Black Gate

Today (the 22nd) marks the 103rd anniversary of Robert E. Howard’s birth.  Surely we all know his biography by now: born in the tiny Texas town of Peaster, the only child of Dr. and Mrs. Issac Howard, a voracious reader who grew into a formidable man — and a legendary writer.  Like Tolkien with epic fantasy, REH is credited with the creation of the modern sub-genre of heroic fantasy — sometimes called sword-and-sorcery.  His stories — action-adventure, sports, westerns, supernaturals, fantasy, and historical . . . well over a million words from his first sale in 1925 until his death in 1936 — have influenced a generation of writers.  Whether it was his intent or not, REH has achieved the sort of immortality the ancient Egyptians craved: a man was accounted immortal if his name outlived the ages.

And so, in praise of Robert E. Howard’s life and work, let us each share our three favorite tales.

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Once, before I gave up arguing with anyone, I was arguing with someone and I wrote, “Science fiction is just a form of fantasy with stricter (but slightly inconsistent) rules. Fantasy fiction takes place in a world which does not exist, operating on principles chosen by the author; science fiction takes place in a world which doesn’t exist but might, operating on the principles of science as we understand it (with some cheating allowed in the form of time travel, FTL drives, Amazing Mental Powers etc).”

They weren’t impressed, as far as I could tell. Anyway, now I’d alter those formulations a little:

Fantasy is a mode of storytelling where all or part of a story takes place in a world which permits events that are impossible.

Science fiction is a genre of fantasy in which impossible events require some sort of scientific account or rationalization.

Science fantasy is a genre of fantasy that uses elements from science and technology but in which some impossible events are explicitly not given an adequate scientific account or rationalization.

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By now, you probably have heard of the passing of Ricardo Montalbán and Patrick McGoohan. I was never into Fantasy Island, which struck me as the usual lame TV schtick. But Montalbán notably helped resurrect the Star Trek franchise with The Wrath of Khan, perhaps the best of all the Star Trek movies. This was all the more remarkable because it followed the disastrous muck of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which was, well, a lame amalgamation of the lame schtick that characterized much of the original television series.  (Please don’t send me any nasty notes; after the first season, which borrowed from actual science fiction stories and had some interest, everything just got a bit silly.  The only thing sillier is people who dress up like the characters and invest pseudo-philosophical religious significance in the whole pointy ear thing.)  Supposedly in real life, Montalbán was just as classy a guy as he seemed on the screen.  Here’s hoping they line Ricardo’s coffin with fine Corinthian leather, he more than deserves it.

Now, what was decidedly not the usual lame television dross was McGoohan’s contributions as the star and creative force of The Prisoner, which I noted in my inaugural post to this blog. (Of course, it’s coincidental that McGoohan died shortly thereafter, though this isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened to me. As a fledgling journalist during the height of the jogging craze in the late 1970s, I did a story about a man who had taken up marathon running after suffering a number of heart attacks. The day the story ran, the guy dropped dead of a massive coronary. And, yes, while running. Though I can only think of only one other better way of going.) Like the character of Number Six, McGoohan seemed to be someone who lived by his principles, regardless of what what was more popularly embraced by the masses, and there’s something we don’t seem to hear much of these days.  In addition to turning down the chance to play James Bond, McGoohan also refused to depict any kind of physical relationship on screen with a woman, evidently for moral reasons, which is kind of funny in light of The Prisoner’s seeming celebration of 1960’s countercultural values.  Also, according to one remembrance, McGoohan turned down the screen roles of Gandalf and Dumbledore! He would have been perfect for both.
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The Zeitgeist has been tying its ectoplasm in knots lately about urban fantasy. Here’s Lilith Saintcrow, underdefining the genre in a recent guest column at Pat’s Hotlist (with a followup at her own site):

Chicks kicking ass. Well, leather-clad chicks kicking ass. Leather-clad chicks kicking ass in an urban environment where some form of “magic” is part of the world. There. That’s about it.

But that’s not all there is to it.

Certainly not, but that really may be the central genre-defining element. I was thinking about this while reading Justina Robson’s excellent Keeping It Real recently. The book kept reminding me of sword-and-planet–with the gender polarities reversed.

I was reading buckets of sword-and-planet last year (some of which I reviewed in this space) and it constantly occurred to me that the aboutness of these books is concerned with male identity: they present idealized images of the lone male adventurer. For Edgar Rice Burroughs, the idealized image was that of an immortal Virginia gentleman. For Robert E. Howard, a man somewhere midway between the barbarism he considered man’s natural state and the aspirations of human intellect. For Otis Adelbert Kline, he’s a down-on-his-luck member of the American aristocracy. For some other three-initialled author the idealized image might be somewhat different, but they share some core similarities.

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Though I’ve understood since childhood that not everybody shared my love of the fantastic, it wasn’t until quite a ways into my adult years that I realized this must be in large part due to differences in how people’s imaginations operate. One spur to this realization was an on-air comment by a local arts-and-culture talk show host that she couldn’t get into a book where things happened that couldn’t in real life (yes, a statement we could unpack at length). At the time I was observing my young son discover stories. It was clear to me that he derived some of the greatest pleasure from precisely those things that never could happen in real life. Moreover, the stories he invented to tell me from two years onward (which I wrote down whenever I could) were gleefully fantastic: night being stolen, his father putting on breasts, the street sucking our house off its foundations. From watching his friends I also was able to see that not all kids do love the fantastic equally; he was close to one end of some bell curve. When the differences show up so early, they start to look like something innate.

The term mimesis is sometimes used to describe techniques of realistic fiction–as imitation, in other words, of something that already exists. All kinds of questions occur here with regard to how people, whether adults or small children, form judgments about what real life consists of and what constitutes an imitation of it, or a violation of its principles. Many of these principles are culturally constituted. Laura Bohannon’s much-anthologized article, “Shakespeare in the Bush,” describes how the Tiv rejected Hamlet as unacceptably unrealistic, on the basis of, among other things, the motivations of nearly every character. Others arise out of an individual’s experience. For those born with synaesthesia, there would be nothing at all unreal about descriptions of numbers possessing color, or (my own case) sounds having a tactile component.

According to Wikipedia, imagination is a “term is technically used in psychology for the process of reviving in the mind, percepts of objects formerly given in sense perception.” In this view, in other words, imagination is mimetic in the purest sense–it “revives in the mind” what one has already experienced. I suspect that the psychologists initially formulating this definition shared the type of imagination described by our talk-show host. For others like my son and myself, the mind is just as prone, or more so, to gravitate to things that one hasn’t experienced, that violate the expectations and principles of real life. The Calvin cartoon in which he has to fend off an attack by his breakfast oatmeal is iconic for me in this regard.

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