I don’t know Maryland geography well at all, but if you are anywhere near either of the places where I will be appearing, it would be lovely to see you there.

Reading from The Silence Of Men

On Friday, May 15th, I will be reading from my book of poems The Silence Of Men at Coco’s Butter Cafe, which is located at 7361 Assateague Dr., Unit 1040, Columbia, MD 20794 (directions). From what I have been told, the cafe serves great chocolate and other desserts, great wine and lovely appetizers. Here’s the rest of the relevant information:

Doors Open/Open mic signup: 7 PM
Open Mic Begins: 8 PM
Feature Begins: around 9 PM
Cover: $10 general admission/$5 for open mic poets
This event is curated by Th3rd Avenue

Translation as Plagiarism as Cultural Transmission: How Benjamin Franklin Helped Bring Classical Iranian Literature Into American English

On Sunday, May 17, at a meeting of the Iranian-American Cultural Society of Maryland, I will be giving a talk and reading from my translations of two masterpieces by the 13th century Iranian poet Saadi, Gulistan and Bustan. At the center of my talk is the story of a plagiarism scandal involving Benjamin Franklin that resulted from publication of a story that he claimed was a chapter of Genesis, but which had actually been written by Saadi.

When: 1:30-3:00
Where: Towson University, 7800 York Building, Room 121, Towson, MD 21252
Information: (410) 258-6651

Admission is free.

So I thought I was going to start my series on classical Iranian poetry with Shahnameh, Iran’s national epic, because it is what I am working on right now, but President Obama’s videotaped Nowruz message to Iran, in which he quotes the 13th century poet Sa’di, has forced me to change my plans. Those lines, The children of Adam are limbs to each other/having been created of one essence, are among the most famous lines of poetry in the world, though few in the United States have ever heard them. They are inscribed on the wall of the Hall of Nations in the UN building in New York City, and the sentiment they express, which you find throughout Gulistan, the book from which they are excerpted, helped in 16th century to catalyze a sea change in the way Christian Europe viewed Muslims and Islamic culture, from one that was governed by the mutual hatred of the Crusades to one that accepted as real the possibility that Muslims were no less human, and believed in humanistic values no less strongly, than the Christian Europeans themselves.

Before I talk about the lines Obama quoted, however (I will have more to say about Sa’di and the rest of his work in another post) I want to acknowledge the importance of the message itself, not just because he sent it–and if you don’t know much about US-Iranian relations beyond the facts of what we called the hostage crisis and the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution, you might not realize just how significant the simple fact of sending such a message is–but also because of how he said what he said. First, the message:

I am going to assume that most of what I have to say about this has already been said elsewhere on the web, but since it sets a context for talking about the poetry that President Obama quoted, I want to say it anyway. First, note that he says he wants to speak directly to the leaders and people of the Islamic Republic of Iran, signaling that he considers the country’s current leadership legitimate and they are the people with whom he needs to talk about resolving the differences between our two nations. Note as well, however, that he has chosen to send this message on the occasion of Nowruz (also here and here), the Iranian New Year, a holiday that is distinctly not Muslim–it is Zoroastrian and therefore rooted in the traditions of pre-Islamic Iran–and that the Islamic Republic has on occasion suggested it would like to replace with an Islamic holiday. Indeed, the Islamic Republic actively pursues the delegitimizing of Iran’s pre-Islamic past on a number of fronts, one of which was an attempt after the 1979 revolution to discredit Ferdowsi, the author of Shahnameh and Shahnameh itself.

When I was in Iran this past summer, to give you an example I saw with my own eyes, we visited the ruins of Persepolis (also spelled Perspolis, which is closer to how the word is pronounced in Persian), which was built by Darius I in 518 CE and was the capital of the Achaemenid Empire. One of the most remarkable things I learned when we were there was that documents found in the treasury indicated that the ancient Iranian kings not only had something like what we would call workers compensation for their employees, but also policies that permitted men to have paid leave from work when their wives were pregnant so they could help out at home. On the wall of the building that was probably the harem, however, and which is now a museum displaying artifacts found on the site, there is a proclamation issued by the government of Iran asserting that, while it is of course wonderful that people can come to see the great works God made it possible for the ancient Iranian kings to produce, we should not forget that they were tyrannical despots who exploited their people, the clear implication being and that it has only been through the Islamic Republic that Iranians have found true freedom. (Other evidence of the essentially humane nature of the ancient Iranian kings also exists, but since that is not the point of this post, I will allow the irony in what I have just written to speak for itself.)

Whether or not Persident Obama was aware of the irony of sending his message to the Islamic Republic on Nowruz, I don’t know, but like most well-constructed ironies this one can be read two ways, either as evidence that he didn’t know what he was doing and that his message will therefore fall on deaf ears, or that he knew precisely what he was doing and was sending the Islamic Republic the message that while he intends to do business with them as the legitimate political leaders of Iran, that does not mean he will kowtow to the world view they would like to impose on the people of their nation. My own sense, though, is that it doesn’t matter whether or not Obama and his people knew anything about what I have just written; the practical effect of his message, specifically his appeal to the common humanity that binds us as the context within which to talk about the differences between us, puts the Islamic Republic on notice that they cannot depend on the US being an easy enemy anymore–by which I mean an enemy they can easily avoid talking to because we fit very neatly into the “enemy” slot in their rhetoric, which is where the Bush administration kept us firmly ensconced for the eight years they were in power.

More to the point, Obama’s message, including his brief quote from the poet Sa’di, had to have spoken very powerfully to the Iranian people, first because the message of shared humanity is one they have heard all too rarely from the US not only in the last eight years, but ever. From long before the US and British sponsored coup in 1953 that unseated Mohammad Mossadeq, the duly elected prime minister of Iran, so that they could reinstate Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (the NY Times report is here; and an allegedly unedited version of the CIA report is here)–all pretty clearly in the interest of retaining access to and control over Iran’s oil–Iranians have seen their aspirations for democracy thwarted time and time again by outside influences. To the degree that President Obama is seriously committed to engaging Iran on equal terms–by which I mean in a way that respects and honors the integrity of their much-much-older-than-ours culture, history and even their politics (a subject that is far more complicated than almost any reporting I have ever seen done on the subject here in the States–and I am certainly no expert)–and to the degree that he can demonstrate that commitment with concrete action, he is committing the United States to a radical change not only in the way we deal with Iran politically, but also in how we see Iran more broadly–since, after all, the way our media covers Iran will absolutely follow the stance our political leaders take towards Iran. (As an aside: I was very surprised by how many of the Iranians I met when I was there this past summer think that the average American thinks they are all some version of what is meant by the phrase “anti-American terrorist.” They see how they and their country are portrayed here; and they–not the government, but everyday people–despair of ever being seen by us on their own terms.)

The other reason that Obama’s use of lines by Sa’di would have resonated very powerfully with the Iranian people is the degree to which Sa’di and his work is loved and revered in Iranian culture to this day. I will write more about Sa’di in a future post. For now, suffice it to say that his position in the Iranian literary canon is not unlike Shakespeare’s place in our own. More to the point, Iran is a culture that loves its poets and its poetry; it is hard for people in the US, where poetry is so little appreciated unless it is couched in the melodies of popular song, to imagine the degree to which poetry is a living part of the culture in Iran. One very rough analogy might be to think about someone like the early Bob Dylan and how popular his songs were–and maybe still are–in progressive circles and then expand that popularity to include pretty much the entire population of the United States, and not just because people liked his tunes, but because they identified with the way he spoke truth to power; and then imagine Bob Dylan’s words not just as part of every child’s schooling, but as the primary text used to teach people how to read English.

As I said in my introductory post, I am not an expert on Iranian literature, and so I make no claim that what I have just told you about Sa’di is 100% accurate and up-to-date–indeed, it’s fascinating to learn the degree to which Sa’di’s reputation has risen and fallen depending on the political climate in Iran–but I think my analogy is generally true. Moreover, it is indisputably true that there is a long tradition in Iran, and other countries in that region, such as Pakistan, of poets being the people who speak truth to power. In fact, the lines from Sa’di that Obama quoted, wonderfully liberal and humanistic as they are, come from a story in Gulistan that is far more radical, certainly for the time it was written, than those two lines would suggest. Here is the full story, though I am now going to switch to my own translation. It’s the tenth story in the first chapter, “Padeshahan” (”Kings”), in Gulistan. First, though, some vocabulary:

• A darvish (dervish in English) was a kind of wandering mendicant, and they were usually Sufi and considered holy men.
• The Propeht Yahia is John the Baptist.

Story 10

An Arab king who was notorious for his cruelty came on a pilgrimage to the cathedral mosque of Damascus, where he offered the following prayer, clearly seeking God’s assistance in a matter of some urgency:

“The darvish, poor, owning nothing, the man
whose money buys him anything he wants,
here, on this floor, enslaved, we are equals.
Nonetheless, the man who has the most
comes before You bearing the greater need.”

When the king was done praying, he noticed me immersed in my own prayers at the head of the prophet Yahia’s tomb. The monarch turned to me, “I know that God favors you darvishes because you are passionate in your worship and honest in the way you live your lives. I fear a powerful enemy, but if you add your prayers to mine, I am sure that God will protect me for your sake.”

“Have mercy on the weak among your own people,” I replied, “and no one will be able to defeat you.”

To break each of a poor man’s ten fingers
just because you have the strength offends God.
Show compassion to those who fall before you,
and others will extend their hands when you are down.

The man who plants bad seed hallucinates
if he expects sweet fruit at harvest time.
Take the cotton from your ears! Give
your people justice before justice finds you.

All men and women are to each other
the limbs of a single body, each of us drawn
from life’s shimmering essence, God’s perfect pearl;
and when this life we share wounds one of us,
all share the hurt as if it were our own.
You, who will not feel another’s pain,
you forfeit the right to be called human.

Because I plan to write more about Sa’di in a future post, I am going to let this story speak for itself, except for two things: First, given that Sa’di lived in a monarchy, consider how much courage it would take to say such things to a king who had the power of live and death over you. Second, consider how radical it would be in a monarchy to suggest to the king that he should rule as if he and the weakest of his subjects were actually part of the same body–the metaphor is a good deal more complext than you might think on a first reading–and then consider the ways in which that metaphor resonates today, not only in countries like Iran, with governments that are in many ways hostile to their own people, but even in our own nation, where our government is supposed to be “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

My next post, unless something else happens to distract me, will be about Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh.

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.

From antisemitism to condoms to….classical Iranian poetry. I was all set to finish the third part of my Thinking About Condoms series (here and here), which I do still plan to complete, when I realized that giving time to that piece would take time away from a writing project for which I have an actual contract. Not that I am getting paid–and that statement is not a complaint; such is the world of small press literary publishing–but Junction Press agreed in January to publish the book-length section I have translated from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, or Book of Kings, which is Iran’s national epic. Since then, I have been mostly doing some necessary additional research and rereading both the draft of the translation I submitted and the trots from which I worked to produce it. (A trot is a more or less literal rendering, in the target language of the translation, of the passages from the source that are to be translated.) It is time, however, to start the work of revision in earnest, and given the other demands my life makes on my time, I had no choice but to put something aside, and the blogging I’ve been doing recently is what I have decided I have to give up, at least for now.

I feel badly about this because, while my translation work is important to me on many levels–and I obviously think it should be important to you on some level as well, or I would not be posting about it–my heart as a poet and writer is much more fully committed to the kinds of issues with which my recent blog posts and almost all of my poetry are concerned. Not that translation is not important; it is, deeply, and I will have more to say about that over the next couple of posts. Doing translations, however, became a part of my writing life only recently, and to the degree that I have had to embrace an two disciplines that were entirely new to me–translation studies and Persian studies–it has meant a sea change in how I think of myself as a writer and, not incidentally, as an academic. The content of what I am translating, for example, almost always takes me farther afield than I would like from what the central concerns of my own writing usually are. First, I have had to learn about the poets I am translating, about the historical periods in which they wrote, about the history of the translation of their works into English–which is a much more fascinating topic than I would ever have thought; I have learned, for example, that Benjamin Franklin was involved in a huge plagiarism scandal involving his use of a poem by the 13th century poet Sa’di–and about the Persian language, its poetics and its literary canon. Not that these are not interesting and worthwhile topics in their own right, and not that they do not involve issues of gender, sex, class, antisemitism, racism, and power and oppression in all their myriad forms, but, because I am not a scholar of Persian studies and am learning as I go about the works I translate and their authors, it is hard for me to do much more than acknowledge that the issues are there. I simply do not know enough, yet, to say anything much more substantial than that.

My first book of translations from classical Iranian poetry, Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan was published in 2004, and the commission which initiated my work as a translator came to me only in 2002. Before that, I had only dabbled in translation. I did an independent study in my senior year of college translating poetry from Hebrew; and when I lived in South Korea, I worked briefly with a woman who was studying Korean literature on translating some poems by Hwang Jini, whom I have sometimes heard referred to as Korea’s Emily Dickinson, an analogy that only works if you consider nothing more than the status each woman’s work occupies in her respective canon. Hwang Jini was a kisaeng and so, in many, many significant ways, lived as Emily Dickinson’s precise antithesis. Since 2004, I have published two more books, Selections from Saadi’s Bustan and, as Professor John Moyne’s co-translator, A Bird In The Garden Of Angels.

When I got married in 1993, I suggested to my wife that an exciting thing for us to do would be to translate some contemporary Iranian literature into English. It seemed to me a good way to get to know her language and her culture–and for us to get to know each other on a different, deeper level–but she was ever as interested in the idea as I was. So I let it drop, though the idea never really left my head, and once I began to learn from some Iranian friends about the impoverished and paltry state of the literary translation of Iranian literature into English–a subject that will probably merit a post all its own–I would allow myself to fantasize about producing such a work. It was always very clear to me, however, that this would remain a fantasy. Not only, as I mentioned above, was Iranian literature a field about which I was truly ignorant, but I neither spoke fluently nor read nor wrote Persian, skills that seemed to me central to any translation project I might decide to take on.

Life, though, has a way–if I can bastardize an old cliche a little bit–of making itself “interesting,” and so when I received a phone call from a friend of mine, a translator of Rumi who is pretty well known on the Iranian arts and culture scene, asking if I would be interested in joining an Iranian-literature project that a friend of a friend of his, Mehdi Faridzadeh, the executive director of the International Society for Iranian Culture (ISIC), was starting, I immediately said yes. (ISIC’s website is in need of work, but you can still find out about the organization if you poke around.) As it was first explained to me, the project would involve my reading existing translations of five major works of classical Iranian literature and then writing summaries that English-language readers could use to familiarize themselves with those texts. The end product would be either a website or a book, and the purpose was to provide readers in the US access to an important body of literature that most of us know nothing about, the masterworks of which are actually well-known throughout much of the rest of the world, and that was, during the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries acknowledged in England and the US as a major world literature that educated people ought to know.

When I spoke to my friend’s friend, however, the description of the project changed. He told me that what ISIC wanted was for someone actually to retell the stories contained in the works that had been selected for the project. This idea intrigued me even more, since there would be more room for creative expression, but when I finally met Mr. Faridzadeh, and he explained that each of my first two contacts had been wrong, that what he wanted was to publish new literary translations of these works, ones that would both stand on their own as works of contemporary American poetry and come to replace the outdated and scholarly translations that are currently the only venue for studying classical Iranian literature in English, I said no. I neither read nor wrote Persian, and while I understood a fair amount of the language–enough, the joke among my wife’s relatives has been for a while now, that they can’t so easily talk about me in front of me anymore–my comprehension was (and still is) limited largely to ordinary conversation, including some of the more common, and colorful, obscenities. I did not see how I could possibly do justice to the project. Mr. Faridzadeh persevered, however, explaining that, precisely because they wanted the final product to be a work of contemporary American poetry, it was more important that the translator they chose be a native-English speaking poet than a Persian bilingual. He would provide me with accurate English-language renderings of each of the texts he was asking me to translate; my task was to reimagine them–retranslate is not quite the right word, since I would be working from English to English–as contemporary American literature.

ISIC’s goal, Mr. Faridzadeh explained, was for these translations to provide a window into Iranian culture and history separate from the highly politicized ones represented by our mainstream media and the inflammatory rhetoric of the Bush administration. (I will have more to say in my next post about President Obama’s Norooz video message to Iran and the Iranian people.) The existing translations of classical Iranian literature, almost all of it poetry, were either too scholarly and/or too old to appeal to contemporary readers. One of the books, Sa’di’s Gulistan, had not been translated in its entirety since the 1800s, while another, Attar’s Ilahi-Nama, had only been translated into English once, in the 1970s. The other books, with the exception of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (of which more in another post), had been similarly neglected. All he asked was that I give it a try and produce a couple of samples. He, of course, wanted to evaluate my work before making a final decision, but doing the samples would also give me a chance to experience whether or not the project was for me.

Obviously, I took the project on, and I did so for three primary reasons. First, I think the role of literary translation in educating people about other cultures is enormously under appreciated, and it made a great deal of sense to me that, given the political situation between the US and Iran, we here in the United States needed more, much more, information about Iranian culture and history. The translations Mr. Faridzadeh was asking me to produce would, at the very least, provide for those who read them a more rounded picture of Iran than was being disseminated through the highly politicized rhetoric of our media and our political leaders. Second, I started to think about my son, who will most likely never be sufficiently literate in Persian to read the works I was being asked to translate in the original, and of my wife’s cousins, and all the second and third generation Iranian-Americans, and the fourth and fifth generations still to come, who are or will be in the same position; and I thought about how the lack of contemporary translations that would speak to them in the English of their times would effectively cut them off from large swathes of their cultural heritage; and suddenly I did not see how I could refuse at least Mr. Faridzadeh’s invitation to try my hand at what he had in mind. And, finally, as a poet, I felt very deeply the value of making the kind of contribution to contemporary American letters that these translations could become, assuming they found the right kind of readership; indeed, the one enduring disappointment I have suffered as part of this project has been the inability and/or failure of the publisher of my first two books even to attempt to connect to that readership.

I would be lying if I denied that some of that disappointment is about my own ego. I am, after all, a writer and a poet. A book of my own work was published in 2006 and, like most people I know who have written for publication, I like to think that my words are important enough to demand the attention of a large and enthusiastic public. If I had my way, lots of people would be reading my books and reviewing them and even teaching them in their classrooms, because I do think I have something to say that it would be worth your while and a few dollars our of your pocket to read. The reality is, though, that what I think is important about what I have to say might, in the long run, turn out to be profoundly insignificant. The writers I have translated, however, and the ones I am translating now, are people who ought to command your attention. Their stories and wisdom, and the poetry in which they have couched them, have withstood the test of time. They have a lot to teach us, and I am going to share some of what I have learned and am learning about them in the next series of blog posts that I write.

Cross posted on It’s All Connected

Given some of the discussion generated by Jake’s comment on David’s Breaking The Seals post, I thought people here might be interested to know about (if you don’t already) the work of Palestinian poet Suheir Hammad. I wrote about her second book of poetry, Zaatar Diva, and a little bit about her first, Born Palestinian, Born Black on my blog here. It’s a review of two books of poetry, but some of what it says is germane to what we are talking about here.

There is a new kind of poetry happening in NYC called The Poetry Brothel. The basic idea is that the poets are prostitutes and the patrons are johns who pay to have poetry read to them in private. There is also a featured performed, who is promoted in a tone recalling the promotion of burlesque, and the whole presentation in general, I think, is meant to recall the speakeasy’s of the prohibition era. Here is a review of the event. Some excerpts (I have eliminated some of the line breaks from the original):

The prostitute whispers, wets her lips and prepares to bare… her heart with a poem. Welcome to New York’s Poetry Brothel, where punters delve between the lines, not the sheets. At a weekend session in a Manhattan night club called the Zipper Factory the look was bona fide bordello. Literary ladies of the night flitted between intimate, candle-lit nooks, red lights and paintings of nudes. Some of the poetesses for sale sported retro-style garter belts and frilly knickers. One swanned about in a top hat and feather boa. But transactions at the Poetry Brothel are of the mind, not the body, and a moment with the catalogue, replete with pictures and whimsical descriptions, reveals what’s on offer.

The Madame — real name Stephanie Berger — came dressed for the part in low-cut dress, elbow-length black gloves and a peacock headdress. “I’d rather be in the bedroom hearing poetry than listening to some old man sitting on a chair on a stage,” she explained by the light of a guttering candle. One-on-one encounters, for which “clients” pay three to five dollars in addition to a 15 dollar entry fee and one free reading, took place upstairs. The “whores” read from their own material, much of which is free verse, making for intense, sometimes baffling performances.

…

But for those needing a break, the Poetry Brothel laid on flamenco guitarists, a fortune-teller, a blackjack table and a bar specializing in port and whisky[.] The young hedonists, most of them students, appear to have struck a surprisingly successful formula. “There just aren’t that many poetry readings where poets show a lot of cleavage,” said The Professor, otherwise known as Jennifer Michael Hecht, aged 43 and a real life professor at Manhattan’s New School. She teaches writing to many of the Brothel’s regulars and is proud of the result.

…

“It’s kind of like the Weimar Republic without the Nazis. At two in the morning you have 20- or 30-year-olds lying all over the place reading poetry,” she said.

…

The Madame promised that the Poetry Brothel welcomed all. “Many are young men with perhaps a secret interest in poems,” she murmured. “Just look at the menu. Get a recommendation. Or say you don’t care. Say: ‘I need poetry. I’m hungry.’”

On the Poetics Listserv to which I subscribe, there has been a mildly heated discussion of this. Here are some snippets (I have retained all original punctuation, etc.):

Ruth Lepson wrote: cooptation of poetry by capitalist objectification of women. not funny. to use a brothel as a metaphor is disgusting. I remember when Denise Levertov criticized a poet for using napalm as a metaphor for personal pain, saying you don’t know what it feels like & it’s much worse than the way you are characterizing it.

Adam Tobin wrote: Why is the capitalist exploitation of women at a brothel worse than, say, the capitalist exploitation of women at a Zipper Factory? It’s just a different kind of labor, no? Given that some artists are seemingly comfortable with capitalism, why should they not acknowledge it in the name of their ventures?

I understand, of course, that brothels have a particular history with a
particular kind of violence attached to it, but so do factories. Do you
direct the same righteous anger at Andy Warhol?

John Cunningham wrote: Political correctness be dammed, I like the idea of “Poetry Brothel”. Firstly, isn’t feminine or feminist poetry (whichever you prefer) spoken from the body. Secondly, here is a legally sanctioned place of ‘intercourse’ (the poetic kind, a.k.a. communication) where the practitioner are protected. For those of you who are speaking out against the body being used in commerce, why are you not speaking out against football or hockey where male bodies are being used in commerce? When you consider the damage that is done to the male body during that contact sport and the lingering effects of it in terms of permanent injury and disability such as arthritis and other diseases, isn’t this just as bad? Or is it that one affects women whereas the other affects men? If we’re going to get on a train, lets get on the right one - the one that carries both male and female on equal terms.

Gwyn Mcvay wrote: Omigod, you’re so right. I hurt in my anterior cruciate ligaments for all of those men FORCED or DECEIVED into collegiate and professional sports every year; BEATEN if they try to leave; often denied any other employment options in the case of being transgendered; not allowed to keep a PENNY of their earnings… oh wait.

First, I have to be honest and admit that I have not actually gone to The Poetry Brothel, so I cannot report firsthand on what it is like, and so what I am talking about here–as were most of the people on the Listserv–is the idea of it, and I confess to being of two minds about this. On the one hand, The Poetry Brothel strikes me as brilliant satire; on the other hand, I think it goes too far for precisely the reasons that Ruth Lepson articulated in her response. But maybe that’s what good satire is supposed to do; and yet, talking about it as satire implicitly ignores the fact that it is an ongoing event, where real people spend real money, which someone somewhere is collecting and using (for whatever purpose).

Any thoughts?

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

Head over to Podcastle to hear me read "Gordon, the Self-Made Cat," by Peter S. Beagle. I was a huge Beagle fan as a kid, so being able to record this was a major “squeeeee!” moment for me.

Pity the adverb. Once, it was a perfectly respectable part of the English language, one that did unto verbs what adjectives do unto nouns — that is to say, modify them. And such modification was considered understandable — after all, when Hamlet urged the players to “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc’d it to you, trippingly on the tongue,” he was not speaking idly. He wanted the play to ring true, the better to catch his uncle out in his schemes and machinations. Oh, Hamlet could have used some shopworn metaphor to get the point across, but why would he do that? Will Shakespeare was too good a writer to use thirty words to do what one does splendidly.

Yet somewhere in the past decade or so, the adverb has fallen out of style. Become passé. They’re too flowery, too squishy. Real authors don’t say someone delivered a line archly, they leave it to their reader to puzzle it out from the way they wrote it, like God and Ernest Hemingway intended. If they must express the fact that someone stretched out lazily, they are better to say that someone stretched out like the morning mist on the prairie. And even that’s getting a bit much. No, good American writing is straight, to the point. Lots of short, choppy sentences. The occasional “and.” Like Papa, damn it.

Well, over at POD People, Cheryl Anne Gardner stands athwart history, yelling “Stop, quickly!”

Frankly, if I want a character to walk quickly, that’s what I want. Sure, I could change it to run, but what if they aren’t running? Get my meaning. Sometimes things happen suddenly, and sometimes they don’t, not to mention the million ways to laugh or speak.

I see so many new authors struggle with comments like these, including myself, since I am in the midst of serious rewrites at the moment. Where do they hear such horrible things, well, they hear comments such as these in writing classes, style books, and see them on the writing blogs — or they might even hear them quoted from their favourite author, who will remain unmentioned.

Spot on.

Look, I’m not saying adverbs can’t be overused; everything can be overused. If every character is saying something wearily, hastily, angrily, warily…well, it can get a bit much. Then again, if I have the need for a character to deliver the line, “Well, I’m ready,” in a fashion that is morose, then it’s pretty frackin’ simple to write the sentence, “‘Well, I’m ready,’ said the erstwhile apprentice, morosely.” A lot simpler than adding dialog to show that Miia is morose, or coming up with an expressive simile to explain what the delivery of the line is, or to just leave the reader to figure it out for themselves.

As Gardner says:

I am currently reading Douglas Adams “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. Adams was one of the most brilliant writers in the sci-fi genre with over 14 million in books sales from that series of books alone. I read the book twenty plus years ago, and it is as timeless now as it was when he wrote it, not to mention just as hysterical to read. His voice is genuine and pronounced, and Adams, like many other European writers, loves his adverbs, using three or four in a row in some sentences and doing it rather effectively, I might add. But then again, those were the days when a novel was judged by its literary definition and not by word count, which means the choice of an adverb over a long drawn out boring description was actually more concise. Yes, an adverb can actually make a sentence tighter without losing its poetry. Go figure.

Ayup.

Look, I’ll admit that it’s all a matter of taste; writing, like any other art form, is not a perfect science. Some people feel that anything beyond a chopped-off, direct statement is too dang flowery to believe. Others, like me, find the style of American literary fiction to have become stilted and stifling, more in love with the elements of writing than conveying a story. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always enjoyed genre fiction more — because, let’s face it, genre fiction is allowed to be, nay expected to be, more free-wheeling, more interested in telling a story than showing off a shiny new metaphor.

For me, writing has always, at its heart, been about telling a story. That doesn’t excuse poor craftsmanship; there is joy, too, in a well-turned phrase, and wordplay used in support of a narrative is a joyful thing to read. But if we are to value wordplay, we do ourselves no favor to declare certain words off-limits. After all, if a paragraph calls for an adverb, it calls for an adverb, and who are we to tell the paragraph otherwise?

(Cross-posted from The Valkyrie’s Tale Blog)

The Background

A magazine I’ve published in was recently involved in an internet kerfuffle of some magnitude. It began when the editor, William Sanders, sent out a piece of professional correspondance (a rejection letter) in which he invoked racist stereotypes and epithets:

No, I’m sorry but I can’t use this.

There’s much to like. I’m impressed by your knowledge of the Q’uran and Islamic traditions. (Having spent a couple of years in the Middle East, I know something about these things.) You did a good job of exploring the worm-brained mentality of those people - at the end we still don’t really understand it, but then no one from the civilized world ever can - and I was pleased to see that you didn’t engage in the typical error of trying to make this evil bastard sympathetic, or give him human qualities.

However, as I say, I can’t use it. Because Helix is a speculative fiction magazine, and this isn’t speculative fiction.

Oh, you’ve tacked on some near-future elements at the end, but the future stuff isn’t in any way necessary to the story; it isn’t even connected with it in any causal way. True, the narrator seems to be saying that it was this incident which caused him to take up the jihad, but he’s being mendacious (like all his kind, he’s incapable of honesty); he was headed in that direction from the start, and if it hadn’t been the encounter with the stripper it would have been something else.

Now if it could be shown that something in this incident showed him HOW the West could be overthrown, then perhaps the story would qualify as SF. That might have been interesting. As it is, though, no connection is shown and in fact we are never told just how this conquest - a highly improbable event, to say the least - came about.

There are some other problems with the story, but there’s no point in going into them, because they don’t really matter from my viewpoint. It’s not speculative fiction and I can’t use it in my magazine.

And I don’t think you’re going to sell it to any other genre magazine, for that reason - though you’d have a hard time anyway; most of the SF magazines are very leery of publishing anything that might offend the sheet heads. I think you might have a better chance with some non-genre publication. But I could be wrong.

Sorry.

William Sanders
Senior Editor
Helix

After this occurred, several authors requested that their work be removed from the archive of Helix Magazine, as they felt they could not support a magazine that was affiliated with anti-Muslim bigotry. (For the record, I was not one of those authors, though I support those authors.) These three women: N. K. Jemisin, Yoon Ha Lee, and Margaret Ronald, were met with yet more bigoted harassment. For instance, William Sanders wrote to Yoon Ha Lee, diminishing her writing on the basis of her race:

Certainly I would not want to continue to publish a story against the author’s wishes, especially a story like this one that never did make any sense and that I only accepted because I thought it might please those who admire your work, and also because (notorious bigot that I am) I was trying to get more work by non-Caucasian writers.

He did remove the material of Yoon Ha Lee’s, N. K. Jemisin’s, and Margaret Ronald’s. However, he replaced their stories with a sexist insult: “Story deleted at author’s pantiwadulous request.”* Screenshots of his defacement of his own magazine can be found here.

Sanders’ actions were unprofessional in other respects as well (for instance, the photograph of bent-over monkeys he posted on his own journal to represent “those people” who were upset over his racism, an image that’s particularly galling in terms of its racial implications in context). A detailed summary by N. K. Jemisin containing many excellent links can be found at this site. I strongly recommend that those who are interested in SF or publishing go over and read the detailed history of the disaster, complete with links to comprehensive analyses of the racism and unprofessionality at work at every stage.

The Reaction

A number of writers were disturbed by this sequence of events. We were disturbed by Sanders’ racism. We were disturbed by his bizarre and unprofessional treatment of writers, and his willingness to deface his own magazine.

I have not asked Sanders to remove my work from his magazine. However, I am proud of the poem I published in Helix, and believe that it deserves a forum free from racism and abuse of authors. I respect my readers, and want them to be able to access our work without being forced to support a publication run by someone who brings racism into his public dealings.

A group of us have decided to solve this problem by creating a mirror site that contains our content from Helix. This site is called Transcriptase. It’s a group effort, featuring content and statements by a number of authors.

Our group statement reads:

We are Helix writers who believe in a speculative fiction community that welcomes all readers—inclusive of all races, genders, and marginalized people of all backgrounds.

In July 2008, Helix editor William Sanders stirred up controversy in the community with remarks that many found offensive. The blogosphere exploded with discussion. You can find a summary of the events here.

As the controversy continued, several Helix writers asked to remove their work from the magazine and were met with unprofessional treatment. This upset all of us. We agreed that we would not stand by in silence.

Transcriptase hosts reprints of our stories and poems originally published at Helix. During the controversy, some of us removed our work from Helix; others left it up. There are valid reasons to make either choice, and we hope you’ll respect that we had difficult decisions to make. We offer our stories and poems at Transcriptase so that you can enjoy our work away from Helix, if you choose.

It’s difficult to summarize how we feel about the incident, since each of us feels differently. Our reactions range from disappointed to sad to angry.

Many writers have chosen to add personal statements to the group declaration. I’ll quote from a couple of them:

N. K. Jemisin:

I will never forget the first time I heard a young cousin of mine—only a little older than 12, the “golden age” as they call it in this genre—say, “Why do you write that stuff? That’s white people’s stuff.”

Science fiction and fantasy, he meant. White people’s stuff.

There are a lot of reasons why he might’ve said this. The visual landscape of SF/F has showcased the fantasies and futurism of one fairly narrow demographic cluster for a very long time. We’ve seen the predictably monochromatic, monocultural results of this in films, TV, and games, of course, but it’s also visible in SF/F fiction, even though fiction isn’t supposed to be a visual medium. Of course it is, since nearly all books have cover art, and textual description is usually meant to appeal to the inner eye. So most fantasies are set in medieval England analogues and showcase heroes described as blond and blue-eyed, or heroines with “porcelain” skin. Most science fiction takes place in futures in which everyone who isn’t physically perfect, straight as a board, and European-American has apparently been wiped out by a comet, with the exception of a token Canadian or two. And while not all books feature author photos, it’s not hard to see that the creative face of SF/F is collectively a pretty pale one: just pick up a copy of Locus sometime and peruse the photos. Or go to an SF/F con. These are colorful in many ways, but not so much on the diversity front.

But there’s another reason why my young cousin might’ve decided that SF/F is the sole province of one group of people, and that is because there’s a stunning amount of bigotry rampant within the SF/F community itself. In just the past year I’ve seen prominent, bestselling SF/F authors calling for the criminalization of homosexuality, advocating the death-through-medical-neglect of Spanish-speaking immigrants (just the illegals, note, as if that’s better), and trivializing rape and sexual objectification. The Helix incident is only the latest salvo in a long-running war by a few individuals in the SF community against several million other members of the human race.

Ann Leckie:

Mr. Sanders is, of course, free to have and express whatever opinions he thinks right. He is also free to run Helix in any fashion that seems good to him. As I am free to be unwilling to work with an editor who treats his writers so disrespectfully. Who despises “political correctness,” insists on the right to fling ethnic slurs, but then
demands that anyone around him approve of his actions, banishing anyone who might question or disapprove–essentially instituting his own brand of political correctness.

I think there are quite a lot of people who sincerely don’t believe they’re racist, who say and do racist things out of ignorance or the blindness of privilege. And if everyone refuses to speak up and say, “Look, that’s wrong,” because in their hearts they know the person in question isn’t really racist, it’ll just keep happening. Is Mr. Sanders racist? I wouldn’t presume to say. Is the use of ethnic slurs racist? Absolutely. Racism might not be the intent, but it is certainly the result.

The full text of these and other author statements can be found here.

Personally, I liked Helix Magazine a lot. Helix published fiction by women writers and writers of color. It published fiction that was shocking - sometimes viscerally, but often because it was politically radical. It was a forum for some excellent work, much of it written by writers who are passionate about social justice. I was not initially - and still am not — sure whether the editor’s willingness to employ racism in his business correspondence outweighs the inherent anti-racist good of the magazine. However, as a writer, I am damn sure that it’s poisonous to support or work for someone who is willing to fling racist and sexist insults at dissenters, and to deface his own product.

The content that’s up at Transcriptase is a smattering of work from some very talented writers. I strongly recommend that those who like science fiction and fantasy, particularly SF&F that’s daring and political, check out the work on the site.

I’ll end with a couple of excerpts from stories published on Transcriptase:

“The Snake’s Wife” by Ann Leckie, a story of court intrigue that deals intimately with gender roles in the ancient world

My father gestured to a slave. “Send the girl,” he said. We didn’t wait long — my sister was ready, had been for some time, most likely. She came in a side door, my mother behind her.

She was beautiful. Skin the color of honey, hair like polished wood. She wore a green dress, embroidered with darker green, and gold had been braided into her hair. Her face was flushed — she, or more likely my mother, had guessed what brought the king here. Prince Atehatsqe smiled when he saw her. My breath grew tight, and I wanted to stand and run, be out in the trees and the rain, anywhere but the hall. I must have realized what my father was planning but not been willing to believe it.

“Girl,” said my father, “the prince of Therete wants to marry you.”

She flushed even deeper, which I hadn’t thought possible, and knelt. “My father, I will obey you in all things.”

“Will you, then?”

“Yes, Father.”

He stood, and drew his sword and swung the edge with all his strength into her neck. Blood spattered his legs, and my sister fell dead on the floor.

“The Brides of Heaven” by N. K. Jemisin

No one realized the extent of Dihya’s madness until she was caught sabotaging the water supply. Even then the madness was difficult to see as she sat in Ayan’s office with her hands tied and her headscarf still askew from the struggle. She did not wrap her arms around herself and rock back and forth. She did not talk or weep incessantly, or fidget. Indeed, Ayan observed, to judge by her calm demeanor and the odd little smile on her face, Dihya might have been saner than any woman in the colony. This irritated Ayan to no end.

“You never attend the evening storytellings,” Dihya said. She had kept her silence up to that point. “Why not? Don’t you like tales?”

“Only true ones,” Ayan replied. “For example, the tale of why you broke into the purification facility.”

“To save us.”

“I cannot see how it saves anyone to be robbed of our only source of clean water.”

Dihya shrugged. “What good is water, to us?”

–

*Personally, I was more upset at the insult than the sexism, because it made it very clear that this editor was willing to seriously undermine the value and integrity of his own project for the purpose of getting in a cheap shot at someone who disagreed with him.

At some point — I think in Locus? — I read an interview with Gordon Van Gelder in which he described his reaction to elves as being like lactose intolerance. “I’m elf intolerant,” he said.

I am also elf intolerant.

And that extends to fairies. Actually, I don’t bother to distinguish between “under the hill” elf stories and “under the hill” fairy stories; they strike me as basically the same equation.

So, consequently, I wasn’t really expecting to enjoy the anthology The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm, despite its excellent editors and dazzling array of author names. And I didn’t.

In my (biased toward giving low ratings) personal rating system, I gave the stories in this anthology the following splay. I didn’t read the poetry.

Five stars: two
Four stars: two
Three stars: three
Two stars: two
One star: eight

There were two stories in this anthology for which I ran out of energy before the author ran out of story, and another that I skimmed heavily.

I certainly can’t blame the authors for this. It was definitely the subject matter. One of the stories I failed to finish reading was “Elvenbrood” by Tanith Lee, who is one of my favorite authors. I devour most of her stories voraciously. Add elves, and I take a nap.

There are problems with writing elf stories — or, rather, there are problems with elves and fairies as those cultural constructs generally appear in modern American fiction. (Western) elves, like vampires, are super-cool. They’re impossibly powerful, impossibly beautiful, impossibly impossible. And also diffident. Worse, the concept of the changeling lends itself too easily to a sort of immature wish-fulfillment, an all-to-easty metaphor for growing up an ugly duckling surrounded by powerful and beautiful swans.

There are intriguing angles from which to approach western-style elves, certainly… but I think it’s fundamentally a challenge. The narratives we draw around them tend to be pretty tired, and I think it’s hard to riff on the concept while still preserving the feel of “elf-ness,” which itself seems to be derived in large part from the tired use of tropes.

The anthology does touch on some non-western creatures that fall into the concept of fairies, such as Japanese kitsune. These stories have a bit more original space in which to work before running into the cloy of elfness.

As with most themed anthologies, I appreciated those stories that went further afield from the subject to draw their material. The most literal and traditional elf stories — like “Elvenbrood” — were significantly less interesting than the riffs that deconstructed and built anew the older tropes.

Although the anthology as a whole left me flat, there are some very nice pieces in it. My favorite was Kelly Link’s The Faery Handbag” which deservedly won a bunch of awards. I first read this piece in Kelly Link’s collection Magic for Beginners. Even among Link’s generally amazing work, “The Faery Handbag” stands out as particularly good. The narrator’s playful voice is compelling; the detail work gorgeous; the non-linear structure intriguingly woven but still sharp by the end. This story doesn’t stir me emotionally the way some of Link’s other work does (”Magic for Beginners” from which her second collection draws its name is my favorite of her stories — unfortunately, I don’t think it’s still available online), but it’s a delightful and original read.

I also really enjoyed Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s “Immersed in Matter” which follows a half-elf boy as he flirts with the edges of human civilization, for subconscious reasons that are only partially clear to him. This story is pretty traditional and the elves in it fit within most of the stereotypes of elves, but the story really worked for me, which I suppose just goes to show that anything can work when done well. I think the keys to this story’s success, at least for me, are the ways in which it slides around the themes of “How do I grow up awkward?” and “What does it mean to be human?” The main character does end up playing out some of the angsty changeling themes, but does so in a way that’s subtle rather than self-pitying. The theme emerges naturally from the story, rather than feeling hammered in or overt. The story benefits greatly from what I felt was nicely rendered and subtle characterization.

Jeffrey Ford’s “The Annals of Eelin-Ok” is a fake sort of academic essay in which a scholar describes the lives of fairies who live their lives in sand castles, ending his essay with the translated text of a memoir by one such fairy. This story — with its classification of fairy types, and concentration on how the fairies interact unseen with human children — seems clearly a riff on the idea of fairies at the bottom of the garden, but Ford’s voice is strikingly clear and compelling, and he uses modern storytelling techniques to create a real sense of emotional involvement with the character. By the end of the piece, a naturally evolving theme of ephemerality has appeared, and despite the fact that fairies often lend themselves to a sort of saccharine tone, Ford doesn’t flinch from his ending, instead pushing to a darker and more ambiguous place.

Hiromi Goto’s “Foxwife” is another of the anthology’s particularly interesting pieces. My favorite thing about the piece is that it seems to take on a fictionalized Japan similar to the way most western authors take on a Defaulty McBland fictionalized England. It doesn’t cater to western assumptions about society, or western assumptions about Japan — which disoriented me a bit early on, in all the best ways. The imagery here is vivid, and the scenes unexpected. The piece doesn’t quite tie together for me, and the ending was weak, but I enjoyed taking the journey of reading it.

I also enjoyed Emma Bull’s “De La Tierra” and Bruce Glassco’s “Never, Never,” although neither is the kind of fiction I usually seek on my own. “De La Tierra” is urban fantasy, following a biologically modified sort of private security agent for the fairy population of LA. This story reminds me of Greg Van Eekhout’s “Osteomancer’s Son,” which will be appearing on PodCastle next Tuesday: action centered around a very shiny idea with lots of eyeball kicks. There’s also a strong political subtext to “De La Tierra” which I went back and forth about as a reader… I wasn’t sure if the message was a little reductive of the complexities involved, or on the contrary a fairly brilliant way of expressing the political ideas. In the end, I settled on a bit of both, and I liked that the story had room enough for me to sustain that ambiguity.

“Never, Never” is an engagement with Peter Pan, told from the perspective of Captain Hook. The story relies heavily on the reader’s sense of nostalgia for the Peter Pan books… which I have to say I don’t have nostalgia for. Still. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like it, and I like the way the piece stretched my imagination. And the tender, slightly melancholic scene between Captain Hook and Tiger Lily enchanted me. Besides, there’s something all too true about the idea that an omnipotent, ever-young Peter Pan would act like an enfant terrible, filling his island at turns with vicious pirates, gigantic war robots, ninjas, and aliens.

I’ll also give a shout out to another story: “The Night Market” by Holly Black is a sort of feminist fantasy short for a YA audience that doesn’t break a lot of ground plot-wise, but has some strikingly cool imagery in the night market scene itself. I thought this story was online, but I’m not finding it at a glance. If someone else knows the link, toss it to me, would you?

A number of the stories in this anthology attempt to come up with some original elf feul by using elf and fairy creatures as direct analogues for environmental damage. For me, this ranged from the moderately successful as in Gregory Maguire’s “The Oak Thing” which has an intriguing enough main character that the piece doesn’t feel heavy-handed, to the unsuccessful “Undine” by Patricia McKillip which took its metaphor too seriously and directly. In general, these weren’t pieces that worked for me (except for Emma Bull’s, which had a lot of other political stuff going on as well).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for environmentalist messages in fiction or otherwise, but I think it’s too easy to make all-perfect all-beautiful elves and fairies a metaphor for voiceless, abused, innocent nature, without really having to examine either the politics of the message or the basis for the metaphor. The prettily written “The Shooter at Heart Rock Waterhole” by Bill Congreve exemplifies this problem for me; the elf who symbollizes nature starts out dead and voiceless. It’s all too unidirectional and easy, all too unconflicted. I’m inclined to support an environmentalist message, but I need more than the metaphorical destruction of a beautiful fairy or elven body to care more than I already do.

I recently read through Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling’s anthology The Coyote Road, which isn’t a new release or anything. But hey. Since I took notes on the anthology, I thought I’d share them, for whatever they’re worth (probably not much).

I thought this was an excellent anthology. Anything edited by Ellen Datlow has, in my opinion, a high chance of being excellent, but I was especially impressed by this one. I’ve been reading through the Datlow/Windling fairy tale anthologies recently as well (and may blog about them), and I thought Coyote Road shone in comparison. I don’t know why that is. If i had to take a guess, I’d say that the rewritten fairy tale genre represents territory that’s more trod, particularly by the time Datlow and Windling hit book 5 or 6. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy the fairy tale anthologies, and particularly some of the stories — I do very much like the fairy tale anthos. But I thought that the Coyote Road had a higher overall quality.

In my personal rating system (which is not at all a fair; it’s tilted severely toward giving things low ratings), I rated two of these stories with fives (total adoration), one with a four (strong enthusiasm), eight with threes (enjoyment), two with twos (competent stories that didn’t appeal to me personally for whatever reason), and nine with ones (stories I didn’t particularly like for one reason or another).

My favorite piece from the anthology is Kij Johnson’s Nebula nominated novelette, “The evolution of trickster stories among the dogs of North Park after the Change.” Diatryma says she adores the character, and there is nice character development here of both humans and canines, but I was particularly impressed by the weaving of different types of narratives into this story. It’s an extremely well-rendered balance of scene, meta-fictional intrustion, and mythic stories, all of which add up to an extremely moving piece.

The other story I rated a five was Kelly Link’s “Constable of Abal,” the story of a woman and her daughter who keep ghosts on ribbons. This story has all the best hallmarks of Link’s work: extremely vivid imagery, appealing strangeness, a carefully constructed mood. My most common complaint about Link’s stories is that they are sometimes structurally weak, or have trouble finding an ending, but this story is plotted extremely well and ends satisfyingly without losing the imagery or the mood.

I also enjoyed Ellen Kushner’s “Honored Guest” which makes me want to check out her Swordspoint series. For some reason, I’ve never read any Kushner before. I’m missing something.

Many of the stories in this anthology are well-written, engaging, diverting reads. For instance, Pat Murphy’s “One Odd Shoe” and Delia Sherman’s “The Fiddler of Bayou Teche” are both very entertaining stories that play with interesting characters, settings, and voices, even though neither felt totally fresh to me. I enjoyed reading them, and I’d read them again. Barzak gives some gorgoeus details about Tokyo in “Realer Than You” and Caroline Stevermer made me laugh in “Uncle Bob Visits’swith her ghost who hates diagramming sentences.

I adore Elllen Klages’s work, which may be why I was a trifle disappointed in “Friday Night at St. Cecilia’s,” the perfectly nicely written and entertaining story of a private school girl who plays a board game with Queen Mab. The story as a whole is diverting and fun and was a pleasant read, but I missed the feeling of emotional resonance I’ve found in most other Klages stories.

There were two stories in the anthology — Jebediah Barry’s “The Other Labyrinth” and Jeffrey Ford’s “The Dreaming Wind” — that I wanted to like more than I did. Both had absolutely gorgeous imagery. I’m a sucker for labyrinths of roses and mirrors, not to mention winds that can recreate people in the image of goats or parrots in the image of baby dolls. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel either story was able to bring their stories to a conclusion that suited their vivid beginnings. “The Other Labyrinth” seems to set up one kind of story, and then switch tone in the middle. “The Dreaming Wind” establishes a phenomenon so cool that I never quite forgave the author for refusing to let the event actually happen.

Like “The Other Labyrinth” and “The Dreaming Wind,” Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s “The Listeners” had an extremely compelling beginning — though in the case of that story, I was drawn to characterization and world-building rather than imagery. Unfortunately, I also felt this story tapered off at the end.

The stories in Coyote Road are supplemented by author’s notes, which I love. Will Shetterly argues in his author’s note that author’s notes in general reduce a story’s appeal to that of a “show” with its backstage tricks revealed — I absolutely can’t agree. One thing I enjoy about fiction is being able to enjoy it through multiple facets. Seeing a story from a writer’s perspective does not dim my ability to see it as a reader.

In my usual persnickety way, I read through this anthology haphazardly instead of straight through — and as usually happens, there were a few stories left at the end whose first pages I kept glancing at and going “I don’t want to read that” before flipping to the next piece. I always end up reading those stories last, and it’s possible that I was just done with the anthology’s theme by the time I got to them — but, as always, I enjoyed those stories least. There were four stories in this anthology that I had to push myself to skim. I abandoned those four at their halfway points.

There are a number of stories in this anthology that take on trickster myths directly, particularly a number that engage with Coyote. Of these, I thought the best was Pat Murphy’s “One Odd Shoe.”

However, in general, I wasn’t as fond of the stories that took a direct look at the trickster myths rather than finding different ways of engaging with trickster legends. I love coyote stories — but I love them enough that I’d rather read the originals than derivatives. Kim Antieu’s “The Senorita and the Cactus Thorn,” for instance, was perfectly competent and entertaining enough, but it was sufficiently similar to the style of the original legends that I found myself wanting to go back and reread those instead.

The authors in the anthology take on a number of different kinds of tricksters, from Hermes, to a labyrinth maker descended from Daedelus, to Louisiana fiddlers. I think the anthology would have been improved by a little bit more diversity in terms of the tricksters that authors chose to work with. For instance, I was surprised that no one engaged with Odysseus or Anansi (Edited to add: Ellen Datlow has kindly pointed out that while no stories took on Anansi, there is a Jane Yolen poem in the anthology that works with the spider trickster). I was also disappointed in the only piece that worked with the historically complicated Brer Rabbit narrative.

For me, the most successful stories were those that found unique ways to engage with trickster mythology. Kij Johnson’s is the msot obvious example. In her piece, she’s directly engaging with trickster myths — and with Coyote — but she’s doing so in a way that engages with and recontextualizes the trickster myths, deconstructing them to investigate their cultural traction, and then rebuilding them to create new insights.

This was a really cool anthology, and I highly recommend it.

A bingo card for arguments about whether or not racism can exist in fantasy and/or science fiction.

(Some commenters may be aware of the story and discussion that triggered this bingo card. I’m not going to link to it because I think the story itself is a red herring from this post. I think the use of an undigested trope was ill-advised, but I also believe it was a good-faith error, and that the author’s response to critics is genuine.

This Bingo card is presented A) in response to the comments on that story, and B) in response to the comments on every other story that spawns variations of these poorly formed arguments. As the Angry Black Woman said about the issue, more or less, whether or not one agrees with a specific charge of racism, using arguments out of the handbook for “How to Suppress Discussions of Racism” is NOT the way to prove your point.)

Feminist/womanist, anti-racist commenters only.

Pratchett remains optomistic and asks that the community respond with cheer.

I have been diagnosed with a very rare form of early onset Alzheimer’s, which lay behind this year’s phantom “stroke”.

We are taking it fairly philosophically down here and possibly with a mild optimism. For now work is continuing on the completion of Nation and the basic notes are already being laid down for Unseen Academicals. All other things being equal, I expect to meet most current and, as far as possible, future commitments but will discuss things with the various organisers. Frankly, I would prefer it if people kept things cheerful, because I think there’s time for at least a few more books yet.

As PZ says, Pratchett “Aintn’t dead yet.”

–

UPDATE: It occurs to me that you all may not know who Terry Pratchett is. He’s a comic fantasy writer who has penned many, many novels in a universe called Discworld. Discworld started out as a fairly simple parody of fantasy epics starring a wizard named Rincewind, but quickly got much more sophisticated. It’s a rich and historically deep series that takes on a number of topics. One of my favorite books is a satire of philosophers and religion. The most recent takes on the historical development of paper money. Very little makes me as simply joyful as reading a new Terry Pratchett book — or even an old one that I like.

Let’s Talk about Science Fiction, Babies

There’s an interesting discussion over at Pharyngula about the possibilities and dangers inherent in human genetic engineering.

The thread is slightly annoying — a fair bit of priveleged wanking, and no one really bringing sophisticated social theory to the table. But on balance, I’d say it’s mostly interesting, at least in terms of seeing how people want to forecast the future.

As I read the comment thread, the thing that strikes me most as a science fiction writer is how much the discourse of science fiction shapes the discourse about these future technologies. On an obvious level, there are appeals to Heinlein, Egan, and similar hard SF ilk. On a subtler level, the themes that people are presenting as thought-provoking in the discussion (what if we modified people to be obedient? what if there was speciation between upper class and lower class people? what if people want to modify their children in ways we find abhorrent?) are in fact staples of the science fiction genre.

In my opinion, near future hard SF (that’s science fiction that works with the best science contemporarily available to forcast events in the next, say, fifty years) has a problem. And that problem is plot. Consider Frankenstein, a very early work of science fiction — a scientist is able to create life, but the novel’s shape is that of a warning story. We Must Not Because.

Writers working within the constraints of traditional plotting have to find a conflict. Science fiction is often a medium of ideas, which means that the conflict generally has to be related to the idea. So, if you want to write about genetic engineering, you have to do so in a way that gives obeisance to conflict.

I am convinced this creates warning stories even where science fiction writers don’t want to write warning stories. It’s a natural form. If you want to write about Neat Idea X, and your story-writing formula is “create problem within the first two paragraphs,” then the urge is to warn against whatever Neat Idea X is. You still get to write about it.

A further problem is that ideas tend to be explored in a finite number of ways. On one hand, this is because the culture that gives rise to the science fiction has a certain number of associations with a given science fictional idea. The western writers who are forecasting dark, genetically engineered futures — and doing so with generally the same set of tools and projected outcomes — are writing within a western context that has certain central concerns about genetic engineering, and certain hegemonic assumptions about reproduction, etc. We would expect that the science fictional discourse would shift when you look at a different culture with different concerns and assumptions, and from what I know about the growing science fiction movements in India and China, this does indeed prove to be the case.

However, the interaction is recursive. Science fiction writers pen their works within the cultural context that shapes their concerns, assumptions, and the channels of their forecasting. At the same time, they shape the discourse. As John Scalzi pointed out last year when he generously agreed to speak to the science fiction class I was teaching, the shape of the cell phone bears an uncanny similarity to the shape of the Star Trek communicator. This particular convergence seems to be only one of many examples of scientists looking at science fictional technology and thinking, “Ooh, I want that!” Science fictionally proposed theories about space and space travel trickle down into the naming of things, and sometimes their study, in an observable fashion.

It’s trickier to observe other influences of science fiction writers on the discourse about science and the future, but they’re present. I’ve argued before that the ways in which people perceive the world are heavily influenced by narrative and story, and so the narratives that are introduced into the culture about certain ideas are shaped by that culture, but once they are present, they shape it as well. Ant-like matriarchal societies, huge TV screens showing Big Brother talking to you, sad grey-clad people in communist dystopias wearing jumpsuits and going through identical motions — these images have shaped some of our impressions of matriarchy, fascism, and communism. Many discussions of matriarchy, for instance, end up reaching back to the imagery that’s entered our cultural consciousness — and terms that evoke insects or hive-minds are deployed. The same thing happens with genetic engineering and the limited number of narratives and images we associate with it. The first few shiny, imagination-catching ideas tend to overwhelm our cultural ability to imagine other outcomes.

The Problems with Warning Stories

Warning stories can be great: fun to read, fun to write. Some of them are also interesting and sophisticated.

However, I worry about the endless parade of science fictional monsters tramping through our cultural imagination. Cloning does not work the way 90% of science fictional representations say it does. Really. Nothing like. I’ve been involved in many bizarre conversations with cloning opponents, and at a certain point, their arguments tend to hark back to weird cultural myths built out of Star Trek and Twilight Zone rip-offs.

There are three problems here.

1) Bad science: many science fiction writers wrote clones that worked in ways that have more to do with fantasy zombies than what actual clones could possibly be because those fantasy zombie clones were more useful for plot and conflict. Because most laypeople know very little about genetics or cloning, the bad science passes them by.

2) One-dimensional (or as good as) representation, which does not allow for ambiguity in the expression of the science fictional idea or the imagined cultural reaction to it.

3) The playing into monster story tropes which follow a certain formula, and therefore require the writer and audience to envision the science fictional idea as part of a monster mold.

Eventually, the combination of bad science, unambiguous representation, and the monster trope seeps down into our narrative about a science fictional idea, and that’s the point at which someone will seriously oppose cloning because they’re afraid that clones will share the memories, experiences, and developmental history of existing adults, and therefore be able to take over the world.

Breaking Out of the Warning Mold

Writers have several ways to navigate these problems while still paying proper attention to conflict. One is to make the conflict much smaller than the level of “Oh noes! Monsters!” which allows the science fiction trope to play out more subtly and resist becoming the basis for a monster-level plot. A fantastic example of this kind of writing as applied to the genetic engineering/cloning tropes, is Tananarive Due’s “Like Daughter,” a story in which a woman of color who was physically abused as a child decides to raise a clone of herself so that she can give “herself” a new, happy childhood. Unfortunately, the child suffers from being treated as a kind of doll and required to enact her mother’s fantasy upbringing. The mother’s best friend has to interfere and take the girl away.

I wish this story was online as it is truly remarkable. It can be found in the excellent anthology Dark Matter (a century of speculative fiction from the African Diaspora), edited by Sheree Thomas.

The conflict of “Like Daughter” echoes in several different directions. The conflict is personal in a way that survives outside the science fiction context, reflecting on the nature of mothers, daughters, and childhood trauma. The conflict is also sociological: as a professor of mine at UC Santa Cruz said about the story, the question of how to resolve traumatic history is particularly salient for the community of color, and it is no accident that the author is black. Thirdly, the conflict does revolve around the science fictional idea of cloning: without cloning, it would be impossible for the story’s conceit to exist. However, the clone does not need to be made into a monster (or, in the flip, made into a one-dimensionally virtuous yet beleaguered outsider) in order for the conflict to function, because the nature of the story’s conflict is subtle.

In science fiction communities, there’s a concept which has caused much war-drumming on one side, and much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the other. It’s a fledgling literary movement called mundane science fiction, or mundane SF. The mundane SF movement was started by science fiction writer Geoff Ryman. It asks writers to eschew some of science fiction’s splashier tropes in order to create more realistic, more resonant futures. In order to accomplish this, the mundane movement has banned certain topics, included AI, faster-than-light space travel, psychic energy, and aliens. I think cloning’s on the list.

I think that the banning of topics may accomplish slivers of the mundane SF movement’s goals, but that the movement would have been better off asking for limited scope instead of limited ideas. For me, the science fiction that feels most real and moving is not necessarily science fiction which does not contain aliens — Octavia Butler’s “Amnesty,” for instance, makes beautiful use of aliens — but that science fiction which limits its scope to investigating personal relationships within an altered future instead of grander, global-level catastrophes. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy other flavors of SF, but this is the type that generally moves me the most. (There are exceptions, such as Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, which definitely functions on a grand and global level.)

The other most dominant technique that I see writers using so that they can avoid monster story formulas while still exploring neat ideas and paying due deference to plot, is to make the science fictional trope part of the story’s background. For instance, in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, characters who become soldiers are genetically modified so that they are faster, stronger, greener, and melded with their own AIs. Scalzi’s plot revolves around a war which these characters are fighting. The genetic modifications are integral to the plot — they make the war possible — but they don’t need to be the impetus for conflict, because a different science fictional trope has taken that center stage.

Scalzi’s book works on a grand scale, but it’s also possible to background science fictional tropes while working on a more limited scale. One novel that comes to mind is Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang, in which many fascinating science fictional elements — future homophobia, America’s loss of primacy as a global power, the colonization of Mars, people who can use technology to have flying races — function as the background in service to the main characters’ more mundane problems. How can people learn to be happy with each other? How can a gay man, isolated and displaced, find his place in the world? The backdrops are Mars and a decaying future, but the problems are timeless.

Unfortunately, the technique of slipping science fictional ideas into the background so that the conflict can be derived from something else tends to work better for novels than short stories. Short stories are limited in how much they can tackle, so it’s difficult for them to investigate more than one idea at a time.

Science Fiction Writer’s Responsibility in Shaping the Discourse

It concerns me that when I look at a thread like the one on Pharyngula, I see a lot of analysis that’s shaped by science fiction narratives, when I know that some of those narratives are driven more by the need for an exciting plot than by any real scientific or sociological extrapolation.

People differ in the amount of responsibility that they feel art has to the real world. I’m on the high end: I’m all about social responsibility.

I think science fiction writers owe it to ourselves and to the culture not to use genre formulas without a clear understanding of what they are, what they do, and why we want to use them. That doesn’t mean genre formulas have to go away, but I’d like to see them used with awareness and deliberation. When they’re used with awareness and deliberation, they usually (in my experience) tend to shift anyway: new narrative possibilities open, and the characters, story, and discourse have a chance to breathe.