Meghan ([info]megmccarron) wrote,
@ 2005-10-12 12:57:00
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Ho shit

Going to World Fantasy.  Getting in Thursday at 2:30.  Leaving late Sunday.  Rock 'n roll.  Geek style.

Guess I better find some sweaters.

Love,
Meghan

PS: via my favorite person-I-don't-know-blog-to-stalk, [info]14theditch , (really, best-written LJ, period.  Guess it helps that it's Jeff Ford and all) I recently encountered the term "hard fantasy."  I feel like the term has way more to do with folktales and "research" than I have any patience for, but I like it none the less.


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[info]yuki_onna
2005-10-12 08:03 pm UTC (link)
So am I--though not arriving till Friday. We should meet up!

Here's hoping I can still get on the programming...

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[info]megmccarron
2005-10-12 08:06 pm UTC (link)
Yeah, totally. Um, as far as I know, I'm tenatively on board for a guerilla twenty epics reading, but programming has a distinctive wiff of legitimacy i have no hope of making my own.

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[info]snurri
2005-10-12 08:05 pm UTC (link)
Hoo doggies! That's great news--see ya there!

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(Anonymous)
2005-10-12 08:17 pm UTC (link)
Hmm, I always thought "hard fantasy" just meant fantasy that was emotionally realistic and had a well-developed setting. So no vague rolling fields of elfland or great destined earth-altering one-true-love. Fantasy where things are messy and Fate doesn't take care of everything. But maybe that's just me projecting my own prejudices/preferences onto the term...

-Tim Pratt

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(Anonymous)
2005-10-12 08:53 pm UTC (link)
I think that's "gritty".

-- David M.

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[info]snurri
2005-10-12 09:30 pm UTC (link)
Odd; Gevers references Swanwick in reference to hard fantasy--Googling the term leads to a discussion of it in reference to Iron Dragon's Daughter--and to me that sounds good and proper and essentially like what Tim's talking about. Like, fantasy with rigor and not mortis. But Gevers also says that hard fantasy is "fantastic literature that is authentically original rather than safely conventional, that strikes to the surreal heart of human nature with a fresh, courageous novelty and flair." Which doesn't sound so much like rigor. So I'm confused.

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(Anonymous)
2005-10-12 09:56 pm UTC (link)
See, I think it's really hard to use the term "hard fantasy" in a genre context without calling up "hard SF" which yes, is also about not being derivative (and not 'missing the internet' again), the same way "hard fantasy" would be about not being LOTR, but hard SF has a much more specific program about grounding SF in "real" science. So, just hearing the phrase "hard fantasy," I think of that same "rigor," i.e. grounding the fantastic in actual folklore traditions and not riffing off other writers and creating a genre echo chamber. The Iron Dragon's Daughter doesn't do that. It injects realism (class, sex, malls) into a genre fantasy world. So perhaps 'hard fantasy's' rigor is more about writing the fantastic in settings that humanity would actually inhabit -- with pain, with class, with ugly people -- as opposed to a boring (and ideologically problematic) ye-old-golden-middle-ages. But that is way vaguer, and doesn't totally line up with what "hard" means to me. "Ugly Fantasy," or perhaps, "Awesome Fantasy," anyone?

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[info]megmccarron
2005-10-12 09:56 pm UTC (link)
that was me

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[info]coalescent
2005-10-12 11:29 pm UTC (link)
So, just hearing the phrase "hard fantasy," I think of that same "rigor," i.e. grounding the fantastic in actual folklore traditions and not riffing off other writers and creating a genre echo chamber.

Interesting. I think of Ted Chiang--i.e. treating fantastic premises with the rigour charateristic of hard sf.

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[info]snurri
2005-10-13 03:41 pm UTC (link)
That's kind of where I was with it. Hence my disconnect, because while both are great writers, I don't see much commonality between Chiang and Ford, whom Gevers presents as "a leading exponent" of hard fantasy.

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Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
(Anonymous)
2005-10-13 10:45 pm UTC (link)
Jeff Ford probably mentioned Swanwick in conjunction with the term "hard fantasy" partly because of Iron Dragon's Daughter, sure, but maybe because also because Swanwick invented (or at least popularized) the term.

I've got a Tachyon chapbook called The Postmodern Archipelago that reprints two Swanwick essays: the famous "User's Guide to the Post-modern" about the so-called Cyberpunk/Humanist "debate" and the later (originally in the 10/94 Asimov's, which I also have around here somewhere) "In the tradition..." which is about, well, here I'll just transcribe a paragaph:

"I'm going to write about what Tove Jansson called "the lonely and the rum," the unschoolable and ungroupable, those strange and shaggy literary creatures that have no ilk or kin and that mathematically can be contained in no set smaller than the set of all sets contained in no other sets. For ease of argument, I'm going to call this congeries of works HARD FANTASY [emphasized with italics in the original], because I honestly believe that it holds a central place in its genre analogous to the place hard science fiction holds in SF."

He doesn't really develop the analogy to hard sf, because he chooses to "define" the term by listing and describing--championing, really--a bunch of work that he feels can be described by the term. And what a list: E. R. Eddison's Zimiamvian trilogy (but not The Worm Ouroboros), Peake's Gormenghast trilogy, Lord Dunsany's stories, some Clark Ashton Smith stories, James Branch Cabell's Jurgen and a couple of his others, Hop Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist--there's an implication that Tolkien and Howard belong on the list as well. Then he gets to much more fully developed thoughts on more closely contemporary stuff: John Crowley's Little Big, Mary Gentle's Rats & Gargoyles, Geoff Ryman's novella The Unconquered Country, Terry Bisson's Talking Man, Rebecca Ore's Slow Funeral, Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood, Tanith Lee's collection Dreams of Dark and Light, Jonathan Carroll's The Land of Laughs, James Blaylock's Land of Dreams, Ian Banks' The Bridge, Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint, and Greer Gilman's Moonwise.

In the year or so after that essay was originally published I bought and read all of the books in the second list. I can't say that I loved them all (but I loved them _almost_ all, and absolutely _respect the all) and I can't say that I can define "hard fantasy" because I've read those book _or_ Swanwick's essay, but anyway, I'm just saying where the term comes from, maybe.

--Christopher Rowe

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Re: Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
(Anonymous)
2005-10-13 10:47 pm UTC (link)
I mean NICK GEVERS probably mentions it. I bet Jeff Ford would too, though.

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Re: Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
[info]megmccarron
2005-10-13 10:58 pm UTC (link)
Christopher, if there were a prize, you just won it.

My only exposure to all those screeds was the joy a Clarion buddy and me took in reading John Kessel talk trash and announce something to the effect of "Moby Dick? Pah. We will do better." In any event, thanks for the contextualization.

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Re: Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
(Anonymous)
2005-10-14 03:41 am UTC (link)
Okay, I revoke my own prize. I haven't looked at this chapbook in years but should have remembered to check the introduction, which Swanwick wrote three years after "In the Tradition..."

Here are a couple of extracts from that introduction:

"I [writes Michael Swanwick] was not the first person to derive the term 'hard fantasy.' Will Shetterley had earlier employed it in an essay to mean, essentially, 'the good stuff,' and I believe others had independently come up with the term as well. My innovation was to give it as elusive and evasive a definition as possible.

[...]

"But since sloppy definition and shoddy critical standards have not served my purpose, let me here explain what I should have said in the essay itself: By 'hard fantasy' what I meant was primary or source fantasy, as opposed to secondary or derived work [note that this doesn't preclude BAD hard fantasy, which David is asking about over at Chrononautic Log]. Conan the Barbarian was a source fantasy, drawn from Robert E. Howard's life and musings and particularly fantasies about the historical past. John Jakes's Brak the Barbarian was derived from Howard's books.

[...]

"There's an important point to be made here... Derived fantasy is not necessarily bad--look at Terry Pratchett's Discworld books. Source fantasies are not always good--consider J.R.R. Tolkien's Silmarillion."

I think Swanwick actually muddies the issue with this stuff, especially that last paragraph, and like the whole "congeries of works" approach better. There we find ourselves back at the Shetterly essay he mentions (anybody familiar with it? I'm not) and the idea that Hard Fantasy is basically the Fantasy that we think is good.

--Christopher

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Re: Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
(Anonymous)
2005-10-14 04:33 am UTC (link)
I think "hard fantasy" has missed its window of opportunity to become a useful term, and this discussion illustrates why: people use it to mean too many different things. And not in the way that people argue over terms like "hard SF" or even "slipstream"; even though there is disagreement over how to define those terms, there is, in practice, a certain level of mutual comprehension when people use those terms in a conversation. I don't think this is the case with "hard fantasy," and given that no usage has achieved even a plurality in the fifteen years that I've heard the phrase used, I tend to think it's a lost cause.

Not that the term will go away, of course.

-- Ted Chiang

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Re: Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
(Anonymous)
2005-10-14 02:56 pm UTC (link)
Still, at least I think I know what he's onto with the "primary or source fantasy" definition (even if I probably wouldn't call it "hard fantasy"), whereas looking at the congeries of works... well, now that I've heard the definition, it's easy to see why what's on the list is on it, but without it? Not so much.

I suppose it's related to the idea of going straight to the folklore, in that you're not passing through anyone else's secondary works (including what Swanwick calls primary works) on the way. Of course plenty of stuff that looks like it's going straight to the folklore does it in a derivative-of-other-secondary-works way, and wouldn't count.

I guess the analogy to hard SF might be that in classic hard SF you're supposed to be getting your core story ideas straight from Nature (or at least Popular Mechanics) rather than just using sciencey stuff (discovered for you by other SF writers) as furniture.

If "hard fantasy" had come first, though, I think we'd be hard-pressed to figure out what the science-fictional equivalent of Gormenghast would be. Any ideas?

-- David M.

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Re: Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
[info]megmccarron
2005-10-14 04:24 pm UTC (link)
I think Ted is probably right about hard fantasy being a useless term, though if we were to engage in some rigorous re-branding of the term, I think the "hard fantasy is to hard SF" tack is the right one to take. Trying to make a genre out of "stuff we think is good" is not only impossible, it's kind of bitchy. But either way, as long as those contradictory definitions are out there, no one's going to forget about them.

It's a shame because if you go to a party and say "I write fantasy," (or have your friend announce it to everyone there...) people come up to you shyly and start talking about the dragon books they like to read in secret. I can appreciate the dragon-book impulse, I understand, but I ain't writin no dragon books. I thought it was interesting that in Kelly's interview at Maud Newton's , she said that she tells people she writes "science fiction." I say the same thing when people ask, even though much of what I write (but not all) would technically be called "fantasy." One, I say it b/c "Science Fiction" is hipper. But two, I say it b/c I think a lot of fantasy going down these days has much more in common with the speculation side of sci-fi (Kelly's work is a perfect example -- what would a haunted house really be like? What there really were some sort of magic to be initiated into? What if a village were trapped inside a handbag?) than the alternate-world, great myths and heros side of fantasy. In other words, in certain writers' minds "science fiction" seems to be becoming more of a mode of approach than a genre with certain tropes that mark its boundaries. It makes me think of the debate over Film Noir -- is it a genre or a style? A genre defined by style? Is that possible? It's something to consider, in any event.

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Re: Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
[info]snurri
2005-10-14 05:53 pm UTC (link)
Much as I like Swanwick's list (haven't read all of it, but most), I have to agree that defining hard fantasy as "fantasy that doesn't suck" isn't very valuable. (Also bitchy, yes.) We seem to be headed towards a definition of something like "fantasy that isn't derivative of other fantasy, but of myths, folklore, and the shared stew of imagination/collective unconscious." Which is good. I like that definition. But I don't like the term "hard fantasy" matched up with it. It implies a rigidity which I find difficult to reconcile with many of the works on that list. I'd rather see it called something like "Source" or "Mythic" fantasy, but that might be just me.

Not that anyone outside of these circles would know what that meant. When people ask me what I write, I say fantasy or fantastic or weird stuff, because saying I write science fiction would be a lie. Used to be, I would say it in an apologetic tone, not because I was embarrassed by the fact of it but because I knew they were thinking that fantasy meant either elves or sex and possibly both. But lately I'm thinking that I need to proclaim my fantasy allegiances loudly and proudly. It's a crusade. The term fantasy must be reclaimed, like the Queer movement, or Dan Savage with "faggot." We write fantasy! We will show you what fantasy is! We will re-introduce you to the "leaf-mould of mind," to your "personal compost-heap" of imagination and story!* Then you will understand!

I have a dream, people.

*(Quotes from Tolkien: "One writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one's personal compost-heap; and my mould is evidently made largely of linguistic matter." ~On the creation of LotR)

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Re: Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
(Anonymous)
2005-10-14 07:14 pm UTC (link)
Let's be clear, though: Nothin' wrong with elf sex. If it's artistically valid.

-- David M.

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Re: Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
[info]snurri
2005-10-14 07:18 pm UTC (link)
All-Star Elf Sex Stories?

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Re: Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
[info]megmccarron
2005-10-14 07:21 pm UTC (link)
You know, I think there may be something wrong with elf sex. Just sayin.

And Dave, I'm pretty spicy slipstream could be overtaken with elf sex-based content no problem.

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Re: Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
(Anonymous)
2005-10-14 07:40 pm UTC (link)
Are they still taking submissions?

-- David M.

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Re: Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
[info]snurri
2005-10-14 07:41 pm UTC (link)
Sub period ends tomorrow. I've got my cover letter printed up and I'm waiting to hear from a beta reader.

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Re: Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
[info]hal_duncan
2005-10-14 06:09 pm UTC (link)
I'm not convinced by that definition if it includes Tolkien. The work that goes straight to the myths and folklore is, in many cases, going straight to, well, secondary or even tertiary sources, by simple dint of the fact that that's all we've got. If Tolkien is "hard fantasy" in that respect (i.e. as opposed to the steaming mounds of derivative shite crapped out by his imitators), well, where was Tolkien actually going to? Germanic folklore of dwarves and elves? How much of that folklore can be considered original, and how much is the -- 'debasement' is too strong a term, perhaps -- of pre-Christian mythology into Christian fireside tales? Even if he's going back to the original sagas with their Aesir and giants and dwarves and all that Wagnerian malarkey, aren't those drawn from oral traditions and hence, themselves, "secondary" material?

It's more obvious with Celtic mythology, I'd say. Is an Arthurian/Grail novel "hard fantasy" if, rather than drawing on modern Arthurian fantasy or even Mallory, say, it goes straight to Wolfram Von Eschenbach, or Chretien de Troyes, or Geoffrey of Monmouth, or texts like Peredur, the Mabinogion, and so on? My understanding is that the grail story goes right back to the Dagda's cauldron, much like all those Victorian fairies go back, through the Sidhe, to Celtic deities. Where fantasy has anything to do with specific folkloric roots, I'd say, I'm not convinced you can credibly call it "hard fantasy" and say you're calling it that because it's "non-derivative". Hell, even if your world-building is original enough that you end up with a unique setting -- a New Crobuzon or an Ambergris rather than another sodding Magic Realm -- cut-and-paste the character roles and plotline of the Hero's Journey in there and you have something just as derivative as any sub-Tolkien Elfland. Star Wars, anyone? Not that that's always a bad thing. A homage can be ripping good fun. Hell, I'd say part of what's sodding great about Iron Dragon's Daughter is the way it critiques Tolkienesque High Fantasy by fucking with the cliches.

I think you could theoretically define a type of fabulation, like Gormenghast, that has sod all to do with folkloric roots at all, just picks some metaphoric conceit (the Big House), makes it (unrealistically) concrete and extrapolates that out through the story (and where that story isn't just another regurgitation of the Hero's Journey). I could fit Jeff Ford's The Physiognomy into that. But it doesn't seem analogous to Hard SF to me. If anything, it's the opposite. Where Hard SF is distinguished by its emphasis on research, on scientific authenticity and rigour, that type of fantasy is being distinguished by its emphasis on innovation, on the originality and individuality of the conceit. It just doesn't feel right, to me, to call that "hard" considering the rigour, the tightness, that term connotes; I'd call it "free fantasy", if anything, given that it's not bound to a traditional background (e.g. Arthurian) or plot-structure (e.g. the Hero's Journey).

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Re: Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
(Anonymous)
2005-10-14 07:39 pm UTC (link)
I dunno; if we start calling the Eddas "secondary", I think we're making the same kind of category error that leads to goofy spectacles like Clarke (or whoever it was) claiming that science fiction is in a direct line of descent from Homer. Not saying there's nothing different about what Tolkien or T.H. White did and what Peake did, but being derivative of philology and folklore, or of medieval lit, is also different from being derivative of a well-populated contemporary commercial genre.

Good point about the aspect of character roles and plots and whatnot, though. (Must... resist... urge to... bring up... Russian... Formalism!) You read Mieville with more or less the same reading protocols you use to read, say, Zelazny.

-- David M.

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Re: Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
[info]snurri
2005-10-14 08:07 pm UTC (link)
I agree that the Eddas (at least the Prose) aren't technically primary, but they're the best we've got. But this brings up a point about motives in writing this sort of fantasy. I think the problem is that there are several different sub-categories to this thing we're talking about. A partial listing, for purposes of defining our terms:

1. Fantasy that uses ur-stories as a foundation upon which to build a "new" mythology that resonates. Tolkien is the prime example. He wasn't as interested in what lay beneath the myths as he was in creating a mythology of a primal (sort-of) Britain.

2. Fantasy that uses the ur-stories as a mirror for the human condition, and tries to get inside. Explores the nature of our reality in a way that the first category doesn't. Lifts up the rock, so to speak. Mythago Wood leaps to mind. Perhaps Little, Big.

3. Fantasy of imagination which has a mythic feel and is not incestuously derivative, but uses no real world ur-stories as a definitive foundation. New mythologies, but stories which go more up than down, as in the first category. Gormenghast. Swordspoint. Talking Man, maybe.

4. Fantasy of imagination which has a mythic feel and is not incestuously derivative, but uses no real world ur-stories as a definitive foundation. New mythologies, but more concerned with exploring the way we perceive and use myth/folklore/fantasy/story than with building a myth of its own. The Land of Laughs and The Bridge would fit here, I think.

Kind of just doing that for myself, but if anyone wants to build/add/eviscerate it, feel free.

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Re: Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
[info]hal_duncan
2005-10-15 01:55 pm UTC (link)
Not saying there's nothing different about what Tolkien or T.H. White did and what Peake did, but being derivative of philology and folklore, or of medieval lit, is also different from being derivative of a well-populated contemporary commercial genre.

OK, I think I can clarify meself a bit better. What I was trying to get at is that, by talking about primary/source/mythic fantasy, this suggests to me that we're lumping Dunsany, Tolkien, Peake and other "1st Generation" fantasists together as a sort of modern-day analogue of the Eddas or those other ancient source texts... that this "hard fantasy" somehow comes from the same process as these earlier works, as a sort of mythopoeic fiction, generative rather than derivative. So over here you have primary/source/mythic fantasy from throughout history, while over here you have the extruded MacFantasy product. I maybe misconstruing and going off on a tangent, but what the hell, let's run with it.

Anyway, thing is, I'd say that many of the historical fantasies we consider primary material fall into category 1 and/or 2 as David S outlines them; they are, in their own way, derivative of their own "well-populated contemporary commercial genre", coming from a tradition in which these tales get told time and again, enriched by successive storytellers with a knack for creating that submersive sense of place (category 1?), with an insight into the human condition (category 2?), or simply with a good turn of phrase. By the same token, I'm sure many of them may will have been dumbed-down or ripped-off by dodgy hacks. Either way, the process that produced the texts we ended up with was one of constant retelling and reinterpretation in the mouths of storytellers and in the hands of scribes. So by the time you get to some Assyrian or Babylonian scribe putting down his version of Inanna's Descent and splicing in Dumuzi's Dream at the end of it, he's rewriting a story -- a couple of stories, in fact -- that've been around for a looooooong time. Ditto with the end version of the Iliad that emerges out of centuries of edits and interpolations by God knows how many "Homers". I think that boiling-down and building-up process is an important part of how you get from a story to a myth, because it generates a dynamic uncertainty and multiplicity of interpretations around an incredibly simple core story. And I think it's kinda important, from an anthropological view, to make that distinction between story and myth. Myths are more complicated critters than stories -- more archetypal, more malleable -- memes mirroring the human condition because they've been created by the human condition rather than one person's conscious narrative decisions.

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Re: Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
[info]hal_duncan
2005-10-15 01:57 pm UTC (link)
So... horrible thought as it is, I think the ancient "mythic or source fantasy" is more analogous, in terms of its process of creation, to the spin-offery of, say, Star Drech novelisations than the original fantasy of Peake, for example. Imagine some fireside in Greece, Nth Century BC...

These are the voyages of the USS Argo, it's five year mission: to boldly go where no Greek has gone before...

Hell, The Argonautica is a Marvel/DC crossover comic of the ancient days if ever there was one. Herakles, Orpheus, Castor & Pollux... everyone's favourite character gets chucked into the mix. It's a shameless plundering of older material. But it comes from a time when that was de rigeur, so the good storytellers were working in this revisionist mode rather than just the hacks. The difference now is that we're meant, as writers, to be coming up with something new, an original work with an original idea, a unique conceit, at its heart... a "novel". So few, if any, are trying to retell the shared tales in a way that improves them.

I guess what I'm getting at here is that I think the focus on originality and invention makes sense in our world of authorship and copyright, but that it's a product of working in the novelistic mode rather than the mythic mode. If I was going to call anything "mythic fantasy" it would be exactly that derivative type of fiction where the characters and settings are archetypal -- common cultural and psychological currency -- and where you have a basic story with many variants and branches, remixed and regurgitated, expanded and spun-off. You could (possibly) place Tolkien in that camp, as a revisionist of Germanic folklore, and you could certainly place his imitators in there, as redactors of the Tolkien mythos; but I'd place Peake or Carroll in an entirely different category -- novelists rather than myth-makers.

Hmmm, I hope that makes some vague sort of sense.

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Re: Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
(Anonymous)
2005-10-17 03:35 pm UTC (link)
I'm with Hal. At Capclave this weekend someone asked me "so what's up with fanfic? why would anyone write it?" To which I said: "well, commercially, if that's your ambition, it's a dumb move; but artistically -- dude, the Aeneid is fanfic. Every bard retelling the Ramayana or the Beowulf saga was doing fanfic. It's all fanfic until Cervantes or so."

And the comics, yeah! The sweatshop, bullpen, factory-style DC and Marvel comics are by far the most mythic, aka premodern, of modern works -- the most similar to shared oral traditions as they existed before the Amsterdam Singularity (although intellectual property law actually predates the creation of the modern form of the human-subjugating AI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company) on March 20, 1602, and the modern copyright of fiction postdates it, it's a convenient date on which to pin the whole shift in the conditions of human existence that created the modern notion of a work of art as something created and morally owned by an individual).

Which is not to say that I too am not an originality bigot. The main reason I do so love Perdido Street Station, for all its glaring artistic flaws, is that it is so original, and I'm so tired of fantasy set in pretty much any mythic tradition. Of course there are always works that are so damn well written that they convince me despite being Arthurian, or Teutonic, or Greek, or Victorian-Faerie (Dora Goss's story on Strange Horizons the other week being the latest example that comes to mind). Of course going to the deep rich strangeness of the source is always better than copying over the shoulder of the hack in the next desk. Of course I am myself guilty, principally of Biblical spin-offs. And of course it does somewhat ameliorate matters, sometimes, when the source material is off the beaten track, the Popol Vuh, say, instead of yet again with the Camelot. Nonetheless, I find myself increasingly curmudgeonly about the whole enterprise of plundering folklore or myth for modern genre fiction.

But maybe that's just today.

Ben (http://www.benjaminrosenbaum.com)

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Re: Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
[info]megmccarron
2005-10-17 07:37 pm UTC (link)
I think I'm with Ben with this whole mythic-tradition dealy. Which is my sophisticated way of saying that the folkloric approach is rapidly moving from the innovative into the realm of yet another genre cliche. Work drawing on folklore runs the risk of 1. cultural imperialism and 2. treating the story's folkloric root as some sort of legitimizing factor for the story itself -- this story is heavily invested in real welsh folktales, therefore it is more useful/more valid than a story about wizards. This is not to knock everyone who takes this approach - many, many people do it well, and I enjoy their work (the Goss story is a perfect example). But the approach's popularity bothers me a little. It seems linked in some way to the explosion of popularity of "family trees" and histories, which can be cool, but often manifest themselves as a way of not engaging with the present. I am especially bothered by the old world diety/fairy/whateves in America approach, because it ignores what really happened to 'old world' traditions in the U.S. -- they didn't stay separate, they got blended and amalgamated and mongrelized. They became jazz. To deny that that process would have occured with myth and story is to ignore the fundamentally good -- and mythic -- thing about the US. It's also to ignore the ugly side of that good and mythic thing -- the melting pot is half crucible, after all, especially when race comes into play.

As for the rest of y'all -- Okay, Dave, fair enough, we should take back fantasy, but fantasy isn't an insult, it's just vaguely useless in terms of the disjunction between definition and connotation to most readers. So I'm not totally sure how to take it back. Even as a marketing category. And I'm with Hal on the difference between 'myth' and 'story' - I think it's why myths always read so much stranger and illogical than story, and why we're drawn to them as writers, because they're stories doing something we don't/can't. As for everything else, mostly this conversation as reminded me how under-read I am. Wahoo!

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Re: Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
(Anonymous)
2005-10-17 09:40 pm UTC (link)
Minor point:

dude, the Aeneid is fanfic.

Not really. The Aeneid was more like work-for-hire. Emperor Augustus wanted Rome to have a national epic, so he commissioned one.

(The Odyssey, on the other hand, might have been fanfic.)

-- Ted Chiang

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)
Re: Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
(Anonymous)
2005-10-17 09:57 pm UTC (link)
Troilus and Cressida, now that is fanfic.

-- David M.

(Reply to this) (Parent)
Re: Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
(Anonymous)
2005-10-24 05:21 pm UTC (link)
It would be work-for-hire if you consider Augustus's claim to Homer's "copyright" legitimate -- if you consider Augustus the Disney CEO to Homer's A. A. Milne.

Some people in the ancient world probably felt that way.

From my point of view, however, if Tony Blair commissions a British national epic based on *The Mists of Avalon* without asking the permission of the Marion Zimmer Bradley estate, it's fanfic.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)
Re: Swanwick and "Hard Fantasy"
(Anonymous)
2005-10-24 05:22 pm UTC (link)
Although I do see what you mean; the Aeneid wasn't fanfic in the sense of Virgil being an impassioned fan of Homer acting out of disinterested love.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

(Anonymous)
2005-10-12 08:43 pm UTC (link)
Woohoo!

-- David M.

(Reply to this)


[info]buymeaclue
2005-10-12 08:46 pm UTC (link)
Yay!

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[info]megmccarron
2005-10-12 09:58 pm UTC (link)
Yeah, so I'm gonna officially claim that room spot...

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[info]buymeaclue
2005-10-13 06:23 pm UTC (link)
All yers! I'll let Sarah know.

(Back later, maybe, to think about hard fantasy. At work and so should probably actually, y'know, work.)

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[info]14theditch
2005-10-17 02:53 pm UTC (link)
Followed the links here and to David's comment board from Gwenda's Journal. Just wanted to say that, although I think Swanwick is very often astute in his essays, and the concept in question might be useful for others, "hard fantasy" is definitely not a term I endorse at all. Please, the less of this kind of crap around the better. Hard Fantasy -- good christ.

Jeff Ford

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]megmccarron
2005-10-17 04:35 pm UTC (link)
Jeff -- your objection is noted, and I always assumed the term was just your interviewer trying to describe your work, not anything you endorsed. I don't endorse it either - if anything this discussion has proved there's nothing to endorse, as no one even knows what it means. I was just noting how odd the term was 'hard fantasy' -- because it made me realize that fantasy is all too often considered 'soft,' and the 'hardifying' of it seemed to be a reach towards making it more acceptible. Which for me, raises all sorts of quasi-gender issues in the way we describe and approach our writing, but that's a discussion for another time. Mostly I liked it as an odd little term.

PS Hope you don't mind my public admittance of blog-stalking you.

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[info]14theditch
2005-10-17 04:59 pm UTC (link)
Megan: Hey, I appreciate the blog stalking. Keep on stalking and hopefully others will stalk along with you. I know Nick, who did the interview, was trying to describe my fiction, which sometimes isn't that easy, especially considering how the bookstores can't decide half the time where to shelve my books. Besides, he did a really great job with the interview, so I take no umbrage there. I think your observation as to the fact that the use of the term "hard" in relation to fantasy in this instance does make you wonder why it would otherwise be perceived as "soft." I agree with you and your journal compatriots that the term is completely empty. We do have to give Michael a nod, though, cause it's also catchy. Got your blog bookmarked now. Who'll be blog stalking whom? Hope to run into you in Madison.

jeff

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[info]megmccarron
2005-10-17 07:40 pm UTC (link)
It's totally catchy. And its useless-ness is certainly not Michael's fault. It has as much to do with the popularity of the term 'hard SF' as it does with anything else. And yes, I hope to see you in Madison!

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]ombriel
2005-10-21 10:21 pm UTC (link)
I noted the problematic gendering of the terms "hard" and "soft" too. SF has become somewhat "legitimate" in academia for instance because it's based on concrete facts (like physics) and so is rational and logical--the way men's thought processes have been coded for centuries.

Fantasy, though, is still the redheaded step-child of academia--it's nebulous and "irrational" and soft, just like them thar wimminfolk. Talking about "hard fantasy" sounds like a way to masculinize fantasy and make it seem more legitimate or serious.

In other words, I'm suspicious of the term "hard fantasy" because it has the potential to become an evaluative rather than descriptive term--the coding could easily slide into something like hard (masculine)=serious/legitimate fantasy and soft (feminine)=fluffy/silly/dragon stories/elf sex.

There's got to be a more useful term, one that doesn't walk the line between descriptive and evaluative in ways that risk sliding into tired gender stereotypes. Ya know?

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

(Anonymous)
2005-10-21 11:05 pm UTC (link)
Given how heavily gendered the hard/non-hard science fiction divide already is, I think it's inevitable. That said, on the SF side, only frothing partisans would also draw the serious/silly line. Plenty of hard SF is serious and plenty of non-hard SF is serious. A gendered term is not necessarily value-laden, as such.

— David M.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

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