Category: Books and Reading

Banned Books Week 2013

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It’s going on right now.

To my knowledge, I’ve never had one of my books banned someplace.  I’ve also never been required reading anywhere on the K-12 level, which — based on the books which do make the American Library Association’s “most banned” list – appears to be one of the common ways to get on the book-banners’ radar.  Friends and colleagues of mine, though, have been banned, and referred to as “tools of Satan”, and had copies of their books burned in public . . . so, no, I don’t approve of book-banning one little bit.

My mother was a school librarian for years, and at one point she was tasked with writing up the guidelines for people who wanted the local school board to remove a book from the local system.  When she was done, I looked at what she had come up with and said to her, “You wanted to make this whole thing as difficult for them as possible, didn’t you?”

And she said, “Yes.”

I don’t believe there were any successful book challenges during her tenure.

(Librarians . . . bringing the awesome ever since somebody with money and an empty storeroom bought a bunch of clay tablets/papyrus scrolls/parchment codices and said to somebody else with a great deal less money and an organized mind, “Hey, you.  Watch over these for me, will you?”)

Tales from the Before Time: No Respect

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Believe it or not, there was a time not so long ago when science fiction/fantasy was a pariah genre — a scant half a step above Harlequin/Mills and Boone category romances and nurse novels, and at least a full rung below westerns.  (Mystery novels were at the top of the genre heap, since the intellectuals of the day would sometimes admit to reading them  for relaxation in between thinking important thoughts.)  I have my own memory from those days, of once being asked, by the instructor of an undergraduate creative writing course I was taking, why I was wasting my talent on writing science fiction.  He clearly thought that “because I like to read it” wasn’t sufficient reason or explanation.

For writers, and even for readers, whose formative literary experiences come from that era, it’s hard to forget having been on the receiving end of all that reflexive critical sneering, and hard to unlearn the resentment and disdain for the literary establishment that rose up in response.  We have to keep reminding ourselves to do periodic reality checks, and to try to appreciate on a gut level that the world is different now:  fantasy and science fiction are major storytelling modes for the visual media, and no longer just the stuff of kids’ television and cheesy drive-in movies; mainstream fiction feels no compunction about borrowing genre tropes for its own purposes; and serious grownups with serious jobs can admit to enjoying sf and fantasy (and even comics!) without fear of losing all their adult credibility.

And if sometimes we feel like the long-time patrons of a little neighborhood bistro that’s suddenly gotten a rave review in some foodie blog and is now full of all sorts of outsiders who don’t really appreciate the original funkiness of the joint . . . well, it’s ungracious to begrudge the old familiar place its newfound good fortune, just because it isn’t exactly the way it was when we found it all those years ago.

Look What the Postman Brought

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One of the small pleasures of a writer’s life is the arrival of author’s comp copies in the mail.  The new-book smell, the solid heft of the real and physical object, the gratifying appearance of one’s name and words in crisp black type . . . there’s nothing quite like it, and it never really gets old.

Today’s mail included our comp copies of the Thomas Easton and Judith K. Dial anthology Impossible Futures, which contains our short story, “According to the Rule.”  We think the anthology looks nifty-keen, especially the cover art:

(This has been a shameless plug.  Buy one; better still, buy a dozen.  They’re just the right thickness to shim up that short table leg that’s been driving you crazy for months now . . . .)

A Poet Passes

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Seamus Heaney has died.

He was Ireland’s first Nobel-laureate poet since W. B. Yeats, but I — being a medievalist at heart, rather than a modernist — remember him with gratitude for his translation of Beowulf, which did so much to bring new readers to a work I’ve always loved.

For every reader, I think, there are some books that aren’t just books, they’re part of the permanent furniture of the reader’s mind; Beowulf was one of those for me.  I liked the brightly colored world of Middle English poetry well enough, but the sepia monochrome of the northern thing, with its occasional smear of red and flash of gold, was the landscape that I really loved.  It always disappointed me when modern readers would see it only as a primitive tale of monster-fighting — almost as much as it would disappoint me when critics failed to appreciate the monster-fights as much as they should have.  (Those are some damn fine monster-fights.)  Heaney’s translation may not have been scrupulously accurate; no poetic translation is ever going to be, and only a silly person would use a poetic translation as a crib sheet.  But it did much to convey the mood and the feel of the work, and showed the reading public why Beowulf is a major work of world literature and not just an interesting historical artifact.

And for that, as I said, I am grateful.

A recording of Heaney reading from his translations at the opening of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists Conference, at University College Dublin.

Today’s Nifty Link

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Over at the blog Ex Urbe, there’s a long, chewy post (with pictures) about the historical development of the city of Rome from its first days as a cluster of huts on a hilltop by the Tiber.

Writers dealing with invented worlds (whether past or future), take note:  This is how a real city grows up.  Your invented cities need to have similar layers to them if you want them to feel real.  (This is also, I suspect, why planned cities can have such a flattened feel to them.  They haven’t had enough time in place yet to accumulate additional strata, so when you scratch the surface all you get is more surface.)

On Writing Forsoothly

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“Writing forsoothly” is the term we like to use around the house for all the different varieties of bad pseudo-archaic diction that infest modern fantasy — historical and created-world fantasy in particular.  J. R. R. Tolkien is undoubtedly to blame for a lot of it, because his characters do like their elevated language; what unobservant readers miss is the way that Tolkien modulates his characters’ dialogue, moving effortlessly from plain vernacular to almost-archaic high formal speech and back again, depending upon the situation and the company.  Strider the Ranger has a much commoner way of talking than Aragorn the Heir to the Throne of Gondor, but at the same time they’re both recognizably the same guy.

It’s probably unwise to play with writing in extreme forsoothly unless you can at least approach Tolkien’s level of skill and language-awareness.  It’s a lot harder to do than it looks, and the failure mode is dire.  But if you’re determined to give it a try — and nobody ever makes any progress in this game unless they regularly try things that they aren’t certain will work — there are a few things it will help to do first.

One:  Ask yourself, “Is this really the direction my writing talent lies in?” and answer it honestly.  If your interior Magic 8-Ball refuses to yield up anything more specific than “reply hazy; ask again later,” find a kind but honest friend and ask them.  Kind, because you don’t want your self-image pulled down and stomped upon with hobnailed boots; and honest, because you’re not asking them for sympathy, you’re asking them for the truth.

Two:  Prepare yourself.  Read genuine period or formal writing until it dribbles out of your ears.  If you start talking in Shakespearean or Regency English at the breakfast table, you’re probably ready.  And a good thing, too, because at that point your friends and family are either bored stiff with your project, or convinced that you’re going nuts.

Three: Stop researching and write.  Don’t worry about getting all the nuances down perfectly; you can always polish the heck out of the language in your second — or third or fourth or fifth — draft.

Four:  Go find that kind but honest friend again.  This time, ask them if the archaic or formal language in fact worked; and ask them, also, whether they think you got it right but took it too far.  As with so many other things in writing, a light hand is best.

(For an interesting example of archaic diction done well in an unexpected venue, check out the historical romance For My Lady’s Heart, by Laura Kinsale, now available again in e-book format after a long while out of print.)

To Be or Not To Be . . . Likeable

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Among the many arguments swirling around the internet this week (I swear it must be something in the air, like pollen) is the brouhaha stirred up by Annasue McCleave Wilson’s  interview in PW with novelist Claire Messud.

In the course of interviewing Messud about her latest book, The Woman Upstairs, Wilson observed that:

I wouldn’t want to be friends with [the protagonist], would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.

To which Messud responded:

For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble.†

Whereupon the literary blogoverse was plunged, as they say, into war. Panels of literary experts were assembled to discuss the relative literary merit of likeable and unlikeable characters; the interview question itself was more than once called out as sexist; and other authors and readers then took to the net in defense of likeable characters, and in opposition to the idea that reading for the company of such characters, like reading for the story, is a lower form of literary engagement.  (A few mostly-woman-shaped people also pointed out that women writers of both popular and literary fiction would do a far better job of combating sexism in literature and publishing if they had each others’ backs, rather than looking for opportunities to stick knives in them.)

What do I think?  Well:

I don’t subscribe to the castor oil theory of artistic merit. (“Yes, it tastes bad; but you should take it anyway, because it’s good for you.”)  I think that if you’re going to expect your readers to spend several hours in the company of a character, you damned well ought to give the reader something in return — maybe a likeable protagonist, maybe an interestingly unlikeable one; maybe an intricately convoluted plot; maybe exquisite prose and imagery; but by God, you’ve got to give them something.

†Actually, I’ve always thought that Hamlet would have been fun to hang out with, in his Wittenberg days. And I kind of liked Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49.

The Do-It-Yourself Method

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Yesterday I wrote briefly about the just-you-and-the-Norton-Anthology method of bringing yourself up to speed on the English or American literary canon.

There is not, alas, a Norton Anthology of Science Fiction that can serve a similar purpose. There’s The Norton Book of Science Fiction, but it’s much more limited in scope, containing only American and Canadian short fiction from 1960 to 1990 (the anthology came out in 1993.)

John Klima, in his Tor.com essay The Ten Most Influential Science Fiction & Fantasy Anthologies/Anthology Series, provides a list of books which, taken all together, can give you a sense of what was considered important or groundbreaking in the field at different times.  The downside is that you’ll need to buy or borrow a stack of books instead of just one.  (I know, I know . . . the thought makes you weep hot tears.)

But if what you’re looking for is a single Big Fat Volume that you can read from cover to cover in lieu of a full-dress classroom experience, then you might want to give this anthology a look:  Sense of Wonder, edited by Leigh Ronald Grossman.  It covers science fiction from the beginning of the twentieth century up to the present, and includes essays as well as fiction.  (Full disclosure:  I have an essay in this anthology, and my husband/coauthor and I have a short story in it as well.)

Wheel Comma Avoiding the Reinvention of

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If you’re going to work in a genre, you need to know the history of the genre — what’s already been done, what the average reader’s expectations are, what the assumed knowledge base of your readership is.

This is one of the few places in the writing game where English majors actually do have an edge — they’ll have been force-marched through a lot of this already, and for mainstream writing, either literary or popular, that’ll just about do it.  If you aren’t an English major and don’t want to be one, you can do it yourself with the aid of a halfway good public library, or with the internet and a copy of an English Lit or American Lit survey syllabus.  (Or you could just buy a used edition of the Norton Anthology of English (or American) Literature, read it cover to cover over the course of a year or so, and form your own opinions.)

If you’re working in one of the genres, such as science fiction, there aren’t going to be as many handy guideposts.

But don’t worry.  I’m here to help you.

Ten Books to Help Get You up to Speed with Science Fiction

(Some of these books are every bit as absorbing today as they were when they were written; others are, as they say, “of historical interest.”  Which ones are which — your call.  Mileage may vary; contents may have settled during shipping; and not all souvenir plates increase in value.)

1. Mary Shelley — Frankenstein (1818).  Don’t be fooled into thinking this one is horror.  It deals with what would eventually become some of the big science-fictional themes — the creation of artificial life, the relationship between an artificial creation and its maker, and the permeable boundary between research and obsession.  Also, it extrapolates its fictional science from then-contemporary interests, such as Arctic exploration and electrical experimentation.

2. H. G. Wells — The War of the Worlds (1898).  A groundbreaking early entry in the invasion-from-outer-space subgenre.  It spawned the classic 1938 Orson Welles radio broadcast and two direct film adaptations, one by George Pal in 1953 and one by Stephen Spielberg in 2007, and is the ancestor of a host of other works.

3. E. E. “Doc” Smith — Gray Lensman.  (Magazine serial publication, 1939; collected in book form, 1951) The great-grandaddy of all space opera.  The book is very much “of its time” as far as social attitudes go, and its prose quality is at best serviceable.  (At worst, it’s deep purple.)  On the other hand, its slam-bang action and resolute lack of psychological complexity can provide one’s inner twelve-year-old with a great deal of fun, and a more critical reader can always play a rousing game of spot-the-familiar-trope.

4. Robert Heinlein — Starship Troopers (1959.) The novel, not the movie, which has almost nothing in common with the book except the title and a few characters with the same names.  Just about every military sf novel since this one has either been influenced by it, or is in dialogue (sometimes, in vigorous argument) with it.  The Forever War, Ender’s Game, Old Man’s War, not to mention all the Star Trek tv shows, movies, and tie-in novels — all of them are in the lineage.  While you’re at it, read another two or three books by Heinlein — I’d pick The Puppet Masters and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress myself — because his work established so much of what you could think of as the consensus science-fictional future.  Avoid his more vocal fans; and remind yourself from time to time that these books were written by a guy who was born in 1907.

5.  Isaac Asimov — with Heinlein, one of the central figures of mid-century hard sf.  His Foundation trilogy (1951-1953)and the stories collected as I, Robot (1950) are probably the most influential of his works.  (The “three laws of robotics” form part of the intellectual furniture of modern computer science.)  You should also read his short story, “Nightfall” (1941).

6. Samuel R. Delany — When science fiction’s New Wave hit the US in the 1960’s, the young Delany was one of its rock stars.  Try Babel-17 (1966) or The Einstein Intersection (1967); if you like those, work your way up to Dhalgren (1975) and the later works.  (I bounced hard off of Dhalgren, but many people love it.)

7. Ursula K. LeGuin — The Left Hand of Darkness  (1969.) Because it marks the point where science fiction and Second Wave feminism collided and made readers’ heads explode.  Her other big novel from that time period, The Dispossessed, has in my opinion worn somewhat better over the intervening decades, but The Left Hand of Darkness has probably been the more influential of the two.  If you like LeGuin’s work, you might go on to read Joanna Russ and Sherri S. Tepper.

8. James Tiptree, Jr — Her Smoke Rose up Forever (1990.) A posthumous omnibus collection of short stories by an influential writer, famous for, among other things, actually being Alice Sheldon.  (She wasn’t the first or the only woman in sf field to hide or at least partially obscure her gender — C. L. Moore, Andre Norton, and C. J Cherryh all spring to mind — but she remains noteworthy for the thoroughness of her cover and the later embarrassment of certain critics who had previously declared her writing “ineluctably masculine.”) The James Tiptree, Jr. , Literary Award is named in her honor.  Notable short stories (included in the collection): “Houston, Houston, Do You Read” (1976), “The Screwfly Solution” (1977)

9.  C. J. Cherryh — Pride of Chanur (1981)  You can’t have sf without aliens, and C. J. Cherryh gives some of the best aliens in the business.  Pride of Chanur is shorter than a lot of her work, and more accessible; the novel’s felinoid aliens (yes, the title is a pun) are different enough to be believably not-human, but not so far away from oxygen-breathing mammalian norms as to be completely inscrutable.

10.  William Gibson — Neuromancer (1984) Science fiction meets the computer age, and the cyberpunk genre is born.  If you like the flavor, read Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson and work your way outward from there; also watch Bladerunner on DVD.

Another Brief Note on Names

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The other day, I talked about portentous weather.  Which led, in the course of time, to thinking about portentous names — by which I mean the sort of name that tells the reader right up front what he or she is supposed to think about a character.

The Victorians loved this sort of thing.  Dickens positively reveled in it, especially for his secondary characters, who rejoiced in names like Thomas Gradgrind and Wackford Squeers; Gilbert and Sullivan parodied it in Ruddigore, when the trusty servant Adam Goodheart, upon his employer’s assumption of the role of Bad Baronet, changes his name to Gideon Crawle.

These days, most writers go for subtler effects — with at least one prominent exception.  I refer, of course, to J. K. Rowling, who didn’t hesitate to give her secondary characters names like Malfoy and Crouch and Shacklebolt, and her readers loved her for it.