Tom Pollock's Blog, page 7

Eastertom

In just over 24 hours I shall descend upon Eastercon like a bald man in search of a cheesburger and geeky conversation.*

Over the weekend I’ll be sticking my oar in in the following ways:

Saturday 6pm -Room 12- I’ll be reading a scene of rail-related weirdness and derring do from The City’s Son. – It’ll be tough, but I’m firmly committed to being even more overdramatic than usual. They’ll probably be able to hear me in Gatwick.

Sunday 1pm -Room 12-’Youth in SF’ I’m moderating a chat on including such luminaries as Tricia Sullivan (Lightborn), Aliette De Bodard (Servant of the Underworld), Janet Edwards (Earth Girl) and Farah Mendelsohn (Rhetorics of Fantasy). Should be interesting.

Monday 1pm -Room 12- ‘Dystopian YA’ Cory Doctorow (Little Brother) Amanda Rutter (Strange Chemistry) Emma Newman (Ten Years Later) and me (Hi!) will be chatting about teenagers, political oppression, and almost certainly, The Hunger Games.

Otherwise you will mostly be able to find me mooching around the halls of the Radisson, looking like I’ve had too little sleep. Come say hey.

*Exactly like this, in fact.

Politics Fiction and Empathy

So I was meandering through the interwebz the other day looking for something interesting to watch and I ran across this:

Committed Fiction

In the (admittedly long) discussion, Miéville and Schaefer ask whether fiction and politics make good bedfellows, whether politics and propaganda must always be separate or opposed and if not then, ‘What is it we’re doing, when we write (politically) committed fiction?’

Miéville concludes that the political intervention enacted by stories is a kind of ‘flag-waving’, such that ‘you can’t read them without knowing they come from a certain place in the world,’ and that this sort of statement of intent is what’s upsetting those readers who accuse political fiction of being didactic or propagandist: people who say that art and propaganda must always be opposed.

I’d be inclined to approach the question slightly differently, rather than ask ‘what is it we’re doing when we write politically committed fiction’ I’d ask ‘What is it we’re doing when we write fiction’ simpliciter. How does it work? And once we understand that, what kind of political impact does that mode of operation lend itself to?

Max Schaefer nails this later on in the video when he starts talking about empathy, because if there’s one key mechanism that keeps stories ticking that’s it – the emotional, and imaginative identification with character. It’s one of the things stories are for, and it leads people to approach them in a very different frame of mind to that in which they approach political debate.

Readers come to stories wanting to see a different point of view, they arrive at the text open, vulnerable, willing to be persuaded.

When I hear complaints that this or that book was ‘too political’ or ‘didactic’ I think it’s that vulnerability talking, especially if the text was encountered young. The best example of this I can think of is Narnia – How many times have you met someone who’ll declare in outraged, almost betrayed tones that The Last Battle was christian propaganda dressed up as a fairy tale, a christ in lion’s clothing? A lot of readers are very suspicious of novels that they perceive as being subordinated to a political dogma, and become unwilling to trust the story enough to sink themselves into it enough for it to work as fiction, for the empathy to take effect.

But that doesn’t mean that a story can’t work as fiction and be political. Why? Because empathy itself can be, and is a political act, a crucial one. Especially when so many political problems result from a failure to empathise. How many of those who’ve spoken out against changing the law on gay marriage, for example, might take a different line if they’d read a book that made them empathise with those they’re discriminating against? If a story had made them understand how it felt to be told that your and your partner’s loving union didn’t deserve the same name as another couples, just because of your genders.

I have no idea, and I have no idea how many people slanted that way on the political spectrum would read such a book in the first place, and how many of them would open up enough for it to do any good. But here’s the point, that act of imaginative outreach, that empathy-epidemiology isn’t at odds with the story’s role as fiction, it’s integral to it. And it is, at the same time, an intensely political act

Living The Gone Away Dream

WARNING: This post contains MASSIVE spoilers for Nick Harkaway’s The Gone Away World. I mean huge. If you haven’t read The Gone Away World, stop reading this and start reading the book instead. Go. Go now. It’s wonderful. You’ll love it. Trust me.

Everyone who’s still here read it? Yes? *Mr Burns voice* Eeeexcellent.

Now, prompted by my (probably irritatingly evangelical) urgings, @alittlebriton read The Gone Away World earlier this month, and when she was about two thirds of the way through she texted me to say: ‘Huh. It’s the Fight Club thing.’ Apparently this is a pretty common reaction to TGAW’s big twist, which I find really interesting because having gone away and thought about it, I’ve concluded the following:

It’s the exact opposite of the Fight Club thing.

Now, it’s possible that I’ve reached this conclusion because I’m a contrary, ornery jackass who needs to disagree with everyone all the time. But I don’t think so. I am of course, a contrary ornery jackass, but I think in this particular case. I’m on to something. And what’s more I think the way Palahniuk and Harkaway’s twists are exact negatives of one another is really quite interesting.

Let me expound:

At first look, the similarity between the two stories is obvious – they both turn on twists in which a major character turns out to have been a product of one of the other characters’ imaginations, indeed, more than that – a projection of recessive aspects of that character’s personality. Both books are written so that for most of them you think there are two people, when in fact there is only one: two sides of one mind. One body, and one name.

But that’s where the similarities end. The differences however, are far more significant.

In Fight Club (or so a conventional reading goes): Tyler Durden is an empowerment fantasy, the mental projection of a man trapped and divested of his metaphorical testicles by modern living . Tyler says to the relatable, slightly pathetic unnamed narrator dude ‘I look how you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not.’ Tyler has the looks, dynamism and charisma of a superhero, but he doesn’t exist.

In The Gone Away World, it is the unnamed narrator who is the projection. Moreover, and this is the key bit, he’s the normal one: ‘a repository of dull virtues in time of trouble, someone to carry the can, speak truth and own up in class.’ The character we empathize and identify with is (or at least starts out (1) as ) a dream. Gonzo Lubitsch, with his biceps of steel, jaw of chiseled granite and combat skills of Steven-Segal-decapitating-deadliness is (in the world of the novel) entirely real. Where Fight Club puts us in world of quotidian frustration and gives us fantasy of empowerment, TGAW puts us in a world that has gone bananas and gives us a fantasy of… what? Normality? Not exactly. More like decency.

If Gonzo and TGAW’s narrator were top trump cards, the narrator would beat Gonzo in quite a few areas (those dull virtues mentioned earlier). Still, there’s only one field where the Narrator seems more superhuman than the man who dreamed him up, and that’s the field of being ‘A terribly nice chap.’ After all, Gonzo (who is kind of his brother, father and best friend rolled into one) shoots him in the chest and he lets it go with an apology.

Wow.

Now, I’m not saying this isn’t credible in the context of the book. I think it’s pretty well handled and it doesn’t feel like a cop out. But it is an act of extraordinary magnanimity, a refusal to hold a grudge and meet violence with violence, a refusal to react mechanistically in a novel which pointedly marks out the hazards of doing just that.

Harkaway gives this superhuman faculty of empathy and humanity to a character who starts out life as a projection, as ‘aphasia with legs’, which might seem almost cynical until you remember who’s projection it is. But Gonzo is James Bond on steroids. He is like totally 100% the Man (TM) and the narrator is what he fantasizes about, what he needs, what he feels he’s missing. Gonzo’s a character we’ve seen eulogized and mythologized over and over in stories, and by making ‘The Dull Virtues’ the stuff of his dreams Harkaway lends them a kind of hyperglamour. The dull virtues become super legendary, mythic squared. It’s a pretty badass way to celebrate being nice.

And why not? After all, Humbert Pestle can play Gonzo like a tin whistle. He sees how the machinery of the hero’s mind works, and applies just the right action to get the desired equal and opposite reaction. It’s the narrator, the relatable, fallable dull narrator who Pestle can’t manipulate. He is free in all the ways that Gonzo’s not. Free to be nice in even the shittiest of circumstances. To act like a human being even when the world wants you to act like an eight-ball clocked by the white at just the right angle to sink into the right middle pocket (2). That’s what heroes dream of. You want an empowerment fantasy? Try that.

(1) Actually, this is pretty interesting because in reifying his fantasy projection Harkaway could be thought to be expressing a much more radical (and given what I’ve just said the fantasy characteristics are, a more optimistic) sentiment than Palahniuk, who leaves his Superhuman as imaginary.

(2) Ooh, I just had a thought: TGAW starts with a game of pool, coincidence? Well, almost certainly, yes. But it’s fun to speculate.

The 50:50 Movement

Pretty well everyone in the SFF community will be aware of this by now, but in case you missed it, here’s a quick run down:

There’s been a frankly disturbing lack of gender parity on panels at cons, awareness of which came to a head at this month’s SFX weekender, when out of a total of about 70 panel spots, only 15 were filled by women. Not that there were actually 15 women featured on the panels, as several occupied more than one panel chair. In fact, I think there were 9 women and more than 30 men. China Miéville stepped down from a panel that had no women in it at all.

On the back of this, Paul Cornell announced on his blog yesterday that if he showed up at a con and found himself on a panel with anything less than a 50:50 gender split, he would recuse himself, and try to find the most appropriately qualified woman in the room to replace him.

So there’s obviously a problem here. Paul, Lizzie Barrett and any number of other people have pointed out the obvious: there are more than enough smart, talented, knowledgeable women for panels at conventions to be gender balanced, so, until someone comes up with a very convincing reason otherwise, we can assume they should be.

If it were me (and it’s about to be, I’m scheduled on a couple of panels each at Eastercon and Alt Fiction). I’d take a slightly different approach. I, like Paul, intend to step back from any panels which I find aren’t 50:50 in terms of gender, but I’m going to ask about gender balance before the event.  The con organizers should be able to tell me who else is on the panel  and if need be, between us we can  approach a woman (and there are many, for almost any given topic I can yammer about) who’ll be as good or better than I will. As far as I can tell, this keeps the simplicity and gender balance achieved by Paul’s approach and helps put the best possible people behind the microphone,  while ducking the following problems: 

a) As Maureen Kincaid Speller pointed out on Twitter, the best qualified woman in the room might not want to be on the panel. Indeed she might, for any number of reasons have already refused the seat. She’ll be under pressure though, and probably embarrassed to say no on the spot (I would be) and that’ll just be awkward.

b) As China Miéville has said: even if the best qualified woman in the room does want to be on the panel, right off the bat she looks like an also ran, second choice, a sort of fastest runner up gifted her opportunity to speak by my extraordinary largess.  It doesn’t matter if the woman in question is the smartest, most erudite, biggest expert in the room.  She may well be.  It’s still going to look (and maybe feel) like I’m riding to her rescue on a stallion of my own enlightened manliness. Which, obviously, is not what we’re going for.

c) Changing the lineup mid-panel’s going to screw the panel up, and eat at least ten minutes of the hour’s running time with awkward ‘is there a woman in the house’ toing and froing. While we ought to be arguing over dialectical materialism, or Dr Who, or most likely dialectical materialism in Dr Who.

There are probably problems with the above approach too, if anyone wants to suggest a revision to it: comment. I’d be grateful.

Whatever solution we wind up with though, it looks like there’s a movement brewing over this, an honest to goodness, manifesto-toting grass-roots thing.  And I’m on board.

 

Awards: What Are They Good For?

 

This morning on Twitter, during a chat prompted by this Ursula Le Guin critique of awards, I said:

@tomhpollockTom Pollock


. @ pornokitsch   @ ClarkeAward @ thefingersofgod  FWIW My view is that awards are useful as the start of a conversation, not the end of one.

Which I take to be true, as far as it goes, but I think it might be useful to unpack it a bit.


There are two related claims here, one which is fairly uncontroversial and one which might raise more eyebrows.

The first claim is just this: When you hand out a literary award that has sufficient cultural traction that anyone gives a crap, people will talk. Some people will agree with your choice of winner, many won’t, some may well call you a jackass but during the ensuing argument, most of them will give at least some reason why. This leads to discussion of the merits and qualities of books (or any other kind of art) which I take to be a good thing,  for at least 5 reasons:

1) It’s fun.

 2) It leads us to articulate the reasons we love a certain story, which can lead us to a better understanding of the things we value in stories in general.

3) In some circumstances it can lead to examination of the politics of a genre or literary establishment (as with the question of the number of women on the Clarke shortlist)

4) Through hearing other people advocate for books we haven’t read we can find new books to love.

5) It’s fun.

However, all of the above are merits of conversation about books. The value of the award is as a tinderbox to spark that conversation.  The question remains, are awards good at this? Or would we better off finding some other way to stimulate debate?

My intuition is that awards are very good at sparking debate

They are good at it, and this is the second, more controversial claim, because they are, fundamentally absurd.

Books aren’t compiled to any universal design aspiration, there aren’t any objective criteria to judge stories by (that’s why some awards, like the Kitschies, specify their own), and yet we persist in saying that The City and The City, say or Midnight’s Children, or heaven help us The Finkler Question is the best book of the year in this or that category.

These claims are so porous, arguable, and so valiantly hubristic, that readers up and down the land put aside their macaroni, WIP, husband, or whatever it was they happened to be doing and leap into the saddle of their social media accounts crying:

“Finkler? Rubbish! What about… and by the way, not to harp on about this, why are all the shortlistees white 40 year old men from Hampstead (again)?” 

I’m not at all sure that Le Guin’s proposed cornucopia of more narrowly conceived awards would garner the same level of involvement from the community. You might as well say that dormice are the pinnacle of the animal kingdom as claim that so-and-so is the best book of all time, and yet that’s exactly what the beeb did with LOTR, and for about a month everyone had an opinion. The more ludicrously sweeping the claim made by an award, the more people it will sweep into the row about how and why it’s wrong. Which, as I’ve tried to show, is a good thing.

P.S. The infinitely witty and wonderful Adam Roberts has a post on awards that’s much more insightful than this one:

A quick and dirty defence of genre (with a small g)

Just a swift one, I promise.

I’ve watched and read a couple of interviews with people  recently decrying genre boundaries. ‘Why do we need to label things?’ they say, ‘Why must we mark things with the smoking brand of sci-fi, fantasy, litfic or crime? All it does is divide us and lead to squabbling, and I just want everyone to get along and CAN EVERYBODY PLEASE STOP YELLING!’

I understand this  point of view, I’m sympathetic, I really am. Sometimes I feel like the kid in the backseat of the car who’s parents are shouting, but I still think the idea of abolishing genre boundaries is tragically misguided.

People who hold this view tend to point to the huge numbers of books that don’t fit cleanly into a genre, or perhaps fall into several: Cloud Atlas, say, or IQ84 or Perdido St. Station. But so what? The fact that a heuristic doesn’t carve the world into precise segments doesn’t make it vacuous.

Genre labels, if nothing else, are a ranging shot, a beginning. A way to have a stab at describing a story in  world strapped for time. Even if that was all they were, then they’d be useful, but they also bring people together, they form communities and help people find friends (as anyone who went to the excellent Steampunk night at Blackwells on thursday will be able to attest). The correlary of this seems to be that those communities become atomized and then snipe at each other, but is this a neccessary product of the genre taxonomy? I don’t think so.

The problem isn’t the division, it’s the hierarchy. It’s the patently invalid inference that because say, litfic and SF are different, that one must therefore be better.

The problem, isn’t the division between ‘SF’ and ‘Fantasy’, or even ‘genre’ and ‘mainstream’ Those categories are fuzzy, cross-cutting and subjective, true but not nearly so much as ‘good’ and ‘bad’.

 

The robot-snoopy-magic dance of imminent World Domination T.M.

*Clears throat for big announcement*

*Ushers everyone in close*

*Yells at top of voice so everyone is a little bit deafened*

The Skyscraper Throne trilogy is being published in the U.S, by Flux!

 

I am, in case you cannot tell, rather excited. There was an auction, and a long wait, and it was all terribly dramatic, but I was utterly blown away by Flux’s enthusiasm, their vision and taste in YA books and how much Brian Farrey-Latz, my now American editor *got* what I was trying to do.

So, readers of America, I am here for all your London-based Urban Fantasy needs.