Third Table Round One, Travelling Guest Fantasy Blog

Yes, after some discussion, we're back, with slightly changed personnel, for a third Round of the Table! Topic for May is/was "Shades of Fantasy" and the posts will be up over on Deborah J. Ross's blog - in the meantime, here's my effusion for the month. Enjoy!

Originally I meant to talk about sub-genres on this, but I’ve done that before, so instead I’ll look at shades in (mostly) high fantasy, varying by both authors’ style and time. Which logically lets me start with one of the fathers of modern fantasy, Lord Dunsany. Here’s the intro to his short story, “Carcassonne:”

They say that [Camorak’s] house at Arn was huge and high, and its ceiling painted blue; and when evening fell men would climb up by ladders and light the scores of candles hanging from slender chains. And they say, too, that sometimes a cloud would come, and pour in through the top of one of the oriel windows, and it would come over the edge of the stonework as the sea-mist comes over a sheer cliff’s shaven lip where an old wind has blown for ever and ever (he has swept away thousands of leaves and thousands of centuries, they are all one to him, he owes no allegiance to Time).

 Writing pre-WWI, Dunsany has more than an echo of Yeats’ Celtic twilight: whimsical tone, slightly formal, archaic usages such as the “they say” beloved of medieval romances. And characteristic of Dunsany, whimsy extended into a long, flapping, image-ridden sentence that in the wrong hands could come perilously close to a place in the Bulwer Lytton awards. No magic apparent in here, yet. This cd. be just a very formal historical novel.
From around the same period we have:

“His highness rode a hot stirring horse very fierce and dogged; knee to knee with him went Styrkmir of Blackwood o’ the one side and Tharmrod o’ the other. Neither man nor horse might stand up before them, and they faring as in a maze now this way now that, amid the thrumbling and thrasting of the footmen, heads and arms smitten off, men hewn in sunder from crown to belly, ay, to the saddle, riderless horses maddened, blood plashed up from the ground like the slush from a marsh.”

Yep, that other Daddy of the Genre, E. R. Edison, from the chapter “The Battle of Krothering Side,” in The Worm Ouroboros. And yes, nobody sounds or ever again could sound like Edison. The lavish detail, the exuberance, the outrageous yet so brilliant faux Elizabethan language is a Phoenix. One of a kind.

The writing in The Worm actually ranges widely, from battle scenes like this, sounding almost straight out of Mallory, to the ornate settings, and breathtaking natural beauty like the sunset that closes this chapter, or the first view of Zimiamvia. But it’s a good shade away from Dunsany, not least in the ferocity of its focus, and the equally ferocious insistence of its rhythm. And Edison can do serious magic, but not here.

Now here’s one of the modern heirs of both Edison and Dunsany. Describing magic outright, 70 or so years later, when fantasy styles have greatly simplified – or been dumbed down, imo – for a far larger, less literate readership.

Lynn Hall had changed again. This time she showed me how her secret wood devoured it, in a monstrous tangle of root and vine that wove into its stones and massed across its gaping roof. Past and future and the timeless wood scattered broken pieces of themselves within two rooms. Nial Lynn’s marble floor lay broken and weathered by the years, even as his blood or Tearle’s flowed darkly across it. A curve of tree root so thick it must have circled the world had pushed through the floor beneath Corbet’s table... 

Much plainer than Edison or Dunsany, yes,  yet no less part of Elsewhere in the starkness of images like the broken marble floor and the flowing blood, here in service to the time-folding, reality-dissolving effect so common in McKillip’s work. Yes, Patricia McKillip again, this time from Winter Rose,Chapter Twenty-Three.
 And now a particularly famous figure from modern fantasy who first appeared in the late ‘60s and returned in the 2000s, through his creator’s trademark mix of utterly everyday details and sudden, yawning vistas of unreality:

The leaves shook and the man came briskly down the ladder. He carried a handful of plums, and when he got off the ladder he batted away a couple of bees drawn by the juice. He came forward, a short, straight-backed man, grey hair tied back from a handsome, time-worn face. He looked to be seventy or so. Old scars, four white seams, ran from his left cheekbone down to the jaw. ( The Other Wind, Ch. 1)

Yup, it’s Le Guin’s famous mage, Ged, in his (happier) old age. Now an almost poverty stricken dweller on the heights above Havnor, with a plum tree and some goats and chooks – chickens, to American readers – a handsome old face, and the four scar marks that invoke his first mortal struggle in the magical world. In this quote everything looks deceptively simple. Until you begin to analyse the subtle, resilient rhythms of the prose, and the almost invisible patterning of assonance and alliteration. If Edison is the High Priest of Ornament, Le Guin is the Mistress of Understatement.
Further into the present, and not quite high fantasy, here’s a very good Canadian writer doing urban fantasy at its most attitudinous. It’s from a world where Keepers use their magic to maintain the fabric of reality against determined incursions from Hell, below, but sometimes, accidentally, from Heaven above. A street evangelist encounters a currently humanly-embodied angel (read the book for the full outrageous details): 

“Greenstreet Mission. We’re doing a Christmas dinner. You can get a meal and hear the word of God.”

Samuel smiled in relief. This, finally, he understood. “Which word?”

“What?”
“Well, God’s said a lot of words, you know, and a word like it or the wouldn’t be worth hearing again but it’s always fun listening to Him try to say aluminum.” (Tanya Huff, The Second Summoning, Ch. 7)

 But, I hear you muttering, where are the famously gritty and dourly “realistic” masters like George R. R. Martin? OK, I confess. I loved Fevre Dream, years ago, but the Thrones books feel to me like a fantasy version of Stephen King’s horror followers. It’s not realism I find in Martin. Perversely, it’s like King, a “gritty fantasy” gross-out.

 When it comes to gritty, I’d sooner go with another prize-winning contemporary woman fantasy writer, and the opening of her first book in the “Chalionverse”:

 Cazaril heard the mounted horsemen on the road before he saw them. He glanced over his shoulder. The well-worn track behind him curled up around a rolling rise, what passed for a hill on these high windy plains, before dipping again into the late-winter muck of Baocia’s bony soil. At his feet a little rill, too small and intermittent to rate a culvert or a bridge, trickled greenly across the track from the sheep-cropped pasture above. The thump of hooves, jangle of harness, clink of bells, creak of gear and careless echo of voices came on at too quick a rhythm to be some careful farmer with a team, or parsimonious pack-men driving their mules. (Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion Ch. 1)

It’s not over-gritty – yet. Before the end it will go beyond gritty to grotesque, to appallingly realized unrealities, like Cazaril’s demon-pregnancy, but here the only signals are in the landscape. The natural fallacy. Bleakness in the meager surroundings foreshadows Cazaril’s own plight, penniless, dressed in rags, with crookedly healed fingers and a back stiffened from flogging lesions, creeping like a beggar toward his last hope of sanctuary, after a life of war, siege and the galleys that have left him only the knowledge of “how to prepare a dish of rats.”

I meant to end with a tour de force from the grand master of modern fantasy, who in one book can do all the shades of tone and voice from chatty children’s book to King James Version mythology, with epic and romance and comedy and tragedy in between. But I’ve traveled too often already in the realms of Tolkien, so I’ll stop here, with the grit under Cazaril’s sandals, only one of my particular favourites among fantasy’s more than fifty shades.

* * * * * 

Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia, and writes fantasy and SF set mostly in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some stories in Australian and US anthologies. Her latest short story, “At Sunset” appears in Luna Station Quarterly for September 2012. “The Honor of the Ferrocarril” is forthcoming in Gears and Levers 3 from Skywarrior Books, and “Spring in Geneva,” a novella riff on Frankenstein, is projected to appear from Aqueduct Press in August 2013.

That Table again - the Last Post for Round 2

Late, late, late muttered the White Rabbit ... So late I missed getting a post in for the Great Travelling Fantasy Guest Bloggers' Round, so late I haven't even managed to get this post up yet!

However...

 The Tabled topic for April  was"SF and Fantasy - we all know the difference, right?"And we have a range of fascinating and complex responses, over on Valjeanne Jeffers' blog. Enjoy!

 

 

 

The Abilities of Disability – at Least in Fantasy

My piece on this month on the Great Travelling Guest Blog Fantasy Table:
In real life, disability is exactly what it says. A lack. A limitation. A loss of possibilities open to others, whether to see, to hear, to walk, to run, or just to go a week without the black dog of depression dropping on your back to take the taste out of everything.
Atop the inner physical limitations, come external ones: doors too narrow for a wheelchair, handles too high to reach, prompts or safety signals only visible, or only audible. A flight of “simple” stairs. Even an escalator can be another infuriating check to someone with a “disability.”
Add on the invisible limits: as with race, class, and colour, even with heterosexuality, disability can leave a person either Othered or literally invisible. Even when visible, the unlucky Other has to run the gauntlet, if not of naming for the problem – right up or down to names like Hopalong Cassidy – then of the other egregious reactions, from pity to repulsion: less happily than Hopalong, the person vanishes behind the stereotype.
 In fantasy, as with race, class and colour etc., things could, even ought to be different. After all, fantasy deploys magic, doesn't it? So you have a hero or heroine with real disability? Blind, deaf, wheelchair limited? Eazy peazy. A bit of angst, a few struggles, and along comes a spell or a wizard, or the character her/himself discovers his/her magic, and presto chango! All normal. Disability gone. Right?
Wrong.Unless the struggles are prolonged and epic and the change comes only at the very end of the story, using magic to remove a disability wd. be a sellout. A hero or heroine normalized at the beginning of the tale wd. provide either no story, or a story with two apparent halves, one to get rid of the "problem," the other to deal with the "real problems?" But hey, dramatic economy wd. put the two together, wdn't they?
So there you are at the start of your epic again, and your hero has a disability and - you might as well deal with his/her problems as a disabled person from square one, however it stretches your imaginative capabilities.
Alas, a quick mental survey of Fantasy I Have Read indicates that most writers have either forgotten this invisible hangup, or chickened out on facing it. The list matches too well with the real-world social map: blind seers or crippled beggars appear quite often among minor or even lesser characters. I can recall only one high-to-mid-level blind character, the bard in Tanya Huff’s Four Quarters series, who is definitely and encouragingly NOT disabled by his blindness and indeed, in the first book, plays a crucial climactic role.
Again, in The Privilege of the Sword, Ellen Kushner offers a powerful cameo of her previous lead character, the great swordsman Richard St. Vier, now suffering from loss of all but peripheral vision, yet devising his own remedies, to remain a swordmaster unparalleled.
Barbara Hambly has two main male characters, wizards, whose magic is off-set by poor vision. One is Antryg Windrose, her most notable wizard, and perhaps my favourite among wizards, Gandalf included. Antryg’s myopia is definitely not “disabling” – though his ability to practice martial arts without his glasses does stretch my credibility – it is only one in a bouquet of anti-establishment attributes. Antryg comes from a dirt-poor tundra family, he learnt his arts from the series’ main villain, and he is more gloriously dotty than  T. H. White’s Merlin, even Antryg frequently considering himself to be outright mad.
There is no deaf, blind, and certainly no paraplegic or quadriplegic main character or protagonist in any fantasy I can think of (and don’t mention Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan, his universe is unequivocally SF.) Does this mean mainstream fantasy is as exclusive of the disabled as of non-WASP, middleclass, heterosexual protagonists?
If so, there is some justification, on narrative grounds. Fantasy is, after all, an adventure genre. Protagonists have to be equally fit for flight or fight, accustomed or at least able to confront dragons and scale castles at a blink. As Hambly’s Californian geek computer programmer ponders at one point in the Windrose series, after three days spent on the run, or the walk, in a pre-Industrial countryside, eating bread and cheese and sleeping in haystacks: “Thank God I don’t have allergies – that’s probably something selected against in the evolution of heroines.” (Silent Tower 179.) And so are blindness, deafness, and of course, any form of wheelchair limitation. Disabilities just make things too difficult for the writer, you see?
But should they? Try telling anyone that Long John Silver’s wooden leg limited Treasure Island in any way, adventures included. Come to that, does lameness limit Hopalong Cassidy? Sure, it would probably bring an appreciable change if Long John had needed to push a wheelchair over Hispaniola, but otherwise?
 In fact, for a writer, disability should present not a limit but a valuable asset, especially in building characters. And by this I don’t mean simply turning the “disabled” to an Other of terror and nightmare, as Long John Silver becomes. Without going completely Pollyanna, I suggest that disability in a main character will give a writer not just means to individualize him/her, but to strengthen that character morally, emotionally, and what matters most to a writer, charismatically.
 I can say this from experience: in the third Amberlight book, Source, I invented an imperial heir, known as a crown prince, with a “delicate stomach,” that could be upset without warning or rule by certain foods. (Art again anticipating nature, I later found one of my own friends actually has this problem.) At the time, this was just an individuating quirk in a mid-range character. But Therkon went on to become the male lead in the fourth, (unpublished) book, Dragonfly, and there I was charmed to find his stomach upsets did not merely show Men under Pressure Behaving Well, but could actually function as part of the plot. Not merely to hamper the action at crisis but to advance the emotional plot (love-story, okay?) and, in one case, to help hero and heroine out of a tight corner as well.
 Again, though I can’t recall a fantasy hero with a mental disability, (there are a few in SF), I managed to produce one who could have suffered from clinical depression. Also unpublished as yet, The Heart of the Fire was meant as my version of the super swordsman: silent, deadly, impregnable to all finer feelings. Unfortunately, by Chapter 2 his workname had become The Killer Caramel, since he had developed an incurable weakness for fostering orphan calves.
Later, more lethal character flaws surfaced: at life crises he would drink himself, not into mere alcoholism, but to a hair-trigger readiness to take offense, and his case, to kill someone. Or someones. Later, he would sink into life-threatening lethargies. Only after four books and buckets of wonderfully dramatic angst did his life even out to a point where these phases finally faded away.
Such “cures” are less available in reality. But as a writer, I have found disability, at least of a “minor” variety, a powerful and fertile trope. Ironically, at least to a writer, “disability” should be considered less a limitation than a valued basis on which to build a strong, dramatic, even charismatic hero/ine. And what writer would consider one of those a disability?