Black Gate

A brief and imprecise history of 20th century SF (with a bit of fantasy) into the 21st:

Back in the so-called Golden Age, it was about rocket ships and blasters and the possibility of an atomic bomb.
Possibilities became reality, and post World War II writers were obsessed with the prospect of nuclear annihilation. Along came the sixties and the New Wave and rather than celebrate technology, feared its dehumanizing potential; mind altering drugs were okay, though. Then it got kind of boring, Tolkien was rediscovered by middle school kids and the fat fantasies started to take off. The cyberpunks depicted technology as neither good nor bad, just something that humans could use for good or bad and was, like it or not, a fact of reality. Then along came things like slipstream, New Weird, New Space Opera (meanwhile, the old space opera and golden agers were light speeding about the galaxy all this while people were accusing the genre of becoming too literary for its britches), Interstitial Fiction and what have you.

So what’s next? Tales of economic doom and environmental disaster? (But wait, wasn’t J.G. Ballard doing that a long time ago?)

The Easter Bunny is a savage and unforgiving beast. This I always knew. I watched in dismay last week as he refused my daughter’s reasonable request for somehing practical and useful: the unyielding edict of the Bunny is that he brings only what is useless and frivolous. And chocolate, sometimes.

I thought I got off easy this year, as the Bunny brought me something I’d often thought about getting myself: the complete Spider-Man (complete at least through 2005). I haven’t been reading a lot of comics lately, but the Sam Raimi movies reminded me of how much I liked Spider-Man as a kid, and I’d often thought about having another look at them to see if they stood up to rereading.

The answer, of course, is that they do and they don’t. Some of the early stories creak audibly, even in PDF form, and there are definitely pacing problems. Page after page of costumed characters going THWAK! Ver-PLOCKKXKK! GLRRRT! at each other doesn’t really constitute storytelling, and as I boredly tapped on the “forward” button I felt some déjà vu from my school-age self, thinking these same thoughts forty-some years ago.

On the other hand, I thought then and think now that it’s pretty amusing when Spider-Man psychoanalyzes his opponents in-between punches. (“Why is it that everyone I fight is overflowing with neurotic hostility?”) And I like it that he has to use his brains to get out of most serious problems–it’s not all thwackery amd bonkery. And it’s just part of the Spider-Man set-up that he has this screwed-up personal life full of problems that superpowers can’t solve.

So: good and bad. But the worst shock that awaited me had nothing to do with the suspenseful plotting of (“Smilin'”) Stan Lee or Johnny (“Ring-a-Ding”) Romita. The horrifying details (with a possible Blood of Ambrose spoiler) beyond the jump.

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If pre-industrial secondary-world settings are the norm for adventure fantasy (and for much Black Gate fiction), I’d like to detour today into some quite different fantasylands. A comment by braak last week on the differences between sf and fantasy started me thinking about fantasy works in which the mysterious is made extremely quotidian. I am writing without the books at hand, so I hope that if my memory is faulty (it usually is) someone will correct me.

The first are a pair of books by Walter Jon Williams, a writer better known for his straight-up sf. These are Metropolitan and its sequel, City on Fire, both Nebula nominees and the latter a Hugo contender as well. They are set in a roofed-over world-city powered by a geomantic substance called plasm, which accumulates naturally in (or under) buildings. The main character is a young woman named Aiah, who gets a job with the public utility that oversees collection and use of plasm. She finds a huge unmapped pool of plasm which she does not report properly… and then becomes entangled with a shady politician/mage named Constantine, whose protege she becomes. The ambiguous emotional resonances of her relationship with Constantine never fully came alive for me, but there’s plenty of action and intrigue and mystery, and I loved the steampunk-y bureaucratization of magic and the truly urban feel. A lot of people read the books as sf, but I would class them as a sort of proto-New Weird, only without the slipstream element. Back when they came out I had a conversation with Walter in which he ran down the list of fantasy tropes he had intentionally incorporated into the books, and they are all there, but one thing I have always found interesting about his work is the way his characters, even or especially his protagonists, are always morally ambiguous in some way. Constantine may be the wise mage/teacher figure, but he is also the dark mage of the books, and Aiah makes some pretty dubious choices of her own. He had a third book planned out, but couldn’t sell it, and as he supports himself with his writing he moved on to other things. …

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I don’t know how people blog on a regular daily basis (well, actually I do, maybe that’s why I don’t read many blogs). I only have to do this once a week, and this week I really can’t think of anything to say that might be of interest to anyone, let alone me. So, here’s a link to someone who actually has something of interest to say about the concept of “The Other.”

Speaking of encountering the other in literal terms, as some efforts of NASA purport to do by sending Elvis Presley recordings out into the cosmos, I highly recommend Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco, which satirizes the whole notion of alien contact as encountering people from other star systems who are more or less just like us, but maybe with pointy ears.

Blood of Ambrose has been out for a while now and it’s starting to be reviewed, rather generously on the whole (a not-uncommon reception for first novels, so I’m trying not to be an egomaniac about it). The reviews somehow make the publication more real to Enge-the-reader (as opposed to Enge-the-writer; these guys aren’t usually on speaking terms). I was looking at the review in Romantic Times Book Review and found myself wondering whether I should trust the reviewer’s judgement and buy the book, when I realized that there were already a few copies of the thing scattered around the house. Presumably these surreal “oh, yeah, that’s me” events will taper off after a while.

I’ve been bracing myself for the inevitable Memo to Morlock: YOU SUCK!!!! sort of review. It’s axiomatic that snarling at critics just makes the writer look worse, so I’m trying to figure out in advance ways that I can cope. (We’ve all seen how these things go. The writer begins by politely justifying his use of colons on p. 58, and before long the whole business resembles an informal colonoscopy of a wholly different sort.) Coincidentally, I ran across a link to this essay on “How to Handle Criticism” (mentioned, with comments, by Jeremiah Tolbert here).

Both of these guys have good advice, but they don’t touch on a potential coping mechanism: pay close attention to how better writers have been slagged in the past; it lends a certain perspective. And, as it happens, I was recently reading an old issue of The New Yorker (1926 vintage) where I came across a dismissive review of a book that some people (including me) still sort of like and which, unlike many a book published in 1926 (or for that matter 2006) is still in print: Dunsany’s The Charwoman’s Shadow.

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