recent reading
I finally got around to picking up ladyjaida and danibennett's Havemercy after Christmas, with my love of the Shoebox Project eventually winning out over the book's rather underwhelming reviews. Also, gay wizards! Mechanical dragons! Political intrigue!
Turns out I probably should have listened to the reviews, as while it was an enjoyable enough read, at the same time it was consistently kind of disappointing. There were a lot of things I liked about it - I liked that the narrative and thematic focus was explicitly on trying to understand and learn about social institutions and the situation of individuals within them (and it made me happy that one of the main threads is essentially the narrative of a PhD student, heh); even though Naomi Novik's pretty much spoiled me for dragons I liked the framing of dragons here as sort of artificial intelligences that learn behaviour patterns from their riders; I was generally quite fond of the characters and enjoyed spending narrative time with them - but overall the book felt vaguely unfinished, lacking that polish and artistry that brings good ideas together into a good book. The world-building (both in the literal sense of the creation of setting and in the sense of properly figuring out social, cultural and political dynamics in the fantasy world you've invented) was pretty half-assed - I can't even remember the name of the world it was set in, let alone give you any kind of description of it without referring to the book - and the pacing was awful; most of the plot was crammed into the last few chapters.
I think I also did it a disservice from the start, though, by coming to it with so many other expectations in my mind. Not just my vast and all-encompassing love of Shoebox (still one of my favourite ever HP fics, after all these years), but the fact that I was hoping that they would scratch the same itch as Sarah Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths series, so I can STOP READING THEM. Monette's books consistently annoy me in their treatment of sex (although not, actually, sexuality and sexual identity, just sex), are irritatingly self-conscious and telegraph-y, and I like Monette less and less the more I see of her in the blogosphere - yet somehow those books push my buttons, damn them. So I was hoping to get Havemercy going on button-pushing duty instead - but on those crucial points, it compares unfavourably. Although Havemercy is much better at producing the feel and tone of a fantasy book about universities, and scholarship, and thesis-writing, Monette's much better at inventing something of substance to be studied; her magic feels more involved, and the history of her world is dense and fluent. Monette's creation of her fantasy cities, meanwhile, is just as unrigorous as Havemercy's, but it's infinitely more vivid. I love Monette's Mildmay as a first-person narrator, with his slangy, thickly idiomatic way of speaking and his gift for incisive simile and metaphor, much more than I enjoyed Havemercy's Rook, whose voice didn't have much to distinguish it other than more swearing than the others. And most of all, however else Monette and her books may irritate me, I love her protagonist Felix Harrowgate. Volatile, dichotomous, difficult, useless with his emotions despite believing he has iron control over himself, and compellingly, authentically, intelligent and hungry for knowledge. Havemercy's Royston, who occupies a remarkably similar fictional niche, is much more even, much gentler, no doubt much more enjoyable to spend time with in real life, and much less entertaining to read about.
Maybe the fact that I didn't really meet it on its own terms is leading me to judge it harshly, I don't know. But to be honest, I found more as I was making these comparisons that they clarified my impression of things about Havemercy I was already "meh" about, than that they suggested faults I would otherwise not have noticed.
So Havemercy gets a general verdict of "enjoyable, but flawed and far from earthshattering", which is a shame, because I wanted to like it a lot.
The other reason I eventually ignored the reviews and picked it up, though, is that I'm trying to work my way through the profic of authors who were huge as fanfiction writers before making it professionally, as points of contact between fan practice and pro production is an important line of research in my thesis. ladyjaida is now the fourth such writer I've tried out, along with Naomi Novik, Cassandra Claire/epicyclical, and Sarah Rees Brennan/Maya/mistful. It's proving a pretty interesting exercise.
As I'm sure you will all be so surprised to hear, Naomi Novik's profic, the Temeraire series, is by far my favourite of the professional works so far, which I think speaks to the fact that the main way her fandom origins show up in the series is that she has made them not fannish, but fandom-able - the Temeraire novels don't resemble fanfiction or transformative response so much as they enable and encourage it. They flick that switch in my head that makes me want to talk about their characters as though they're real people, and speculate about what's going to happen to them in the next instalment, and wonder about things that might have gone on behind the scenes of the narrative, and seek out fic purely because I want to spend more time with them. I'm nowhere near a framework at the moment for discussing or explicating how Novik manages this - I do wonder how it relates, though, to the sheer extent of her involvement in fandom; Novik really is not just a Big Name Fan, but a Huge Name Fan, in a lot of respects - and for now, I'm more interested in picking at my somewhat vague and unrigorous criteria for something being fandom-able. The idea of "talking about characters as though they're real people" seems to be becoming something of a crux in my work, actually.
Havemercy is in many respects the least interesting of the four for thesis purposes, as I think its flaws speak more to the limits of ladyjaida's skills than anything else; Shoebox shows that she has a real gift for dialogue and humour, and a great handle on teenage friendship and sexual awakening, but it never required her to do any world-building or even, really, given that it's prequel fic that has to fit within JKR's backstory narrative, any plotting. In that respect, I suppose, it highlights the different skill sets required for profic and fanfic, which is useful for my purposes if I want to look at the impact in media products of crossover, but it's nothing new in that respect.
Where it's potentially more interesting, I think, is relative to the slash & m/m romance issue - Shoebox was slashfic, and while Havemercy is, as far as I can tell, distinct from what's being called m/m romance one of its main narrative threads is the development of a relationship between the aforementioned Royston and Hal, a young man and the ward of Royston's brother given the task of keeping Royston company during a period of exile in his brother's estate. Now, I think Shoebox is a stellar example of how good slash can be - not only not slipping into stereotyping, but producing an involved, particular narrative of teenage sexuality that situates it firmly both in a male homosocial environment and a society that isn't quite great about homosexuality, and negotiates it relative to the difficulties that both these things pose. While I liked the initial development of Hal and Royston's relationship, however, especially how plausibly a friendship and attraction between them unravelled, it gradually started slipping into somewhat more uncomfortable tropes - a mentor-student relationship; a worldly, experienced older gay man-naive young country boy relationship; Hal starts to get incredibly weepy and clingy...And the job Havemercy does of presenting attitudes towards homosexuality in its fantasy world is even more half-assed than most of its worldbuilding; there's a suggestion that homophobic prejudices are at play in its society, but no real impression given of why that should be so (this is one thing that sf could really do with remembering in its worldbuilding; contemporary homophobia is a product of a huge complex of social factors - if those factors aren't in place, would homophobia exist?), and they don't seem to have much bearing on Hal and Royston. What's producing that difference between Shoebox and Havemercy is I think worth spending some time and words on in the future.
I finished Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments trilogy over New Year, as well, and had a very similar love-hate reaction to it as I did to her HP fic, all those years ago - perhaps unsurprisingly, as the resemblance between CC's profic and her fanfic is so great that it's clear she mostly used fanfic as a testing ground for her original ideas (which would certainly explain how little her fanfic resembled the Harry Potter canon - well, that and the plagiarism). Couple of things struck me about them for my learnings, though - firstly, how very intermedial they are. They are incredibly visual books, and I also found a lot of traces of videogames in their construction; I think there's possibly something productive in connecting this to all the crossing and combining of media that goes on in fan practice generally. Secondly, the fact that their engagement with genre and with their fictional ancestors is very much pastiche-y and homage-y, rather than parodic or subversive or revisionist. And finally, the inexplicable to me obsession with characters like the male love interest Jace (or Spike from Buffy, or CC's fanon Draco) - characters who are totally out of touch with their emotions, jackasses and smart-asses to mask their inner ~*vulnerability*~, patronising and irritating 90% of the time but it's Okay because for the other 10% they are Passionate and Poetic and Tortured and Magnetic or wtfever. I epically do not get the attraction of characters like that (from CC's work, give me Isabelle, who may be shallow but is never cruel and never tries to pretend when she doesn't care about something, or Magnus, if he were at all interested in women, who is charming and clever and slightly hard-edged and entirely honest about his feelings for Alec) - but a large swathe of fandom seems to, and I think there's something to be poked at in that.
Sarah Rees Brennan, sarahtales atm but previously maya/mistful, was by a long way my favourite fic author out of the four of these writers. I like Quality of Mercy more than I like Deathly Hallows; I am staggered at how wonderful a story Drop Dead Gorgeous makes of an unutterably daft premise (Harry is part Veela), and perhaps most importantly I always buy her Draco Malfoy, which is unbelievably rare. I also think, that while it is not my favourite of the four series, her Demon's Lexicon is the best of the profic - and I think the reason for both these things lies in the same place. More so than any of the others, sarahtales's fic is clearly written to say something about the HP canon, to pick at and highlight characterisation, to expose moral and thematic tensions. There is more at stake and more being said in her fic than just the story of the characters, and the same is true with The Demon's Lexicon; there is a lot going on in that book, about child psychology, about teenage coming of age narratives and the way they intersect with narratives of fantasy and the supernatural, about masculinity and representations of masculinity. That kind of discourse is entirely absent from something like CC's profic or fanfic (although present in the Temeraire series, of course, in its recurrent discussion of the rights of sentient species), and I think it's something that's not a big part of fanfic writing generally. I'm reluctant to make any kind of big statements or draw any conclusions from this perception at the moment, as I have a feeling it's all bound up in my long-battled prejudices about what fiction "should" and "shouldn't" do, rather than what it does or doesn't do, but it's something I'm intending to think and write more about.
For no reason other than pleasure, I also just finished reading Justine Larbalestier's Liar - and, like pretty much everyone else who's read and blogged about it, I'm not going to review it, as being as it is a book about a compulsive liar and unreliable narrator it is incredibly difficult to talk about it without ruining it for someone who hasn't read it. So instead I'm just going to recommend it wholeheartedly - THIS is how good YA lit can get: utterly engrossing and engaging, so authentically teenage as to be almost painful, and playing a very, VERY clever game with the reader's fictional competency. I thought it couldn't be anywhere near as good as people were claiming it was; it really was.
Finally, one last word from me on the m/m appropriation debate: I've seen a line of argument starting to circulate that runs something like, the fact that female bodies are absent from m/m erotic narratives invalidates claims that they're a progressive way of engaging with female sexuality. Which, I see where they're coming from, but. I can't help but feel, if a woman is choosing to write or read explicitly about something that turns her on - surely that is a direct expression of or engagement with her sexuality, whether or not there is a body in the text that in any way resembles hers? She is saying, I find this hot - in what way is that not confronting her sexuality? The involvement of her body and her sexual make-up is in the act of reading and writing, does it have to be in the text itself? Idk. I absolutely agree that this leads to an elision of representations of female sexuality that is hardly progressive, but I just take issue with the framing that women are ignoring their own bodies full stop; I think it takes a very unhelpfully reductive view of what constitutes a sexual act.
Turns out I probably should have listened to the reviews, as while it was an enjoyable enough read, at the same time it was consistently kind of disappointing. There were a lot of things I liked about it - I liked that the narrative and thematic focus was explicitly on trying to understand and learn about social institutions and the situation of individuals within them (and it made me happy that one of the main threads is essentially the narrative of a PhD student, heh); even though Naomi Novik's pretty much spoiled me for dragons I liked the framing of dragons here as sort of artificial intelligences that learn behaviour patterns from their riders; I was generally quite fond of the characters and enjoyed spending narrative time with them - but overall the book felt vaguely unfinished, lacking that polish and artistry that brings good ideas together into a good book. The world-building (both in the literal sense of the creation of setting and in the sense of properly figuring out social, cultural and political dynamics in the fantasy world you've invented) was pretty half-assed - I can't even remember the name of the world it was set in, let alone give you any kind of description of it without referring to the book - and the pacing was awful; most of the plot was crammed into the last few chapters.
I think I also did it a disservice from the start, though, by coming to it with so many other expectations in my mind. Not just my vast and all-encompassing love of Shoebox (still one of my favourite ever HP fics, after all these years), but the fact that I was hoping that they would scratch the same itch as Sarah Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths series, so I can STOP READING THEM. Monette's books consistently annoy me in their treatment of sex (although not, actually, sexuality and sexual identity, just sex), are irritatingly self-conscious and telegraph-y, and I like Monette less and less the more I see of her in the blogosphere - yet somehow those books push my buttons, damn them. So I was hoping to get Havemercy going on button-pushing duty instead - but on those crucial points, it compares unfavourably. Although Havemercy is much better at producing the feel and tone of a fantasy book about universities, and scholarship, and thesis-writing, Monette's much better at inventing something of substance to be studied; her magic feels more involved, and the history of her world is dense and fluent. Monette's creation of her fantasy cities, meanwhile, is just as unrigorous as Havemercy's, but it's infinitely more vivid. I love Monette's Mildmay as a first-person narrator, with his slangy, thickly idiomatic way of speaking and his gift for incisive simile and metaphor, much more than I enjoyed Havemercy's Rook, whose voice didn't have much to distinguish it other than more swearing than the others. And most of all, however else Monette and her books may irritate me, I love her protagonist Felix Harrowgate. Volatile, dichotomous, difficult, useless with his emotions despite believing he has iron control over himself, and compellingly, authentically, intelligent and hungry for knowledge. Havemercy's Royston, who occupies a remarkably similar fictional niche, is much more even, much gentler, no doubt much more enjoyable to spend time with in real life, and much less entertaining to read about.
Maybe the fact that I didn't really meet it on its own terms is leading me to judge it harshly, I don't know. But to be honest, I found more as I was making these comparisons that they clarified my impression of things about Havemercy I was already "meh" about, than that they suggested faults I would otherwise not have noticed.
So Havemercy gets a general verdict of "enjoyable, but flawed and far from earthshattering", which is a shame, because I wanted to like it a lot.
The other reason I eventually ignored the reviews and picked it up, though, is that I'm trying to work my way through the profic of authors who were huge as fanfiction writers before making it professionally, as points of contact between fan practice and pro production is an important line of research in my thesis. ladyjaida is now the fourth such writer I've tried out, along with Naomi Novik, Cassandra Claire/epicyclical, and Sarah Rees Brennan/Maya/mistful. It's proving a pretty interesting exercise.
As I'm sure you will all be so surprised to hear, Naomi Novik's profic, the Temeraire series, is by far my favourite of the professional works so far, which I think speaks to the fact that the main way her fandom origins show up in the series is that she has made them not fannish, but fandom-able - the Temeraire novels don't resemble fanfiction or transformative response so much as they enable and encourage it. They flick that switch in my head that makes me want to talk about their characters as though they're real people, and speculate about what's going to happen to them in the next instalment, and wonder about things that might have gone on behind the scenes of the narrative, and seek out fic purely because I want to spend more time with them. I'm nowhere near a framework at the moment for discussing or explicating how Novik manages this - I do wonder how it relates, though, to the sheer extent of her involvement in fandom; Novik really is not just a Big Name Fan, but a Huge Name Fan, in a lot of respects - and for now, I'm more interested in picking at my somewhat vague and unrigorous criteria for something being fandom-able. The idea of "talking about characters as though they're real people" seems to be becoming something of a crux in my work, actually.
Havemercy is in many respects the least interesting of the four for thesis purposes, as I think its flaws speak more to the limits of ladyjaida's skills than anything else; Shoebox shows that she has a real gift for dialogue and humour, and a great handle on teenage friendship and sexual awakening, but it never required her to do any world-building or even, really, given that it's prequel fic that has to fit within JKR's backstory narrative, any plotting. In that respect, I suppose, it highlights the different skill sets required for profic and fanfic, which is useful for my purposes if I want to look at the impact in media products of crossover, but it's nothing new in that respect.
Where it's potentially more interesting, I think, is relative to the slash & m/m romance issue - Shoebox was slashfic, and while Havemercy is, as far as I can tell, distinct from what's being called m/m romance one of its main narrative threads is the development of a relationship between the aforementioned Royston and Hal, a young man and the ward of Royston's brother given the task of keeping Royston company during a period of exile in his brother's estate. Now, I think Shoebox is a stellar example of how good slash can be - not only not slipping into stereotyping, but producing an involved, particular narrative of teenage sexuality that situates it firmly both in a male homosocial environment and a society that isn't quite great about homosexuality, and negotiates it relative to the difficulties that both these things pose. While I liked the initial development of Hal and Royston's relationship, however, especially how plausibly a friendship and attraction between them unravelled, it gradually started slipping into somewhat more uncomfortable tropes - a mentor-student relationship; a worldly, experienced older gay man-naive young country boy relationship; Hal starts to get incredibly weepy and clingy...And the job Havemercy does of presenting attitudes towards homosexuality in its fantasy world is even more half-assed than most of its worldbuilding; there's a suggestion that homophobic prejudices are at play in its society, but no real impression given of why that should be so (this is one thing that sf could really do with remembering in its worldbuilding; contemporary homophobia is a product of a huge complex of social factors - if those factors aren't in place, would homophobia exist?), and they don't seem to have much bearing on Hal and Royston. What's producing that difference between Shoebox and Havemercy is I think worth spending some time and words on in the future.
I finished Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments trilogy over New Year, as well, and had a very similar love-hate reaction to it as I did to her HP fic, all those years ago - perhaps unsurprisingly, as the resemblance between CC's profic and her fanfic is so great that it's clear she mostly used fanfic as a testing ground for her original ideas (which would certainly explain how little her fanfic resembled the Harry Potter canon - well, that and the plagiarism). Couple of things struck me about them for my learnings, though - firstly, how very intermedial they are. They are incredibly visual books, and I also found a lot of traces of videogames in their construction; I think there's possibly something productive in connecting this to all the crossing and combining of media that goes on in fan practice generally. Secondly, the fact that their engagement with genre and with their fictional ancestors is very much pastiche-y and homage-y, rather than parodic or subversive or revisionist. And finally, the inexplicable to me obsession with characters like the male love interest Jace (or Spike from Buffy, or CC's fanon Draco) - characters who are totally out of touch with their emotions, jackasses and smart-asses to mask their inner ~*vulnerability*~, patronising and irritating 90% of the time but it's Okay because for the other 10% they are Passionate and Poetic and Tortured and Magnetic or wtfever. I epically do not get the attraction of characters like that (from CC's work, give me Isabelle, who may be shallow but is never cruel and never tries to pretend when she doesn't care about something, or Magnus, if he were at all interested in women, who is charming and clever and slightly hard-edged and entirely honest about his feelings for Alec) - but a large swathe of fandom seems to, and I think there's something to be poked at in that.
Sarah Rees Brennan, sarahtales atm but previously maya/mistful, was by a long way my favourite fic author out of the four of these writers. I like Quality of Mercy more than I like Deathly Hallows; I am staggered at how wonderful a story Drop Dead Gorgeous makes of an unutterably daft premise (Harry is part Veela), and perhaps most importantly I always buy her Draco Malfoy, which is unbelievably rare. I also think, that while it is not my favourite of the four series, her Demon's Lexicon is the best of the profic - and I think the reason for both these things lies in the same place. More so than any of the others, sarahtales's fic is clearly written to say something about the HP canon, to pick at and highlight characterisation, to expose moral and thematic tensions. There is more at stake and more being said in her fic than just the story of the characters, and the same is true with The Demon's Lexicon; there is a lot going on in that book, about child psychology, about teenage coming of age narratives and the way they intersect with narratives of fantasy and the supernatural, about masculinity and representations of masculinity. That kind of discourse is entirely absent from something like CC's profic or fanfic (although present in the Temeraire series, of course, in its recurrent discussion of the rights of sentient species), and I think it's something that's not a big part of fanfic writing generally. I'm reluctant to make any kind of big statements or draw any conclusions from this perception at the moment, as I have a feeling it's all bound up in my long-battled prejudices about what fiction "should" and "shouldn't" do, rather than what it does or doesn't do, but it's something I'm intending to think and write more about.
For no reason other than pleasure, I also just finished reading Justine Larbalestier's Liar - and, like pretty much everyone else who's read and blogged about it, I'm not going to review it, as being as it is a book about a compulsive liar and unreliable narrator it is incredibly difficult to talk about it without ruining it for someone who hasn't read it. So instead I'm just going to recommend it wholeheartedly - THIS is how good YA lit can get: utterly engrossing and engaging, so authentically teenage as to be almost painful, and playing a very, VERY clever game with the reader's fictional competency. I thought it couldn't be anywhere near as good as people were claiming it was; it really was.
Finally, one last word from me on the m/m appropriation debate: I've seen a line of argument starting to circulate that runs something like, the fact that female bodies are absent from m/m erotic narratives invalidates claims that they're a progressive way of engaging with female sexuality. Which, I see where they're coming from, but. I can't help but feel, if a woman is choosing to write or read explicitly about something that turns her on - surely that is a direct expression of or engagement with her sexuality, whether or not there is a body in the text that in any way resembles hers? She is saying, I find this hot - in what way is that not confronting her sexuality? The involvement of her body and her sexual make-up is in the act of reading and writing, does it have to be in the text itself? Idk. I absolutely agree that this leads to an elision of representations of female sexuality that is hardly progressive, but I just take issue with the framing that women are ignoring their own bodies full stop; I think it takes a very unhelpfully reductive view of what constitutes a sexual act.