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At some point — I think in Locus? — I read an interview with Gordon Van Gelder in which he described his reaction to elves as being like lactose intolerance. “I’m elf intolerant,” he said.

I am also elf intolerant.

And that extends to fairies. Actually, I don’t bother to distinguish between “under the hill” elf stories and “under the hill” fairy stories; they strike me as basically the same equation.

So, consequently, I wasn’t really expecting to enjoy the anthology The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm, despite its excellent editors and dazzling array of author names. And I didn’t.

In my (biased toward giving low ratings) personal rating system, I gave the stories in this anthology the following splay. I didn’t read the poetry.

Five stars: two
Four stars: two
Three stars: three
Two stars: two
One star: eight

There were two stories in this anthology for which I ran out of energy before the author ran out of story, and another that I skimmed heavily.

I certainly can’t blame the authors for this. It was definitely the subject matter. One of the stories I failed to finish reading was “Elvenbrood” by Tanith Lee, who is one of my favorite authors. I devour most of her stories voraciously. Add elves, and I take a nap.

There are problems with writing elf stories — or, rather, there are problems with elves and fairies as those cultural constructs generally appear in modern American fiction. (Western) elves, like vampires, are super-cool. They’re impossibly powerful, impossibly beautiful, impossibly impossible. And also diffident. Worse, the concept of the changeling lends itself too easily to a sort of immature wish-fulfillment, an all-to-easty metaphor for growing up an ugly duckling surrounded by powerful and beautiful swans.

There are intriguing angles from which to approach western-style elves, certainly… but I think it’s fundamentally a challenge. The narratives we draw around them tend to be pretty tired, and I think it’s hard to riff on the concept while still preserving the feel of “elf-ness,” which itself seems to be derived in large part from the tired use of tropes.

The anthology does touch on some non-western creatures that fall into the concept of fairies, such as Japanese kitsune. These stories have a bit more original space in which to work before running into the cloy of elfness.

As with most themed anthologies, I appreciated those stories that went further afield from the subject to draw their material. The most literal and traditional elf stories — like “Elvenbrood” — were significantly less interesting than the riffs that deconstructed and built anew the older tropes.

Although the anthology as a whole left me flat, there are some very nice pieces in it. My favorite was Kelly Link’s The Faery Handbag” which deservedly won a bunch of awards. I first read this piece in Kelly Link’s collection Magic for Beginners. Even among Link’s generally amazing work, “The Faery Handbag” stands out as particularly good. The narrator’s playful voice is compelling; the detail work gorgeous; the non-linear structure intriguingly woven but still sharp by the end. This story doesn’t stir me emotionally the way some of Link’s other work does (”Magic for Beginners” from which her second collection draws its name is my favorite of her stories — unfortunately, I don’t think it’s still available online), but it’s a delightful and original read.

I also really enjoyed Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s “Immersed in Matter” which follows a half-elf boy as he flirts with the edges of human civilization, for subconscious reasons that are only partially clear to him. This story is pretty traditional and the elves in it fit within most of the stereotypes of elves, but the story really worked for me, which I suppose just goes to show that anything can work when done well. I think the keys to this story’s success, at least for me, are the ways in which it slides around the themes of “How do I grow up awkward?” and “What does it mean to be human?” The main character does end up playing out some of the angsty changeling themes, but does so in a way that’s subtle rather than self-pitying. The theme emerges naturally from the story, rather than feeling hammered in or overt. The story benefits greatly from what I felt was nicely rendered and subtle characterization.

Jeffrey Ford’s “The Annals of Eelin-Ok” is a fake sort of academic essay in which a scholar describes the lives of fairies who live their lives in sand castles, ending his essay with the translated text of a memoir by one such fairy. This story — with its classification of fairy types, and concentration on how the fairies interact unseen with human children — seems clearly a riff on the idea of fairies at the bottom of the garden, but Ford’s voice is strikingly clear and compelling, and he uses modern storytelling techniques to create a real sense of emotional involvement with the character. By the end of the piece, a naturally evolving theme of ephemerality has appeared, and despite the fact that fairies often lend themselves to a sort of saccharine tone, Ford doesn’t flinch from his ending, instead pushing to a darker and more ambiguous place.

Hiromi Goto’s “Foxwife” is another of the anthology’s particularly interesting pieces. My favorite thing about the piece is that it seems to take on a fictionalized Japan similar to the way most western authors take on a Defaulty McBland fictionalized England. It doesn’t cater to western assumptions about society, or western assumptions about Japan — which disoriented me a bit early on, in all the best ways. The imagery here is vivid, and the scenes unexpected. The piece doesn’t quite tie together for me, and the ending was weak, but I enjoyed taking the journey of reading it.

I also enjoyed Emma Bull’s “De La Tierra” and Bruce Glassco’s “Never, Never,” although neither is the kind of fiction I usually seek on my own. “De La Tierra” is urban fantasy, following a biologically modified sort of private security agent for the fairy population of LA. This story reminds me of Greg Van Eekhout’s “Osteomancer’s Son,” which will be appearing on PodCastle next Tuesday: action centered around a very shiny idea with lots of eyeball kicks. There’s also a strong political subtext to “De La Tierra” which I went back and forth about as a reader… I wasn’t sure if the message was a little reductive of the complexities involved, or on the contrary a fairly brilliant way of expressing the political ideas. In the end, I settled on a bit of both, and I liked that the story had room enough for me to sustain that ambiguity.

“Never, Never” is an engagement with Peter Pan, told from the perspective of Captain Hook. The story relies heavily on the reader’s sense of nostalgia for the Peter Pan books… which I have to say I don’t have nostalgia for. Still. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like it, and I like the way the piece stretched my imagination. And the tender, slightly melancholic scene between Captain Hook and Tiger Lily enchanted me. Besides, there’s something all too true about the idea that an omnipotent, ever-young Peter Pan would act like an enfant terrible, filling his island at turns with vicious pirates, gigantic war robots, ninjas, and aliens.

I’ll also give a shout out to another story: “The Night Market” by Holly Black is a sort of feminist fantasy short for a YA audience that doesn’t break a lot of ground plot-wise, but has some strikingly cool imagery in the night market scene itself. I thought this story was online, but I’m not finding it at a glance. If someone else knows the link, toss it to me, would you?

A number of the stories in this anthology attempt to come up with some original elf feul by using elf and fairy creatures as direct analogues for environmental damage. For me, this ranged from the moderately successful as in Gregory Maguire’s “The Oak Thing” which has an intriguing enough main character that the piece doesn’t feel heavy-handed, to the unsuccessful “Undine” by Patricia McKillip which took its metaphor too seriously and directly. In general, these weren’t pieces that worked for me (except for Emma Bull’s, which had a lot of other political stuff going on as well).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for environmentalist messages in fiction or otherwise, but I think it’s too easy to make all-perfect all-beautiful elves and fairies a metaphor for voiceless, abused, innocent nature, without really having to examine either the politics of the message or the basis for the metaphor. The prettily written “The Shooter at Heart Rock Waterhole” by Bill Congreve exemplifies this problem for me; the elf who symbollizes nature starts out dead and voiceless. It’s all too unidirectional and easy, all too unconflicted. I’m inclined to support an environmentalist message, but I need more than the metaphorical destruction of a beautiful fairy or elven body to care more than I already do.

I recently read through Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling’s anthology The Coyote Road, which isn’t a new release or anything. But hey. Since I took notes on the anthology, I thought I’d share them, for whatever they’re worth (probably not much).

I thought this was an excellent anthology. Anything edited by Ellen Datlow has, in my opinion, a high chance of being excellent, but I was especially impressed by this one. I’ve been reading through the Datlow/Windling fairy tale anthologies recently as well (and may blog about them), and I thought Coyote Road shone in comparison. I don’t know why that is. If i had to take a guess, I’d say that the rewritten fairy tale genre represents territory that’s more trod, particularly by the time Datlow and Windling hit book 5 or 6. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy the fairy tale anthologies, and particularly some of the stories — I do very much like the fairy tale anthos. But I thought that the Coyote Road had a higher overall quality.

In my personal rating system (which is not at all a fair; it’s tilted severely toward giving things low ratings), I rated two of these stories with fives (total adoration), one with a four (strong enthusiasm), eight with threes (enjoyment), two with twos (competent stories that didn’t appeal to me personally for whatever reason), and nine with ones (stories I didn’t particularly like for one reason or another).

My favorite piece from the anthology is Kij Johnson’s Nebula nominated novelette, “The evolution of trickster stories among the dogs of North Park after the Change.” Diatryma says she adores the character, and there is nice character development here of both humans and canines, but I was particularly impressed by the weaving of different types of narratives into this story. It’s an extremely well-rendered balance of scene, meta-fictional intrustion, and mythic stories, all of which add up to an extremely moving piece.

The other story I rated a five was Kelly Link’s “Constable of Abal,” the story of a woman and her daughter who keep ghosts on ribbons. This story has all the best hallmarks of Link’s work: extremely vivid imagery, appealing strangeness, a carefully constructed mood. My most common complaint about Link’s stories is that they are sometimes structurally weak, or have trouble finding an ending, but this story is plotted extremely well and ends satisfyingly without losing the imagery or the mood.

I also enjoyed Ellen Kushner’s “Honored Guest” which makes me want to check out her Swordspoint series. For some reason, I’ve never read any Kushner before. I’m missing something.

Many of the stories in this anthology are well-written, engaging, diverting reads. For instance, Pat Murphy’s “One Odd Shoe” and Delia Sherman’s “The Fiddler of Bayou Teche” are both very entertaining stories that play with interesting characters, settings, and voices, even though neither felt totally fresh to me. I enjoyed reading them, and I’d read them again. Barzak gives some gorgoeus details about Tokyo in “Realer Than You” and Caroline Stevermer made me laugh in “Uncle Bob Visits’swith her ghost who hates diagramming sentences.

I adore Elllen Klages’s work, which may be why I was a trifle disappointed in “Friday Night at St. Cecilia’s,” the perfectly nicely written and entertaining story of a private school girl who plays a board game with Queen Mab. The story as a whole is diverting and fun and was a pleasant read, but I missed the feeling of emotional resonance I’ve found in most other Klages stories.

There were two stories in the anthology — Jebediah Barry’s “The Other Labyrinth” and Jeffrey Ford’s “The Dreaming Wind” — that I wanted to like more than I did. Both had absolutely gorgeous imagery. I’m a sucker for labyrinths of roses and mirrors, not to mention winds that can recreate people in the image of goats or parrots in the image of baby dolls. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel either story was able to bring their stories to a conclusion that suited their vivid beginnings. “The Other Labyrinth” seems to set up one kind of story, and then switch tone in the middle. “The Dreaming Wind” establishes a phenomenon so cool that I never quite forgave the author for refusing to let the event actually happen.

Like “The Other Labyrinth” and “The Dreaming Wind,” Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s “The Listeners” had an extremely compelling beginning — though in the case of that story, I was drawn to characterization and world-building rather than imagery. Unfortunately, I also felt this story tapered off at the end.

The stories in Coyote Road are supplemented by author’s notes, which I love. Will Shetterly argues in his author’s note that author’s notes in general reduce a story’s appeal to that of a “show” with its backstage tricks revealed — I absolutely can’t agree. One thing I enjoy about fiction is being able to enjoy it through multiple facets. Seeing a story from a writer’s perspective does not dim my ability to see it as a reader.

In my usual persnickety way, I read through this anthology haphazardly instead of straight through — and as usually happens, there were a few stories left at the end whose first pages I kept glancing at and going “I don’t want to read that” before flipping to the next piece. I always end up reading those stories last, and it’s possible that I was just done with the anthology’s theme by the time I got to them — but, as always, I enjoyed those stories least. There were four stories in this anthology that I had to push myself to skim. I abandoned those four at their halfway points.

There are a number of stories in this anthology that take on trickster myths directly, particularly a number that engage with Coyote. Of these, I thought the best was Pat Murphy’s “One Odd Shoe.”

However, in general, I wasn’t as fond of the stories that took a direct look at the trickster myths rather than finding different ways of engaging with trickster legends. I love coyote stories — but I love them enough that I’d rather read the originals than derivatives. Kim Antieu’s “The Senorita and the Cactus Thorn,” for instance, was perfectly competent and entertaining enough, but it was sufficiently similar to the style of the original legends that I found myself wanting to go back and reread those instead.

The authors in the anthology take on a number of different kinds of tricksters, from Hermes, to a labyrinth maker descended from Daedelus, to Louisiana fiddlers. I think the anthology would have been improved by a little bit more diversity in terms of the tricksters that authors chose to work with. For instance, I was surprised that no one engaged with Odysseus or Anansi (Edited to add: Ellen Datlow has kindly pointed out that while no stories took on Anansi, there is a Jane Yolen poem in the anthology that works with the spider trickster). I was also disappointed in the only piece that worked with the historically complicated Brer Rabbit narrative.

For me, the most successful stories were those that found unique ways to engage with trickster mythology. Kij Johnson’s is the msot obvious example. In her piece, she’s directly engaging with trickster myths — and with Coyote — but she’s doing so in a way that engages with and recontextualizes the trickster myths, deconstructing them to investigate their cultural traction, and then rebuilding them to create new insights.

This was a really cool anthology, and I highly recommend it.

A bingo card for arguments about whether or not racism can exist in fantasy and/or science fiction.

(Some commenters may be aware of the story and discussion that triggered this bingo card. I’m not going to link to it because I think the story itself is a red herring from this post. I think the use of an undigested trope was ill-advised, but I also believe it was a good-faith error, and that the author’s response to critics is genuine.

This Bingo card is presented A) in response to the comments on that story, and B) in response to the comments on every other story that spawns variations of these poorly formed arguments. As the Angry Black Woman said about the issue, more or less, whether or not one agrees with a specific charge of racism, using arguments out of the handbook for “How to Suppress Discussions of Racism” is NOT the way to prove your point.)

Feminist/womanist, anti-racist commenters only.

Your blogger in PR last week, with the book she’s been reading for five effing months because she spends too much time on the internet and reads too many things for law school, leaving Tony Judt 2/3rds incomplete. This makes her sad, and potential partners will probably reject her for it.

I have so been here.

Yes, I judge people by their literary choices. Do you list The Da Vinci Code as one of your favorite books on Facebook? Talk about how great Ayn Rand is? Read John Grisham novels somewhere other than on an airplane or the beach? Think that God is super smart for having written the Bible? Even worse, say that you don’t like to read? I’m running in the other direction (especially when it comes to dating you).

Yes, it’s judgmental. Yes, perhaps it is a little mean. I don’t care. Dating is a compatibility game, and I don’t imagine things would ever work out with someone who thinks Dan Brown is the height of great literature or that Ayn Rand had some awesome ideas (or was even a decent writer). Literary taste can be a pretty good weeding-out mechanism, and for me it’s right up there along with foodie- and wino-ness (can’t date a guy who only eats to live and doesn’t really care what he puts in his mouth); progressive values (no Republicans, Libertarians or apathetic people, please); and an interest in politics, feminism media (that’s pretty much what I do all day, so I’d like to be able to talk about it). And you definitely have to like dogs. Preferably big ones.

Before someone jumps on me for being snobby or judgmental, this is a values issue and, as I said before, a compatibility game. There are a lot of things that are worth compromising on, but the things that take up a good deal of my time and that I thoroughly enjoy — food, wine, politics, reading, and adorable slobbery hairy beasts — I want to be able to share with my partner. Other people might privilege other things, and that’s fine too — I’m sure there are plenty of people who seek out partners who share their religion or their vegetarianism or their love of music or their passion for sports or whatever else.

So before this gets too serious, what are your unconventional deal-breakers in relationships? And has anyone read any good books lately?

Oh honey, you are pretty:

I’ve known this since freshman year of college when, for a class, I read an interview with her in which she lamented that too many black were going to school, but I’ve never said it here: Toni Morrison is a racist dumbass of monumental proportions. If you combined the worst condescending attitudes towards black people of a white liberal with an actual black person who thus has no fear of saying whatever she wants about blacks, you get Toni Morrison.

I remember in that college class I had a choice between getting an A or saying exactly what I thought of Toni Morrison in my final paper. It was an easy choice.

BTW, I learned from that same class by reading Beloved that a novel has to be some pretty atrocious crap to win both the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize. Man did I need a Tom Clancy novel as a palate cleanser after that.

Am I the only one who has a really hard time believing that getting an A on a written assignment was ever an option for this dude? My favorite response was when a commenter corrected his use of the word “pallet”:

[No what you can do? You can shut up. It’s not the most common word. -Ed.]

Not like “know.”

Of course, if your education consists of studying the fine literature of Tom Clancy, I suppose we can’t really blame you for… that.

Pratchett remains optomistic and asks that the community respond with cheer.

I have been diagnosed with a very rare form of early onset Alzheimer’s, which lay behind this year’s phantom “stroke”.

We are taking it fairly philosophically down here and possibly with a mild optimism. For now work is continuing on the completion of Nation and the basic notes are already being laid down for Unseen Academicals. All other things being equal, I expect to meet most current and, as far as possible, future commitments but will discuss things with the various organisers. Frankly, I would prefer it if people kept things cheerful, because I think there’s time for at least a few more books yet.

As PZ says, Pratchett “Aintn’t dead yet.”

–

UPDATE: It occurs to me that you all may not know who Terry Pratchett is. He’s a comic fantasy writer who has penned many, many novels in a universe called Discworld. Discworld started out as a fairly simple parody of fantasy epics starring a wizard named Rincewind, but quickly got much more sophisticated. It’s a rich and historically deep series that takes on a number of topics. One of my favorite books is a satire of philosophers and religion. The most recent takes on the historical development of paper money. Very little makes me as simply joyful as reading a new Terry Pratchett book — or even an old one that I like.

You know you’re a nerd when this is your favorite part of the holiday season (and yes, it is mine).

Let’s Talk about Science Fiction, Babies

There’s an interesting discussion over at Pharyngula about the possibilities and dangers inherent in human genetic engineering.

The thread is slightly annoying — a fair bit of priveleged wanking, and no one really bringing sophisticated social theory to the table. But on balance, I’d say it’s mostly interesting, at least in terms of seeing how people want to forecast the future.

As I read the comment thread, the thing that strikes me most as a science fiction writer is how much the discourse of science fiction shapes the discourse about these future technologies. On an obvious level, there are appeals to Heinlein, Egan, and similar hard SF ilk. On a subtler level, the themes that people are presenting as thought-provoking in the discussion (what if we modified people to be obedient? what if there was speciation between upper class and lower class people? what if people want to modify their children in ways we find abhorrent?) are in fact staples of the science fiction genre.

In my opinion, near future hard SF (that’s science fiction that works with the best science contemporarily available to forcast events in the next, say, fifty years) has a problem. And that problem is plot. Consider Frankenstein, a very early work of science fiction — a scientist is able to create life, but the novel’s shape is that of a warning story. We Must Not Because.

Writers working within the constraints of traditional plotting have to find a conflict. Science fiction is often a medium of ideas, which means that the conflict generally has to be related to the idea. So, if you want to write about genetic engineering, you have to do so in a way that gives obeisance to conflict.

I am convinced this creates warning stories even where science fiction writers don’t want to write warning stories. It’s a natural form. If you want to write about Neat Idea X, and your story-writing formula is “create problem within the first two paragraphs,” then the urge is to warn against whatever Neat Idea X is. You still get to write about it.

A further problem is that ideas tend to be explored in a finite number of ways. On one hand, this is because the culture that gives rise to the science fiction has a certain number of associations with a given science fictional idea. The western writers who are forecasting dark, genetically engineered futures — and doing so with generally the same set of tools and projected outcomes — are writing within a western context that has certain central concerns about genetic engineering, and certain hegemonic assumptions about reproduction, etc. We would expect that the science fictional discourse would shift when you look at a different culture with different concerns and assumptions, and from what I know about the growing science fiction movements in India and China, this does indeed prove to be the case.

However, the interaction is recursive. Science fiction writers pen their works within the cultural context that shapes their concerns, assumptions, and the channels of their forecasting. At the same time, they shape the discourse. As John Scalzi pointed out last year when he generously agreed to speak to the science fiction class I was teaching, the shape of the cell phone bears an uncanny similarity to the shape of the Star Trek communicator. This particular convergence seems to be only one of many examples of scientists looking at science fictional technology and thinking, “Ooh, I want that!” Science fictionally proposed theories about space and space travel trickle down into the naming of things, and sometimes their study, in an observable fashion.

It’s trickier to observe other influences of science fiction writers on the discourse about science and the future, but they’re present. I’ve argued before that the ways in which people perceive the world are heavily influenced by narrative and story, and so the narratives that are introduced into the culture about certain ideas are shaped by that culture, but once they are present, they shape it as well. Ant-like matriarchal societies, huge TV screens showing Big Brother talking to you, sad grey-clad people in communist dystopias wearing jumpsuits and going through identical motions — these images have shaped some of our impressions of matriarchy, fascism, and communism. Many discussions of matriarchy, for instance, end up reaching back to the imagery that’s entered our cultural consciousness — and terms that evoke insects or hive-minds are deployed. The same thing happens with genetic engineering and the limited number of narratives and images we associate with it. The first few shiny, imagination-catching ideas tend to overwhelm our cultural ability to imagine other outcomes.

The Problems with Warning Stories

Warning stories can be great: fun to read, fun to write. Some of them are also interesting and sophisticated.

However, I worry about the endless parade of science fictional monsters tramping through our cultural imagination. Cloning does not work the way 90% of science fictional representations say it does. Really. Nothing like. I’ve been involved in many bizarre conversations with cloning opponents, and at a certain point, their arguments tend to hark back to weird cultural myths built out of Star Trek and Twilight Zone rip-offs.

There are three problems here.

1) Bad science: many science fiction writers wrote clones that worked in ways that have more to do with fantasy zombies than what actual clones could possibly be because those fantasy zombie clones were more useful for plot and conflict. Because most laypeople know very little about genetics or cloning, the bad science passes them by.

2) One-dimensional (or as good as) representation, which does not allow for ambiguity in the expression of the science fictional idea or the imagined cultural reaction to it.

3) The playing into monster story tropes which follow a certain formula, and therefore require the writer and audience to envision the science fictional idea as part of a monster mold.

Eventually, the combination of bad science, unambiguous representation, and the monster trope seeps down into our narrative about a science fictional idea, and that’s the point at which someone will seriously oppose cloning because they’re afraid that clones will share the memories, experiences, and developmental history of existing adults, and therefore be able to take over the world.

Breaking Out of the Warning Mold

Writers have several ways to navigate these problems while still paying proper attention to conflict. One is to make the conflict much smaller than the level of “Oh noes! Monsters!” which allows the science fiction trope to play out more subtly and resist becoming the basis for a monster-level plot. A fantastic example of this kind of writing as applied to the genetic engineering/cloning tropes, is Tananarive Due’s “Like Daughter,” a story in which a woman of color who was physically abused as a child decides to raise a clone of herself so that she can give “herself” a new, happy childhood. Unfortunately, the child suffers from being treated as a kind of doll and required to enact her mother’s fantasy upbringing. The mother’s best friend has to interfere and take the girl away.

I wish this story was online as it is truly remarkable. The conflict echoes, in moving ways, off of many points. The conflict is personal in a way that survives outside the science fiction context, reflecting on the nature of mothers, daughters, and childhood trauma. The conflict is also sociological: as a professor of mine at UC Santa Cruz said about the story, the question of how to resolve traumatic history is particularly salient for the community of color, and it is no accident that the author is black. Thirdly, the conflict does revolve around the science fictional idea of cloning: without cloning, it would be impossible for the story’s conceit to exist. However, the clone does not need to be made into a monster (or, in the flip, made into a one-dimensionally virtuous yet beleaguered outsider) in order for the conflict to function, because the nature of the story’s conflict is subtle.

In science fiction communities, there’s a concept which has caused much war-drumming on one side, and much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the other. It’s a fledgling literary movement called mundane science fiction, or mundane SF. The mundane SF movement was started by science fiction writer Geoff Ryman. It asks writers to eschew some of science fiction’s splashier tropes in order to create more realistic, more resonant futures. In order to accomplish this, the mundane movement has banned certain topics, included AI, faster-than-light space travel, psychic energy, and aliens. I think cloning’s on the list.

I think that the banning of topics may accomplish slivers of the mundane SF movement’s goals, but that the movement would have been better off asking for limited scope instead of limited ideas. For me, the science fiction that feels most real and moving is not necessarily science fiction which does not contain aliens — Octavia Butler’s “Amnesty,” for instance, makes beautiful use of aliens — but that science fiction which limits its scope to investigating personal relationships within an altered future instead of grander, global-level catastrophes. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy other flavors of SF, but this is the type that generally moves me the most. (There are exceptions, such as Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, which definitely functions on a grand and global level.)

The other most dominant technique that I see writers using so that they can avoid monster story formulas while still exploring neat ideas and paying due deference to plot, is to make the science fictional trope part of the story’s background. For instance, in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, characters who become soldiers are genetically modified so that they are faster, stronger, greener, and melded with their own AIs. Scalzi’s plot revolves around a war which these characters are fighting. The genetic modifications are integral to the plot — they make the war possible — but they don’t need to be the impetus for conflict, because a different science fictional trope has taken that center stage.

Scalzi’s book works on a grand scale, but it’s also possible to background science fictional tropes while working on a more limited scale. One novel that comes to mind is Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang, in which many fascinating science fictional elements — future homophobia, America’s loss of primacy as a global power, the colonization of Mars, people who can use technology to have flying races — function as the background in service to the main characters’ more mundane problems. How can people learn to be happy with each other? How can a gay man, isolated and displaced, find his place in the world? The backdrops are Mars and a decaying future, but the problems are timeless.

Unfortunately, the technique of slipping science fictional ideas into the background so that the conflict can be derived from something else tends to work better for novels than short stories. Short stories are limited in how much they can tackle, so it’s difficult for them to investigate more than one idea at a time.

Science Fiction Writer’s Responsibility in Shaping the Discourse

It concerns me that when I look at a thread like the one on Pharyngula, I see a lot of analysis that’s shaped by science fiction narratives, when I know that some of those narratives are driven more by the need for an exciting plot than by any real scientific or sociological extrapolation.

People differ in the amount of responsibility that they feel art has to the real world. I’m on the high end: I’m all about social responsibility.

I think science fiction writers owe it to ourselves and to the culture not to use genre formulas without a clear understanding of what they are, what they do, and why we want to use them. That doesn’t mean genre formulas have to go away, but I’d like to see them used with awareness and deliberation. When they’re used with awareness and deliberation, they usually (in my experience) tend to shift anyway: new narrative possibilities open, and the characters, story, and discourse have a chance to breathe.

Greetings Feministers!

I’m Rosanne Griffeth of the Smokey Mountain Breakdown and I will be using my guest blogging appearance to blog about Appalachian women.

I’m a writer and a teller of tales. It’s what I do best. My plan is to post essays and stories between Feministe and my blog through the week, each dealing with an aspect of these amazingly strong women’s lives. While my stories are largely fiction, they are derived from oral traditions passed on to me from the women of Grassy Fork, Tennessee. So, if there is an essay on Feministe…there will be a story on the SMB that relates to the essay…or if there is a ficlet here, I’ll be running my mouth over there.

Perhaps my two favorite fictional representations of Appalachian women are Fairlight Spencer in Christy by Catherine Marshall and Ruby Thewes in Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. Both of these women ring 100% true to me, perhaps because I live 5 miles from the factual “Cutter’s Gap” and 20 miles from the factual Cold Mountain. My essays and stories will be drawn from my observations from this still remote area of Appalachia.

About me… I have a BA and an MFA in Theater. My emphasis was on costume design with a research interest in dramatic criticism, specifically feminist theater and women playwrights and women’s roles of the English Restoration period. I spent my early career working in “the vanities” of the film industry as a make-up artist and wig master throughout the US and the UK. I then moved on to costume design and from there to broadcast media at CNN.

My writing is heavily influenced by Marjorie Rawlings and Flannery O’Connor. I avoid Faulkner like the plague. I am, indeed, a Southern writer of the Dead Mule school in the sub-genre of Southern Gothic. I’m extremely interested in the intersection of beauty and the grotesque. I’m very interested in the psychology of faith.  I’m also a contributor for Hillbilly Savants, Appalachian Writers and Dew on the Kudzu.  If you are looking for political correctness, you will be sadly disappointed in me.

I now live on a mountaintop with my dogs and my goatherd. I consort with and write about Jesus’ Name Serpent Handlers, moonshiners, cock fighters, tent revival preachers, and sweet little old women who are waiting to die.

Welcome to my world and I hope you enjoy my visit on Feministe.

Tomorrow I will talk about the history of women in Appalachia and have a retelling of local story from the post-Civil War era.