Reading: Finished Harrow the Ninth (then grabbed a copy of Nona the Ninth)
Listening to: “Spawn of the Changing Raven” by Black Tiger (HDK 54) and “Journey Through Realm and Region” by Unsheathed Glory (HDK 154)
Watching: The Tempest (Stratford Festival 2019)
Playing: old NES and Sega games like Super Mario Bros. and Golden Axe
Recently, a student asked why I like the Middle Ages so much.
This was in a short fiction elective, and we’d been reading lots of genres, some sci-fi, some fantasy, some realistic, some fairy tale-ish, some Southern Gothic, some suspense. During one of our discussions, we somehow came around to my particular tastes as a reader, and I said that I’ve always been drawn to stories about the past, particularly the medieval period in world history, and one student spoke up, a bit bemused, asking why.
“Because for as long as I can remember, I’ve like that era,” was what I said, which isn’t a good answer.
Why do you like something?
Well, because I always have.
Not a good answer. Circular reasoning. But I didn’t have any answer to give. Why did my tastes develop the way they did? Was it the media I consumed as a young child that influenced me? Was it something genetic, something intrinsic to my personality?
I honestly don’t know. But for as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to stories with knights and castles and forests and monsters. Sometimes those stories were older than medieval (Greek myths preoccupied a lot of my late-elementary years), sometimes they weren’t medieval at all (I had quite an obsession with both Oz and Candyland as a wee youngster), but even if I strayed at times from Ye Olde Medieval Times, I always returned to knights and castles and forests and monsters eventually.
It might have been the media I consumed, the stuff floating in the air. The 1980s were a time when medieval fantasy was emerging as viable mass entertainment: the Conan movies, Red Sonja, Dungeons & Dragons, Legend of Zelda, etc.
As a kid, I was devoted to shows like The Gummi Bears, and to movies like The Princess Bride and Labyrinth (neither of which is strictly “medieval,” but they’ve got some of the trappings, i.e.: castles, goblins, sword fights, kingdoms), and when Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves came out, I was ALL IN. I had the action figures, the soundtrack, and the ticket stubs to show my devotion.
I also had books, like Rosemary Suttcliffe’s Arthurian novels for young readers. And the Endless Quest D&D books. And Narnia. And The Hobbit. And the Prydain Chronicles.
Going to my first Renaissance Festival as an eight-year-old cemented this obsession. Once you’ve wielded a wooden sword from the Renaissance Festival, there’s no going back.
Basically, there was a lot of medieval-ish stuff in the world for kids in the eighties and early nineties. I was exposed to a lot of it, and I loved it.
But why did I love it? That’s the thing I can’t explain. Not every child who grew up in America back then ended up loving the Middle Ages. Not every child who traipsed around the local Ren Fest ended up loving the Middle Ages. Not every kid who saw Conan grew up to be obsessed with sword and sorcery, and not every pre-teen who watched Kevin Costner shoot a bow and arrow ended up loving the Middle Ages as much as me.
What gives?
I didn’t have a good answer for my student, and I still don’t. She made it quite clear that she finds all this medieval stuff to be boring as hell, and I told her that’s great. Different strokes for different folks. The world would be boring if we all liked the exact same thing all the time.
But why do we like what we like? How much is driven by innate personality and how much is driven by outside influence? Nature vs. nurture, etc.
I can try to explain why I love the Middle Ages to my student, why I’m drawn to it, but those explanations won’t really have an impact on her. She’s not interested (nor does she need to be), and my enthusiasm won’t make her enthused, no matter how passionate my defense.
I do think it’s interesting that she was so curious to know. My love of the Middle Ages was so foreign to her experience that she was driven to seek an answer, to get an explanation. For her, my love of the medieval period was as strange as my love for black coffee. She was mystified by my tastes, as I often am by people who take an interest in Real Housewives or eat Velveeta cheese.
But that’s just it. Taste is taste. We can’t explain it, not fully. We can hunt for past experiences, for childhood affinities, for memories and upbringing to explain it, but when it comes to it, our tastes are what they are, and it’s no use arguing someone out of their tastes nor for arguing someone into your tastes.
We can share. We can gush and be enthusiastic, and maybe that will get others curious, maybe help them explore something unfamiliar and strange. Who knows, maybe several years from now, this same student will remember my passion for the Middle Ages and become curious enough to read the Brother Cadfael Chronicles, or The Once and Future King, or Beowulf, or whatever.
Or not.
There’s no explanation for taste. It’s a kind of alchemy, but it’s also a kind of magic. The spell either works or it doesn’t.
Or maybe, eventually, it does. When we least expect it. The heart wants what the heart wants.
And my heart — now and then and hopefully always — wants castles and knights and swords and dragons.
Perhaps I’m slow on the uptake, but when I read Jared Shurin’s observation about the influence prestige TV dramas have had on fantasy novels over the last decade, I knew immediately that he’d put into words that overwhelming but unnameable feeling I’ve been having since forever about fantasy fiction and why I feel so out of step with what’s going on in the current literary landscape.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy prestige TV shows. I watched Game of Thrones. I used to write weekly recaps/reviews of Mad Men for a film website. I will go to the grave saying The Americans is the best fucking show ever made. I like all these programs and others too. I’m in favor of well-made serialized dramas on my TV screen.
But what I’m not so in favor of, I guess (thought I’m stilling working this out within my own brain), is the transformation of books into text-based TV shows, and particularly fantasy fiction, which AS FANTASY, has the capacity to go beyond what can be perceived with our eyes and into the realms of dreaming and language and, well, the fantastic, i.e.: that which cannot be understood with our senses but goes beyond those limits, and that if we surrender the literary landscape to the grammar of cinematic storytelling (of which, I must note, I’m a huge fan), we’re on our way to losing something special in our written stories, something that we might not even remember existed if we keep aping the structure and conventions of TV and movies.
What I’m really getting at, I think, is that while I’ve certainly loved books like Black Sun and She Who Became the Sun and The City We Became and This Is How You Lose the Time War, I can also TOTALLY see them as TV shows, and that’s not just because at this point in our history we can pretty much see any book as a TV show eventually. It’s because these books (yes, even Time War) follow the structure and storytelling conventions of prestige television almost perfectly. Multiple viewpoints (aka the A story, B story, and C story of a TV show), sequences and chapters that could very easily translate into a single episode of a show, and the kind of complex characterization that makes for juicy roles top-notch actors want to play.
None of this is a criticism by the way. Again, I LIKE this stuff.
But it’s only one way to tell a story. And for fantasy — a genre in which the only thing limiting the author are the made-up rules of her own made-up secondary world — it feels like we’ve traded something expansive for something rather more… limited.
Look, I get it. Conventions change. Reader expectations change. Prestige TV is dope as shit, so why wouldn’t we want our books to do the same thing?
But then I read something like Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales (or, like, “Smith of Wooten Major”), or John Bellairs’s The Face in the Frost, or a Clark Ashton Smith short story, and I’m like, “This could be a TV show, but in doing so, a lot would have to change.” The translation from written word to cinematic image would be just that: a translation. And something would be lost in the process.
Talented filmmakers could certainly make something of these stories, and they might even be genius things, but they would be fundamentally different things from the written literature.
Think about the previous Narnia movie adaptations, and consider what might come of Greta Gerwig’s forthcoming attempts, and then go back and reread the Chronicles of Narnia. It’s not that they are “unfilmable” or some such nonsense. They are perfectly adaptable to cinema.
But the cinematic versions would need to alter the literary ones. Choices would need to be made that go beyond just, “What should we cut for time?”
This was the particular talent of Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Phillippa Boyens when they adapted The Lord of the Rings to the screen. They made a lot of changes, and whether you think those changes were necessary or not, they resulted in three movies that are pretty fucking great, both as adaptations of the source material and as movies in their own right.
And then think about how sloggy and stilted something like Chris Columbus’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is. Rowling was still writing in the age before all our base are belong to prestige TV.
Not that anyone writing in the 20th or 21st century can escape the influence of cinema entirely, but the prestige TV template hadn’t quite solidified yet in the 1990s and early 2000s. It was starting to (I’m looking at you George R.R. Martin, former TV writer… I mean, is it any wonder Game of Thrones became one of the most successful prestige shows of the last twenty years? It’s like the guy knew how to write things that would play well on TV!), but the influence of television on our literary landscape wasn’t quite as ubiquitous as it is now.
Movies? Yes.
But HBO-style TV, with its multiple viewpoints and intersecting story lines and character-focused narratives, not so much.
That’s why it was so important to get it right when taking a book and making it into a movie. So much could go wrong in that translation.
But now, book to (small) screen feels almost effortless. Sure, we may have to cut here and condense there, but in the main, it’s all right there on the page. A show bible ready-made.
I know I sound grumpy about it, and maybe I am, but I also know that I love these books-that-could-be-TV-shows-because-TV-shows-are-how-we-tell-stories-now. I really, really like a lot of these fantasy series! And yes, I would totally watch the TV adaptation if/when it comes out.
But I also kind of like the omniscient narrator? And stories with just one viewpoint character? And fantastical elements that defy visualization? And maybe stories with characters that are maybe a little “flat” (hello, Conan!) but are still awesome anyway because fantasy is a genre that delivers on maybe more than just deep characterization.
Like, maybe, drama and snappy dialogue aren’t the things I always need from my fantasy. Maybe I need weirdness. And wonder. And a strangeness that cannot be translated to the TV screen. And something older, like a fairy tale. And not the new kind where everyone is a fully-realized, three-dimensional person with motivations and psychological depth, but the old kind, where everyone is an archetype and acts weird AF sometimes, and we just accept it because we don’t need psychological realism in our Grimm.
I don’t know. I’m just thinking through some stuff, I guess.
But man, when I read Shurin’s point about prestige TV, it was like the scales fell from my eyes. It’s why I’m a bit out of step both as a writer and a reader. I like prestige TV, and I like the way modern fantasy novels are written, but I also like the old stuff too, the less prestige-y stuff. The weird stuff and the ancient. I kinda wish we could have more of it. Maybe we do, and I’m not reading it (highly possible). If it is, I want to know. I want to read something that can only be read, that lives in words best of all and isn’t a word-version of something practically cinematic.
Fantasy is expansive. I don’t want it narrowed down to a set of storytelling conventions that emerged from only one form of media.
However, as Shurin points out, it IS “slightly reductive” to reduce all currently-popular fantasy literature to this one thing, and it’s not as if This Is How You Lose the Time War (or insert other popular novel) is merely a film treatment. That IS too reductive, and something like Time War is also an epistolary novel, which has a long and venerable tradition that predates TV by a long shot. So maybe my griping is taking things too far. Maybe I need to chill.
Nevertheless, our society is a cinematic one. The moving image dominates our thoughts and dreams and our entertainment, and as Shurin predicts, the next great influence on fantasy literature will be (video) gaming, so yeah, we can’t escape the image makers. I’m intrigued by the ways gaming can influence our literary storytelling, so again, it’s not that I’m opposed to this sort of cross-pollinating. I’m just wondering: Is it possible to have a successful (i.e.: widely read) fantasy novel these days that doesn’t get its storytelling paradigm from prestige TV (or video games or INSERT NEW VISUAL MEDIUM HERE)? We still read classic fantasy, yes, but those books have the backing of time and reputation. We read them because we’ve been told we should read them, or because age bestows a kind of authority.
Like with so many things, a throwback — a new piece of art that hearkens to an earlier form — can be seen either as a delightfully retro oddity or as simply “out of step.” But these throwbacks are catering to a niche crowd, to those who intentionally seek out the strange and “arty.” The popular stuff, the stuff that garners widespread attention, fits itself (most often) within the current paradigm. It might do things a little differently, but not too different. There’s a sweet-spot that such things often hit — the spot between familiar and new — that is precisely what makes them both popular and critically acclaimed. This is the way of things. There’s no sense yelling at the clouds about it. It always has been and always will be.
What I wonder is if we can ever again escape the velocity of cinematic storytelling when it comes to literature. Or does the moving image (in whatever form, even gaming) simply have too much allure. Has our collective imagination been too thoroughly colonized by cinema to ever go back (or forward) to something else? Do we even want to try something else? Maybe it’s just me, the weird freak who wants more flat characters and overt “telling” in my fantasy novels, and is kind of sick of snappy dialogue, and pines for the omniscient narrator. Not all the time, but sometimes. The dictates of the market are one thing; what fantasy literature has the potential to be is something else.
I tried sticking to my homegrown reading challenge, but, well, I just couldn’t. The library is TOO GOOD to pass up. All those books! Infinite possibilities!
I did start reading a book that I’ve had on my shelf for ages (Raymond Feist’s Magician: Apprentice), so that was one good result of my reading challenge. And I gathered a stack of books from our home shelves and have them sitting by my bedside, so I’m ready to read more of the books I actually own.
But the library! I can’t quit it, not even for a season.
I suppose it’s because “reading recklessly” is just too much fun. I hear about a book, I want to read it. And the library lets me get it. I can’t stick to a prescribed order when it comes to reading. I just need to go where the whim takes me. If my ultimate goal is to read as much as I can and enjoy as much as I can, then I need access to my library. I need the inter-library loan system, and I even need my Hoopla app. I’m not strong enough to resist the power of the library, especially if what I really want when I read is to enjoy myself.
And that’s what I really want. I want to read all the books and have fun doing it.
Of course, by focusing more attention on the books I already own, I’m doing something good too. I’m glad to be reading Magician: Apprentice, and I’ll be glad to pick up Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales next, and the Lais of Marie de France, and Dragons of Winter’s Night, and Bradbury: 100 Stories, and so on.
But, yeah, I also need my library books. I don’t like artificially constraining myself. And the library is right there! It’s got all the books!
I’m often creating challenges and restrictions for myself in an attempt to try something new or push myself into an unfamiliar direction. I don’t think this tendency is a bad one, but I also am naturally rebellious, and the minute I start imposing restrictions on myself, I start bristling at them.
Anyway, I’m reading library books and ebooks again. But I’m also reading more books from my homegrown shelves. I’ve reopened my awareness to those books I already own, and I’m making it a point to reacquaint myself with them. I couldn’t stick to my challenge, but I did gain something from it. And that’s cool.
According to Esquire, short books are IN right now. I am part of this reading trend, apparently, because I too read This Is How You Lose the Time War partly based on Bigolas Dickolas’s recommendation on Twitter.
(I mean, not because of their recommendation, but because our book club thought it was funny that someone who goes by the moniker Bigolas Dickolas was getting a viral response to a tweet about this book, and also, it was a book we all had on our reading lists anyway.)
But I have always liked short books, so it’s not really a trend for me. I like really long books too. I basically really like books, all sizes.
But short books are having their moment, apparently, and that’s good for me (I guess) because I tend to write shorter books (at least for now… who knows what will happen in the future). Not that anything I’ve written has become an internet phenomenon like This Is How You Lose the Time War…
But I’m not interested in shorter books for my own career’s sake. I’m more interested in them for my sake as a reader and observer of trends in fantasy fiction.
My question is this: Has fantasy joined the short books crowd, or will the trend continue to be longish books? (I’m defining longish as 400 pages or more.)
I’m not against longish books by the way. (See above: I like books of all sizes.)
But there was once upon a time when fantasy novels were shorter than they are now, particularly the fantasy of the mid-20th century, and everyone was cool with it. We all know that Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings set the template for what a fantasy series is “supposed” to be, but even LOTR isn’t that long when you think about it. It’s one book that clocks in at roughly 1,000 pages (which is long, yes), but it was published as three separate books of roughly 350 pages in length (so, today’s normal book length or shorter).
But starting around the 1990s?, epic fantasy needed to be EPIC both in scope and size. Five, seven, ten books in a series, and each book is pushing 800 pages, and some are even longer than that, and it’s not really fantasy unless it’s dense with detail and world-building. Tolkien’s LOTR wouldn’t even be considered long by these standards.
I guess we’ve moved away from massively long books in recent years, but most fantasy is still around the 400-600 page range. Six hundred pages isn’t LONG, but it ain’t short either. Put it into a series of several 600-page books, and we’re talking about a commitment.
When I pick up an old pulpy paperback from the 1960s or 70s, I’m always surprised by how short these novels are compared to today. Jack of Shadows was SLIM. I just bought the Empire of the East series by Fred Saberhagen and each of the three volumes combined is shorter than many a single fantasy novel you’d see on the bestseller chart today. The Last Unicorn is sub-200 pages, so are Le Guin’s Earthsea novels. Patricia McKillop, Andre Norton, Poul Anderson, Michael Moorcock, et. al. were writing slim volumes back in the day and everyone was cool with it.
I know trends in publishing are different from trends in storytelling and reading, but the two trends intersect. If the market has decided a fantasy novel has to “be” a certain kind of thing, then that is what we often see getting published.
Slightly large caveat here: With indie publishing, writers can basically do whatever they want. We can publish shorter books and not bat an eye. So, in this sense, we’re not beholden to what traditional publishers are looking for when publishing fantasy novels. We can bring back the olden days of sub-200 page novels and live like kings and queens. Definitely. This is true. I’m living that dream right now, with my longest paperback reaching only 284 pages. Huzzah!
However, the expectation of readers can still be set by what the publishing norm is in any given genre, and if indie writers and trad publishers continue to put out fantasy novels that are 400 pages or more a pop, then readers have expectations for what a “fantasy novel” is. The publishing trend can impact the reading trend.
(Obviously, as we’re seeing with the overall trend of readers reading shorter works in general, the market can and will adjust to what readers want, so it’s not all puppet-masters pulling the strings from above. I’m just curious about whether fantasy READERS are interested in shorter works overall. Maybe they are? Maybe there already is a trend for shorter fantasy novels and I’m just missing it? Very possible.)
I know I’ve really enjoyed the shorter fantasy I’ve read from the 60s and 70s. The commitment isn’t as huge, so if the book is a little uneven or weird, it’s okay. It’s only 160 pages. The swiftness of the storytelling is refreshing too. Even though these books are short, they don’t skimp on plot or world-building or anything else. They move breezily from strange vista to strange vista, and I don’t feel like I’m missing anything from the experience even though it’s a much shorter experience than what I’m often used to with books from today.
As a writer, I know I will continue to write shorter books (and hopefully longer ones too!), but as a reader, I’d love to see shorter fantasy novels make a comeback. With that shortness comes a slightly different approach to storytelling that I think can be refreshing. In 200 pages or less, both the writer and the reader can take chances that we might not otherwise take if the story were longer. I’d love a return to the old pulpy paperback days. Give me 150 pages and some weirdness, and I’m in!
I’m reading John Bellairs’s The Face in the Frost, and I guess I was not prepared for how creepy and downright scary this book can be at times. I’m not sure why this surprised me since Bellairs is known for scary YA fiction, but I’ve been pleasantly (and creepily) surprised by how spooky The Face in the Frost is.
It’s a wonderful mixture of anachronistic elements and a sort of whimsical and madcap, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink type fantasy, but then it adds these supernatural horror elements, and it makes for a unique experience. I really love these pre-1980s fantasy novels where there’s a playful spirit of anything goes.
As I often do, I wonder if a book like this could be written today, or if there are authors who are doing this sort of thing in our current fantasy literature scene. There very well might be; I’m not well-read enough in today’s novels to say one way or another. But I am curious if there’s a place for Bellairs’s style of fantasy in our current moment.
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