World Fantasy Con: What Are the Taboos in Fantasy Today?

[kate_nepveu]

Wow, this won the poll in a landslide. So:

Description:

What Are the Taboos in Fantasy Today?
They shift with the times. Is the writer ever really free to write about ANYTHING?
Sharyn November (m), John Grant, Tom Doherty, Steven Erikson, Lucienne Diver

November (sdn) is Editorial Director of the YA line Firebird. Grant is a novelist and co-

Comments

[dancinghorse]

Oh, nice notes

[kate_nepveu]

Arrrrrrrrrrrrgh.

*considers, adds more r's*

I'd noted that the non-Western, non-Native urban fantasies on the prior panel list ( http://kate-nepveu.livejournal.com/265977.html ) were either small press or more romance-oriented, but I'd hoped they were the leading edge of a trend.

Clearly, we shall just have to make them be so.

Or something.

[kate_nepveu]

That's good; perhaps it is more of a leading edge then, or alas perhaps it's the escapist/non- thing?

[sartorias]

Thanks for typing that up! While there's nothing new here, it's kinda cool to see impressions gathered from all over listed like this.

But I do wish the moderator had gotten onto how such things are handled and when they work, specifically techniques of quiet subversion.

[kate_nepveu]

Any thoughts on that end to start it here?

[sartorias]

I have a terrific headache today, and I don't like to clutter others' blog up with gab, so I'll try to be short

[kate_nepveu]

Hope you feel better, and you never clutter.

I think you're exactly right as a general descriptive matter. To poke at it some more:

Is it effective, I wonder, when authors skip right into stage two or three? (Sarah Caudwell's novels are stage three WRT sexual orientation, for instance.) I mean, obviously effective in terms of the story depends on context--someone might well say, reading Caudwell's novels, "hey! that's not how London barristers and the society they move in really is!" whereas a fantasy or sf novel has more flexibility. But in terms of pushing society as a whole in the direction that the author would like on the topic? I can see that a mix of all three stages might be desirable, because any of them might click with a different reader (and indeed I think I've heard people say that one variant or another was revelatory for them).

Just noodling.

[agrumer]

I'm gobsmacked that someone would think 1984 is dated. I reread it just a few months back, and it's more relevant now than it was when I first read it in 1983. It's timeless. It'll still be relevant a thousand years from now.

[mmcirvin]

I do get a little annoyed at people who speak of it as prophetic--well, actually it is prophetic, but in the truer sense of the word, the allegorical-jeremiad sense rather than the fortuneteller sense. Orwell was writing about stuff that was in his world and is in ours.

[desperance]

I was seized by it when I was more or less Z's age: that and Brave New World. I loved SF as a whole and devoured whatever I could find, but these were books I kept coming back to. That thing they say, about good books being better? They're not wrong.

Anti-intellectualism in SF

[agrumer]

The traditional form that anti-intellectualism takes in SF is disdain for the humanities.

Re: Anti-intellectualism in SF

[kate_nepveu]

Oh, good point. It's like conformity, it seems to me; things that the genre thinks it's resisting but is often giving in to in unexamined ways.

[mmcirvin]

He was probably thinking about Huckleberry Finn every step of the way.

[kate_nepveu]

You're right--the sharpest edge of the new taboos that November mentioned.

I don't know Turtledove or his writing processes from a hole in the wall, but I will also speculate that he had the effect on the everyday reader in mind (as opposed to the ones deciding whether it should be in a school library). I don't remember, at this point, what you did about anti-Semetic slurs in _Farthing_; but if I were reading Turtledove's book, *even knowing* what kind of setting it was and that the term would be accurate, I think I would still be very jolted to see it on the page. (I get jolted to hear it in a song that I like, where it's being used in a very sarcastic way.)

[fledgist]

I agree. It was an obvious, highly-visible, workaround.

What's interesting is that in another novel in the series, Turtledove (possibly imitating S.M. Stirling who uses the word in the 'Nantucket' series) has the word 'wog' used as a term of contempt by some characters (granted, they're the bad guys). I find that just as offensive as 'the n-word', but, because it's a British rather than an American usage, I suspect he thought he could get away with it.