Warren Rochelle's Blog - Posts Tagged "carole-mcdonnell"

Welcome to the January 2013 edition of the Great Fantasy Traveling Roundtable Blog.

This month we are pondering that mainstay of fantasy literature, the Hero and the Quest, with thoughts on unlikely heroes, what a hero is and isn’t, how authors such as Frank Herbert have used this trope, and how we interpreted said Hero and said Quest in our own fiction. Enjoy and reactions and responses are always welcome!


Warren Rochelle
My Heroes
According to the online version of the American Heritage Dictionary, a hero is:
1. In mythology and legend, a man, often of divine ancestry, who is endowed with great courage and strength, celebrated for his bold exploits, and favored by the gods.

2. A person noted for feats of courage or nobility of purpose, especially one who has risked or sacrificed his or her life: soldiers and nurses who were heroes in an unpopular war.

3. A person noted for special achievement in a particular field: the heroes of medicine.

4. The principal male character in novel, poem, or dramatic presentation.

The word hero should no longer be regarded as restricted to men in the sense [of] “a person noted for courageous action,” though heroine is always restricted to women.

Two of my favorites heroes are Russell and Jeff, who happen to be two of the four protagonists in my novels, Harvest of Changelings (Golden Gryphon Press, 2007, paperback, 2008) and The Called (Golden Gryphon Press, 2010). They are rather unlikely heroes. Briefly, Russell and Jeff are the Fire and Water of their tetrad, their found family. Tetrads are the basic social unit of Faerie, and come in all kinds of gender combinations; their tetrad has three boys and one girl, Hazel, the Earth. Malachi, the other boy, is the Air.
Often there are couples within the tetrad with the couple as primary bond, the tetrad as secondary. Except for Malachi, who is half-fairy, these children are the descendants of changelings left in our universe centuries ago. In Harvest, their long-dormant fairy DNA is awakened and they became to change, and become more magical, acquiring such abilities as flight and glamour-casting. At first they are dealing with these changes alone, then they find each other, and of course, they find themselves fighting Evil, human and otherwise, and on a Quest.

When the reader first meets Russell Avery White he is 12 and in the 5th grade, having had to repeat two grades earlier. The school system has classified him as learning disabled. Red-haired, he has grass-green eyes and is living with his father and pregnant stepmother. His birthmother ran away years ago, taking with her his little brother, and leaving Russell to be verbally and physically abused by his dad. As he tells the other three: “I don’t remember him ever not doing it, now that I think about it” (Harvest 214). Russell’s body and soul are scarred and wounded. He is angry and thinks of himself as dark. He has learned to keep secrets, including his growing awareness of his attraction to boys. He dreams of centaurs—dreams sent by Faerie.

Jeffrey Arthur Gates is 10, a 5th grader and in Russell’s class. He has dark brown hair and sea-green eyes, and suffered “aggravated and protracted sexual abuse” from age 6 to 10. His father was the perpetrator; his mother abandoned him. Like Russell, he has been classified learning disabled. Like Russell he is scarred; Jeff’s are invisible. Now in foster care and fearing returning to his father, Jeff dreams of dragons.

With Malachi, Hazel, they will fight demons, monsters, evil people, as, with the help of Malachi’s father, they search for the gate to Faerie.

In The Called, the two boys, now lovers, are older, emotionally and mentally in their late teens, their physical aging slowed from their years in Faerie. They are called home to Earth to reunite their tetrad, to fight in another war against evil. And they are still haunted by their pasts: the abuse, the pain, and the anger. They are still Outsiders.

They carry no swords or spears. Their births seem ordinary, their rearing, with the abuse, less so. They are called to adventure, to the Quest—but it is more that adventure and the Quest finds them. Helpers, animal and wise souls, yes, and as they encounter evil and discover how to deal with it, they are tried and tested. There are monsters, yes, but the evil is often interior—the shadows of their pasts, and the damaged adults who sort of care for them. Russell’s anger is not easy for Jeff to deal with, no matter how much he comes to love him. Russell’s darkness, his disbelief in his own goodness, is not easy for anyone to deal with. For Jeff, the Somebody in the dark who came for him is still there, a ghost that is always present. They make awful mistakes again and again.

And Russell and Jeff are two of my favorite heroes.

Why?

From pain comes strength? Yes, sometimes, but not always. Pain and anger can break someone; it breaks Russell; Jeff surrenders to it. Perhaps part of the answer can be found in these words by Jane Bowles*: “Your first pain, you carry it with you like a lodestone in your breast because all tenderness will come from there. You must carry it through your whole life but you must not circle around it.” That pain can bring tenderness, is, I would argue, the real source of the strength of my problem children. If they had not suffered and survived and grown from this, Jeff and Russell would have found their
Quest-given tasks far more difficult. As Fred Chappell said in the blurb he wrote for Harvest: “Perhaps a new beatitude is discovered: the broken shall mend the earth.”

But aren’t heroes the characters with whom the reader is to identify? The Hero is the archetype of the Self, right? The Hero and the Quest is the archetypal journey of coming of age (yes, I know it is problematic in its privileging of the public and the masculine)? But are there people who have not been hurt? We all were children once. And surely Heroes are Outsiders. I do identify with these two boys who grow into young men: they are telling part of my own story; they represent parts of my Self.

The potential for heroism is present in all of us. The pain and hurt that comes to us can break us, but it also has the potential for ultimately bringing us greater strength of character and a truer sense of Self.

The Quest is an ongoing journey.

*Jane Bowles, 1917 – 1973, is an American writer and playwright considered by Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and John Ashbery to be “one of the finest and most underrated writers of American fiction.” She has “long had an underground reputation as one of the truly original writers of this century.”

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Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, “The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. His short story, “The Boy on McGee Street,” was just published in Queer Fish 2 (Pink Narcissus Press, 2012).

http://warrenrochelle.com

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Deborah Ross
Hero on a Quest
Once upon a time, a hero represented a very particular character, an archetype if you will. He was invariably male, either a youth or in the prime of life, neither a child nor infirm with age; he was physically powerful and if not morally irreproachable, clearly a “good guy.” It was fine for him to have a flaw or two, so long as it did not interfere with his ability to accomplish great deeds and conquer mighty foes. Occasionally, the flaw would prove his downfall, as in the case of Achilles. The tradition that stretches from Odysseus, Beowulf, and Gilgamesh continued through King Arthur and his knights, to Tarzan, the superheroes of comic books, Doc Savage, and James Bond. True, there were occasional female-heroes in this mold, but mostly they imitated the men, only with brass bikinis, improbably high heels, and better fashion sense. What made them heroic, men and women alike, were physical prowess, lofty ideals, and larger-than-life goals. In other words, they were Worthy of The Noble Quest.

The Quest was always something beyond the reach of the ordinary person. No average plowman or shop-keeper could aspire to find the Grail or slay the dragon. The Quest usually involved what Joseph Campbell called “the hero’s journey,” meaning that the central character must leave behind the familiar, venture into unknown terrain fraught with danger, and then return home. Sometimes he is changed by his experience, sometimes he merely puts himself back on the shelf until the next plea for help.

The function of this kind of Hero is not only as a Campbellian agent – that is, to guide the reader through a transformative journey – but as an agen instrument of Order and of The Triumph of Good. (Notice how the topic lends itself to unnecessary capitalization?) The world has veered toward Chaos, if not actually toppled headlong into the abyss, and the task of the Hero is to set things right. (I suspect that one modern incarnation of the classical Hero is the detective, who restores right social order by solving puzzles that lead to the apprehension of wrong-doers.) One of the implications here is that only those of noble birth, etc., and who are favored by the gods have the capacity to do great deeds. Aforementioned nobles undoubtedly relished stories that demonstrated them how superior they were and didn’t mind the peasantry being reminded of it. This propagated a hierarchical power structure in the same way as did the notion of the divine right of kings. It reinforced the notion that those with political power were inherently better (stronger, luckier, sexier, purer of thought, beloved by the gods) than those who had none.

In an interesting twist, if one wants to praise someone in the People’s Republic of China (or the old Soviet Union), one says he or she is a Hero of the Revolution.

One of the most interesting changes to come about with the development of the novel was the notion that stories about people of ordinary stature and circumstances could be interesting, and that such characters, however humble, might behave in admirable ways. Of course, “ordinary” is in the eye of the beholder and people who were illiterate due to poverty had little opportunity to see themselves in novel characters. Jane Austen wrote about her own fairly comfortable social class, people whose circumstances were familiar to her. One might consider her a Hero of the Novelistic Revolution.

With the shift to non-Heroic characters came the concept of a protagonist – one who acts — rather than a hero, and the blurring of lines between a person who may do extraordinary deeds but is not of the aristocratic, chosen-by-God mode. We might encounter protagonists-of-noble-birth who are heroic in spite of rather than because of their dynastic sociopolitical standing. Eventually, we also had anti-heroes, reluctant heroes, villains-with-hearts-of-gold, and women heroes (to distinguish them from the typical wailing wilting damsel-in-distress heroines). We had central characters who represented ordinary people who rise to extraordinary heights, people that could be you or me. We stopped calling them heroes for a while, but now often do so again.

Sometimes ordinary-people heroes go on quests, sometimes they get dragged kicking and protesting into adventures, and sometimes they simply ache with dreams until they wake up one day and take a small step toward realizing those dreams. In some ways, they carry us with them on their quest more readily because they are more like us. But with the specificity of character comes a different sort of distance from the reader. Many of the old-style Heroes were pretty bland as characters; they didn’t need quirks and failings and insecurities because they were, after all, Heroes. We now appreciate that in the hands of a skillful storyteller, superficial similarities (gender, race, socioeconomic status, nationality) fade in importance compared to the common human experience and aspirations. A sympathetic character trumps one who is “like me.” Added to that is the value placed on diversity and “exoticism” (which is another way of saying, the romantic aspect of strange lands and people).

I wonder if the shift from superhuman/aristocratic Hero to ordinary person acting in heroic ways also reflects a shift in empowerment. Once upon a time, not only could the people who comprised the vast majority of the work force hope to achieve anything notable, they dared not draw attention to themselves. I think now of the people who jump into rivers to save children, or land disabled airplanes under near-impossible circumstances, or place themselves between gunmen and the students in their care (or talk those same gunmen into laying down their weapons). These are true heroes and what they accomplish – often without planning or forethought – may not fulfill the classical definition of a quest. But to the children who are still alive and to everyone who hears these stories and gets tears in their eyes, these spontaneous acts of courage shine all the brighter.

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Deborah J. Ross began writing professionally in 1982 as Deborah Wheeler with Jaydium and Northlight and short stories in Asimov’s, F & SF, Realms Of FantasyY and Star Wars: Tales From Jabba’s Palace. Now under her birth name, Ross, she is continuing the” Darkover” series of the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, as well as original work, including the fantasy trilogy The Seven-Petaled Shield, forthcoming from DAW. She is a member of Book View Cafe. She’s lived in France, worked for a cardiologist, studied Hebrew, yoga and kung fu, plays classical piano, loves horses, and is active in the local Jewish and Quaker communities.

http://deborahjross.blogspot.com/

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Chris Howard
Frank Herbert and the Quest without a Hero
Like any writer I have many stylistic influences spanning classical, romantic, and contemporary authors from Homer, Hugo, and Dostoyevsky to Terry Pratchett, Richard Morgan, and Caitlín Kiernan. But if I had to pick an author whose work influenced me to the core–and at a young age–it would be Frank Herbert. For a particular work it would be Dune.

One of the things Dune taught me was that the protagonist of the story can go on the quest, suffer at the hands of an oppressor, struggle through and around the obstacles enemies lay out for him, and he can even complete the quest and emerge victorious. And he can do all of this without being a hero.

Or maybe Paul Atreides was just a different sort of hero, one I had never come across before. With Dune Frank Herbert made me look at heroes and their quests in a different way.

I think many fantasy writers would automatically stick Tolkien on the list, but although I have read the Lord of the Rings dozens of times—and The Silmarillion at least ten—I can’t say Tolkien affected me the same way—or as deeply. Certainly Tolkien showed me the wonder of maps, invented languages, an excitingly deep world, and how a big story—Lord of the Rings—can become just one insignificant fragment of a far longer and more complicated story. These are the things I still love about The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. I probably would have said Tolkien was my favorite author when I was a teenager, but when I hit twenty or so, after four or five readings about Paul Atreides and all the craziness he gets up to with the fremen, I sort of felt like I had graduated from The Lord of the Rings to Dune.

Dune was also exotic, non-traditional. It had European roots without being entirely European, and that drew me in. There was also a very familiar parallel with Paul’s move from Caladan with its broad oceans to the faraway and very different desert world of Arrakis. I had moved around a lot and I thought that gave me insight into Paul’s plight—typical teenager. I was living in Japan, going to high school, when I first read Dune, but I had also lived just outside Paris, and in Idar-Oberstein, Germany. I had been up and down South Korea, Italy, and through East Germany by train to Berlin. I had lived on both American coasts, and I was living in Silicon Valley. In my seventeen- or eighteen- year-old mind there was definitely something that connected the changes shaking up Paul’s life and the constant moving around when I was young.

If the unfamiliar and striking backdrop of Arrakis lured me in first, that was quickly followed by Herbert’s push and play with the concept of a hero. Paul Atreides wasn’t your typical innocent kid with a quest thrust on him, with everything he counted on pulled from under his feet. He wasn’t just a pawn struggling to find his way in a universe of space-folding guild navigators and galactic-scale trade and political manipulation. He was a significant piece in the Bene Gesserit breeding program. He took the terrible risk—basically gambling everything—to gain god-like powers, which he used to gather and train thousands of fanatical soldiers. He defeated the emperor’s forces, killing armies and princes, the whole time maneuvering himself onto the throne, marrying the emperor’s daughter purely for political gain. And he ends the last chapter with less control over his life than when the story started.

Paul was a man playing god,” said Herbert.

That idea hooked me at the first reading—that the hero could take on powers that he would not be able to control, that he could end up flawed so deeply he wasn’t a hero anymore.

None of the main characters in The Lord of the Rings had an evolution like Paul Atreides. Frodo, Aragorn, and the others were heroes in the traditional sense. Even if Frodo didn’t come home whole, he came back a true hero, having lost a finger and defeated the greatest evil of his age. Paul Atreides didn’t come home from his long journey a hero. He was a messiah at the head of a monster of religious ferocity he created. Anything that monster did would be done in his name, and he didn’t really control it.

Then he unleashed it on the universe.

In Herbert’s own words, “The bottom line of the Dune trilogy is: beware of heroes. Much better to rely on your own judgment, and your own mistakes.”

Paul had the quest. He made the journey. He was victorious. There’s a clear apotheosis stage—literally. Paul Atreides is deified. He passes through the stages of the hero’s journey. He just isn’t a hero. Not in the usual sense.

I haven’t read Dune in ten or fifteen years, but I can still feel the affect that book and the following two—Dune Messiah and Children of Dune —had on me. I loved the culture clashing in Dune, the court intrigue, the power and plans of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, the dinner parties with codes and signals and conversations being carried on at several levels at the same time—and only understood by a few. But it was the protagonist wielding power beyond his control that pulled me back into that universe again and again. It was Paul-Muad’Dib driving his followers, his family, the guilds, the Bene Gesserits, and the entire empire toward a doom he could not escape.

That is what has stuck with me to this day. Paul became a model for the kinds of heroes I love to write about. Heroes who barely have the will or personal strength to hold onto the reigns of some monstrous power that is part of them, or that they have created, and sometimes they end up being consumed by it.

In the introduction to his short story collection Eye, Frank Herbert elaborates on this theme. “Dune was aimed at this whole idea of the infallible leader because my view of history says that mistakes made by a leader (or made in a leader’s name) are amplified by the numbers who follow without question. That’s how 900 people wound up in Guyana drinking poison Kool-Aid…”

I don’t know if it’s unusual but I love the idea of a protagonist who isn’t heroic in the traditional sense. I love an unsympathetic hero–or a hero who starts the story without a shared compassion or a strong connection with the reader, and grows to become sympathetic.

On the other hand I also love a good straightforward heroic quest, where the hero is good and right and fights evil. I know Herbert has been taken as being an active opponent of the hero’s journey, the monomyth, the whole Campbell thousand-faced hero, and in the Dune trilogy it looks that way–even with Paul’s progress through the story closely following many of the steps Campbell describes. It’s what Paul ends up becoming that disrupts the structure.

I don’t think Herbert’s in the same camp with David Brin, a confirmed and outspoken adversary of the hero’s journey and the Campbellian insistence that components of the myths are common among most cultures worldwide (Read Brin’s fun and interesting “Star Wars” despots vs. “Star Trek” populists: http://www.salon.com/1999/06/15/brin_...).

Herbert was more of an explorer of conflict and ideas, using his heroes to work through serious flaws in leadership, on the environment and very long range planning, the power of linguistics, and down to challenging what’s considered normal and abnormal. In the Dune books at least, he did not focus on science or future technology. His explorations frequently brought him up against traditional character structure and reader acceptance, but I don’t consider him an enemy of the popular heroic journey and story structure. I consider him a thoughtful science fiction writer who wanted to push the boundaries of the genre in ways that focused on awareness of important issues—ecology, flaws in perception—the infallible leader, and on the dangers of accepting without examination long-held beliefs and cultural fixtures—the hero who completes the quest and returns home a better or at least a more evolved person.

Herbert said, “We tend to tie ourselves down to limited choices. We say, ‘Well, the only answer is….’ or, ‘If you would just. . . .’ Whatever follows these two statements narrows the choices right there. It gets the vision right down close to the ground so that you don’t see anything happening outside. Humans tend not to see over a long range. Now we are required, in these generations, to have a longer range view of what we inflict on the world around us. This is where, I think, science fiction is helping. I don’t think that the mere writing of such a book as Brave New World or 1984 prevents those things which are portrayed in those books from happening. But I do think they alert us to that possibility and make that possibility less likely. They make us aware that we may be going in that direction.”

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Chris Howard is a creative guy with a pen and a paint brush, author of Seaborn (Juno Books) and half a shelf-full of other books. His short stories have appeared in a bunch of zines, latest is “Lost Dogs and Fireplace Archeology” in Fantasy Magazine. In 2007, his story “Hammers and Snails” was a Robert A. Heinlein Centennial Short Fiction Contest winner. He writes and illustrates the comic, Saltwater Witch. His ink work and digital illos have appeared in Shimmer, BuzzyMag, various RPGs, and on the pages of other books, blogs, and places. Last year he painted a 9 x 12 foot Steampunk Map of New York for a cafe in Brooklyn. Find out everything at http://www.SaltwaterWitch.com

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Carole McDonnell
The hero in stasis
Perhaps it’s the Judeo-Christian virtue of endurance. Perhaps it’s my own life. But my characters have never really wanted to go on a quest. Often they end up on one. Because the genre requires it, because the story requires it. But, for the most part, the quests of my heroes is the quest of a happy home. Home, as they have found it, is a burden to them and they generally want to leave home in order to find or create a better home — far from their own tribe or clan.

I haven’t read up on the hero’s quest in a while so I’m not sure why the hero generally leaves home. Maybe I’ve fallen into the requirements of the trope without knowing. After all, the hero’s quest is such a part of our culture. The prince must depart his land, fight dragons or ogres, marry a woman from another clan, then bring her happily back.

I will say, though, that my characters tend to be heroes of endurance. Whether women or men, they are mired in stasis — usually by well-meaning parents or clans. It is as if, my muses are not so much concerned with the quest but with exploring the brief imprisonment the hero endures. In most fantasy books, the hero has his little encounter with the jail/dungeon/dark prison then he moves on. In my books, the enduring of the dungeon is the entire novel. The hero or heroine is mired in waiting. This waiting involves hope, remorse, existential questions to God, deadly routine, and the determination to hold on to their personality, character, and/or will.

Thus, the quest is to leave the state of being mired and to return to a normalcy the typical hero takes for granted. To merely have a happy home. Perhaps that is why many of my characters are princesses or wives in unhappy marriages or damaged children of kings and warriors. Men and the healthy have a certain freedom that women, the sickly, and young children do not.

There are moments when they seem to have an apparent chance to leave their dungeon —whether by suicide, flight, or concession to the powers that be— but their love for another character, hope in Divine Intervention or a possible change of mind of their prisoner, or a holding on to their will prevents them from leaving. I suspect this kind of hero stasis can only be understand by those readers who, like The Godfather’s Don Corleone, are constantly being reeled back in —-in spite of every attempt to flee the clan.

So my new soon-to-be published novel, The Constant Tower, is not for happy middle class kids who want an adventure in order to grow, but for kids in bad neighborhoods, poor kids who wish to run away from home, kids who don’t want to be in clans, women married into hateful clans. Folks who just want to be happy with the normal. The Christian worldview of battling for a regular life in the face of suffering, sickness, and the fact of others controlling our lives changes the Hero Quest trope a bit — because of that Christian virtue of Endurance.

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Carole McDonnell is a writer of ethnic fiction, speculative fiction, and Christian fiction. Her works have appeared in many anthologies and at various online sites. Her first novel, Wind Follower, was published by Wildside Books. Her forthcoming novel is called The Constant Tower. http://carolemcdonnell.blogspot.com/



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Sylvia Kelso
When is a Quest Not a Quest?
“Quest: a journey towards a goal,” quoth the ubiquitous Wikipedia. “Hero” – one of the few words that descends but doesn’t translate from Classical Greek or Latin. “Heros” in Greek means exactly the same as “hero” in English. Whatever that may be.

The usefully succinct Wikipedia once again:
hero (male) and heroine (female) came to refer to characters who, in the face of danger and adversity or from a position of weakness, display courage and the will for self sacrifice—that is, heroism—for some greater good of all humanity.

Key-words, courage, philanthropism, self-sacrifice. Says something about the general run of homo sap. sap. that these last two qualities should be the benchmark for heroism, doesn’t it?

Outside literature, heroes don’t need a quest. They can fulfill the Wikipedia criteria without warning or training, on a surf beach, at a bushfire, beside a stormdrain. Inside littracha, everybody from Joseph Campbell up or down has produced endless lists of quest and hero variations. “’Bilbo went to find a treasure, there and back again, but I go to lose one, and not return’” (FOTR, 3 75), says Frodo to Gandalf, in That Book, citing just two possibilities. And every type of hero or quest studs modern fantasy, with the exception of one. The true anti-hero doesn’t appear.

An anti-hero usually loosely means, a hero who doesn’t look heroic: he’s unwilling, or ugly, or cowardly, or immoral. But in fact, a real anti-hero wd. be the opposite of a hero: when the crunch came, instead of fronting up like all the unlikely heroes, from Sam to Beau Mains, the anti-hero would turn and run. And without a hero who can meet the Wikipedia criteria, the whole “heroic” storyline would collapse.

But suppose that even if the hero/es behave/s in good heroic fashion, the Quest turns out not to be a Quest? Does that violate the spirit of both terms?

Quests are trickier than heroes. In littracha, you need them because without a goal, the hero/es’ wanderings wd. degenerate into a picaresque novel, a train of adventures with no coherent end. With a goal, there’s motivation for the story arc. There’s a visible reason to keep going somewhere.

I have done my share of starting-a-book-with-a-Quest, but for some reason the Black Gang, aka the creative part of the writing crew, chose to end my second Amberlight book at the start of a Quest. It was complete with dream omens, the gathering of a company, and an unknown but apparently desperately urgent goal. Deprived of their magic McGuffin at the end of Book 1, the main cast has been struggling to maintain their small Utopian community of Iskarda in the turbulent vacuum left by the fall of the city of Amberlight. At the end of book two, the McGuffin is suddenly restored – but now it’s no longer the basis of their former power, it’s a literal “seed,” powerless to protect even itself.

Only one solution, says their chief strategist. Get it out of here: the River knows it exists, the power-wolves will be after it. So make a public, heavily visible departure in hopes this small indefensible community will be ignored. Take it where? The answer is already supplied, perhaps by the McGuffin itself: the dreams’ goal, the image of a place their own lore identifies as the River’s source.

The novel turned out a two-fold story, told in letters between the chief Quester and her community’s newest foreign member, back in Iskarda. The Quest section proceeded in the proper mode: obstacles, traumas, self-discoveries and harrowing interpersonal conflicts, moments of wrenching loss, exotic new environments, uncovered secrets, and a tail of cataclysmic events, as the McGuffin’s presence disrupted or outright overthrew River states. All kosher by Quest list-rules. The “heroes” also met helpers as well as enemies, they transcended their ordinary selves, their actions were meant to benefit many others. Eventually, they reached the place that had been their goal.

The Questers had come to assume they would find not merely the River’s Source, but a solution to all the problems of a world by then convulsed in war, threatening to destroy Iskarda along with the precious new states founded in the McGuffin’s wake. Whatever it was, the goal would give them the means to save everything.

And it didn’t happen.

The Questers dealt, in some sort, with the shock. They picked themselves up, realized that their world was still dissolving behind them and set off, empty-handed, to fight and if necessary fall with their friends. As they very nearly did. In a sense, the return journey was far more heroic, in the general sense, than the one toward the goal, because unlike Frodo with his treasure lost, the return journey offered only probable immolation for its end.

Of course, this being a fantasy novel, the eucatastrophe that Tolkien first articulated eventually intervened. But the question remains: if the hero goes through the motions of the Quest, heroic and otherwise, but reaches his goal to find it – well, not what he expected – can that journey still be called a quest?

And if it isn’t a quest, though the journey remains motivated, is the goal-seeker a hero, in the most rigid and basic sense? That is, can you have a quest without a hero, even if you do have heroes without a quest?

The Black Gang consider the whole Q and A a critical trivium. Who cares, they say, if it’s “really” a quest or the heroes were “really” heroes? if it looks like a hero, and talks like a hero, and acts like a hero, it’s a hero, isn’t it? And if it looks like a Quest, and sounds like a Quest, and produces a story like a Quest, who cares? Nobody said the goal had to be more than a purpose or an aim. If you want a list-maker’s version, they sniff, then puff out your chest and claim it as the ultimate variation – the Quest that looked like a Quest and sounded like a Quest, and wasn’t technically a Quest at all.

And on this one, I think I’ll let the Black Gang have the final word.

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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.

Travelling Fantasy Blog Tour: Disabilities and Fantasy
This month our travelling fantasy blog tour deals with disabilities in fantasy.

Disabilities in Fantasy

As we know, disabilities come in all kinds. Mental, physical, emotional.

One of the problem with creating/defining a disabled character is deciding how restricted one's character will be. A character who is utterly unable to move will not be available for derring-do unless his mental/dream world is being explored or unless he lives in a world that allows for his mind and heart are able to affect people and situations. This kind of utterly disabled character could be asleep, in a coma, in cryo-sleep or even dead. However, for the most part, a disabled character generally is able to move around.

There are also disabled characters who are not really disabled. This often happens in sci-fi where technology is so advanced that a disability hardly matters anymore. There are also stories where disabilities are considered romantic -- the odd eye-patch, a blind character such as Star Trek's Geordie who seems more hip than challenged (It's the future, after all!) or a character with an attractive limp. Consider the movie, Avatar, where for all intents and purposes, the hero's disability doesn't matter to the extent that it should, and his being helped by a female of a lower/different class feels a bit like Mr Rochester being helped by Jane Eyre. Whatever the effect, the film's creators can preserve their cake and eat it simultaneously. In some fantasies, as in the Drakengard video games, often some exchange is made between the disabled and some other entity which renders the disability useful in some ways. For instance, Caim gives up his voice to bond with his Dragon. It's a loss but it's also a gain.

There is also the situation where a disability is not seen -- by the disabled character, by fellow characters, by the audience, or by the reader as a disability. This can be good, bad, idealized, or romanticized. In the original Star Trek, the Vulcan Spock (and many of the so-called advanced cultures) are idealized because of their inability to feel emotions. There is also a disability which is a kind of living death, a character who has some kind of debilitating ever-worsening illness which makes them continually at war with their bodies, for instance, "The Incredible Shrinking Man."

Whether mentally, intellectually, or physically disabled, a character with a disability is also affected spiritually. They are "marked" in some way that makes them view the world a little differently than others in their world.

Because of my health issues and my son's, I have become very interested in abilities, afflictions, infirmities, and disabilities. I try to see how being disabled can be strengthening to the human soul and how it opens the eyes to situations the able-bodied do not see. I don't think one has had to suffer in order to have one's eyes open to the world but I think it helps. For me, a disabled hero (with a true disability) is an excellent character. I will admit that I often write about disabled characters as a kind of catharsis, or to show the able-bodied how difficult life is for the sickly. But I also write about disabled characters because they populate the world I live in -- especially with the rise of autism in the US population) and they rarely show up as heroes in fantasies. . I feel we ought to show the lives of all kinds of people that disabled people and the "unseen" can see themselves in literature, and that others can see them as well.

In my short story, Lingua Franca, the inhabitants of a far-off planet do not consider themselves disabled. In my novel, Wind Follower, the main character is so ashamed of his disability (epilepsy) that all around him pretend not to see it in order to spare him from shame. There is also an autistic learning disabled character who -- although she is almost an old woman-- is a playmate of the main character. In my novel, Constant Tower, disabled boys born in the Wheel Clan are either killed or made into "living ghosts" called studiers, who are made to feel grateful because they have been spared death. -- Carole McDonnell

Difference and Ability in F&SF
Chris Howard

I spent some time thinking about this month's roundtable topic, disability in fantasy (and SF), building a list of characters I can remember from the literature as well characters in my own books that come to the story with physical or mental differences--differences that force the character down less certain paths or put boundaries on action, sometimes painful boundaries.

I started out with the idea this was going to be difficult, that disabilities in fantasy and science fiction were poorly represented, but hoping that was just my own limited scope of reading, and the lack of differently-abled characters was not pervasive. I think, it turns out, I was partially correct, that there aren’t many examples, but there are significant ones—just from the books I have read. Many more from books I have yet to read.

Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan, born with significant physical impairments, came immediately to mind. (Bujold has characters with disabilities in several books). Michael Moorcock’s Elric was another, although it’s been decades since I’ve read the stories. William Gibson has several stories containing characters with prostheses, or characters who are wheelchair-bound. There are also a few Tim Powers books, but the one that comes to mind is The Stress of Her Regard, in which the main character, a physician, lives with physical and mental disabilities, as well as other characters with prosthetic eyes and missing limbs. (I did google around after writing this post, and found the "Decloaking Disability Bibliography", a fairly long list of authors with books that attempt "to explore the intersection of disability and technology within texts from the genres of science fiction and the literature of the fantastic." It’s an impressive list, and just shows that I need to find more time to read. Link below).

As my kids have moved through the teenage years I’ve read more and more YA lit, and my impression is there’s some real focus on disabilities there, characters with paralysis, speech limitations, bulimia, dyslexia, Tourette’s syndrome. Most of these aren’t in fantasy or SF books, but in stories that focus on characters struggling to cope with differences in a social context, characters breaking free of walls they have put up themselves, or that society has constructed to hold them back.

This month’s topic also made me look critically at my own work. I do have a few characters with limited or missing senses and limbs (Emandes in Sea Throne, Corina in Seaborn who has lost the complete control of her body), but not that many. I have written several books with main characters who struggle continuously against mental limitations or differences—Kassandra in Saltwater Witch­, Thea in Dryad. Internal struggles form the basis for my favorite kinds of characters. This month’s topic put the focus on an important missing element in my reading as well as my writing.

Finally, there’s an interesting recent example—a recent read for me anyway—in Joe Abercrombie’s character Monzcarro “Monza” Murcatto, who begins the first page of Best Served Cold as the ruthlessly competent fighter and captain of Styria’s most feared mercenaries, but by the end of chapter one she’s mercilessly killed and thrown off the battlements into a ravine. Duke Orzo, who commands and orchestrates the whole thing, can wipe his hands and go about his continued political maneuvering with his greatest military threat broken and lying in her own blood below his castle, dead.

Almost.

Monza, it turns out, is only mostly dead. She’s picked up—almost in pieces—by a mysterious stranger and nursed back to a damaged but still breathing version of her old self. As you can guess by the book’s title, she sets out to destroy everyone involved in her “death”. I won’t be giving anything away in saying I think she does okay.

Decloaking Disability Bibliography
http://www.panix.com/~kestrell/Decloa...

Chris Howard is a creative guy with a pen and a paint brush, author of Seaborn (Juno Books), Salvage (Masque/Prime, 2013), and a shelf-full of other books. His short stories have appeared in a bunch of zines, latest is “Lost Dogs and Fireplace Archeology” in Fantasy Magazine. His story “Hammers and Snails” was a Robert A. Heinlein Centennial Short Fiction Contest winner. He writes and illustrates the comic, Saltwater Witch. His ink work and digital illos have appeared in Shimmer, BuzzyMag, various RPGs, and on the pages and covers of books, blogs, and other interesting places. Last year he painted a 9 x 12 foot Steampunk Map of New York for a cafe in Brooklyn. Find out everything at http://www.SaltwaterWitch.com


The Abilities of Disability – at Least in Fantasy

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 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 Hopaling 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. Alas, a quick mental survey of Fantasy I Have Read 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 even 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?

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 consider 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 suffer 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, kill someone. Or someones. Later, he would sink into life-threatening lethargy. 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?

Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia. She writes fantasy and SF set 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 short stories in Australian and US anthologies.

This was first posted at:
http://carolemcdonnell.blogspot.com/2...

Disabilities and the Fantastic

In Irish mythology, only a king without imperfections could sit on the throne. According to The Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Folklore (Checkmark Books, 2004) “a king could only claim the goddess of the land as his wife—and through her, sovereignty of the country—if he were whole and without blemish. If injured he was forced to abdicate the throne” (49). So it was for Nuada, who lost his hand or arm in battle, and had it replaced with a silver one (thus becoming Nuada of the Silver Hand). This injury meant he had to give up his leadership of the Tuatha Dé Danaan.1 Only when he is given a magical prosthesis is he allowed to return to the throne. His silver hand is not enough; it has to be covered by a special skin to appear normal (362).

Nuada lost his throne, thanks to prejudice against the disabled. That he did is indicative of attitudes which suggest that those who are not “whole” are no longer capable, and that their disability somehow hurts others, in this case, the people he ruled. Nuada was still able to fight with his silver appendage, but that wasn’t good enough. He wasn’t whole; he couldn’t be king.

Tiny Tim, in A Christmas Carol, is another disabled character in fantastic literature. His lonely crutches in the corner, carefully preserved, are a familiar image to many readers. If he is not treated, death is his future—and it is only through the repentance of Scrooge’s evil ways that Tiny Tim can receive the medical care he needs. Unlike Nuada, who experiences prejudice, Tim is accepted and loved by his family. But it could be argued that Dickens is exhibiting prejudice against the disabled, as he isn’t a fully realized character; rather he is a symbol of repentance and redemption, an image of pity, and not a little boy who happens to have a disability.

So, what is going on with the presentations of the disabled, of disabilities in the fantastic? Surely, there are characters who are more than just victims of prejudice and pathetic imagery? My (admittedly unscientific and indeed casual) research for this blog took me to The Passive Voice website (http://www.thepassivevoice.com/09/201...), and “10 Inspirational Disabled Characters from Sci-Fi and Fantasy.” Tyrion Lannister, from Game of Thrones, immediately got my attention. Yes, as Passive Guy says, “The insults thrown at Tyrion Lannister in both the books and the TV show Game Of Thrones are, sadly, a reflection of what many dwarfs in our real world have to go through (although Tyrion, being a contrary sort, takes one of these insults – “Imp” – and makes it his own).” But he is presented as a “fantastic character first, a dwarf second . . .Of course his size is an important part of what makes him Tyrion, but he’s so much more: clever, sardonic, scheming, sexy and vulnerable. Tyrion is not “just” a dwarf: he’s one of the best characters on TV right now.”

Another character I found intriguing was Toothless, from How to Train Your Dragon. He has a damaged tail, which dooms him to being flightless, and thus, probably to death. Young Viking Hiccup, however, makes him a prosthetic tail (perhaps the “first dragon-limb-replacement”) and he takes wing. According to Passive Guy, Toothless is a “great example to set kids who might never have thought about what it means to need a prosthesis.”

All right, so far, so good. Better, yes? Well, not according to one commentator, Steve Godden, who felt the entire list bordered patronizing, and borderline insensitive. Must the disabled be inspirational and good examples? Can’t they just be a dragon who needs a tail, or a prince who happens to be a dwarf? Godden found this list to be “[offputting sic] as characters are being defined by their disabilities, and therefore not as whole people. He notes that the “One of the things the athletes at the para-Olympics requested is that the term ‘inspiring’ should not be used.” As he further notes, “Characters are only ‘inspiring’ if they stoically accept their disability.” However, another commentator, Mira, brings up the question of intent. Why are these characters in the story at all? It is important, she argues, that the disabled be seen, and not hidden away or (often literally) looked over. According to Mira, “. . . sometimes those in a targeted community sometimes get too caught up in political correctness, and forget intent. Sensitivity is important, for sure, but sometimes there are positive things happening even if they are not 100% sensitive.”

True and Godden agrees: “Representation is important, I just wish we had reached a place where there was no need to represent because it was no longer an issue.” But we will always have the disabled, whether due to genetics or an accident or disease. The place we need to reach is one in which there is no longer discrimination against the disabled, and they are considered whole people, and not a disability, or inspiring examples.

In the interest of full disclosure (and shameless self-promotion) two of my main characters in Harvest of Changelings and The Called, Russell and Jeff have learning disabilities, a legacy from their fairy heritage. I remember being quite aware of not making them an image but fully realized people who are, among a long list of adjectives, also learning disabled. I hope I succeeded; that was my intent.

So, there has been progress from Nuada’s disguised hand and Tiny Tim’s presentation as an image and not a boy who is disabled. A bad-ass prince, a dragon, and two boys who help save the world. They are real, visible, and certainly not stoic and they are certainly more than their disability: they are heroes.

Let’s keep on until we reach the place where the disabled are just there, among the rest of us—all part of the human rainbow—including disabled villains.

Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, "The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. His short fiction has appeared in such journals and publications as Icarus, Collective Fallout, North Carolina Literary Review, and The Silver Gryphon. His story, “The Boy on McGee Street,” was recently published in Queer Fish 2.

1 The Tuatha Dé Danann ("peoples of the goddess Danu), are a race of people in Irish mythology. In the invasions tradition, they are the fifth group to settle Ireland. The Tuatha Dé Danann are thought to derive from the pre-Christian deities of Ireland. When the surviving stories were written, Ireland had been Christian for centuries, and the Tuatha Dé were represented as mortal kings, queens and heroes of the distant past; however there are many clues to their former divine status. A poem in the Book of Leinster lists many of them, but ends "Although [the author] enumerates them, he does not worship them." Goibniu, Creidhne and Luchta are referred to as Trí Dé Dána ("three gods of craftsmanship"), and the Dagda’s name is interpreted in medieval texts as "the good god." Even after they are displaced as the rulers of Ireland, characters such as Lugh, the Morrígan, Aengus and Manannán mac Lir appear in stories set centuries later, showing all the signs of immortality (Wikipedia contributors. "Tuatha Dé Danann." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 22 Feb. 2013. Web. 19 Mar. 2013).

Science Fiction and Fantasy: We All Know the Difference, Right?


From the Great Traveling Round Table of Fantasy Bloggers


The Difference Between SF and Fantasy by Carole McDonnell

Science Fiction generally falls into two categories: hard or soft. Depending on the reader’s belief in his scientific aptitude or love of hardware technologies, the SF reader can explore technological, biological, physiological sciences that are emerging, yet to come,probably possible and hypothethical.

The Fantasy writer and reader roam larger territories. Sometimes those territories are far afield from modern known science, sometimes they are mental realms, sometimes spiritual arenas,sometimes past historical and cultural lands.

The science fiction reader joins the SF writer in seeing how far the mind of man can go, often learning about and wading deep into some emerging science the author or the reader share. And often the sf reader will have the sf novel in one hand, a scientific tome in the other, and be sitting in front of the computer: facts are checkable.

The fantasy reader may read her fantasy book alongside another book — if that other book deals with some lore of some lost culture. But the fantasy reader is just as happy to venture into the unknown world of the author’s mind. All the reader asks, however, is that the novelist be true to the world he or she has created.

Whether the fantasy novel deals with European vampires, Native America shapeshifters, East Indian demi-gods,European elves, alternate realities, far off planets, Earth analogues, living,dead, non-living, eternal, godly, helpless, miniscule, mammalian, oceanic,elemental, speaking, non-speaking, beings within this galaxy, across galaxies,planetary, geophysical, or plainly and simply human, the fantasy world the author creates must be held up to the collective scrutiny of its readers.

Fantasy is game-playing of a higher order of imagination than Science fiction because the SF author is bound by and exploring the ramification of rules he has found. But the fantasy author is examining larger premise of creativity. This is not to say that science fiction is not creative but while Science fiction aims to discover and seek out rules and aspects of life that is already there, the fantasy writer aims to create whole new worlds or culture, emotion, and spirit.

No wonder, then, that fantasy comes in so many forms with so many varieties. Fantasy is extreme.

Carole McDonnell holds a BA degree in Literature from SUNY Purchase and has spent most of her years surrounded by things literary. Her writings appear in various anthologies including “So Long Been Dreaming: Post-colonialism in science fiction,” edited by Nalo Hopkinson and published by Arsenal Pulp Press; Fantastic Visions III” anthology published by Fantasist Enterprises; “Jigsaw Nation” published by Spyre publications,“Griots: A Sword and Soul anthology,” edited by Milton Davis and Charles Saunders, “Life Spices from Seasoned Sistahs: writings by mature women of color,” “Fantastic Stories of the Imagination” edited by Warren Lapine and published by Wilder Publications.

Her novel, Wind Follower was published by Wildside Books. Her other works include My Life as an Onion, Seeds of Bible Study: How NOT to Study the Bible. Her collection of short stories,Spirit Fruit: Collected Speculative Fiction, is available on kindle and also at Lulu.com Her second novel, The Constant Tower, will be published in 2013

SciFi Versus Fantasy? by Theresa Crater

I teach a class in writing speculative fiction and often use Orson Scott Card’s book How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. In it he classifies Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series as science fiction rather than fantasy. Why? Because they take place on other planets. I say hooey.

Why? Because they have all the earmarks of fantasy. Early fantasy reinvented the medieval, mostly European. It brings Celtic, Norse and Germanic mythology to life. Now writers are expanding culturally, which is all to the good, but many fantasies still take place in a predominantly agricultural world whose cities have castles, farmer’s markets and guilds of artisans. Then there are the aristocrats and rulers along with their soldiers or knights. People move about on horseback for the most part. Or sail on ships. Fantasy is pre-industrial revolution.

Many say science fiction began with Frankenstein, although it’s still got a lot of hidden alchemy and magic in it.But the text argues between the old mistaken alchemy and the new correct chemistry. Much of the science in that text looks like dark fantasy to us now,but that was the science of the day. Science fiction is the conscience of science. It looks over the shoulders of men in their laboratories and asks,“What will happen if?” What will be the moral, social and personal price humanity pays for your discovery? It’s the same question Mary Shelley asked.

Urban fantasy has complicated the picture, but the reason it’s fantasy is that it convinces us that the possibilities science tells us are not real are real after all. Faeries exist.Vampires haunt the night. But if you add aliens, then I’ll have to say we’re back to science fiction.

Theresa Crater brings ancient temples, lost civilizations and secret societies back to life in her paranormal mysteries. The shadow government search for ancient Atlantean weapons in the fabled Hall of Records in Under the Stone Paw and fight to control ancient crystals sunk beneath the sea in Beneath the Hallowed Hill.

Her short stories explore ancient myth brought into the present day. The most recent include “The Judgment of Osiris” in Tales in Firelight and Shadow and “White Moon” in Ride the Moon.Writing as Louise Ryder, she publishes women’s fiction. God in a Box returns us to the 1970s world of feminism and Eastern philosophy. Theresa has also published poetry and a baker’s dozen of literary criticism. Currently, she teaches writing and British lit in Denver. Visit her at http://theresacrater.com.

Science Fiction and Fantasy: We All Know the Difference, Right? by Warren Rochelle

One of the first questions I ask my students in both my fantasy and science fiction lit classes is just what is the difference between these two closely related genres. After all, as Ursula LeGuin says, “Fantasy is the ancient kingdom of which science fiction is but a modern province.”

Close relations indeed, one the descendant of the other, or rather one evolving from the other, the metaphors and tropes of fantasy of sword, sorcery, the Hero and the Quest, magic, fairy kingdoms, monsters, and the rest, giving way to the metaphors and tropes of technology and the machine, of science, and other worlds and aliens.

The simplest distinction is, of course, magic and science, the impossible and the possible. Or, to cite a definition that appeared on the listserv of the SFRA (Science Fiction Research Association, whose purview is SF and fantasy), “if the story has dragons in it,it’s fantasy, but if the dragons are given an evolutionary history, it’s science fiction.” I would modify that slightly: if the story has dragons in it as one of the native fauna, it’s fantasy, but never mind that.

So, Elves, fairies, witches,wizards, magic—the impossible, fantasy. Spaceships, lasers, warp drive, aliens and mutants—the possible, science fiction.

All right. But just the other day,my individual study student this semester, Evan, turned in a blog post on Dune.First, Evan’s individual study is the writing of a science fiction novel, along with some readings and journals. I suggested Dune. After all, it is one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written. Everybody knows that, right?

Evan begged to differ: “One important thing to note about Dune is that it’s not really a science-fiction story. It’s a fantasy. It’s about a chosen prince having his kingdom stolen,then mastering the magical arts and fighting, as well as befriending the natives of his land and the super-powerful creatures that inhabit it, all to overthrow the evil emperor and reclaim his rightful place. The whole story reeks of fantasy. They have sword fights for one thing.”

Wait a minute. Many of Paul’s abilities as Kwisatz Haderach come from his genetics—he is the product of a ninety-generation breeding program, a long-awaited messiah. His prescience gets“turned on” when he takes the Water of Life, a natural by-product of the life cycle of the giant sandworm. His enhanced mental abilities are, in part,attributed to his training as a mentat, a human computer. Doesn’t that make the novel science fiction?

Not according to Evan. He argues that the novel doesn’t need to be science fiction: “The emperor’s ships could be boats on an ocean just as easily as spaceships … The sandworms are basically dragons or wyverns and Paul’s [Kwisatz Haderach] status is basically that of a wizard or a magical hero. He’s not a sci-fi hero. He doesn’t make machines,tinker, or have any real connection to technology . . . While the story does contain loose sci-fi elements, aside from a singular instance of a small drone being used and the fact that their economy relies on large spaceships, the story is simply not sci-fi. It is science-fiction flavored fantasy.”

All right. Evan does have a point and I wasn’t able to shake his conviction—not yet anyway. If we were to have this discussion again, here is what I use to counter his argument. I would point out that Paul has and does use atomic weaponry and the spice, another sandworm by-product, is harvested by machines. A force field surrounds the family castle.

I would ask if the SF hero has to make machines or be connected to technology? Not those with psychic powers,which Paul has. But, more importantly, a primary basis of the novel, its controlling metaphor, is ecology, or interconnected biological systems—here, an entire planet. The Fremen, thanks to Liet-Kynes, and his father, are superb field ecologists, and have given over their entire culture to the mission of bringing water to their desert world.

It is here, I think, that Evan’s argument that the novel is fantasy doesn’t quite work. Yes, the relationship between the two genres is clearly discernible in his analysis of Dune,particularly in how science fiction evolved from fantasy through a reimagining of familiar metaphors and symbols and devices. Science fiction is, in many ways, the modern response to the questions and themes of fantasy.

I am not suggesting that ecology can’t be a theme in fantasy; it often is, including the idea that magic itself must be saved, conserved, and renewed, if necessary. But the world-view of Dune, ultimately, is rooted in science, the possible, not the magical, the unseen, the impossible but still the imagined.

And that, I think, might be the difference between science fiction and fantasy. But I don't think I will be able to convince Evan.

Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, “The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001),Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010.

He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections.His short story, “The Boy on McGee Street,” was recently published in Queer Fish 2 (Pink Narcissus Press, 2012). Contact him at: http://warrenrochelle.com

The Difference Between Fantasy and SF is Horses by Andrea Hosth

If your characters get about on horses, you are writing fantasy. If they travel using something mechanised,then you are writing SF. Your SF can have wizards, and spaceships which fly through hand-waving. Your story can lack any form of magic whatsoever, but if the tech level has not advanced beyond the equivalent of a horse-drawn cart, it’s still fantasy.

This is almost not an exaggeration.Reader expectation is a force which can easily overcome author intention. What you write may be fantasy, science fiction or some combination of both, but your setting is what determines whether or not a story is science fiction.

Still, if I am to take a serious stab at the question, I’ll start by considering the definition that “science fiction is what could be, while fantasy is what never could be”. Of course, this is a definition which works best if you take a strict “hard science fiction” approach to SF, since a very large portion of science fiction involve smagic-equivalent hand-waving science.

There are many definitions for fantasy, mostly revolving around some variation of “has magic”, but that is a definition which quickly falls down. I prefer to regard fantasy as “any story where the setting/world building is intended to be different to an accurate depiction of our own world”. Thus a historical novel (intended to be accurate)is not fantasy, but alternate history is fantasy, books with working magic are fantasy, stories set in the future are fantasy (because there is no possible way for them to be truly accurate). Hard or soft, sword and sorcery, magic realism – the crux of the fantasy genre is that something exists in the story which demonstrably cannot be located and pointed out as having existed in (the current agreed understanding of) our world.

Science fiction is thus a subset of fantasy, and the question becomes how it separates itself off from the broader genre. A quick perusal of the Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness shows that even the completely soft end of science fiction can still be regarded as“unambiguously science fiction” – though in this case it appears that science fiction can be science fiction purely in terms of setting, which brings us back to the horses. The TV Tropes site goes on to base science fiction firmly in the realm of a ‘what if’ story, and makes the crux of the story a ‘technological difference’.

So, science fiction is a story where there is an intentional difference to our world where the crux of the tale depends on a difference in technology/science. Even if the science is not rigorous, and cannot by any means be considered hard science fiction, it is still science fiction if the core of the story is “what if this this technology…”.

Stories which have a scientific setting, but which are not interested in that setting – where the technology is of no import to the tale but is merely a fancy dress which could be exchanged for other fantastic clothing – could perhaps be termed science fantasy. And the flip side – stories with horses and magic where the crux of the story is a technological question?

I recently discussed the question of science fiction vs fantasy in my own novels, pointing out that the magic-rich Champion of the Rose has at its core a technological question – it’s a “genetic manipulation gone wrong” story in a fantasy setting. I suppose this may be termed “fantastic science”, since it’s using a magical means to attain a scientific action.

But, on the whole, my definition is my definition. Like so many other genre questions, it becomes an “I know if when I read it” answer, with every individual’s answer having some slight variance, and most readers interested in specific sub-genres rather than the whole breadth and depth of fantasy or science fiction.

Meanwhile, I’ll be over here writing about a mechanical horse.

Vampires or Space Helmets…Fantasy or Science Fiction? by Valjeanne Jeffers

Technology and fantasy: put them together and you have a delicious synergy that’s not quite SF, not quite fantasy. Some of my favorite authors have skirted the divider between fantasy and science fiction. Octavia Butler, for example, while she is almost always described as a science fiction author blended the two quite brilliantly in books like Wild Seed and Clay’s Ark. Nalo Hopkinson also combined them with sheer genius in her novels Brown Girl in The Ring and Clay’s Ark. Nalo Hopkinson also combined them with sheer genius in her novels Brown Girl in The Ring and Midnight Robber.

The existence of technology in fantasy often results in the co-existence of “science and sorcery,” as Charles Saunders (creator of Sword and Soul) has described my Immortal series. In my novels you have werewolves and vampires—totally in control of their preternatural abilities and using said abilities to protect their universe; but still such characters are most often found in fantasy or horror genres. Yet the Immortal series also has time travel, aliens… and technology to support its futuristic setting. Such as in the excerpt from Immortal book 1:

"Karla walked across the wooden floor of her living area into a kitchenette. A press of her fingers on the first sphere of a triangular pod started coffee brewing.

She filled a cup with chicory,walked back into the living area and pushed the second button on her remote,activating a blue panel beside the window. Jazz music filled the apartment.Like her bedroom console the unit kept time, transmitted holographic images and played tapes. Using the third button, she opened the curtains.

Thus, the Immortal novels have been described as both fantasy and science fiction novels. Use a little science and one still can be considered a Fantasy writer. Use a bit more and you’ve inched into the science fiction genre. An excerpt from Colony: A Space Opera(my novel in progress) illustrates this point:

She was born 20 years after Planet Earth’s decline. The same year IST began building the probes:lightweight spacecrafts that humans could live in for years, if need be, and that moved fast enough to break the sound barrier—traveling millions of miles within weeks.

In 2065, global warning had accelerated. The final stage in Earth’s destruction had begun. Temperatures of150 degrees scorched the planet. Tidal waves, monsoons and cyclones tore it apart. Those who could afford it moved underground. Food became the world’s most valued resource. The rest were herded under the domes.

Scientists scurried to genetically reproduce fruits and vegetables—with horrible side effects. Money still ruled the world. But money was gradually becoming worthless. That’s when the government saw the writing on the wall and created IST and the probes: spacecrafts designed for one purpose, to seek out planets capable of sustaining human life.

When a writer uses technology in fantasy, the lines between the genres are even more gloriously buried. What maybe described as science fiction by one reader/writer can just as easily be characterized as fantasy by the next. The only real rule here is to make one’s technology believable; credible; plausible. Although it doesn’t yet exist—in a kind kind of literary sleight of hand.

Pulling this off, just gives me one more reason to absolutely love speculative fiction…even if no will ever be able to figure out whether I’m a science fiction or fantasy writer. I think I prefer it that way.

Valjeanne is the author of the Immortal series, The Switch II: Clockwork (includes books I and II) and several short works of fiction.

Her fiction has appeared in Steamfunk!, Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology, Lune Wing, Purple Mag, Genesis Science Fiction Magazine, Pembroke Magazine, Possibilties, 31 Days of Steamy Mocha, and Griots II: Sisters of the Spear (in press). She works as an editor for Mocha Memoirs Press and is also co-owner of Qand V Affordable editing.

Preview or purchase her novels at: http://www.vjeffersandqveal.com

Amazing Fantasy Round Table: 50 Shades of Fantasy
This month's Amazing Fantasy Round Table examines the question of whether modern fantasy comes in shades other than grim and gritty.


Warren Rochelle: Fantasy: How Many
Shades of Grey?

All right. I’ve been browsing in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. I googled “different kinds of fantasy—and, for the most part, found similar lists and similar terms. I doubt most of those who write for this blog would be surprised at the terms and definitions I found, such as:

Ø high fantasy: immersion, set wholly in the secondary world, “with its own set of rules and physical laws,” (no connections between here and there). Think Middle-earth.
Ø low fantasy: “a sub-genre of fantasy fiction involving nonrational happenings that are without causality or rationality because they occur in the rational world where such things are not supposed to occur. Low fantasy stories are set either in the real world or a fictional but rational world, and are contrasted with high fantasy stories (see above)… The word "low" refers to the level of prominence of traditional fantasy elements within the work, and is not any sort of remark on the work's quality” (Wikipedia contributors. "Low fantasy." (Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 27 Mar. 2013. Web. 2 May. 2013.) Examples include The Borrowers, Tuck Everlasting, The Five Children and It, Edward Eager’s novels, and so on.

Ø epic fantasy, which is centered on the quest, relies on a heroic main character, stresses the battle between good and evil, heroes, legendary battles—often called heroic fantasy. A portal-quest or portal fantasy could be a variant, with a prime example that of the Chronicles of Narnia.

The lists go on to include contemporary/urban fantasy, anthropomorphic, historical, dark, science fantasy—you get the idea. Fantasy, all about good vs. evil, the light versus the dark, heroes and heroines, magic, dragons, and their ilk, comes in many shades of grey. (50? That’s another essay—see the blog on sexuality in fantasy, okay?) Then, there is immersive vs. intrusive and liminal or estranged and … But instead of defining each and every one, and dredging up examples (which is something I like to do when I teach fantasy lit—English 379, this fall, 3:30-4:45 TTh, come on down), I want to talk about the shade of grey I write and why (and yes, grey, the British spelling, and not the American gray. Grey just looks …. well, grey, and it’s prettier… I digress).

So. What’s my shade of grey? I have two published fantasy novels, Harvest of Changelings (Golden Gryphon, 2007) and its sequel, The Called (Golden Gryphon, 2010). A third is being edited, The Golden Boy, and a fourth in progress even as I write, The Werewolf and His Boy. They are all, I am thinking, low and intrusive fantasies. True, The Golden Boy is sort of pushing the above definition of low, as it is set in an alternate reality, that of the Columbian Empire. Magic is real, but it is illegal, and the Empire is definitely meant to be a rational country. Magic, does, however, intrude, according to the Columbian political and religious authorities. But, the others: this world (more or less), and then magic returns (thus intruding), or is disclosed in some fashion, voluntarily and otherwise. Harvest and The Called are set in North Carolina; Werewolf, in Virginia. Complications ensue—lots of complications. Bad things happen. The good guys are in serious trouble. Yes, there are forays into Faerie from time to time, but on the whole, things happen here, not there.

The question of the moment is why, to what end. Part of me has always wanted to believe in magic (oh, all right, part of me does believe in magic) and that it is real and if we just knew—the right people, the right words, where to look—we could find it. It’s always been here. There has to be a reason for all these stories. So, I create fictional worlds that satisfy this longing. In these worlds the magical and the mundane intersect, overlap, come into conflict—and I find these encounters fascinating. As do their real-world counterparts (encountering the unexplainable), such meetings pull back the veils and reveal us as who and what we really are. They are meetings in which we are forced to ask the question of what it means to be human. That some of these encounters are fraught with peril is also part of this question.

To be human is, sometimes, to be in danger, to be facing great evil, and to have to confront that evil, albeit the evil is a monster, another human, or a personal darkness. To be human is to undertake the quest. As Le Guin says in her essay, “The Child and the Shadow,” “fantasy is the natural, the appropriate language for the recounting of the spiritual journey and the struggle of good and evil in the soul”(Language of the Night 64).

In low fantasy, in intrusive fantasy, the metaphor, the myth, the symbol, the shadow, can be real, literal. It can be touched, felt, and fought. Russell, a hero of Harvest and The Called, is an abused child; so is Jeff, his partner. They grew up with people who behaved monstrously. They also find themselves confronted with evil reptilians and black witches and other bad guys. They find they have to fight their inner demons as well as those that wait for them. Could I do this in high fantasy? I think so, but I am finding it is important to me to acknowledge the darkness and mystery that is here, in this world.

Good fantasy, after all, is about human beings doing human things, and with all the ambiguity and trouble and good and evil and love and hate and all the rest that comes with being human. Yes, they have to deal with the magical, the impossible, the mystery, the myth made real, but they are still humans—most of the time, and mostly.

So, I write in this shade of grey because it is here that I live, that my imagination lives. Oh, yeah, by the way: magic is real.

*****
Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, "The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. His story, “The Boy on McGee Street” was published in Queer Fish 2 (Pink Narcissus Press, 2012). http://warrenrochelle.com


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Andrea Hosth: Grimdark

The last ten years have seen a rise in what is known as "grimdark fantasy" (or, more amusingly, as "grittygrotty"). Joe Abercrombie defines the core of the genre as:
"The dirt physical and moral. The attention to unpleasant detail. The greyness of the characters. The cynicism of the outlook."

There are numerous articles discussing grimdark, covering everything from what makes it "more real", "less real", "nihilist", "gratuitous", "honest", or "unimaginative". Most of all, "sexist".
Beyond being a sub-genre I'm disinclined to read, I'm sure some of my negative reaction to grimdark is due to some of its champions positing it as an "evolution" of fantasy: something which has left less evolved, inferior versions of fantasy behind. This both annoys and confuses me.

Part of the confusion is due to what I see as a lack of newness about some of these concepts. Are grimdark protagonists more morally ambiguous than, say, Elric of Melniboné? Steerpike of Gormenghast? Heck, Lord Vetinari of the Discworld? How much more cynical in outlook are these worlds compared to, say, Mary Gentle's "Grunts" (a satire of heroic fantasy, but certainly not a recent one)? Is Leiber's Lankhmar naïve and 'unevolved'?

What exactly has evolved here? Is a willingness to describe people peeing the big advance we're supposed to find in grimdark?

The other, perhaps larger, source of my confusion is whether the link made between "grey" and "real" is supposed to lead to a second link between "heroic" and "fake". If the charcoal greyness of the protagonists is the big selling point of grimdark's advances (ignoring the decades of "pre-grimdark" fantasy featuring morally grey characters), does it follow on that real heroism does not exist?
The people-are-fundamentally-rotten trope is common to another genre: post-apocalyptic. Almost inevitably, post-apocalyptic stories feature small bands of people, sometimes fighting viciously for resources against other bands, until their own group dissolves when Untrustworthy-Second-Male produces a schism against Mr-Reluctantly-In-Charge because he wants to be in charge/to get the girl/to go that way. My own apocalyptic story was a direct reaction to how boringly predictable I find this story progression, and to recent events at the time of drafting – particularly the 2010-2011 Queensland Floods. Here, as with countless other natural disasters, lives and safety were threatened…and thousands of people stepped up. Helped out. Behaved heroically.

If we spend the time to look around us, at the real world, we see villains, we see plenty of morally grey people – a vast bunch on the paler side of the grey scale. And we see heroes.

Grimdark is a genre which removes a portion of the real. To cast a crapsack world as a "more real" world is to ignore the considerable amount of grey in large portions of heroic fantasy, and to suggest that the concepts of nobility, heroism, selflessness, and the rule of law are all weak figments which do not and never did exist in (historical) reality.

A brief stroll through the myths and legends which are used as the basis for many modern fantasy stories will show us that grim and tragic events are hardly new to the genre (try Deidre of the Sorrows on for size). A passing acquaintance with history will show us heroes.

*****
Andrea K Höst was born in Sweden but raised in Australia. She writes fantasy and science fantasy, and enjoys creating stories which give her female characters something more to do than wait for rescue.Her website, Autumn Write.

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Sylvia Kelso: Shades of Fantasy

Originally I meant to talk about sub-genres, but I’ve covered this before, so instead I’ll look at shades in 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.
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.

Now here’s one of the modern heirs of both Edison and Dunsany. Describing magic outright this time, 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, and 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 The Second Summoning, 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. In this one, a street evangelist is confronted by 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.” (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 gross-out 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. (Lois McMaster Bujold The Curse of Chalion Ch. 1)

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.
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 messy surroundings foreshadows Cazaril’s own plight, penniless, dressed in rags, with crookedly healed fingers and a back thick with 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 Press, and “Spring in Geneva,” a novella riff on Frankenstein, is projected to appear from Aqueduct Press in August 2013.

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Carole McDonnell: Shades

This month's blog tour is called Shades of Fantasy -- a perfect title, I think. Because what is shading, exactly?


There are shades of evil, shades of humanness, shades of power, shades of the psyche, shades of power, shades of spatiality, shades of time, shades of intelligence and different kinds of intelligences, shades of sexuality and gender, shades of cultures, shades of life and non-life. Each shading can bring us closer to the darkness in the universe or in humanity. It can also bring us closer to the light.

Depending on the writer, any of these shadings can be explored. A good fantasy book will show its reader so many shadings of its theme that the book and its issues will forever linger in the reader's mind. For better or for worse or for all the shadings in between.

*****
Carole McDonnell is a writer of ethnic fiction, speculative fiction, and Christian fiction. Her works have appeared in many anthologies and at various online sites. Her first novel, Wind Follower, was published by Wildside Books. Her forthcoming novel is called The Constant Tower. http://carolemcdonnell.blogspot.com/

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Deborah Ross: Fantasy –A Long View of the Gritty, and Hope for the Numinous

At first, I thought the current fashion of dark, gritty fantasy – fantasy noir – is just that, a recent shift in popularity, like the explosion of angsty teenage vampire stories. If we take the long view, it’s an established variation in a much larger genre. Historically, fantasy’s appeal was as tales of wonder, from Homer’s Odyssey (a “tall tales” story if there ever was one) to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Scary things certainly do happen in these stories and much is at risk, but the tone is elevated and the sensibilities are distinctly romantic. I suspect that one reason movie-goers who loved Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings and found the novels unengaging was the somewhat old-fashioned “epic” level of prose, very much in line with the mythic tradition Tolkien is so much a part of and yet foreign-sounding and artificial when placed in the context of contemporary “realistic” literature. In this, Tolkien’s work has much more in common with Beowulf than with The Dresden Files.

Spooky stories like the early Gothic novels such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk (1796), the works of Edgar Allen Poe or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) approached the fantastical as other-worldly, making no pretense of portraying the seedier side of everyday reality. In Germany, Gothic fiction was called Schauerroman (“shudder novel”), in the sense of a delicious fascination with the macabre. Black magic, occult rites, vampires and ghosts, haunted castles, “the sins of the fathers,” Byronic heroes, ancient curses and the like pervaded these works.

Even stories that sought to balance supernatural elements and realistic settings could in no way be described as “gritty.” As time went on and literary tastes changed, the macabre or horrific elements shifted to include “explained supernatural” and psychological horror. What constitutes “realistic setting” has evolved from 18th Century drawing rooms to the streets and skyscrapers of modern urban fantasy.

Contemporary gritty fantasy, whether in an urban setting or not, has been influenced by the larger movements in 20th and 21st Century literature. The Cold War fostered the twin sensibilities of paranoia and impending disaster, giving rise to generations of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories. I don’t think Ann Radcliffe or William Polidori, or even Robert Louis Stevenson would have dreamt of the bombed-out cities, virulent plagues, social disruption, and ecological collapse that characterizes modern dystopic fiction. Taking this thought a step further, I see the transformation of the zombie from a figure in voodoo religious rites to yet-another-monster to the victim of an epidemic, to one of hordes that walk the streets and break down doors, infecting everyone they bite, with all the attendant end-of-the-world you-will-be-eaten-next tropes. As a person who remembers the McCarthy Era, I see a chilling parallel in the underlying themes of contagion and loss of humanity. In this way, what we see in gritty fantasy today, particularly the dystopic and urban flavors, reflects the fears rampant in recent history.

At the same time, although it has occasionally fallen out of popular favor, epic fantasy, whimsical fantasy, fantasy that echoes spiritual or religious themes of hope and redemption, not to mention beautiful magic and romance, has not gone away. I think readers (and writers!) respond to the optimism and portrayal of courage, loyalty, and imagination in these tales.

I first got the idea for my own epic fantasy trilogy from a series of short stories that were published in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword & Sorceress series. I love horses and was intrigued by the cultural clash between the Romans with their cities and disciplined infantry, and the nomadic horse peoples of Asia – the Scythians, Sarmatians, and others. I wondered how these two very different cultures might give rise to different systems of magic as well as different military strategies. One story (the first one being “The Spirit Arrow” in S & S XIII) wasn’t enough! I fell in love with the vast reaches of the steppe, the nature-based religion of the nomads, the lore of horses. This isn’t so different from what Tolkien envisioned in the Rohirrim of Rohan, although I came at it from a different historical context. As one story followed another, “Rome” deepened and became less of a monolithic enemy and more of a culture to be admired. In order to create the complexity of conflicts necessary for a work of novel length, I added an ancient city-state, guardian of the magical devices that once protected the living world from the forces of chaos. All this was background for the real story, the adventures of a handful of characters as they make their way through this world, each with her or his own goals and follies. I was off and running with The Seven-Petaled Shield. The first volume comes out in June 2013.

Hosted this month by Carole McDonnell:

This month the Travelling Fantasy Blog Tour discusses Children and Fantasy. It's my topic because this is the month my book The Constant Tower comes out. Although there is one adult POV in the novel, I think of Constant Tower as a young adult book because YA often deals with the fear of loss, the desire to please a parent, and other stuff that childhood nightmares, hopes, and fears are made of.

Fantasies and Fairytales often begin with a story about children or youths. Whether or not, the child grows into adulthood during the course of the story, one can be sure that the hero's life has been affected by some great trouble in his -- or his parent's-- past. Trauma abounds in fantasy, and a novel that is conspicuously empty of children, childhood trauma, family issues, childhood betrayal just doesn't feel right. And a fantasy peopled with only adults (and without backstories or flashbacks) feels unreal.

That said, a story decides where to put children, and a story decides if it is going to be a YA story or an adult story. Childhood has its own fears; youths has its fears and wishes; adults fears, wishes, and regrets. An adult story containing children needs to deal with the child's fear/desire for its own safety. It must identify with a child’s awe, powerlessness, or ignorance and the adult's response to that -- even if only in passing. A writer of an adult fantasy has to write from a child's viewpoint at one moment, and from the adult viewpoint at another.

In my opinion, the two most important aspects of children are: their need for a loving, guiding parent and their childlike -- often irrational-- way of looking at the world. But these two aspects of children are rarely shown in a realistic manner.

Offhand, I can only think of books like A High Wind in Jamaica, and Henry James "Turn of the Screw" where the child mind has been shown in its terrifying un-adult worldview. When the thought-life of children pop up in some fantasy stories, we usually end up with characters like the sister of Paul Atreides in Dune, kids so prescient that they are turned into wizened psychics. And children are generally not allowed to be too needy because in worlds where heroic stuff has to be done — childhood has to be amended, unless the helplessness of the child aids the hero/heroine's maternal streak. Generally, teen angst in fantasy spurs the main character onward. There are rites of passages, vengeance, and journeys to begin.

In fantasies, kids are often freed from their bad destinies by going on a journey or they are pulled out of perfect Edenic homes and thrust into a cruel world. (Of course there are stories such as George MacDonald's "The Day Boy and The Night Girl" where the children aren't aware of the limited worldview they've been given by traumatized well-meaning parents.

But what if the Edenic world they were pulled from was not as perfect as it was supposed to be? Or what if they are unable to runaway? What does one do with that? And what if there are no adults around? Then the control of events is in the hand of a youthful character who is learning/discerning truths as he goes along.

The fantasy writer who writes about youthful characters must be both adult and child throughout the writing of the book. The adult reader will have to watch events with both a child's eye, and an adult's eye, perceiving disasters the child has yet to understand. But at the same time, the adult reader will encounter her youthful self and perhaps reconnect to her own forgotten childhood innocence. At the same time, a child who is reading the fantasy must learns and discern along with the youthful character. Perhaps he should know a little more than the main character in some things, and a little less in others. But at the end, there should be hope for both the youthful character and the youthful reader. . .whether the hero has had his adventure far from home, or whether he -- like those in my novel, The Constant Tower-- was forced to stay at home and endure.

Other writers speak on this topic below:

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Fantastic Children
by Warren Rochelle

Children in fantasy, or children and fantasy or children’s fantasy—those seemed to be the three likely variants of this month’s topic for the Great Traveling Fantasy Roundtable Blog. Hmm, but what about fantastic children—children with magical powers? Such gifted and special beings do show up in children’s fantasy—and they are definitely children in fantasy—and, I would argue, they might also be the children that the children who read children’s fantasy yearn to be.

I certainly did. After reading The Chronicles of Narnia in third grade (and since reread many, many times), I wanted to have conversations with animals, go for morning rides in forests on the back of a centaur, saying hello to rabbits and squirrels who said hello back. But the Pevensies, for all that they becomes the Kings and Queens of Narnia, and manage to “clean up the messes made by adults,” are still English school children (Ford, Companion to Narnia, rev. ed., 2005 140). So is their cousin, Eustace, and so is his friend, Jill. They know magic is real; they can recognize it by its feel, but they are not magical.

I so wanted to go to Narnia—okay, I still want to go to Narnia, but I wanted to be not just around the magical—I wanted to be magical. I can recall running on the playground in the sixth grade, at the ripe old age eleven or twelve, and running, running, and thinking if I just kept running, and with the right wind, that I could spread my arms, just like a plane, and fly.

I know, I know, fantasies of flight are not unusual. We all dream of it, often literally. And it is those children—the ones who can fly—that I want to consider here, the children in fantasy who are fantastic, the sons and daughters of the fey, the young witches and warlocks. I want to take a closer look at the fantastic children in two novels: the four of my own, Harvest of Changelings, and Harry in the first installment, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. There are quite a few others, of course, such as Will Stanton of Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series, the Princess Eilonwy in The Prydain Chronicles, and the young Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea.

In Harvest, none of the four—Jeff, Russell, Hazel, and Malachi— know they are magical in the beginning. The slow awakening of their magical abilities, such as flight (of course), teleportation, and being able to call up a wind or start a fire, comes as a surprise to all of them. This awakening becomes part of the personal growth and struggle and identity crisis of each of them—a coming of age, as it were—and is a dominant theme in the novel. Each of the four are already outsiders: Jeff and Russell are both learning disabled and survivors of abuse; Hazel is unusually gifted and has been raised by indifferent grandparents; and Malachi is marked as different by his size and appearance, and his intelligence. Learning that they are magical thus further sets them apart, even as it expands their notions of just how the world really is. They are no longer of the mundane. Their specialness is also that of mission, of quest—they discover that there are things they must do—that only they can do. They are chosen ones, and they must confront evil.

These same patterns—and no, I didn’t do this on purpose—are easily discernible in Harry, who when we first meet him on 4 Privet Drive, is an outsider, living under the steps—not “normal” as his aunt and uncle profess to be. They are Muggles—mundanes—Harry, like his parents, is not. He is a wizard and like my protagonists, has to learn what this means and how to use these inborn powers deliberately and with intent. He, too, has to grow into his abilities, and this, too, is a struggle of identity and growth, a coming of age, of growing up. He, at least, can do this in a world where magic is acceptable, that of Hogwarts Academy and the rest of the wizarding community. Harry, “the boy who lived,” is, of course, the chosen one, fated to be the enemy of the great evil of Rowling’s universe, Voldemort.

Will Stanton turns out to be “the last of the Old Ones, immortals dedicated to keeping the world from domination by the Dark . . . [and] the force of the Dark is rising.” Another chosen one. So is Ged. The still-all-too-human protagonists of these stories, as magical as they are, still have all the frailties and foibles and fears that are part of childhood, of growing up, of being human. And yet, they have been chosen for great deeds. Grails await. The Pevensies are also apparently chosen—they fulfil an ancient prophecy; their rule restores the kingdom. Any unusual abilities seems only to come after death (but that is another essay).

It can’t be coincidence that I could also describe Jesus as a child in much the same way.

So, what is going on here with these gifted, fantastic children? Is it an inherent power of this great myth of the gifted, the chosen, the sent? Is this, as C.S. Lewis argues, an affirmation of the truth of the Christian myth? Or, is this wish fulfillment? Could these stories be an attempt, through metaphor and myth, to explain the truly gifted, such as Daniel Tammet, the autistic savant with his seemingly magical computational abilities, his unbelievable memory? A plot device? As our heroes learn to use and understand their magic; so does the reader. They ask the questions to understand what is happening, and so the reader comes to understand as well.

I think the answer to all these questions is yes. I think that when we encounter fantastic children—gifted, magical children—in fiction, and when we tell such stories, we are trying to explain what can’t be explained—the mysterious wiring of Tammet’s brain, the mysteries of religion—the mysteries of anyone who is given great abilities and the time and place to exercise them. As the heroes grow, so does the reader.

I still wish I could fly. I still want to go to Narnia.

***
Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, "The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. His story, “The Boy on McGee Street” was published in Queer Fish 2 (Pink Narcissus Press, 2012).
http://warrenrochelle.com

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Children and/in Fantasy
by Sylvia Kelso

There’s always been a strong link between children, or the idea of children, and modern fantasy: partly through the juvenilizing of fairytales – Grimm’s collection were domestic rather than fairy stories – and partly through the tacit but powerful view that fantasy is the opposite of rationality, and hence something left behind, when, as St. Paul wrote, “a man” will “put away childish things.”

This is largely a view beginning with the Enlightenment, but fantasy has still had its English defenders, beginning with Coleridge, and moving on of course, to that T-man, with the ground-breaking 1930s lecture “On Fairy Stories.” Tolkien conflates fantasy and fairy story, and valorizes both, but predictably, he has to confront the “childish challenge” before he can defend the power of faery for adults.

Children AND fantasy is thus something of a default setting: as Tolkien noted, not all children are either enchanted by or even comprehend fairytales. Even Lewis Carroll can fail notably with children, beginning with me. I only read the Alice books with appreciation once I cd. identify the wicked parodies, eg. of Wordsworth, recognize the chess game moves, and understand the nonsense. As a child, I found the whole deal not only bewildering but at times outright menacing.

Children IN fantasy tends to branch out from this default connection. Being considered the rightful audience, children, it seems, are easy for adults to insert as characters IN fantasy/modern fairytales. Children are, perhaps, taken not only as the rightful audience, but thanks to their supposed readiness to accept the unreal, as fantasy’s best audience. As flow over, their presence in the text, especially as pov characters, not only offers a viewpoint child readers can readily accept, but their acceptance of the unreal events presumably makes such credence easier for children outside the text. And partly, of course, modern fantasy and fairy tale stories were once, mostly written FOR children.

Modern fantasy starts around the turn of the 19th century, almost as a descendant of imperial romance (think Rider Haggard) and ghost stories (think Sheridan LeFanu.) Andrew Lang, Lord Dunsany, and perhaps most importantly, George McDonald, whose books span both adult and child audiences, seem to be the founders of the form.

In contrast, modern children’s fantasy starts about the same time as modern children’s fiction, sometime in the middle of the 19th Century. One of the earliest and most illustrious examples is Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, which is not a fairytale, but is most certainly fantasy, and as a child, a beautiful illustrated edition had my whole-hearted allegiance.

As I recall it, Water Babies was notably clear of the problems that beset later children’s fantasy. One such problem emerged as my mate Natasha Giardina wrote her PhD thesis, on the transmission of ideologies through children’s fantasy; this was the uncertainty of the narrative voice. Adults until after WWII still seemed unsure how to write for children. For example, does the narrator try to speak as an omnipotent pov to children? (Yes, very often, cf. the asides in The Hobbit.) Does the quasi-adult voice work? (Not very comfortably, no.) Does the narrator try to enter the child’s view point? (Occasionally, and not all that well, in pre WWII texts like The Hobbit. The one exception I can think of is Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books. ) Worst of all, does the author, without or without using the narrator’s voice, attempt to preach? That is, to impress on the child reader, consciously or unconsciously, the morals, and more worryingly, the ideologies of the adult world?

The answer to the latter was a resounding Yes, hardly surprising, since none of us can completely escape our culture and world-view, but very uncomfortable for the analyst, when such world-view includes racism and sexism – evident even in the Harry Potter books – as well as religion, as in the famous case of the Narnia books. In contrast, such preaching rarely occurs in adult-aimed fantasy. It seems a lasting adult assumption that children, even when reading for pleasure, have to be taught.

So children in fantasy may represent not only the primary audience, but also the work’s target, in moral and ideological terms: that is, what happens to child characters, what they learn or fail to learn, do not “simply” provide amusement, as for an adult reader, but are powerful socializing tool. “It’s only a story,” in a dismissive tone, with implicit rider, “and a kid’s story, what can it matter?” is one of the silliest assumptions ever made. To the child, lacking adult experience against which to test the text, it’s a manual for the world ahead, and what that manual says can be easily be swallowed whole.

In adult-directed modern fantasy, children are not central characters, for the simple reason that a child protagonist instantly shift the story to the Children’s or YA category. Children here are, at best, appurtenances – or perhaps hindrances – to the main characters. It’s a rare female fantasy protagonist who has even born a child, let alone takes one around with her. I can think of only one novel, Pat Wrede’s Caught in Crystal where the protagonist does actually take children on a Quest, and I can’t think of any male fantasy protagonist who does so. Some of them do have children, but usually these are shuffled off to the side, or hurriedly grown up to take a bigger part in the story.

Most often, children with any important role in adult-aimed fantasy are those familiar characters, the youthful prince or princess who is a pawn in the power struggles of one or more kingdoms. At times they are befriended, protected, guarded, or their causes promoted by the adult protagonist or other characters, but they themselves have little part in the action. In Patricia McKillip’s Ombria in Shadow an orphaned ducal heir fulfills this role, and the main male and female characters largely act in his interests. Robin McKinley’s Spindle’s End does better, by growing the abducted infant princess up in the course of the story.

Tolkien, of course, had the best of both worlds with the hobbits. Their view point is central to both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, they are no bigger than well-grown children, and they can behave like children, particularly in Pippin’s case. Yet they are in fact adults, and longer-lived than humans – thirty-three, not twenty-one, is the age for hobbit maturity. So Middle-earth remains a domain where children’s wonder and innocence in the face of the unreal are central for readers of all ages, and a domain that both child and adult readers can enter without worrying about publishers’ categories. (Though I wouldn’t introduce the Black Riders in Book One to any child under ten, myself. )


Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia. She writes fantasy and SF set 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 short stories in Australian and US anthologies.

This month, my fellow Fantasy Roundtable Bloggers and I discuss what many have argued is inherent and integral to fantasy literature, evil. Is evil necessary in fantasy? Is Good versus Evil an integral and essential conflict? Do heroes need villains? Here are some thoughts on those questions and others on evil and the fantastic.


Warren Rochelle
Evil and the Fantastic

As luck would have it, just last week I asked my English 379 (Fantasy Literature) students to respond to this prompt, while we were reading and discussing The Fellowship of the Ring:

Discuss evil as an element of fantasy, paying attention to how it is presented in The Fellowship of the Ring. Is evil necessary for fantastic literature? Why? Do we have to have evil to understand and appreciate good? What can we learn from evil about human nature?

Their responses were quite interesting. Below is a sample:

According to Wanda*:
“Evil is necessary for all literature, not necessarily in the form of a villain, but in some form that is counter to good. Evil is not black and white because people are not black and white. Each character in a story has flaws, has vices, and has the possibility for evil. The ring in LOTR brings out the corruptibility or weakness in each character that comes into contact with it (besides Tom), even resulting in Boromir’s death.”

Margaret argues that fantasy needs evil—or villains—to be interesting and engaging:
“Is it possible for a fantasy to exist without evil? Or more importantly, without the villain? As much as it would be a perfect utopian setting, it wouldn’t be very interesting. Imagine the Lord of the Rings without Sauron or any of Grimm’s fairytales without the wicked stepmother. The idea just doesn’t fly. But take The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the fifth Narnia book. There are a few scenes in the story where the characters are faced with temptation: a spell to become the most beautiful, a pool that turns all to gold, treasure when hoarded breeds a dragon. However, I don’t necessarily classify these as evil; at least, they don’t fall into the same category as the White Witch or the Calormenes.”

Jed insists that
“The existence of Evil is absolutely paramount in Fantasy. In it the difference between Good and Evil, which is blurred in many genres, is stark and apparent. At [its] very foundation, Fantasy is the valiant struggle of what is pure and good against that which is corrupt and evil.”

Aaron insists we see past the simplistic black and white:
“Ultimately, issues of “good” and “evil” are important elements of any story. Morality, or lack thereof, is a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Good fantasy explores this just as much as any other type of literature. There is no reason why is has to do so in a simplistic way.”

Zeno has this to say
“In the end, conflict is the essence of Fantasy; but the best stories are ones that acknowledge that “evil” is not necessarily a cut and dried force; even books in which there are forces of pure evil and good, there are situations where “good” characters must deal with their own “evil.” Evil, as an idea, is necessary to fantasy, because it provides a stable and easily recognizable theme for the conflict that any book will center around. However, the best books force us to reconsider what is evil, and how best to deal with that evil, and how to respond when, occasionally, good people do bad things, and evil people do good things.”

Arabella doesn’t think evil is essential, arguing that
“I don't think evil is a necessary element of the fantasy genre, however it is an important element of many fantastical books. Just like in any other genre, the story doesn't have to be good vs. evil. The plot doesn't need to center around an evil wizard, ruler, or fantastical creature. What fantasy does is give us the option for those type of plots, making evil an important element, although not a necessary one.

Fantasy opens up new worlds and in those worlds is the opportunity for characters to be truly evil. An opportunity, not a requirement. In the world we live in, I would argue that evil does not truly exist. Our world is categorized in shades of grey and though some may be darker or lighter than others, they are not a pure white or black. The fantasy genre can create worlds in which there is that absolute good and evil we can trust. There is often a distinct line with the good guys on one side and the villains on the other. There can be obvious criteria for those characters who make up good or evil and through these the story can be ruled by the absolutes. Evil is yet another fantastical element that can be a part of fantasy stories. It helps create boundaries and definitions of what is good and through evil the goodness of characters becomes not only more obvious, but also in a way more good. The two opposite ends of the spectrum play against each other to create the good vs. evil fantasy story to which we are accustomed.”

What conclusions, if any, can be drawn from this random sampling of the 43 students enrolled in the 2 sections of Fantasy Lit I am teaching this semester? Many, but not all of them, fall in the category of the “fantasy geek” kids who cut their teeth on Rowling, Tolkien, and a variety of role-playing games, and love, love, love Game of Thrones. They are really into this stuff. A surprising number came to Tolkien first through the movies. A goodly number want to write the great American fantasy novel, and have reams of various drafts already written.

So, is evil is a necessity in fantastic literature? Sort of, yes, no, maybe. Conflict, yes—evil, maybe. Is evil even real? Is it, as another student noted in class discussion, the absence of good? Is their youth that prevents some of them from seeing that evil can be a matter of degree, that a Dark Lord isn’t a necessary presence? That evil can both be banal and ordinary and a Balrog or a Dark Lord? That evil doesn’t always leaves scars and wounds on the body, but as well on the mind and the heart?

Conflict, as in any story, fantasy or not, is an essential plot element. In fantasy, this is often—quite often—expressed as good vs. evil. The hero must have an enemy. It is in this conflict and in this exploration of just what is good and evil that we learn what fantasy has to teach us: what it means to be human and that to be human is to be capable of both good and evil. And here, I would argue, is one of the greatest strengths of fantasy literature.

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Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, "The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010), all published by Golden Gryphon Press. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. His short fiction has been published in such journals and collections as Icarus, Collective Fallout. The Silver Gryphon, North Carolina Literary Review, Romance and Beyond, and Aboriginal Science Fiction. His short story, “The Boy on McGee Street,” was just published in Queer Fish 2. He is presently working on a novel about a gay werewolf and his godling boyfriend and a collection of gay-themed speculative fiction short stories.

For more information, please see: http://warrenrochelle.com

*All student names have been changed to protect their privacy. Each student gave written or oral permission for their work to appear here.

Deborah Ross
Evil, the Fantastic, and Making Sense Out of Pain

I don’t think it’s possible to discuss evil without talking about the literature of the fantastic. We hear people talk about “evil incarnate,” usually in reference to some person or institution that has committed particularly heinous acts, as if evil were a tangible, measurable thing that exists outside the human imagination. In real life, things are rarely that simplistic.

Certainly, history and even some current religious thought puts forth the notion of those, human or not, who are inherently evil. To this day, some people believe that snakes (or spiders or other animals) are evil (I encountered one such man in a pet store, warning his young son that the garter snake would steal his soul if he weren’t careful). Once the mentally ill (or physically ill, such as those who suffer from epilepsy) were thought to be possessed by demons. Such beliefs persist today on the fringes of mainstream Western society, although they have largely been expunged from medical and psychiatric practice. We believe that such conditions as schizophrenia and sociopathy arise from disorders of neurophysiology, even if we cannot yet pinpoint the precise etiology. Even when we do know exactly what neurotransmitters and part of the brain are involved, it is still a widespread and understandable human tendency to ascribe unexplained phenomena, whether beneficial or destructive, to supernatural agency. Even though intellectually we may understand that a mass murderer is not an incarnation of some demonic spirit, nor is he possessed by one, and even if we cannot explain why such a person is utterly lacking in empathy for other human beings, we still often use words like evil, wicked, damned, devilish, satanic, and demonic.

Humans are capable of cruelty and viciousness so extreme in degree or scope that few of us can comprehend it, let alone the motivation behind it. How can we make sense of atrocities like the Holocaust or its equivalents, historical or modern? Of the massacres in Africa, Central Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, to name but a few?

I think we can’t, not by ordinary thought. The mind numbs with the magnitude of such deliberately inflicted suffering and takes refuge in numbers, pop psychology, and political analysis. It is difficult enough to struggle with the petty unkindnesses of everyday life, the irritations, the mundane acts of thoughtlessness, the emotions like jealousy or vindictiveness. Almost everyone loses their temper with one another at one time or another, or an unhealed resentment prompts them to strike out without thinking. These acts are understandable even when we disapprove of them, because they lie within the scope of our own experience. As we seek forgiveness for ourselves, we find the means to extend it to others. While these moments, and the means of making and accepting amends, smooth our relationships, they don’t make for a very dramatic tale.

Fantastical literature, on the other hand, enlarges the sphere of reality. This could be the introduction of magical elements into the ordinary world (urban fantasy), or parallel worlds (such as Faerie or Narnia) that interact with our own, each with its own set of rules. Or completely independent worlds (Discworld, Middle Earth).

Fantastical literature is also characterized by the use of archetype and metaphor to evoke experiences for which we have no direct vocabulary. We don’t need to have personally surrendered to the Dark Side of the Force in order to understand why the temptation is at once seductive and terrifying. Nor do we need to have witnessed an atomic bomb blast to imagine the devastation of dragonfire or a wrathful volcano god/dess.

In discussing how to portray interesting, multi-dimensional villains, it’s often pointed out that these characters – antagonists to the point of view character – are often heroes in their own eyes. They don’t get up in the morning, look in the mirror, and say, “I’m going to be evil today” or “Evil! Evil! Rah-rah-rah!” The best and most frightening villains have the same capacity for greatness as do heroes, whether it is physical prowess, intellect, a wounded heart, or simple charisma, only it is applied either in the wrong manner or for the wrong ends. If a tragic hero has a fatal flaw but is nonetheless admirable, then a great villain also has his blind spots, to his ultimate ruin.

Evil in fantastical literature ranges from the motivating force in such otherwise sympathetic villains to a “pure” black-and-white quality, one that is so alien to ordinary human sensibilities as to be utterly incomprehensible. We cannot know what it is, but we can know its effects – what it does to individuals, nations, and entire worlds. Black-and-white evil is in most instances a whole lot less interesting than those who come under its influence but still retain some degree of choice. That choice may be a once-and-for-all decision, informed or otherwise, or it can be the continuing possibility of turning away from the inevitable consequences, a possibility that diminishes with each step toward the abyss.

If Evil is monolithic, unmixed with any goodness, and incapable of change, then the resolution of the story conflict is reduced to either/or, yes/no, win/lose. This is not to say that such tales are less adrenaline-fueled than those that are more complex, only that there are fewer possibilities for a denouement: Evil wins and everyone dies/suffers; Good wins and the hero lives happily ever after; Good wins but the hero meets a tragic, sacrificial end. The first two may lead to an exciting climax and catharsis but are unlikely to offer the deeper emotional resonance of the third. If, on the other hand, Evil is one among many conflicting motivations, other resolutions become possible. The evil character discovers the capacity for love and sacrifices himself for a greater cause; the hero and villain form an alliance; either hero or villain crosses the gulf between them and healing ensues; the villain makes a last-ditch effort to salvage some good from the harm he has done; the possibilities become endless. All these rely on the capacity of sentient beings to choose their future actions, even when they had no power over what happened to them in the past and cannot undo what they have done. And in the course of these journeys, we ourselves gain insight into our own unhealed wounds, our festering resentments, our self-condemnation, and ultimately, our hope for redemption.

**
Deborah J. Ross began writing professionally in 1982 as Deborah Wheeler with Jaydium and Northlight and short stories in Asimov's, F & SF, Realms of FantasyY and Star Wars: Tales From Jabba's Palace. Now under her birth name, Ross, she is continuing the" Darkover" series of the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, as well as original work, including the fantasy trilogy The Seven-Petaled Shield, forthcoming from DAW. She is a member of Book View Cafe. She's lived in France, worked for a cardiologist, studied Hebrew, yoga and kung fu, plays classical piano, loves horses, and is active in the local Jewish and Quaker communities.

http://deborahjross.blogspot.com/

Carole McDonnell
Personalized Personified Evil

Evil comes in many forms. It can be subtle, like a self-loathing thought. It can be impersonal like a famine, man-made like a war. It can be global, like a swarm of alien invaders, or it can be personal where one finds one's self and only one's self turning into a fly. It can be brushing like poverty ...or falsely joyful soaring like crack cocaine or soma. It can be, invasive and occult like a cancer. It can be deceptive like a double-agent, giving wrong information...like Iago turning all our white to black…or like a demon disguising itself as an angel of light.

I'm a Christian so I guess I'll write about Personalized Personified Evil. There are so many things to hate about evil -- its pettiness, its selfishness, its delusion, its egotism. But what I have always disliked about evil is its relentlessness, its ugly, ugly will. As a Christian, I'll say it even more clearly: I hate Satan --him and his ugly, ugly will.

The relentlessness of evil is not fascinating, certainly not in daily life. Although sometimes the great villains -- as in the scifi film Terminator-- are fascinated because they have the human quality of relentlessness.

Sometimes the "evil" is a system --as in The Hunger Games or Stepford Wives or non-human --as in HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or TRON, or the MATRIX or an oligarchy/cult -- as with the nine-headed-hydra of Greek myth or Metropolis or Rosemary's Baby or even Deliverance or of the kind of kin/households one often finds in horror films –then the evil must be endured, made powerless, or systematically dismantled section by section. That is structural relentlessness.

Very often, however, the pattern of evil is of the pattern shown in the Bible. Evil is contained within one Person. That person has control of many systems, minions of differing hierarchy, has A) superior knowledge, B) a rationalized goal, C) the lack of care for those who must be trampled for the completion of the goal, D) total power or near-total power and E) the utter dislike of personal failure. And finally...relentlessness, which is the mental strength to commit to the goal repeatedly and to reassess and recalibrate until the goal is achieved or the evil Person is destroyed.

Jesus described the Devil as one who comes to kill, to steal, to destroy and the best Biblical representation of evil or Satan is shown in the battle between Moses and Pharaoh. The lines are drawn. A good God and an enslaved people on one side and on the other side a relentless Figure of Power who refuses to let the enslaved people go. It doesn't matter how defeated the Figure of Evil (or his minions) are -- the goal is enslavement of another.

The human characters in fantasy can be considered demonic, even though they don't represent the Devil himself. So while there are many evil characters in fantasy who come to kill, steal, and destroy, the fact is an evil character can elicit pity, identification, and fear. We fear evil in the fantastic because we recognize its immensity. We identify with the evil because we see our own flaws in them. And we pity the evil (sometimes) because we recognize that at one point or another, we were stopped by a greater power or we realized our own powerlessness.

**
Carole McDonnell is the author of the fantasy novels, Wind Follower and The Constant Tower, both published by Wildside Press.

Chris Howard
Fantastically Evil

I started out with the idea of spinning this topic away from the Saurons of the genre—the supremely bad players with vast armies of hideous soldiers and architecturally magnificent but poorly-lit fortresses, players who want to take over extensive amounts of someone else’s territory, an entire world, or some valuable plane of existence. I wanted to spin this topic toward the blended moralities in Glenn Cook, Joe Abercrombie, Brent Weeks, and others, where the main characters are not always good, and some are clearly great fans of seeing others in pain—proudly wearing their “Go Sauron” jackets when off screen.

On the other hand I know the “evil protagonist” thing is all the rage. Every fantasy and SF discussion group on Goodreads and the Amazon forums has a dozen threads on “books where there main character is evil”, or something like that.

What about the good villain—or apparently good villain? I don’t mean where the villain thinks he’s doing the right thing, because that’s pretty much what drives every complexly-written scoundrel. Power-hungry, ladder-climbing, step over the bodies of your superiors to get what you want types of characters are the mainstay. Power, money, control—these are the things that motivate so many baddies, along with a generous portion of justification for whatever they are after.

Another common theme is the bad guy or girl who must do something evil in order to survive —kill, drink blood, go all Mr. Hyde on us, or do bad things as the result of some curse. Come on, doesn’t everyone deserve to survive? Every reader can understand that kind of drive, and in many cases it’s the thoughtful appreciation (and sometimes sympathy) that shapes the reader’s reaction to the villain’s actions, usually based on the physical and emotional price paid by the afflicted character in order to fight or throw off the curse.

Still, that’s still not quite the evil I’m thinking about—or the “good” when I say “good villain.” Like many writers I spend a lot of time thinking about evil—evil people, as well as their actions and motives. First, someone tell the NSA I was just doing research. Second, here’s where I’m going:

What if the character or characters who represent evil in a story want to help develop the world instead of destroy it? What if they benefit as much as the heroes, the shopkeepers, the simple but courageous village gardeners from the worldwide advancement of magic, technology, living conditions, clean water, and green pastures? What if they are as much turned off by a giant volcano spewing reeking sulfurous clouds as any hero? What if they are against war of any kind?

I started down this path in Teller, with the principal evil character making it clear that she wants all of humanity to progress. She’s even willing to help in an underground, organized-movement sort of way—you know, duffle-bags full of cash, “removing obstacles”, and other varieties of influence in the right places. Teller is contemporary fantasy, and so the characters are living in a world with runes, rockets, and Reddit. Think of hundreds of “evil” characters around the world, nominally working together, with the common goal of getting rid of humans. Not by wiping them out—that would be messy, but by making sure that civilization either advances to the point where humans can travel to other planets—getting the majority of them offworld, or to the point where humans develop the technology to “digitize human consciousness” and go virtual—with two paths from there: withdrawal into some localized computational substrate with a small realworld footprint (e.g., “still here, but quiet and out of the way”), or by extending the range of exploration by sending “digitized human freight” to planets lightyears away and decanting the data into physical forms on the other side (e.g., “grass is always greener colonization strategy”). The baddies want our world after all—and although they really don’t get along, there is one clear and shared requirement for the take-over: they want the world in move-in condition.

I continued plotting and writing using this flavor of evil with my latest book, Salvage, where the principal evil character, Damaris, is completely open to discussions with one of the protagonists, and even hints that he’s going to invest in the character’s company Knowledgenix, which develops advanced autonomous robots. Damaris genuinely likes Jon Andreden, and wants to help him succeed.

Evil in the fantasy genre doesn’t have to mean miles of wasteland, ever-present storm clouds, minions with sharp weapons and low morale, or any mode of transportation that involves chiropteran wings—although I am a fan of some of these, especially the wings. To me, a villain who shares values with the protagonist frightens me more than any straightforward grab for money or power. It totally freaks out the heroes, too.

**
Chris Howard is just a creative guy with a pen and a paint brush, author of Seaborn (Juno Books, 2008), Salvage (Masque/Prime Books, 2013), Nanowhere (Lykeion, 2005), and a shelf-full of other books. His short stories have appeared in a bunch of zines, latest is "Lost Dogs and Fireplace Archeology" in Fantasy Magazine. His story "Hammers and Snails" was a Robert A. Heinlein Centennial Short Fiction Contest winner. He writes and illustrates the comic Saltwater Witch. His art has appeared in Shimmer, BuzzyMag, various RPGs, and on the pages of books, blogs, and other interesting places. Find out everything here: http://www.SaltwaterWitch.com

Valjeanne Jeffers
Wither the Evil and the Fantastical?

I have often contemplated the nature of evil. What is it that drives men and women to commit evil deeds? I have concluded that evil folks are made, not born. And there are many reasons that evil doers continue on their path. The quest for power. Selfishness. An abiding hatred of everyone― including themselves.

Thus, as a writer, I have found that villains with myriad layers are more interesting, realistic and more fun than one dimensional evil doers—the villain tormented by love or guilt over his own deeds. The man or woman obsessed with material gain or power. This is the stuff of which great villains are made; such as the antagonists of my Immortal series, “Tehotep” and “Z100,” the villainess of The Switch II: Clockwork. Art, after all, should imitate life.

Then too, some evil acts may be committed by folks who are not necessarily evil but who have simply made the wrong choices (whatever their motivation). I recently had an inner dialogue about one of my newest characters. I concluded that the character was not evil. But she does make choices that result in mayhem. And who among us has not made bad decisions? And in my Immortal saga and The Switch II: Clockwork (which includes books I and II), I explore these questions through my characters—none of whom are perfect—and plots.

Yet what would a science/fantasy novel be without the fantastical?

Fantastic is described as wondrous and wild; to quote a few definitions. These are perfect metaphors for a SF/fantasy villain: an evil doer with preternatural powers and with dark foreboding or evil intentions. A villain can, and should, wreak havoc with the lives of one’s heroines and heroes.

In my novels my evil doers are imbued with fantastic powers―supernatural or man-made. Of course, I've given fantastical gifts to my heroines and heroes, too. And thank goodness for this! For how could they complete their life-changing quests without them? How could the plot twists and turns take place? How could the glorious battles I envisioned, happen? The fantastic too, is a perfect metaphor for speculative fiction. For as writers we don’t want the ordinary. We don’t want the humdrum.

We want the fantastik. This is stuff of which SF/fantasy worlds are made.

In my newest novels, which I’ll release later this year, Mona Livelong: Paranormal and Colony: Ascension, I've used both the evil and the fantastic to build my worlds. Take a gander below at the excerpt for Mona Livelong: Paranormal Detective.

Sally looked closer, stretching his mouth further open with a gloved hand. She reached inside. “It looks like a key. . .How did I miss this?” Probing with her fingertips, she pulled the metal from where it was sticking just under his tongue. All at once, she jerked spasmodically.

“Sally—Sally!”

“Yes. . . I. . .” The laboratory waved before her eyes. . .

Light from a single, gas streetlamp pooled upon the empty street. Footfalls echoed behind her, unhurried, yet unrelenting in their step.

She whirled around His big, tattooed body blocked the dim light.

He was a swarthy man, with dimpled cheeks and full lips, handsome, except for his glistening gray eyes; and his smile. . . a terrible cold grin, the grimace of a killer: a sadist. . .

I hope I’ve done justice to my characters. I hope my readers will be pleased.

**
Valjeanne is the author of the SF/fantasy novels: Immortal, Immortal II: The Time of Legend, Immortal III: Stealer of Souls, and the steampunk novelsImmortal IV: Collision of Worlds and The Switch II: Clockwork (includes books I and II).

She is a graduate of Spelman College, NCCU and a member of the Carolina African American Writers' Collective. She has been published under both Valjeanne Jeffers and Valjeanne Jeffers-Thompson. Her writing has appeared in: The Obamas: Portrait of America's New First Family, from the Editors of Essence, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, Pembroke Magazine, Revelry, Drumvoices Revue 20th Anniversary, and Liberated Muse: How I Freed My Soul Vol. I. She was also a semi-finalist for the 2007 Rita Dove Poetry Award.

Valjeanne's fiction has appeared in Steamfunk! Genesis: An Anthology of Black Science Fiction, Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology, LuneWing, PurpleMag, Genesis Science Fiction Magazine, Pembroke Magazine, Possibilities, 31 Days of Steamy Mocha, and Griots II: Sisters of the Spear (in press). She works as an editor for Mocha Memoirs Press and is also co-owner of Q& V Affordable editing. Preview or purchase her novels at: http://www.vjeffersandqveal.com

Andrea Hosth
Evil in Fantasy

One of the biggest clichés of fantasy is the Dark Lord. Nameless, faceless and big on Mwahaha, the Dark Lord is Evil because he is Evil. His motivations include "More Evil Now,” "Evil for the Sake of Evil,” "Can I Get Some Evil with That?" and "Just Because.” Or World Domination.

Dark Lords are generally accompanied by Minions. The minions are often nameless, faceless/masked and lack such complexities as a personality. Created to serve – or just brought up bad – they unswervingly follow orders and are rarely human enough to have a crisis of loyalty.

A Dark Lord, an unequivocal Evil with no reasons other than Evil, can still make for a compelling tale. Some of the creepiest stories I've read, the most genuinely frightening, involve a true nameless, faceless evil: implacable, impossible to reason with, and entirely lacking in easily exploitable weaknesses or Evil Overlord logic.

Despite the fact that my first attempt at a book featured a Dark Lord (Sith the Destroyer) and obedient minions (Tar'Sithans) – at least until I edited them into slightly less paper-thin cyphers – I'm not generally inclined to use "Evil because Evil" primary antagonists (though I'm happy to throw thousands of predatory monsters into my characters' paths). Instead I tend to lean toward "greedy people" and "quite reasonable people with conflicting interests". The latter are not so much "Evil" as "on the wrong side".

My greedy people drift quite close to the Faceless Evil archetype, and tend to spend most of the story off the stage. I'm generally not that interested in detailing the slippery selfishness of a person who, when everyone has enough apples to get by, decides to scheme or manipulate or outright take someone else's apples. These people often start out conscienceless, and their development is from greedy to greedier. I think they constitute a kind of Evil, just one which doesn't name itself that way.

People with conflicting interests, on the other hand, fascinate me, although I quite often can't write from their point of view. The person who steals an apple because their family is starving. And then realises that by stealing that apple, they're making someone else's family suffer. Would they still steal the next apple? How do they justify it? What if that apple becomes two, or twenty, or all? And that quick, unnoticed theft becomes a need to protect yourself from retribution, and outright damage, and people dying by deliberate act. At what point do you become Evil? Is it the first apple? Or the first awareness of damage? The irrevocable blow?

Or are people with conflicting needs simply people with conflicting needs, and right to do what to others is wrong?

I try to take care when making the other side in a story "Evil". Because if "they're Evil" is the reason, the excuse, the justification for any and all actions by those the story considers "Good,” at what point will people of that world be able to point to my characters and say: "Evil"?

**
Andrea K Höst was born in Sweden but raised in Australia. She writes fantasy and science fantasy, and enjoys creating stories which give her female characters something more to do than wait for rescue. See: www.andreakhost.com

October 2013: Great Traveling Fantasy Roundtable Blog: What does it mean to be human?

Being Human

Deborah Ross

I think we Homo sapiens have been discussing what being human is and means since we developed abstract language and probably before that. At first, the driving motivation was undoubtedly how to tell what is us and not-us. This is certainly a biological imperative at the cellular level; our immune systems must tackle the question every day, attacking foreign substances like viruses, bacteria, and allergenic proteins, and it’s also why cancer is so insidious (cells with the right molecular passwords that nonetheless behave like ravening barbarians). The same distinctions hold true at the level of the individual, family/clan, and larger, political units. Whether we’re talking about communities or nations, “us” = “human” = friendly, safe, cooperative, reliable, and “them” = “something else” = dangerous, untrustworthy, competitors for limited resources. In this way, “human” tends to be exclusionary and frictions tend to narrow the scope even further.

In science fiction and fantasy, however, we tend to use the term in a inclusionary way. Often the words “human” and “person” are interchangeable. Sf/f writers and readers pioneered the suggestions that all sapient races think of themselves as people and therefore, “human,” whatever the biological differences from Homo sapiens. I had a lot of fun with a race of giant slugs in Jaydium, who insisted that mammals were incapable of “personness.” The television series Star Trek often portrayed what Earth-humans and alien-humans have in common, rather than their unbridgeable differences. (The similarities were undoubtedly caused in part by the relatively primitive makeup and special effects, leading to the joke about aliens being actors with funny foreheads.) The creators of the series also exploited the romantic appeal of the exotic to generate love stories between members of different species, a phenomenon highly unlikely to occur in nature but one that had the effect of demonstrating the shared values of sapient beings. This is an example of broadening of the use of “human” as a term to include any beings of similar intelligence and culture that we can understand and sympathize with.

The inversion of the broadening effect comes up most commonly in horror: beings that look and sound human but which lack some trait or motivation we consider so important as to be a necessary part of the definition of human: empathy, for example, or the capacity for love. A prime example of this is the vampire, who “walks among us” as if human but differs in his essential nature. The horrific aspect arises in part from his blood thirst, but even more from the betrayal of the assumption of shared humanity.

None of this addresses the question of what it is it we feel defines human as opposed to intelligent-animal, a question not restricted to writers of speculative fiction. We can look at the biological characteristics of Homo sapiens, such as opposable thumbs or a greatly developed prefrontal cortex (the region responsible for complex moral judgments and control of social behavior, among other things). We can look at behavioral traits like language, prolonged rearing of young and care for the aged, the use of fire and cooking, tool-making, and the like. But in this larger universe we live in, is it wise to judge another entity as human or nonhuman based solely on what they look like or how they act? Is a child born with crippling, distorting defects or an adult with a deforming disease not still human? What about a person who has suffered a debilitating stroke and can no longer communicate? These and many other, similar questions highlight the difficulty of defining human by observable characteristics.

Instead, we can look to experiential qualities: the capacity for love, for wonder, for kindness; the awareness of personal mortality and the “binding” of time through personal and generational transmission of memory; abstract thought, and so forth. It may well be that animals have some of these abilities but lack the means (or perhaps the inclination!) to communicate them to us. We know, for example, that many species exhibit behavior we interpret as grief, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. Certainly, cooperation is not limited to Homo sapiens, and tool- making definitely is not. So instead of emphasizing how we are different from other creatures in our world, we can focus instead on how wonderful it is that the things we value in ourselves are not exclusive to our species. Or, contrariwise, that humanity is not limited to humans.

Fantasy and What It Means to Be Human

Andrea Hosth

One of the primary preoccupations of science fiction is said to be the question of what it means to be human. Seeing ourselves through alien eyes allows us to see ourselves anew. It’s a question which is less commonly associated with fantasy, and yet the sub-genre is equally ripe for examining the question of humanity through the use of non-humans.

One of the common positions taken when depicting humans in fantasy (particularly in fantasy which uses a roleplaying game basis, but also many less structured works) is that of humans as a middle ground, a kind of neutral party capable of achieving good, but all too ready to give in to baser impulses.

Other characteristics typically awarded humanity are versatility and creativity. Humans can be all things, while other races possess extremes – age/intelligence combined with sterility. Strength mixed with a lack of imagination. Humans are portrayed as young, vigorous, spontaneous, a little naïve, courageous, capable of great love and vivid passions. It is a very common trope to have the resolution of a dire battle revolve around a human’s ability to love, or innovate, believe, or be brave to the point of stupidity. It is equally common for other races to be failing, or to “Go into the West” and leave their territories to humans territories. Who took up residence in Rivendell, once Elrond moved on? Did they drift, dowdy and out of place, among the echoes of their splendid predecessors?

This frequent positioning of humanity as a versatile and rapidly improving ‘young’ race does not appear to be a deliberate examination of what it means to be human (as seen in those novels which attempt to make a point about humanity by viewing it through alien eyes), but instead a glorification of the traits humanity currently displays. Crude and ignorant – but just because of youth! Comparatively powerless, but able to think of new solutions to old problems. Vigorous, a bit chaotic, blundering occasionally, but heading inexorably upward, natural successors to the world’s bounty.

These are the stories we write about ourselves, the flip side of the grimdark/grittygrotty species of fantasy, where the narrative itself rhapsodises about human nature as something special and true and good.

I’ll end, without further comment, with a series of quotes from Doctor Who. The Doctor is not always so complimentary, but this has been the thrust of many of the rebooted series:

" Well, you could do that. Yeah, you could do that. Of course you could. But why? Look at these people, these human beings. Consider their potential! From the day they arrive on the planet, blinking, step into the sun, there is more to see than can ever be seen, more to do than — no, hold on. Sorry, that’s The Lion King. But the point still stands. Leave them alone!" – The Christmas Invasion.

" Oh, might have spent a million years evolving into clouds of gas… and another million as downloads, but you always revert to the same basic shape: the fundamental human. End of the universe and here you are. Indomitable, that’s the word! Indomitable! Ha!" – Utopia.

" The one thing you can’t do… is stop them thinking. [He begins rising upwards angelically] Tell me the human race is degenerate now…when they can do this." – Last of the Time Lords.

“And shards of gold flecked violet split the air with sound and fury! With laughter love and tears I pressed my lips to these spirits, freed them to walk across the page,”
First Breath, Valjeanne Jeffers

What is it that drives our characters? Their humanity. And this is more important than their preternatural powers. Their strength. Or what they look like. It even takes precedence over the wondrous plots we, as writers, devise. That our characters are human and driven by the same emotions and quests that drive us as writers, and which drive our readers– even if they are sociopaths or mad men. The need for love, shelter, money. The emotions of desire, rage, melancholy…

The same qualities that make us, the writers and our readers, identify with them and love them. Or hate them.

I have created characters so loathsome that I couldn’t wait to kill them off. And others that I loved so much I used all sorts of plot machinations to keep them alive. Our characters are spirits who walk across the page: women and men who mirror our struggles.


What it means to be human

Carole McDonnell

From the beginning of time (and perhaps before time began) the question has always existed: what does it mean to be human?

Humanity lives/exists within a prescribed setting which limits knowledge, age, joy, the body, sexuality, tribe, power, authority, dominion, physical movement, movement in time.

As a writer of Christian fiction I grew up with the story of Adam and Eve which is the first encounter most Christians have with the question of What does it mean to be human. In that story, man is created but not yet settled into a specific kind of being. (And in the Christian mythos, man will not find his true “self” and “being” until the end of time when time is no more.

Adam and Eve are beings who do not die. Yet they are not really immortal. They’re in a strange nexus of creation where they are like god with (some) dominion and some knowledge. But they lack something, something God apparently thinks is not particularly important. They do not understand right and wrong.

They have consciousness but are without law or conscience. They have a blissful ignorance of evil and cannot judge/blame either themselves, others, God, or the world. For them, it is a world which is neither immoral or moral.

Despite God’s desire that they remain outside of the realm of guilt or consciousness of evil, God did make them moral beings. Their one morality: the freedom to obey or not to obey. They are aware of one thing that they lack: they do not fully understand the ramifications of evil: disease, death, cruelty, hunger, toil, meaninglessness, and the thousand ills flesh is heir to. This knowledge of death is what separates them from God, what makes them less than God.

But third agency enters the picture and challenges them to be like God. The agency tempts them with knowledge of evil, law, conscience, guilt. The humans take a wager upon themselves. It is possible that humans can understand evil and not fall into guilt. Their first response to eyes opened to evil: shame. Shme about what? Shame in their comparison to perfect God. Thus humanity falls from its own perfection as it aimed for God’s perfection.

There is so much in this story, myth, history. And all fantasy stories echo it. All these elements are found in fantasy: Humans who wish to put side emotions and become, robots who wish to be humans, humans locked way from Eden, humans betrayed by a God, humans betraying their gods, humans casting off their gods, intrusive deceiving godlike figures, humans battling death, humans defying death, humans conquering time, humans failing a task, humans striving, humans ignorant of evil, humans being dominated by the world, humans dominating the world. All the echoes are found in fantasy stories and will apparently continue until the end of time.
Carole McDonnell is the author of the Fantasy Novel , The Constant Tower

http://www.amazon.com/The-Constant-To...

Spirit Fruit: Collected Speculative Fiction an eBook available as an eBook at kindle.

What Does It Mean to be Human: Answering in Fantasy

Warren Rochelle

What does it mean to be human? This is a question I pose when I teach my science fiction lit class, foregrounding it as one of the perennial themes of the genre. I have yet to pose this same question in fantasy lit. When I was thinking about what to write for this month’s post I found myself wondering why I don’t. After all, as Le Guin says in “Prophets and Mirrors: Science Fiction as a Way of Seeing,” “the story—from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace—is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding” (quoted in Language of the Night 27). So, why shouldn’t I consider fantasy as a tool for “the purpose of gaining understanding”—for understanding something about meaning human?

Science fiction often answers this question with aliens of one kind or another; how then might fantasy do so with werewolves, dragons, and elves, fairies, and witches, and other assorted magical beings? As Vulcans and Martians become ways of seeing and understanding humanity, through juxtaposition, comparison, and contrast, through reflection, and in metaphor and symbol, so these denizens of Faerie. Science fiction also will sometimes posit answers to this question when humans are taken out of the familiar—the green hills of Earth to the deserts of the Moon and Mars, the metal worlds of spaceships and space stations, to planets only imagined. When the background noise is gone—the background itself—then we can often see ourselves as we really are. So it is when we enter Faerie—the Golden Wood, the haunted house, the gingerbread cottage, Lantern Waste, or sometimes, the house next door, or in our own house. Facing the dangerous and/or unfamiliar, confronting the evil and/or the strange, often demands we be most our selves—or began learning what being that self means.

All right, let’s start with werewolves, which are of particular interest to me at the moment as I am finishing up The Werewolf and His Boy. Are werewolves human? Sometimes. If you prick them, will they not bleed? Yes, sometimes wolf blood, sometimes human. Depending on the legend used, they are at least in human form most of the time, or twenty-odd days out of the average thirty. But what I find telling is when we look into our reflection and we can, if the light is right, see into the dark recesses of our souls, the hidden places in our hearts, and there find the wolf, the beast, even without fangs or fur. Humans are animals, occasionally, we are beasts. Wrestling with the feral parts of our nature, recognizing they exist—that is part of what it means to be human.

For my werewolf, Henry Thorn, he has to sort out both what it means to be wolf and to be boy: that he both needs to run, to hit raw meat, to howl, and to cry and miss his mother and to love another human being. For Henry, this means loving Jamey, another boy—but that’s another essay. Henry also finds out more about who he is as a boy when he finds himself in a den of werewolves, amongst the beasts. Jamey needs protection and caring for—and Henry learns something more about human love, and thus about being human. It is through fantasy that I can explore the answers Henry finds as he also asks and begins to answer the question of who he is—human boy, wolf—Henry Thorn.

In what might be an iconic werewolf tale, American Werewolf in London, the question of what it means to be human—or rather, can a werewolf be human—is answered, no, or not quite, as the beast, the wolf, is far too strong, the call of the wild, or rather the disease, overwhelms the unlucky American tourist. He dies a beast. But then, our humanity is fragile—and the beast is never as far as away as we might like to think. My werewolf knows the beast is always present—and that if he remains in beast-form too long, he risks a difficult return to being human. Perhaps this tension between beast and human, with the beast sometimes the one in control, is an attempt to explain humans in mobs, or at war. Surely the beasts were the ones at My Lai, at so many Native American villages, at Auschwitz.

Fantasy, with its transformations, its wishes, its dreams and magical beings who are so very much like us and yet so very different, does present ways to explore answers to the question of what it means to be human. This doesn’t seem all that surprising as I write this, but until presented with this month’s blog theme, I hadn’t thought about it this concretely in connection to fantasy lit. Yet, as Henry Thorn, the werewolf, is clearly telling me, I have been thinking about it for quite some time. So, the next time I teach fantasy …

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Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, “The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010), all published by Golden Gryphon Press. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. His short fiction has been published in such journals and collections as Icarus, Collective Fallout. The Silver Gryphon, North Carolina Literary Review, Romance and Beyond, and Aboriginal Science Fiction. His short story, “The Boy on McGee Street,” was just published in Queer Fish 2. He is presently working on a novel about a gay werewolf and his godling boyfriend and a collection of gay-themed speculative fiction short stories.