Monsters, panels, fantasy

[sartorias]

Two links got me thinking this morning. First, Sirens has put out its call for programming ideas, the theme this year being Monsters and women in fantasy. Then, without much mention of women either as fantastical creatures or as writers, this provocative link by superversive, the gist of which we had an interesting discussion about last night over the phone

Comments

[sartorias]

Oh, I think there are, too--like I said, a full spectrum--the question for me is this notion that the non-mythopoeic is somehow more "adult" (an aesthetic judgment implied)

[kalimac]

I'm another to whom Tolkien and Howard strike totally different reactions. The first I adore, the second bored me stiff, the more puzzlingly so as he was recommended to me with enthusiasm by people who knew I liked Tolkien

[sartorias]

Yeah, I agree about Martin's world, but millions of happy readers disagree!

[aulus_poliutos]

Westeros isn't such a bad place if you have a sword and can use it. :)

But Martin himself said that he'd rather go to Middle Earth than Heaven, so he has some doubts about his own world, it seems.

[sartorias]

And it also seems that his concept of Heaven was formed by bad Sunday School drawings.

[shweta_narayan]

I do think that the subgenre of fantasy has come of age, in that one can find a full spectrum of ideas in fantasy form.

This! Yes.
And thus anyone complaining that fantasy has virtually no [X] has simply not read widely enough. Especially when their examples are all (straight?) white men.

You'd think someone who knew the word "mythopoeic" could look up recent winners of the mythopoeic award...

[sartorias]

Yeah, you'd think he would reach past stuff written by white guys with violent covers signaling the type of fantasy inside.

Ah well.

[jordan179]

I remember a long Usenet thread based on the assumption that science fiction was all about white people. The posters who were claiming this were ignoring most science fiction written after 1960, and in many cases wrongly identifying characters as "white" -- for instance they believed that Juan Rico and Honor Harrington were "white," despite the fact that Rico is directly identified as Filipino and Honor Harrington lives in a time and place where most human races have long since mixed together, and has decidedly non-Caucasian features such as epicanthic folds on her eyes.

[shweta_narayan]

Juan Rico's non-whiteness is a haha-gotcha tokenism, and Honor Harrington is effectively white, whatever her "ethnic mix", because of social factors.

The category is not about epicanthic folds. It's about who has race privilege and therefore doesn't have to deal with being visibly Othered at all times and cope with microaggressions, macro-aggressions, always factoring in how people in the dominant group react to us because of how we look to them, and generalized ignorance about any of this from the dominant group when we bring it up.

[asakiyume]

I do suppose a lot of people equate the type of moral clarity you tend to get in those mythopoeic works with black-and-white judgment (which I think is a false equation) and then further equate black-and-white judgements with a child-oriented view of the world (though if anything still too many *adults* have black-and-white views of issues... maybe they are adults only in terms of years on earth).

[sartorias]

Yes and amen.

[alanajoli]

I think you're probably right. I also suspect that a Sense of Wonder is also something that critics and cynics equate with childhood, since it is so much easier to come by as a child. I'm trying to remember a fable in which the idea was presented that children and older people are the ones best able to have a Sense of Wonder: the children because they haven't yet lost it, and the older folk because they've regained it. But I can't remember where I picked that up. I suspect it might have been an essay on fairy tales -- maybe something Lewis once said?

[asakiyume]

I'm not sure, but it does seem like the sort of thing Lewis might have said.

[breathingbooks]

I think so. I know sf will happen (and is happening), so it can come off as just history that hasn't occurred yet and will appear brighter when it does. Fantasy, on the other hand, takes a big hammer, smashes reality, and laughs. Sci fi is just my future. I need an invitation to fantasy.

[sartorias]

Sci fi as future used to signify a type of hope, but that has been replaced by anxiety about the future, I think. When I talk to readers, many say they have no interest in reading near future sf, when all they need to be depressed is to watch the news and listen to all the pundits' dire predictions.

[breathingbooks]

I have no interest in near future sci fi either, but that's because it dates so quickly and it's no fun to know the story will be proven wrong within my lifetime or the one after that. Plus, it's too easy to predict - not necessarily the path, of course, but there are certain obvious routes Earth history can take.

Do you think attitudes correlate with age?

[sartorias]

I don't know--maybe with times? The replacement of religion with Progress ("in the future all our problems will be solved because we will worship the purity of Science") is not as prevalent as I remember it being in the early sixties, for example, for any age.