In Pursuit of Mysteries

Matrix Revolutions

I've been looking closely at the released trailers for the Matrix Revolutions and I just noticed a “real world” shot with a ship (obviously piloted by Neo and Trinity) is crashing into the ground. The interesting thing is that the shot is at an up angle and you can see a large break in the eternal cloud cover (”burned sky”) behind them and the moon showing through. I wonder if that is a plot point?

Go China!

http://www.panmacmillan.com/Features/China/debate.htm

China says:

“Two untrue things are commonly claimed about fantasy. The first is that fantasy and science fiction are fundamentally different genres. The second is that fantasy is crap.

It’s usually those who claim the first who also claim the second. The idea is that where SF is radical, exploratory and intellectually adventurous, fantasy is badly written, clichéd and obsessed with backwards-looking dreams of the past - feudal daydreams of Good Kings and Fair Maidens.

It’s easy enough to distinguish the writers at the far edges of the spectrum - Asimov versus Eddings, for example. But the problem with the ’sharp divide’ argument is the number of writers - often very brilliant ones - who fall in the middle, who blur the lines. David Lindsay, William Hope Hodgson, Jane Gaskell, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Gene Wolfe: the list could go on. These are writers for whom the ‘fantastic’ is not ethereal and wispy but tough and real, where ‘magic’ operates like science or science magic, and where the sense of subversion, of alienation, of sheer strangeness that saturates their work defies easy categorisation as SF or fantasy.

That’s the tradition that I’m interested in - I see myself as writing Weird Fiction. And as soon as you see that as your foundations, then the idea that fantasy is crap disappears.

When people dis fantasy - mainstream readers and SF readers alike - they are almost always talking about one sub-genre of fantastic literature. They are talking about Tolkien, and Tolkien’s innumerable heirs. Call it ‘epic’, or ‘high’, or ‘genre’ fantasy, this is what fantasy has come to mean. Which is misleading as well as unfortunate.

Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious - you can’t ignore it, so don’t even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there’s a lot to dislike - his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien’s clichés - elves ‘n’ dwarfs ‘n’ magic rings - have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was ‘consolation’, thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader.

That is a revolting idea, and one, thankfully, that plenty of fantasists have ignored. From the Surrealists through the pulps - via Mervyn Peake and Mikhael Bulgakov and Stefan Grabinski and Bruno Schulz and Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison and I could go on - the best writers have used the fantastic aesthetic precisely to challenge, to alienate, to subvert and undermine expectations.

Of course I’m not saying that any fan of Tolkien is no friend of mine - that would cut my social circle considerably. Nor would I claim that it’s impossible to write a good fantasy book with elves and dwarfs in it - Michael Swanwick’s superb Iron Dragon’s Daughter gives the lie to that. But given that the pleasure of fantasy is supposed to be in its limitless creativity, why not try to come up with some different themes, as well as unconventional monsters? Why not use fantasy to challenge social and aesthetic lies?

Thankfully, the alternative tradition of fantasy has never died. And it’s getting stronger. Chris Wooding, Michael Swanwick, Mary Gentle, Paul di Filippo, Jeff VanderMeer, and many others, are all producing works based on fantasy’s radicalism. Where traditional fantasy has been rural and bucolic, this is often urban, and frequently brutal. Characters are more than cardboard cutouts, and they’re not defined by race or sex. Things are gritty and tricky, just as in real life. This is fantasy not as comfort-food, but as challenge.

The critic Gabe Chouinard has said that we’re entering a new period, a renaissance in the creative radicalism of fantasy that hasn’t been seen since the New Wave of the sixties and seventies, and in echo of which he has christened the Next Wave. I don’t know if he’s right, but I’m excited. This is a radical literature. It’s the literature we most deserve”

Events so far…

I haven't written much the last couple of weeks. It's been so busy at work that I just ignore LJ for the most part and after work, I just want to do something besides the computer.

My mother's Vespers ritual went well with the local OTO on Sunday. It was performed following mass and was a fairly meditative rite. It involved a lot of call and response between the lector and the congregation with a large part of it done in a simple plainchant. I think that this worked well and it is different than the ritual work that most people normally see around here.

R, mom, and I went out to dinner at the Bengal Tiger, a nice Indian place, following the rite and then I took her to my grandparents. Yesterday morning, she flew back to Salt Lake. It was good to have her visiting and she and I were able to have a three hour or so chat late Saturday night about the nature of ritual work, practice and the roles of people in their own development. A lot of things that are similar in our outlooks are things that, in herself, she had attributed to her specific religious upbringing within Protestant Christianity and her reactions to that upbringing. Since my upbringing was in a fairly liberal form of Catholicism (by her) and then my own teenage involvement in paganism, it's hard to say now how much of such things are more based on the nature of our personalities. She and I feel very much the same or close on a number of issues with no reason why (though she is my mother after all).

I'm almost finished with Dharma Punx finally. I picked this up a few months ago when R and I visited her parents in Berkeley, read about a third of it in a sitting and hadn't gotten around to finishing it. It's a fairly interesting book about someone's turn around of their life. Not for everyone but I've enjoyed it.

This Friday is 's Halloween party and the next day I head to McNeil Island Prison with for the prisoners' Samhain feast. This will be my first time and I'm not sure what to make of all of it. We'll see…