comic books, Disney films—and are rarely doing much original world-building. Even series for adults have problems keeping their narrative threads from unwinding; but when I look at shows intended for children I see a noticeable dearth of attention paid to anything more than running gags and shiny colors. And personally, I consider this a travesty; which is why I thank the universe for providing me with old shows on DVD, and why I can be unfamiliar with Mr. Postgate's works and still be saddened at such a blow to children's entertainment.

So, goodbye, Mr. Postgate. I never knew you, but I know you treated children like human beings, and for that I can never thank you enough. Good luck with whatever you've traveled on to, and consider yourself on the list for eventual brain-to-jar conversion.

Next time: Why I don't feel ashamed for writing about Transformers

I am your meta-MetaFilter. Call me "Filter Omega".

As usual, life and circumstance puts the lie to my posting claims. The post about obsession and Oliver Postgate (well, his work, that is) is to come later today; for now, you receive more link salad.

• Music industry shifting its anti-piracy tactics. Provided they hold true to this, it looks the RIAA is finally focusing its money and time on targeting music uploaders rather than music downloaders, and is starting to do some work on respecting the privacy of the individual. Unfortunately, they aren't abandoning their current (asinine) crop of lawsuits, so I can only gain so much respect...


• A Mr. Wendell Jamieson gives us a very different take on It's A Wonderful Life. What's better than lit crit? Cynical lit crit!


• POSTNotes. These are briefings and longer works from the UK's Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. I have not gotten a chance to read them yet; I'll edit with a review when I get a chance (and encourage you readers to let me know if this is just terrible stuff). In the meantime, I just dig this idea; it's both a quick way to get an update on current science, and a nice little way for government to make itself a bit less opaque.


• And finally, your dose of schadenfreude: Anti-kidnapping expert kidnapped. This is terrible and I hope Mr. Batista gets out of it safely, and yet at the same time there is a dark part of me that cannot help but laugh. Welcome to the downfall of my generation.

Whither the Trenchcoat?

I have previously ranted about cartoonish magic, people who think "ridiculous" means "epic", and the half-dozen things that need to leave my genre right now. I also found time to rant about dragons. And you are probably thinking to yourself, what right do I have to question these things? Okay, hopefully you're just thinking I'm amusing, but I need to take a moment. The truth is, I don't think I'm the greatest writer in the world; but I am a reader. And that means, if you're writing, I'm one of the people you're aiming for. So, that's really all the right I've got, and that's really all the excuse I'm going to give; I in no way claim final authority.

There. Now. Tonight, I'm ranting about fantasy and fashion.

Allow me to say it, as many, I've sure, have said before: stop it with the god-damn trench-coats.

You can call it the trench-coat; the long coat; the duster; you can dissemble about lapels and buttons; you can attempt to justify it however you want, but the truth is, the trench-coat, long, flowing, and just a little cowpunk, is on a literary ship that has long since sailed.

I mentioned cowpunk, and yeah, it probably starts with cowboys. The duster is standard wear for a high noon showdown. Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett probably helped, too (though off the top of my head I'm not remembering either Marlowe or Spade wearing the long-and-flowy). And I can think of plenty of fantasy stories where the main character wears a dark cloak. But whatever brought it to life, you know what killed it? The Matrix.

The rumor, at least as presented in Coupland's JPod, is that the coat was used for one purpose: shortening the render time on the CGI sequences. And in so doing, the brothers Wachowski managed to trigger, or at least feed into, an obsession with the trench-coat.

People think trench-coats are macho. They think trench-coats look awesome. I own a trench-coat, a black one, and I enjoy wearing it, because it is warm and has big pockets. But it has been a long time since trench-coats looked awesome, and the Matrix is why, along with the Matrix's fans, Casablanca's fans, Joss Whedon's fans, and, ultimately, gamers.

I am a gamer. I've done the board game thing, the pen and paper thing; I've walked around at night pretending to be a vampire; I've hit people with padded sticks and shouted out how much damage my magic weapon did. And you know what I've seen tons of? So many tons of them that it has become a running joke? The trench-coat. In particular, the black trench-coat, often the black leather trench-coat. Some of us have dusters. But when I see a trench-coat, I do not think of cowboys, or vampires, or hard-boiled detectives. I think of Vampire LARPers. The symbolic cachet of the trench-coat is not gone; it's just shifted. It has left the shoulders of the badasses and moved to the shoulders of those who want to be them.

There are subversions possible, of course, some of them even clever. Simon R. Green has a main character who is sort of famous for wearing a white trench-coat; and Firefly brought them back around by using them to invoke the image of cowboys. But for the most part, when I see them, I think of guys with inappropriately long hair and a bad dice habit, who are probably using that trench-coat to store a bottle of Coke; and while that image is not there for the population writ large, they are likely to think your main character really, really wants to be Neo.

So if you want to invoke that imagery; or if you're setting it in the Wild West; or if your main character is a nerd or a goth kid or a LARPer; then by all means, go ahead. But otherwise, the trench-coat and the duster are probably not your best bet. And don't go trying to sneak in a greatcoat either; it's really just a trench-coat with muttonchops.

There. I said it. I'm done with telling you what not to write until the end of January, at least; I can't promise much more than that, though. These posts are just so much damn fun, like a class on literary theory wrapped up in razor blades. (I'm also done with similes like that until at least next Friday...)

No More Dragons

Nota Bene: Like all my denunciations of literary trends, I have to jump in and say this, lest I get even more of a flame war than I'm hoping for/fearing:

I exempt those who are writing for the purposes of irony, parody, metacommentary, and symbolic commentary on deeper issues, and I will always listen to an inventive application of an old idea.  After all, one of my favorite Neil Gaiman stories is about the Holy Grail.  And I exempt, too, my good friend (and Actual Published Author) Sara Harvey, who has gotten a story about dragons sold to a small press and should not take this as an attack against her story.  She had prose on her side.  Also, lest I be forced to eat crow, I may write a story about dragons some day; but I wouldn't really count on it.

Okay.  So, seeing as how I already posted some link salad today, I'll make this one brief.

Dragons.

It's more than a little astounding to me that I missed these guys in my discussion of fantasy tropes; looking back I think I was mostly focused on urban fantasy, but I'm 90% positive that shouldn't have stopped me.  This whole thing starts with an unfortunate contradiction, but one that I have to shore up in order to hold onto my Master's degree. 

I, like any red-blooded boy who wore glasses and defended the literary cachet of Piers Anthony, loved dragons.  I'll even go so far as to say I love dragons; I love what they symbolize, I love the imagery, I love their deep archetypal potency. 

That said, people of the world, fantasy authors everywhere: stop writing about dragons.

I'm not old; I'm not the pinnacle of literary experience.  Six years in college and I never read Proust.  But trust me when I say that I have seen dragons done to absolute death.

I have seen classic Arthurian dragons and wise Chinese dragons; I've seen dragons as fire-breathing lizards; I've seen dragons as genetic experiments; I've seen dragons as a joke and dragons as a linchpin in the idea that believing in something enough can make it real.  Heroic dragons, villainous dragons, stupid dragons, smart dragons.  I've seen dragons made of molten stone and lightning.  I've seen dragons who looked like silver-scaled cats.  I've seen dragons with spotlights for eyes.  I've even, and I don't recommend putting this into Google Image Search, seen a dragon made entirely of boobies.

(In fact, I think this might be a valid way to judge the remaining stamina of any fantasy trope: has it been converted wholecloth into science fiction?)

"But Tyler," you're asking, with a presumptuous familiarity, "why can't we use dragons anymore?  They're so symbolically potent!"

First of all, dragons are not that symbolically potent anymore; in a sense they've started more and more to represent themselves, and while you can get some mileage out of different cultural approaches to dragons, you can only get so far with that.  But to address the more important question, you can't use dragons for the same reason that you can't use werewolves, vampires, Cthulhu, or zombies: It's too easy to write a story that goes no deeper than "dragons and…".

What do I mean?  Take a book I picked up and put down last week, the currently critically-acclaimed His Majesty's Dragon.  It seemed well-written enough; the prose was good, though not really my thing, and it seemed like the 70 or so pages like there would be a bit of military politics and quasi-real-world nationalism, and that seems like it might be worthy of praise.  But in the same breath, you had a main character thrust into a life-changing situation for no apparent reason, and his new companion, a young dragon who [SPOILERS!]

 

 

 

is, of course, one of a rare breed of dragons who are Very Special and who have never been seen in England before.

 

 

 

[END SPOILERS!]

 

           

 

I read, as I said, about 70 pages; and then I was given the new John Hodgman book, and I switched over to that, because the truth was, it seemed like a lot was hinging on me being interested in a story that was, in essence, "dragons and the Napoleonic Wars".

Without being exhaustive, I've seen plenty of stories that have done this, and not often done it well.  I've seen "vampires and politics"; "zombies and corporate America"; "Cthulhu and Sherlock Holmes" (there's an entire book of that combination and I'd argue only half of it really works); and of course, like everyone, I've seen "dragons and spaceships", or even better, "dragons and a troubled assassin".  In other words, I'm not saying His Majesty's Dragon is unique, and I don't want to seem to be disguising a negative review as an essay.  I just think that it's one of the latest in a long line of books that are using the addition of dragons to carry something very  

I could just as easily try to claim that Dune is crap for expecting me to enjoy "politics in space", or that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is crap because it expects me to enjoy "vampires in high school".  And I'll admit, some of it is that my love for dragons is not as strong as it once was.  But some of it is also that dragons have a tendency, again like zombies or Lovecraftian horrors, to become a major force behind getting people to read a book.  Buffy used its vampires (and werewolves and demons and what-have-you) for more potent effects than just garnering viewers—in fact, most of the viewers I know love Buffy despite its use of vampires, not because of them, and I think that's ultimately the difference.

I go back to my point about their lack of symbolic cachet.  See, dragons have this problem: they're pretty god-damn distinctive.  You can put theoretically new spins on a dragon, but you're going to wind up with some variation of a flying lizard; nameless horrors from the depths and shambling animated corpses have at least a little more variation, though they're starting to wear out their narrative elasticity as well.  They have a tendency to crowd out other aspects of the narrative: people come to dragon fiction and one of the first things they want to know is "how do these dragons work?!"  Which of course forces the author to find some new way to portray their dragons; which means they spend time on that and not on, oh, characters or plot; and the downward spiral continues, all thanks to the addition of dragons. 

This is my complaint with dragons—they take over a story, and they do it so effectively that they have a tendency to receive a warm welcome when doing so.

Save narrative.  Don't write about dragons.

Canned Funny, Or, Why I Write Fantasy and Not Comedy

I adore Jasper Fforde; I think he is one of the greatest things to happen to fiction. I feel similarly about Douglas Adams, as well as Terry Pratchett, who I consider the most easily digested narrative theorist in human history. In non-fiction humor I have to give credit to Dave Barry, who has many times had me choking on my own spit, as well as the lesser-known Lore Sjöberg and the bigger, less bald juggernatus of David Sedaris and John Hodgman.

In short, I adore funny books.

I also adore Neil Gaiman, who sits somewhere between urban fantasy and modern horror's answer to Splenda (and who is, sometimes, quite funny). I love Mark Z. Danielewski's capacity for bizarre, existential creep, and I love Steven Hall's psychotropic The Raw Shark Texts, which genuinely had my pulse pounding. I love the creepy things John Carpenter can make happen and I love the gray-washed atmosphere of the early episodes of Heroes, before things took off into modern mythology (not that this is in and of itself a bad thing; it was just not the same thing that hooked me).

In short, I like scary books.

In the middle, I find many things Neil Gaiman writes, but also the work of Joss Whedon, who is a personal idol, and who has admitted quite plainly that he loves to intersperse creepy moments and funny moments as liberally as possible in his shows. One of my favorite books of the past year has been Résumé with Monsters, which as disturbing as it is very funny; and I would be remiss if I did not mention the entire genre now known as zom-com, from the better-known Shaun of the Dead to the older and more classic Evil Dead movies and Dead Alive (Braindead if you insist on being from other countries).

More than horror, in some ways, more than comedy in many ways, I adore the writers and filmmakers who are able to mix the two; who can take two genres which depend upon surprise and sudden swells of emotion to work their magic (the two that aren't porn), and combine them in ways that blend and enhance rather than neutralize. So then, the obvious question, hinted at in the title: Why don't I write that? I suppose there is a simple answer, but if it was really that simple, I wouldn't write a blog post about it, now would I?

First of all, comedy is hard. When I was much younger I had a dream of being a stand-up comedian; I worked on routines here and there, pecked at ideas, aped comics I saw on television in an effort to find what was funny. I suppose it left me with a good understanding of what is and is not funny (see below), but it also left me with the understanding that comedy is incredibly difficult. When I am funny, and I'll admit I am capable of being so, it comes effortlessly and suddenly; it doesn't take preparation, it just shoots out. When I prepare--when I analyze--it starts to lose its bite. Call it gonzo comedy if you want, or accuse me of being Tom Robbins or William S. Burroughs or someone else famous for odd editing habits; I just can't edit comedy and preserve its marrow.

Second of all, fantasy (or horror, or whatever you want to call my work) is not hard. Note that I do not say this other genre of writing is easy; it isn't, it is very challenging. But it flows out of me more easily than comedy does, and it is much easier for me to edit and still preserve its core. And what's more, it is something I can think about; it is something I can focus my mental energy on very easily, and as such, it is something that, while it challenges, does not run dry (save for those terrible times when I get stuck and can't get any words to flow from my hands to the screen, which is another, much darker affliction).

Also, and this is the nicest way I can say this: "Creepy" is almost universal; "Funny" is almost universally personal. To be slightly less diplomatic, I do not find most comedy funny. At all.

I don't like comedy that relies on the embarrassment of its main characters for its punch--I just end up feeling bad for the person, wincing when I'm supposed to laugh. I see right through comedy that depends on firing off taboo words and subjects as quickly as possible. I don't like comedy about having sex with fat people. I don't like comedy that depends upon enforced gender segregation. I don't like comedy about lying to people for the purposes of sex. I don't like comedy about bodily functions. I don't like stoner comedy. I don't like racial comedy. The list goes on and on.

And then, there are the exceptions. There's Superbad, which is about trying to get laid, and Arrested Development, which should be cringe-inducing but is hilarious. There's the stand-up work of Eddie Izzard and Robin Williams, both of whom make fun of, among others, the English, the Americans, most of the Middle East, and the French, as well as, in Izzard's case, the Holocaust (if Williams hit that subject I have yet to read it).

Comedy, for me, is in tone, delivery, facial expression, motion; it's the way a line is said and the flailing as a character falls. To this day, one of the most brilliantly funny moments in Whedon's seminal Buffy the Vampire Slayer comes during the seventh season, and takes place entirely in a speechless background shot; a similar Firefly moment sends me into giggle fits, because of nothing more than the look on Nathan Fillion's face. When I'm reading comedy, it's about timing; the way the writer controls the cadence, the twisting of words, the behind-the-scenes smirking and the implication. Terry Pratchett is a master of this--were there a just God this mind would be preserved forever.

I can do these things; I know I can. But the truth is, if I find most things that send the general public into gales of laughter to just be noisome or excruciating, how can I hope to know when I've got something that's funny?

I realize writing for oneself is important; if you don't love it, how an you feel good about foisting it on others? But even in that there is a trap, because I consider good comedy so rare and bad comedy so prolific and fecund that I don't want to risk adding more of the latter at the cost of the former. If I write comedy it gets dissected and reassembled and juggled about and analyzed; and then we run once more into the issues mentioned above. Again, comedy is hard--I want it to be perfect, more so than I want all my writing to be perfect, and I am liable to be destructively hard on myself if I try to write it.

This is not to say I never write comedy, or that I will never write a book that is entirely comedy; maybe I'll get incredibly lucky and some blow to the head will allow me to be the next Jasper Fforde (I would never, however, pretend to be the next Terry Pratchett; some lightning really does strike once). Maybe I'll even get there through hard work and a nice bolt of inspiration. But for the moment, I feel that what wit I can muster is best put into the mouths of my characters and the twists in my phrasing. I am at home with the creep and the mystery and the anomalies, and I prefer to stay down here playing with myth to going up in the light; up there, people might not be laughing with me.

New Forms of Reference?

These posts keep getting shorter; I wonder if perhaps we are approaching some sort of blog singularity here, where eventually the novels I hope to post will just start magically appearing here for you all to read. The things men dream before their coffee...

What brings me here is actually a Saturday morning breakfast scan of the wonderful and illuminating Cabinet of Wonders. Her recent topic of focus seems to be menageries, and that in and of itself is wonderful (though I shouldn't view pictures of strange animals first thing in the morning, it leads to visualizing how they'd each feel crawling across my bare feet). What really riveted me, though, enough to warrant a post, was a single footnote in the second paragraph: "'the price of admission was three half-pence or the supply of a cat or dog for feeding to the lions.' [wiki]" (emphasis mine).

[wiki]. Thrown out as simply and as casually as [3], or [Atlas Shrugged, pp 87-91]. As though this were a thoroughly legitimate bit of academic annotation.

A Google search for "[wiki]" is fruitless, of course, given that the engine won't pay much attention to the brackets; and I don't know enough about Heather MacDougal to know if she's fully plugged in to current mainstream academic endeavor. But nevertheless, she is an eloquent and clearly educated writer, if not necessarily formally so, so I don't think this is necessarily random chance. The reference made by the footnote is relatively clear, if in need of more specification in a bibliography, and the information is exactly the sort one would quote from another source.

Is the war beginning to go quiet? Have mainstream intellectuals begun to accept wikis as a source of real and verifiable data? I'm not wholly overjoyed at the prospect--wikis are a great launchpad, but need at least as much if not more verification of sources to be solid points of reference--but I do love to see this sort of cultural progress in action. Maybe next we'll be seeing it in scholarly essays published online. Or maybe Ms. MacDougal is a fluke, and we'll be going right back to the same internecine war about what should or shouldn't constitute a primary or secondary source. Either way, I'm excited to see what happens next.

Review: The Incredible Hulk

Let's open this review with a trivia question: In the course of the movie, there are two major Hulk characters and a character with his own comic book who are hinted at but not explicitly named as such. Who are they? (One of them is introduced in their pre-superhuman form, so you'll need to guess the Super-Sekrit codename to get the win.)

My experience of The Incredible Hulk, in under 100 words: It was a thoroughly enjoyable film, with Edward Norton and William Hurt's performances standing out among the somewhat tepid work from the others, but with the fight scenes and special effects standing heads and shoulders above any other good thing about the movie, except for how wonderfully geeky their scriptwriters are. Definitely moremore eye-candy than brain-candy, but still with the thoughtfulness that is the hallmark of good Incredible Hulk stories.

That said, if you want my spoilerific deeper thoughts, you'll have to delve into the next paragraph, which begins a document that is FULL OF SPOILERS! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

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My comic-book geekdom is more or less a side effect of my mother's boss's comic-book geekdom. I never had a series I followed religiously until I was older and too caught up in my twenty-something college elitism to read anything but Vertigo titles--all my comic books in high school were last month's issues, given to the family by my mother's boss so I could enjoy them, which meant I generally had a day or two of reading a dozen comics and then had to hope the generous giver of comics was still following that series the next month. And yet, somehow, I understand the Marvel Universe deeply and completely. Call it cultural osmosis. Or perhaps just call it Wikipedia. Whatever it is, I love Marvel's universe much more than DC's, and I'm so grateful to see it getting such great treatment on the silver screen.

And among the various Marvel characters, I've always found the Hulk has one of the most enthralling, because while he is superhuman he is only rarely a superhero. At root, the Hulk is just a creature, a force of nature, even, separate from any morality except that which is imposed on him by external forces--when he's heroic it's usually because Bruce Banner aimed himself at something evil before the transformation, or because whatever was evil that week coincidentally got in his way. I won't get into analyzing the psychological side of the Hulk, as plenty of paper has already been sacrificed to that subject; I will, though, say that the film did a fantastic job of portraying this side of the Hulk.

Really, the best thing about Marvel movies is that they know their audience. All of their movies have been full of comic-fan in-jokes, but the amount of Hulk trivia tossed into The Incredible Hulk is amazing. We have our now-standard and still-awesome Stan Lee cameo (though Iron Man still has the best one to date), we have references to two major Hulk antagonists and a very covert reference to another superhero who, I believe, will be getting his own movie sooner than later, all of which came out without ever feeling like they interrupted the narrative to do an apostrophe to the nerds. And we have a "you wouldn't like me when I'm angry" joke, and Lou Ferrigno coming back to voice the Hulk (that's right, that "Hulk Smash!" was original, grade-A Smash) and even giving us a little pizza-loving cameo.

But even separate from my enormous nerdiness, there is plenty to love about The Incredible Hulk. I was at first put off by them deciding to skip the origin story in favor of beginning in media res, but as the movie continued, the quick flashes of the Hulk's origins they did during the credits grew on me more and more. I like that they focused on the fugitive angle, and brought the audience in to Bruce's angst after it had mellowed and matured.

I have to give major kudos to Edward Norton for his portrayal of Banner--I can give no higher compliment than to say that I sometimes forgot who was playing the character. I really felt for Bruce over the course of the movie, but never in that awful, too-clean way that seems to always infect superhero films. Scenes like the almost-sex between Bruce and Betty highlight the fear and stress and misery that is life as the Hulk, without dragging the film into bathos. I have to congratulate William Hurt, also, for his portrayal of Thunderbolt Ross, though I do have to jump in here and say that his character is where the script breaks down a little for me (more on that in a minute).

Of course, I have to talk about the fight scenes, which are excellent. The Hulk is, as he should be, a force of nature, but while he's brutish, he's got an animal cunning that belies the utterly brilliant scientist inside him. The final battle with the Abomination, in particular, was awesome, especially the outburst, necessary and spine-tingling, of a nice, old-school "HULK SMASH!"

Unfortunately, I now have to jump back to Thunderbolt Ross. He was far too dumbed down. I know, I know--why would I go to a superhero movie expecting an intelligent script? Because this wasn't just a superhero movie, this was a Hulk movie, damn it! Give me some brains in amongst the brawn. And they did--except that they transformed Ross into an out-and-out villain. In the comics, Ross headed the project that created the Hulk, but he considered the Hulk a monster and was doing his best to arrest or destroy Banner, not bring him in to create more Hulks; he was a bad guy only in the sense that he kept shooting the Hulk with missiles. I felt like the angle presented in the comics was far more interesting: it made Ross a more morally gray character, rather than a mustachioed metaphor for the military-industrial complex.

And while I am talking about characterization, I have to talk about the Abomination. I love Tim Roth, and I have found him to be an amazing part of any movie he's been in. Except this one. Maybe it's that Emil Blonsky's motivations are really just a huge, steaming cup of blind testosterone, but it seemed like Roth wasn't even trying. And while the shot of Blonsky standing about three inches tall next to the towering slabs of first the Hulk and then Thunderbolt Ross may have been meant to give us some insight into his thirst for strength, it really just came off as comically ham-fisted.

(I'm not even going to get into Liv Tyler--she did a great "the world hurts me" face, and her ability to plaintively say "Bruce?" was strong, but for the most part I'm not impressed by her as an actress.)

Ross and Blonsky (and Roth, though not Hurt) are really the weak points of the movie, and the fact that their motivations are the underpinnings of the plot makes the whole thing feel sort of overly simplistic, plot-wise. Fortunately, Norton's and Hurt's acting skills, some really inventive fight scenes, and the constant low-grade thrill of watching Banner try to evade Ross and his goons help to redeem the movie.

And then... [[WARNING! WARNING! DOUBLE-PLUS SPOILER AHEAD!]]

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And then...there's the end of the movie. There's Thunderbolt Ross, and he's drunk (and William Hurt is playing a hilariously gruff and miserable drunk in this scene, let me say), and he's sad, and then the door opens and there's a silhouette and the whole surface of my skin tingles because Tony Stark just walked into the bar! (I cannot give this the emphasis I want, lest I attract bypassing eyes to this spoiler.)

I love this last scene more than I reasonably should. It made the Marvel film universe feel interconnected in exactly the way the comic books were, and that was a level of cool I did not think it was possible for these movies to hit. And beyond that, it reminded me that pretty soon this is coming out, and while I don't love the Avengers that much I am going to be all over that movie like William Burroughs on a key of heroin.



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In short--this movie was excellent, and a comic book fan will love it on a whole different level. I felt like the Hulk was finally done cinematic justice. Now, don't forget your Hulk trivia--answers go up tomorrow.

That's Not Epic; Or, Why I Don't Like to Admit to My Genre

So, Jerry "Tycho" Holkins, as many of my readers might know, recently posted this magnificent denigration of the Anita Blake series. Without getting into the meat of the article, he summarizes several events in the series, and frankly, stripped of whatever talent for prose Laurell K. Hamilton may have, the sheer silliness of the series is laid bare. These elements are one tip of the many-peaked iceberg of what I hate in urban fantasy as a genre, and why I am so reluctant to use that term to describe my writing, however apt it might be.

There is a tendency in all fantasy, urban or not*, which I have been aware of and had trouble articulating for years. I think the most basic, raw way I can describe it is the tendency to believe that, narratively, "bigger is better"; a conflation of "epic" and "overpowered", and also of "many plot elements" and "good plot". I've seen it at its worst in gaming (even--perhaps especially--in professionally written materials), and I don't understand it.

To address the issue of "epic": I have often heard things defined as "epic" which seem to me to just be silly, masturbatory power fantasies. Take, for example, The Elric Saga—a series which, I will allow, I very much enjoyed, but which is guilty of this very thing. At several points in the series, Elric is faced with monsters/sorcery/gods/whatever that are beyond the capability of he and his allies to defeat, a fact which is usually hammered into the reader's perception via the bathetically horrible death of one of said allies (who, seriously, should all wear red shirts and talk in bad accents, because if their enemies don't kill them, Elric does). Even Elric's supposed impossibly powerful black sword, Stormbringer, can't defeat these foes, though in some cases (I'll note the lizardmen in The Sailor on the Seas of Fate) it does some half-assed sort of damage to them. When Elric does defeat his Unstoppable Horror of the Day, it is never through some ingenious plan on his part, or some noble sacrifice—he always summons Gadonkadonk, Lord of Tree Sloths or Maguffinator the Scuzz Elemental, and they swoop down/up/through the scene and (sometimes after expounding on how much Elric owes them) take care of whatever the problem is.

This isn't interesting. This stirs my blood about as effectively as a swizzle stick. Elric never seems challenged, and he never seems interesting—he always faces impossible odds, and then after some flailing and struggling that is there basically to pad the word count, just calls up today's deux ex machina.

This is exactly my problem with what a lot of people call "an epic story". When all odds the heroes face are impossible, "impossible" loses meaning as a word; when the world seems to be ending every day, saving the world takes on all the savor of punching a time clock at a gym (something which happens in the Buffyverse all the time, but Whedon and his staff have the courtesy to comment on that narratively).

To me, an epic story should include high stakes, but those stakes need not always include the world, and they need not always involve foes who can explode mountains with their mind or shrug off tactical nuclear weapons or what-have-you. While these ideas might make great action movies (and I emphasize might), they make for piss-poor storytelling. The best stories—even the best true epics—involve threats to at most a region (Hrothgar's kingdom in Beowulf), which, granted, was probably the scope of the world to those authors; usually, the stakes are high, but only, or mostly from the perspective of those struggling to attain them (The Odyssey). And while those threats may be supernaturally powerful, or at least very powerful in comparison to the heroes, the heroes rarely attain their victory by just buying a bigger gun—even the world's favorite action heroes tend to win through a combination of firepower and ingenuity (look at the Terminator movies—the first two. Or Die Hard).

A similar issue plagues stories that are just, to use a description which was unfortunately applied to something I wrote, "a grab-bag of magical touchstones"; or, to be more specific, stories which cram in a bunch of plot elements and expect the narrative to somehow mash them up into something fascinating and riveting. Tell me, which of these pieces of vampire fiction would you rather read:

• A story wherein a journalist is bitten by a vampire and tries to control his degeneration into a monster, while dealing with a group of AIDS and cancer patients who want the physical stasis vampirism offers and are seeking a way to "cure" the infected/afflicted portion of the human population through transformation into vampires, ignoring the fact that becoming a vampire brings one's predatory instincts to the fore; or
• A story wherein a man can, thanks to being half-fairy before he was bitten by a vampire, choose to access his new powers whenever the sun sets, but must contend with a nonspecific risk of fully degenerating into a vampire every time he does so, based on a variety of factors; while he faces this problem, he finds himself set against a group of vampire bite victims who can, thanks to their experiences, literally sniff out vampires through the dead blood in their veins, and who want to perform an ancient ritual to transform the moon into a second sun so that vampires will be driven off the planet, too fanatic to care about the damage this will do to the earth.

Yes, that second plot is far, far dumber than the first one, and is absolutely a straw man argument on my part; but this is what most fantasy and urban fantasy books look like to me. For a classic example, check out the Nightside books by Simon R. Green, which include such great scenes as the battle wherein the most fearsome wizards in all of the Nightside face the main character and two men who cannot die, and are then killed to a man by one of those two immortals and the other's demonic girlfriend, before said girlfriend teleports the main characters to a bar run by the descendant of Merlin so they can talk to him about the whereabouts of Lilith, Adam's first wife…

No, there is not much else to the book. This is how the plot of Hex and the City progresses. I guess in theory the main character winds up struggling a little with the discovery he's not wholly human, but it lasts a page and previous to that, he shows about as much humanity and depth as Jason Voorhees. And the Nightside series is middle of the road for urban fantasy—many of the classic, constantly-cited works of urban fantasy have problems like this. You also see the issue in many well-known video games, movies, TV shows, and anime series—a climactic battle in which one character is exploding the other character's head repeatedly, only to have their head reform before they charge in with their overpowered magic item they got because of some nonspecific destiny and cut off one of the eight arms of the villain's true form. There's no life, no conflict, no character development—or when there is, it's so over the top and loaded with pathos that it's about as riveting as an actor on a blank stage clawing at his face and screaming "NOT THE BEES!"

But then, there's the Silent Hill series of video games. There's Tim Powers, whose novels, while they might sometimes involve the fate of the world on some metaphysical level, are usually about the struggle between two characters with the magic just serving as its backdrop. And there's Joss Whedon, who, while he ends the world eight or nine times in the course of eight years, manages to work that level of constant drama into the characters' personalities, and uses it as a springboard for a commentary on the human condition—two words absent from many fantasy authors' lexicons.

This, I think, is my biggest problem with the bloated excuses for "epics" and the overly crowded narrative landscapes: all too often, it seems like these authors are waving brightly-colored flags to distract from the fact that their stories aren't saying much. Their characters don't grow or change; any internal conflict they go through is flat and two-dimensional, sometimes no more than a throwaway line like "I was disgusted". These stories wind up being the literary equivalent of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, without the special effects budget necessary to make the lack of substance interesting to watch. This is why, despite its aforementioned failures, I love the Elric Saga and will defend Moorcock's writing: while sometimes he's hyperbolic, and some of the notes on his narrative instrument are out of tune, the man does give us a little bit of insight into Elric's struggle, and that combined with some strong prose brings the story out of the swamp that mires so many fantasy series. The Song of Ice and Fire, which I have mentioned here before, is so amazing partially because it is about nothing but people (some would argue too many people, but that's a different discussion), with the magic, as I will harp so many times, serving to add a bit of a creepy sheen and a few narrative curveballs to the story.

The world has urban fantasy that does what I would like it to do, it's just not what the world tends to think of when it thinks of "urban fantasy". And that is why, for right now, I am reluctant to admit to my genre. I don't think I'll necessarily revolutionize urban fantasy; I'm not even sure I'll move urban fantasy ten degrees clockwise from where it is right now. But right now, I am working on a synopsis for Done with Mirrors, and my number one hurdle is: "How do I not make this book like every other urban fantasy book I have ever read?" And in that, at least, I have a clear guide, formed though it is from research into the genre's failings. Watch my plot elements. Watch my power level. Don't put the world in peril again. And always, always ask myself this question: how does this forward the internal arc of my characters?

*It is, to my mind, worse in urban fantasy, because the silliness is rendered more blatant when the world surrounding the writing is comparatively normal.

Six Things I Hate About Fantasy

For all its cultural marginalization (a topic for a different post), science fiction and fantasy cover a huge amount of literary and cinematic ground. Unfortunately, this breadth also means that it covers a fair amount of very bad literary and cinematic ground; there are dozens of books with a title something like "[Occupation/Species] of "[Region/Planet/Fictional Location]" or "[Name]'s Quest/Journey", and the phrase "b-movie" conjures more images of cheap rubber suits and bad vampire makeup than pretty much anything else. And don't even get me started on the comedic fantasy genre (Pratchett gains special exception from my aspersions on the matter).
Now, there's not a lot to be done for this; every genre of book, film, and TV show is going to attract its bad apples, it just happens that, as a fan, I am more pained by the bad fantasy shows than the bad mainstream stuff. Like any writer with a blog and a little bit of faith in their ability, I like to think that there are some people reading this who have considered writing in the same genre I do; and it is for you, my loyal readers and colleagues, that I write this post. What follows is a list of things which have not only infiltrated the genre, but have been done to absolute death. The ideas have entered the realm of parody kicking and screaming; barring some truly revolutionary spins on these concepts, any attempt to use them must be performed only in conditions of abnormally high irony.

1. Count Dracula. This guy has narrowly escaped death, only to be killed again, more times than I can count. I understand the literary desire to revamp old myths and legends and books--Alan Moore has built a fantastic career out of this desire and some form of hallucinogen. But Dracula has been strip-mined into oblivion. He's been portrayed by four great actors (well, the jury's perhaps still out on Leslie Neilsen and David Carradine), battled at least three generations of the Van Helsing family, been Mina's captor, been Mina's lover, led a town full of vampires to redemption, and, at least twice, has been part of a vampire movie's "twist ending". Vampires are a difficult trope to work with in general--the BBC series Ultraviolet being one of the few versions of the myth that hasn't been done to death--but the Big D himself has been trod into the ground and sewn back together so many times he looks like a Victorian hamburger. Leave him in peace.


2. Jack the Ripper. Speaking of the urge to revamp...the indomitable Liz Lacy has already tackled this subject previously, so I will keep this brief: I understand that the Ripper murders are one of the world's most famous unsolved mysteries. I understand that the rumors of a Masonic connection make him very appealing as a focal point for a sci-fi or fantasy piece. But trust me, whatever you want to do with him, it's probably been done. Move on to the Zodiac Killer, or the Boston Strangler; they are far creepier for their lack of wide cultural exposure.


3. The Third Reich. I'm not sure if Raiders of the Lost Ark started it, but I'm hoping Mike Mignola will prove to have finished it. "It", in this case, being the constant narrative abuse of Nazi occultism or super-science. It is, from what we can tell, a historical fact that Hitler was a member of an occult secret society, and that certain non-Judeo-Christian mythologies were a part of National Socialist belief. It is even, according to some sources, a fact that Hitler and his top men were involved in all sorts of strange black magic rituals to ensure the victory and endurance of the Reich. And certainly, I love some good urban fantasy, and I appreciate that the Nazis are one of the most universally-accepted villains here on God's green Earth. But just as it is impossible to tread new ground with Count Dracula, Hitler's purported demonological experiments have seen too much action to be employed well at this stage; a mention of "Nazi occultism" is more likely to get rolling eyes than clapping hands. Given the examples of both Hitler and Dracula, maybe you can use this rubric: If it's been used as the final boss in a video game, don't write about it. (It has the advantage of also covering ninja...)


4. Heroic Vampires.
I never watched Moonlight, and I never watched it for one simple reason: I'd seen the exact same show twice before. I love a good redemption story, but we're to the point where the heroic vampire is an assumed part of the vampire subgenre. That isn't to say that your vampires should be cackling and inhuman to a man, but there are far more ways to add humanity to a vampire than to have them go out and fight crime. And for God's sake, learn from the examples I just linked to: if you have to add a vampire to your story, don't ever make a vampire a detective.

5. Assassins. People who kill for money are all over every form of entertainment media, but the fantasy genre is particularly bad about them, I think; the "fantasy novel about an assassin" is an exhausted subgenre in and of itself. Again, giving these authors the benefit of the doubt, I think this stems from a need for a psychological and cultural backdrop of the character's inner morality and struggle to be good with evil methods, and a need for an excuse to put the main character in harm's way, but you can paint these narrative elements with a much finer (and less worn) brush.


6. And last, but not least...The Honorable Loner, Outcast from His People. The temptation to title this last item "Drizzt do'Urden" was almost irresistible. Drizzt is just one of the most visible (to a fantasy nerd) examples of a trope that is also embodied in the Heroic Vampire, above, and the heroic assassin, and a vast number of other characters who are from more noble backgrounds. Fantastic literature, stretching all the way back to ancient mythology, is brimming with heroes who rejected or were rejected by their cultures, families, what-have-you. Some theorists think this is the hallmark of the hero's journey. But the outcast has gained a certain cultural sheen that I think goes unremarked-upon far, far too often; someone I know once commented that they felt it was stupid that the rebellious main character of a video game was punished and had to make do with substandard equipment for most of the game, when as the rebel they should be a bigger badass than anyone who obeys the rules. James Dean was a beautiful drop of poison in our culture's narrative cup; Wolverine made the poison taste like beer. That is not to say that I think every main character should be utterly accepted and mainstream and integrated--having a normal man wander out into a paranormal adventure is just as bad , stereotype-wise, as having the main character be an outcast vampiric assassin. I certainly play with the stereotype of the outcast hero in my own manuscripts. But I do think that it needs to be approached with caution, lest you find your main character developing a squint and a predilection for cigars (a point at which there is no choice but either descent into parody or narrative euthanasia).

There you go. This is certainly advice from someone who may or may not be qualified to give it, but even if all this does is make one budding writer reflect a little on the content of their narrative, I feel like I've made a worthy contribution. And as proof that I do not consider myself infallible, I encourage you to read my short story "A Study in Hellfire", and judge for yourself whether or not I achieved a sufficient level of irony. If I did, maybe you'd be willing to listen to my thoughts on the narrative uses of Jesus...

Dirty Magic

It all starts, like most great things, with an argument.
A friend of a friend (I do not halve that yet because I'm honestly not sure of my opinion of them yet) got into a discussion with me about George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, one of the only true fantasy series I have started reading since I became able to drink legally*. His complaints about the series were legion, though nothing I found myself able to agree with; but one of his complaints struck a chord with me: "I like high fantasy...the characters in [another fantasy series I won't denigrate here] throw magic around like it's a basketball."
Which brings me to this blog post.
It is no secret to the people who know me that I have found urban fantasy to be my preferred genre. It doesn't mean I'll never sally into another genre--my first published story, after all, was science fiction--but it is where I'm most comfortable. And yet, at the same time, there are series within that burgeoning genre that I just plain can't stand. I won't get into which series I mean--I don't want to earn attention solely through controversy--but the common factor in all of them, and the place in which A Song of Ice and Fire deviates, is this: they're all very crowded, and they're all too clean.

The crowded issue is one that I like to call Inflation of the Supernatural, and I found it to be most evident in (bear with me on this one) the Sonja Blue books by Nanci A. Collins (I recommend them, especially if you're in your early twenties or younger and want a working example of the word "splatterpunk"). Plenty of fantasy writers, whether medieval, Victorian, urban, suburban, what-have-you, have a tendency to add more magical creatures to their stories as they grow, whether within a single narrative or over the course of multiple books/issues/seasons. Of course, with the new supernaturals come new conspiracies, new groups, new rules of etiquette, new ways powers interact, etc., etc.; until eventually the world is so mired in supernatural things that the reader isn't mystified by them anymore, which often leads to the realization that all these new critters are really there to disguise the gaping holes in the plot.
This sort of thing can work in a Monster of the Week format where the new creature or concept is in and out within the course of the narrative, or in something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer where the point isn't really a coherent universe; but these cases are rare, and even there it makes the narrative a little chunky around the midsection. It's even more dangerous in urban fantasy because, when that world is overflowed with the supernatural, the disconnect is far worse than a world based around a historical period or a completely alien setting. If you're willing to take a geekier angle to this whole thing, check out White Wolf's original World of Darkness series (or hell, any roleplaying game, but this is the worst); near the end of the game's meta-narrative, people were joking about the five humans left in the World of Darkness untouched by the supernatural, crowded out by over one hundred sourcebooks worth of new critters.
By contrast, Martin's Song series has almost nothing supernatural in it, and what is there is apparently unique. There are the dragons; Valyrian steel; the Others; and manticores (which from the brief description are more like bugs). So far, that's really it, except for some random bits of old and strange magic (more on that in a moment). This allows, nay, forces, Martin to focus on the real tools an author needs to master--his characterization and his plot--and allows the reader to connect with the character, and, more importantly, makes the supernatural parts of the story that much spookier.
Which brings me to Dirty Magic.
A huge problem I have in a great many fantasy series is how clean-cut their magic system is. For lack of better terminology, many books tend to use magic with a huge, Bruckheimerian special effects budget; flaming runes on the air, heads exploding, things hurtling forward of their own will. Even the strange rituals cause massive earthquakes and the leveling of cities and the like. Yet...look at The Lord of the Rings, the book from which the archetype of The Wizard in modern fantasy stems. The magic in Tolkien's world is subtle, for the most part; Gandalf and Saruman are more charismatic and manipulative than they are hurlers of lightning. Sauron's machinations are subtle corruptions of personality, not sudden mutations of body (barring the Morgul blade that stabs Frodo, but I have to confess, I only remember the physical mutations being caused by that in the films...).
George R.R. Martin does Tolkien one better, and makes magic much more like the ritual magic and superstition practiced by actual, Earthly humans, albeit with the advantage that it works. Magic is bloody, and horrifying, and painful to watch, and its prices and side effects are horrifyingly clear. Yet, even when they are clear, they are fairly matter of fact, and pretty symbolically realistic--often with a little twist that leaves the reader clutching their innards and making noises that are vastly short on vowels.**
It is this system that I prefer. It is this magic that I like. The magic that can't be codified, can't be nailed down; the magic that is bloody and scary and clearly exists in the realm of the mythic where logic breaks down and woodsmen cut out virgin girls' hearts for their queens. I like the magic that makes people hang horseshoes on their doors and building their houses far away from certain roads, the flipside of the little children dodging sidewalk cracks. It's books like this that I love--books where the explanations of the horror only show you how little of the world you really understand, and how tenuous a spell's connection to sanity really is. I could wax poetic all night, but the truth is, this is what I love in urban fantasy, and this is what I hope to bring in my books: just enough codification to make you see the chaos.

*I assure you the two are unrelated; it's just an easy, non-numeric benchmark.
**I won't get into the details of Song's magic, for fear some poor reader might hunt me down and skin me before my career is even off the ground.