The Defensive Fantasist

I posted a link to the article by Charlie Stross on "Five rules for cold-bloodedly designing a fantasy series" (see previous post) to a Message Board I have been a member for a number of years. The Message Board is a busy one, and primarily frequented by readers and writers of Fantasy fiction.

I thought that posting the link might be useful to many of the aspiring writers on the list.

Instead, it seemed to be taken a totally different way!

There were comments such as:

...[I am] disturbed by someone writing fantasy who doesn't like it...

What a cynical person!...And how can you be so cold-blooded about Fantasy?

My god, a fantasy writer who doesn't like fantasy.... Now there’s a concept to restore one's faith in the genre.

My gut feeling is that it's a mistake to write in a genre that you have no personal enthusiasm for.

I don't believe he should be writing fantasy if he actually does not enjoy the genre.

if I was an agent I wouldn't go near something if the author presented himself to be unenthusiastic and just doing it because he believes he can - whether it's good fantasy or not.

Wow, I had no idea they would get so defensive! I personally think they took the article the wrong way, which leads me to a few observations:

1. Charlie Stross never says that he doesn't like fantasy. In fact in a number of other posts on his blog he mentions his first fiction love being Fantasy and that all he ever read as a teenager was SF and Fantasy.
2. He states "I've read a lot of extruded fantasy product in my time -- and I don't much like it" and "While there's nothing intrinsically wrong with Fantasy, the marketing mechanism applied to it tends to promote those aspects of it that I really don't like".
3. He just finished the 'fantasy' novel he speaks of (The Family Trade) and it is getting some amazing reviews. Apparently it is great, original, and people are already looking forward to the sequels. Do you think you could write a novel at all if you were not enthusiastic about it?

To me, this also highlights a difference I have noticed between readers of Fantasy and readers of Science Fiction (and please take this as a gross generalisation of the circles I move in, not a caveat against all fantasy readers):

Go up to someone reading a Science Fiction book and say "I think Science Fiction is childish crap with little literary merit" and they are most likely to answer: "yeah, well, so what, I enjoy it".

Say the same thing about Fantasy reader and you will probably get an answer that is a lot more defensive of the genre (see the comments above).

I've seen lots of mentions (on the internet in blogs and message boards, at talks, and panels, and cons) that "Fantasy is a Dying Genre", despite the fact that our bookshop shelves are teeming with new titles and new authors.

"Fantasy is a Dying Genre" is probably a really bad way to put it because that is not what they really mean. They mean that it is dying because it is collapsing under its own marketing weight! There are so many generic-Tolkien-clone-multi-series-fantasy-epics (what Stross calls "extruded fantasy") filling the shelves that it is becoming tough to find something new, original AND well-written.

The fantasy genre has become like fast food - you know what it is going to taste like; you know it has the same ingredients no matter where you go; it is safe, comfort food. But who can eat McDonald's every night of the week without getting bored (or even sick) from it eventually?

That, I think, is the true fear of those who take the "Fantasy is dying" line.

For sure, there are some really amazing new fantasy authors out there really pushing the envelope and showing us that you don't need elves, dwarves and dragons to make a good Fantasy: China Miéville, KJ Bishop, Jeff Vandermeer, Steven Erikson to name but a few. But to find the gold amongst the dross can be a daunting, and off-putting task. It is a shame that many become disillusioned with the genre before they find these authors.

I turned off Fantasy when the Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms tie-ins started flooding the shelves. It took me a long time to get back into it again but the above authors all restored my faith in the originality of the fantastic.

Why then do Fantasy readers often seem so defensive about this line of reasoning? Why do they cry foul about this when in almost the same breath they can whinge about the time it is taking Robert Jordon to finish a series that should have ended volumes ago? I have no idea. It baffles me. If anyone has thoughts on this feel free to let me know (as I am sure you will).

Charlie's Fantasy Rules

Charles Stross, author of the excellent "Singularity Sky" and "The Atrocity Archives" recently posted an article on his diary entitled: Five rules for cold-bloodedly designing a fantasy series.

He goes into the details of the process he went through to plot and plan his next work (a fantasy, not SF). I was quite fascinated by this as I have recently gone through a similar process just before reading his blog. His process is almost identical to the one I used.

I have almost finished a 200,000 word SF-Space Opera novel. It has taken me over 5 years to write and I'm quite happy with the results. Will it ever get published? Maybe, but given the ratio of fantasy to SF being published, probably not.

So, I thought: I'd have more chance getting published if I wrote a decent fantasy.

Normally I don't write fantasy (as such), I write SF and Horror and possibly Dark-Fantasy and Magic Realism. I never thought I would ever attempt to write a "fantasy" novel because I don't like much of what is currently on the shelf and I have drifted away from it.

For my process I thought:

a) What sort of fantasy do I enjoy? And I love old style "Sword and Sorcery" stuff, of which there is not much of these days. I would write an old-style swashbuckling Sword and Sorcery adventure. I also love "Dying Earth" type stories (Jack Vance, Clark Ashton Smith etc) that are set on thousands of years in the future: the sun is dying, earth is a barren wasteland reverted to barbarism and filled with remnants of Strange Science largely indistinguishable from Magick.

b) What authors do I like who wrote this stuff? And yes, they were all already dead:

• Edgar Rice Burroughs - Tarzan, John Carter of Mars
• Robert E Howard - creator of Conan, amongst others
• Clark Ashton Smith - Lovecraftian horror and fantasy, although I feel Smith is far superior to Lovecraft.
• William Hope Hodgeson - The Night Lands, House on the Borderlands

I would use all these guys as influences. Combine all the above, shake them, stir them, and see what comes out.

In the end I am really enthusiastic about what I came up with and found the sort of fantasy story that I'd not only want to read, but want to write too! No elves, no dwarves (or dwarfs if you are that way inclined). No dragons. Instead: anthropomorphs, flying machines, automata.

In the end, I'm writing something I never thought I would write - a fantasy! And I'm loving it!

The Time Traveler's Wife

The Time Traveler's Wife - by Audrey Niffenegger (A Mini Review).

Beautiful, heartbreaking, wonderful, uplifting. If you have a soul that is not numb to this world you will cherish this book. If your soul is numb to the world, this book will wake you up, revitalise you, and show you that Love is an amazing thing worth holding and keeping in your heart.

I shouldn't have read the end on the train this morning without a kleenex handy though. Everyone was staring at the grown man weeping in his seat.

Rejection Time

Nothing new for me, but my short story How Does Your Garden Grow was rejected by Dark Animus today :-(

I knew it probably wouldn't get in before I even sent it for a couple of reasons;

• The only genre the story fits in is Horror, but it is not really too horrific, and none too scary. More an old-style 30s or 40s horror, if anything. It was inspired by a Clark Ashton Smith story, but not similar in style.
• James, the Dark Animus editor, hates stories in Present Tense. I can understand this, some of them are attrocious, but this story doesn't seem to work any other way.

Anyway, back to the submission process for this one.

Fantasy Planes

I found this site today: Fantasy Planes - filled with great images of flying-craft that never were. I've always been fascinated by man's attempts at flight, especially those Victorian and early 20th Century contraptions that imagined the future. I have to agree with the site's owner that:

"...the most interesting airplanes are the ones that never got built."

Take for instance the Bel Geddes Airliner #4 - first proposed in 1929 Airliner #4 had a crew of 155, and sleeping berths for 606 passengers! Its wingspan was a massive 528 feet, 2 and a half times the width of a Boeing 747. Transatlantic plane flights would have taken 72 hours and been as cofortable as a cruise ship, which took a week for the same journey.

The Burnelli UB-14 [pictured] was designed for Clyde Pangborn to "race, nonstop around the world", refueling in the air "and without touching foreign soil, arrive back at his starting point and drop his wheels on the same American runway from which he takes off."

But my favourites have to be those of comic-book artist Harry Grant Dart. In the early 1900s he was imagining amazing air-battles that prefigured (and eclipsed) those later to be seen in World War I. Images such as Going Into Action [Harpers Weekly, 1907], and The Vampires [Harpers Weekly, 1910] depict vast flotilla of air and sea-craft battling it out in what looks almost like a modern Space Opera War between battlecruisers.

Very inspiring stuff for my writing at the moment :-)

What's With TOR Paperbacks?

I've just finished reading Scott Westerfeld's Succession duology, Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds. I read them both in paperback, published by TOR in the US, and I wasn't exactly happy with the quality of the typesetting.

Both books in the series were filled with typographical errors and obvious bad spell-checking. You know those words that are real words, and so aren't picked up in a spell-check, but are horribly out of context in the wrong place? Lots of those.

But the worst problem seemed to be the hyphenation! It was all over the place. In the middle of sentences that were nowhere near a line-end or page-end. Words such as reconstructions with the "re-" bit on the last line of a page and then "constructions" on the next page... haven't they heard of kerning!? They could have easily spaced the last line a little more and forced the entire word onto the next page, improving readability.

I noticed this problem previously with John C.Wright's Golden Age trilogy, also from TOR, and probably the best SF I have read in many years. Those texts were also a mess.

This has very little to do with the author. I enjoyed both authors very much, but it looks sloppy. It indicates a lack of care in production that I think it is insulting to the author. Or maybe it is just laziness on the part of TOR's editors?

I hope they improve the quality of their paperbacks soon, because they have some really great authors. I'd hate to not enjoy an author because an Editor can't be bothered to do their job well.

The Master of Disgust

Salon has posted an article "The Master of Disgust" on H.P.Lovecraft, creator of the Cthulhu Mythos, discussing the two opposing camps whose views have grown up around his work: those who think Lovecraft was a "hack"; and those who champion him as an artist of "philosophical and literary substance".

I love Lovecraft, having first read most of his stuff when I was about thirteen, but I don't strictly belong in either camp. I do think he was a bit of a hack, just a bit, but in a great way! Like how old Godzilla movies, or an Ed Wood film, are really bad but all the better because of it! They go beyond bad and into genius.

Robert E.Howard, creator of Conan, was a bit of hack, but I love his work too! Like Lovecraft's work, it has a darkness and an urgency that surpasses its over-weighted use of adjectives, implausible plot lines and clichéd characterisation.

There is more to Lovecraft than purple prose and, although it might not be scary, it has had an enormous influence on both the Horror and Science Fiction genres, in print and screen.

(But Clark Ashton Smith... now there was a writer!)

I love my Cthulhu creatures; I love the over-written descriptions of things that cannot be described; I love the places writers such as Stephen King, Ramsay Campbell and Charlie Stross have taken the style and ideas of Lovecraft. I love the fact that we can laugh at the tentacled horror we call Cthulhu (now available as a plush toy).

Maybe that was Cthulhu's plan all along? Get us to love his, worship him as a plush toy, an action figure, a film, an auto-biography even? It would make it so much easier to take over the world if we already love him :)

How Much Do SF and Fantasy Writers Earn?

Tobias S. Buckell is a Science Fiction author (2002 John W. Campbell Award Nominee, and Winner of the 1999 Writer's of the Future Contest) whose first novel is due soon.

He recently conducted a survey of 75 published SF&F authors to discover how much they earned from their labours. The results are quite fascinating, and nowhere near as low as I expected it to be. If you want to be published, and maybe even make a living from your writing this is a great article, with lots of tips.

Go ahead and give it a read: "How Much Does a Science Fiction or Fantasy Writer Make?".

I Just Don't Get It

I just finished reading Jon Courtenay Grimwood's lastest novel "Stamping Butterflies". I found that this book has a lot in common with M.John Harrison's recent return to SF "Light".

They both have multiple plot strands (past, present, near-future and far-future) that interweave throughout. They both concern the science of Quantum Physics, especially as it relates to Chaos Theory and the Uncertainty Principle. They both involve the discovery of Faster-That-Light (FTL) drives that allow man to spread out of this tiny corner of the galaxy that we call the Solar-system and colonise the stars. They are both exceedingly well written.

But for me, the main thing they have in common is: I Just Don't Get It!

I've read Light twice now, but in the end I just don't understand what went on. I enjoyed the ride. I loved the imagery that Harrison's skill with language invoked. I appreciate the beauty of it all and the characterisation, and the hard-SF ideas, and, and.... there is a lot I could go on about, I did actually enjoy much of it, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what it was all about.

Stamping Butterflies had exactly the same effect on me. I enjoyed each individual plot strand of the story. I followed each plot strand quite well, I thought. Some of the Marrakech scenes were really written, bringing strong images of Marrakech to me as I read. But I just can't work out how each strand weaves together to give me the whole!

Maybe I'm just the sort of person one reviewer on Amazon was talking about when he mentions in relation to Light:

Only the shallow reader who isn't prepared to dirty themselves in the muddy
waters of empathy will not get the point of this novel.

"The muddy waters of empathy"!? Please, that's just too much! I have always thoroughly immersed myself in my books (just ask my wife) and am no stranger to those muddy waters. I just think that with these two books the authors have tried too hard to be mysterious. Tried too hard at hiding a message, because the fact is, I know they mean something... I just don't know what!

I'll probably read Stamping Butterflies again one day, I'll probably read Light again too. Maybe, if I keep reading them over and over, one day the penny will drop and I'll let out a big, satisfied Aha! of understanding.

Anthrpomorphic Portraits

George Underwood is an artist and illustrator, probably best known for album covers such as David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust" as well as covers for T-Rex, Mott the Hoople and Procul Harum (all great late 60s musicians). He has also done a few Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror book covers in his time (covers for Greg Bear, Brian Lumley and Michael Moorcock).

What I like best about his work though are his "Anthropomorphic Portraits" - traditional style portraits of dogs, cats, birds and lions dressed in late Victorian and early 20th Century finery. They are all quite eerie, but I would love to own one of two to place above the mantlepiece: especially Dr.Schnauzer and Self Portrait.

These are the sort of characters I had in mind when I named this blog, and how many of the characters might appear in the novel I am just starting to write.

On the writing desk

As this blog is an attempt to get me to write more often and more regularly I thought I would jot down the current writing projects I have lined up in front of me:

How Does Your Garden Grow - [Short story - COMPLETE] A pulpy-horror story inspired years ago by Clark Ashton Smith's short story The Garden of Adompha. This one is done, reworked, edited and is currently out in circulation looking for a home amongst the horror fiction magazines.

The Memory of Water - [Short story - RE-EDIT] Not horror, not SF, not fantasy, possibly (just maybe) Magic Realism - but who knows with all these sub-genres these days? It definitely has some weird elements to it, but probably not as strange as what I would normally write. I'm quite happy with this story but know, from an initial editing by a well-respected professional, that it needs a little work. I hope to tidy this one up over the next few days: tightening the tension, less telling, more showing, all that sort of stuff. And then send it off into the wide-world and wait for the rejections to come in like postcards from a far off land.

Work Like the Dead - [Short story - 50% COMPLETE] Oh no! Not another zombie story! Yeah, I suppose it is, but quite different, owing more to stories like Dale Bailey's The Anencephalic Fields or Death and Suffrage than George Romero or Lucio Fulci's Zombie genre. I'm enjoying writing this one, although sometimes getting it to read the way I want it to has been as painful as pulling teeth with pliers.

The Darkling Crowd - [Short story - 20% COMPLETE] Inspired by a line from a poem by Aleister Crowley and the "Paranormal Phenomena" of Shadow People. Still a way to go on this one, especially considering I just ditched half the story because it was waffle. I think I'm on the right track now though.

Saving for Elysium - [Short story - 20% COMPLETE] The tale of an After-Life Insurance Salesman, his dead mother's pleas for a better heaven, and the steps he takes to 'get away from it all'.

The House of the Golden Gryphon - [Novel - RESEARCH STAGE] This is the one with the McKenzie's Guides in it, inspired by the dream mentioned in my first post. With the help of my wife [who asks LOTS of questions] I was able to flesh this dream out into quite a good novel idea (or at least I thought so). Swords, Sorcery and Strange Science; that's about as much as I can tell you about this one at the moment, but I'm enjoying all the research into Victoriana, automata, population demographics and even some planetary physics. Hooray for the internet!

Wow! That's a lot for me to work through. Better get back to it I suppose.

What's in a name?

My decision to start a blog, like most of my decisions, was rash and impulsive. I wanted somewhere, other than my business website, to keep my family and friends informed of what I was up to. I wanted something that would (possibly) force me to write a little more; discipline me to a daily routine of writing in my journal. And so...

I started a blog! I hear that everyone is doing it these days.

I joined Blogger.com, filled in all the forms, and then got to the field that said: 'Title'. My mind went blank. I couldn't think of a thing... or at least nothing that wasn't cheap, tacky, clichéd, banal or trite. I decided that I hadn't thought this through very well and left the screen open whilst I went back to writing my latest story.

It took me a while to notice it while I was writing but, there it was, right in front of me! Mysterious, obscure, suggestive, and just plain strange! It was exactly the sort of title I was looking for.

But where did it come from?

Shall I explain? [As long as you don't bore me, I hear you say]

A few months ago, I had a rather strange dream. I can't say too much, as that dream has now become the basis for my current major writing project, but...

In the dream: I awake inside an old Victorian-style mansion - in a basement filled with cast iron gears turning, and steam pistons and boilers jetting warm vapours into the darkness. I walk up and out of the basement, not really knowing who I am, or where I am. I wander long deserted halls lined with locked doors and flickering gas lamps. I turn one brass door-knob after another, working my way further and further through the house.

Eventually I find an open room, and there is a desk, all polished mahogany and curlicued brass fittings. On the desk are a small pile of books resting on a leather edged blotter. I look at the titles of the books and they are:

McKenzie's Manual of Anthropomorphic Configurations
McKenzie's Guide to Automata Repair
McKenzie's Little Book of Etiquette for Modern Men and Women

There was a bit more to the dream, not much, but enough for me to extrapolate a rather neat idea for a novel!

In the dream, I didn't really look through the books either - or at least I don't remember doing so. The titles intrigued me though. I'm still not quite sure how one of those titles relates to what I'm going to do with this space, but it was better than anything else I could come up with!

I guess the contents of any of those books would be a little like "The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases", which I picked up the other day and am enjoying. I think the McKenzie's line of books are a little less-satirical, though. The sort of thing you would expect to find in an old magazine like The Strand; invoking images of late-Victorian pseudo-science and rollicking adventures of derring-do; lino-cut engravings of men (or in this case anthropomorphs) in Saville Row suits and bowler hats on bulldog heads; women with wide skirts and elaborate lace parasols hiding their soft kitten faces from the sun.

I think that the sort of things I will be musing on here will be as ecclectic and numerous as the configurations of anthropomorphs in McKenzie's Guide. I'll write on my art, my writing, on what I'm reading and what I'm listening to. I might comment on a movie I see, or politics, or the strange beast we call humanity. Sometimes I'll probably just vent my woes and proclaim my joys. And like any good follower [read: mad scientist] of McKenzie's Guide, I'll probably mix it all up a bit, just to see what happens.

So, that's the tale of the title, and the end of my first post. Now let's see how regularly I can discipline myself to update this thing!