Posts made in April, 2012

• The Chill is Gone

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  Paul Tobin

  I don’t know what scares me. And that isn’t a dodge. I honestly don’t know. I don’t WANT to know. The things that scare me are hidden. Because what scares me is not knowing. Those scratchings at the windows, the knocks on the walls, the voices from nowhere, those are what send shivers down my spine. It’s the building tension, the suspense, the unknown. Once I find out that the scratchings on the window are from the cat having once again decided that the outside world is bullshit and it wants back in the house where its domain is unchallenged, the fear is gone. And those knocks on the walls? Once you discover that the changing weather is making the house settle, and anyway your house is actually built fourteen blocks away from the ancient Norse graveyard, then what’s the point of being scared? And those voices from nowhere? As soon as you understand you’ve left your ipod playing, and that it ISN’T voices from the nether realms trying to drag you into the stygian depths, once you realize that it’s actually the Ramones informing you of Janie’s “punk rocker” status… the chill is gone.

  If you tell me what scares me, I’ll tell you that it doesn’t scare me anymore.

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• I Blame Tolkien

  Why Write Fantasy?

  I don’t really remember the exact moment I decided I wanted to start writing—I came to it late and played with the idea off an on during college and through the early part of my professional career as a software programmer—but I do remember the moment that fantasy first fascinated me. It was in third grade. My best friend had read The Hobbit, and had recommended I read it too. So i did. And I loved it. I adored it. It was my first exposure to fantasy, and I remember how transfixed I was, not merely by the story, but also the maps and the covers.

  The covers, if I’m recalling correctly, were these ones:

  

  The world, as anyone who’s read them will tell you, is so wide and deep it’s easy to fall into. I loved the fairy tale feel of The Hobbit and the deeper, more dangerous feel of The Lord of the Rings. I even liked (not loved, it took me three tries and nearly a decade to finish it) the feeling of myth that The Silmarillion gave.

  So when I started making up my mind that I actually wanted to write, I knew it would be fantasy. But the point of this week’s posts isn’t so much the origin of our writing and why we write it, but why we enjoy fantasy in particular. What it brings to the table.

  I enjoy writing science fiction, but I have to admit, I find it too similar to our modern day world at this point. There was certainly a time when science fiction was little different from fantasy; it was just that one looked backward and one looked forward. Today those paradigms have been broken over and over again, and science fiction has stayed ahead of the technology curve, but it’s getting harder and harder to do so.

  But for me, that’s only part of the problem. I enjoy looking back to another time. I enjoy the escapism of fantasy. But first and foremost, I find compelling because of the particular brand of agency it grants the characters (and so, to the reader). It gives a sense of power that we’ll never have in real life. And so, from this perspective, it’s fun to write about kings and queens; it’s fun to write about thieves and wizards; because in them we get to experience wondrous things, things we dreamed about as children. I think that’s why the buying market has trended away from science fiction and more toward fantasy. Readers are looking for the same things in fantasy that make me want to write it.

  So while I enjoy science fiction enough to dabble, I doubt that I’ll ever write a science fiction novel. Fantasy’s what I love, and that’s where I’ll stay.

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• Fantasy Is as Fantasy Does

  Why Write Fantasy?

  

  This week, we’re knocking around the essential question: why write fantasy? At least for me, it’s barely a choice. I feel compelled to write fantasy, and always have. I’ve tried my hand at the more “serious” stuff, usually under the lash of a professor, but I can’t help coming back. Addiction? Barely healthy compulsion? Undiagnosed brain tumor? Who can say, but there it is. I mean, I could try to legitimize or rationalize by talking about Jungian archetypes or how humans have been doing fantasy since the Epic of Gilgamesh (if not earlier), but at the end of the day, it’s pretty much hardwired. Why do I prefer the color teal to mint green, or vodka to tequila? I just do.

  When I was younger, I had more than one teacher or professor try to impress on me the importance of learning the craft of writing in the realistic short story format before trying my hand at speculative fiction, especially long speculative fiction. The speech usually went something like, “You need to master the fundamentals—pacing, dialogue, character development, tone, blahblahblah—before you’re ready to venture into other territory.” (more…)

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• It’s All About The Freedom, Baby!

  Why Write Fantasy?

  This week’s topic is; Why Write Fantasy?

  The answer is very simple. It’s all about Freedom! When one decides one is going to write fantasy, it is very liberating, because the writer is publicly throwing off the very last shackles that bind his so–called soul.

  I mean seriously, when one decides to become a writer, you are already severing all ties with workaday humanity. You are expecting, nay, demanding, that the cutters of wood and the drawers of water give you enough of their hard earned money that you can swan about cobbling together your little stories. James Branch Cabell once declared that a writer should learn all they could when they were young, but when they actually started to write, they should be a thing apart from humanity, so that they could follow the dictates of their inner voice without other people’s opinions messing it up.  Naturally, being James Branch Cabell, he used better words than that (Obviously, Jim wasn’t big on writer’s workshops).

  A writer is thus already something strange in the eyes of most people, and many of them become fabulous monsters. Oh, some of them try to maintain a facade of normality, (more…)

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• How Can We Not Write Fantasy?

  Why Write Fantasy?

  I wrote a novel about a girl who can turn into a wolf. Of course this is a fantasy, no one can turn into a wolf. (Though a world where there are fish with both eyes on one side of their head, where frogs can change gender, cows eat birds, and crows teach classes in tool-making, does make anything seem possible.) The belief that one’s wolf nature, or one’s dragon or cougar nature could rise to the forefront under certain provocation is absurd: no one can turn into another animal. As a metaphor for the complicated aspects that make up the human unconscious, it has a certain resonance, however. Following up the idea that if this girl was able to turn at will into a wolf, what adventures might befall her, is a natural progression. But still just a fantasy.

  So, let’s not write fantasy. Let’s write reality. Let’s only write things that can happen because they have happened. Okay. Here I sit before this screen, touching keys which create words on something which is not a page, which will show up on the Night Bazaar, which is real, and not imaginary at all. But where it is, and what it is, could take quite a bit of explaining. If you were to try to explain it to someone who died a hundred years ago, he would know that you are insane. In the Country of the Blind, the one-eyed man is locked up for having hallucinations.

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• One Foot in Reality, One in the the Fantastic

  Why Write Fantasy?

  Why write fantasy?  What can you do with fantasy that you couldn’t do writing realism?

  Hmm. 

  Why choose between them?  Why not use both?

  Albert R. Broccoli, the driving force behind James Bond in the movies, once described his approach to the Bond films as ‘keeping one foot in reality, one in the fantastic’.  I wholeheartedly agree–I believe that the more ‘real’ my reality is, the more easily the reader will accept the fantastic elements I use.  It’s sort of a corollary to Blake Snyder’s ‘Double Mumbo Jumbo’ (one piece of magic per movie!); if I make the rest of the story as believable as the real world, audiences will accept when I throw the King of Hell at them.

  Oh, let me clarify–I don’t write fantasy, per se.  My stuff is more ‘supernatural noir thriller (so far, with no sexy vampires)’.  To me, ‘fantasy’ has always meant ‘high fantasy’, with dwarves with hairy feet, D&D monsters and quests for some object of righteousness.  My stuff deals with the fantastic in a different way.  Since this post asks the question “Why write fantasy?”, and I don’t, I thought I’d address how I use the fantastic in my work (fantasy-fantastic; close enough.  Sue me.) (more…)

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• Fantasy? Fantastik!

  Why Write Fantasy?

  This week we’re discussing: why write fantasy? But perhaps the question should be, why not write fantasy? As a lover of the fantastic, I’ve never really understood the viewpoint ‘I don’t read fantasy or science fiction because it’s not real’. The subtext to this inevitably seems to be and therefore what’s the point? To which I would say: firstly, that’s the whole point! Fantasy is escapism! It’s an abundance of imagination and wonder in a few hundred pages and it’s also fun! Why would you not want to read fiction like that?

  And secondly I’d say: you’re right, it’s not real, at least not in the literal sense. But if you peer a little deeper into the mirror, reading fantastical fiction is often about reading between the lines as much as what’s offered up on the page.

  I’ve tried writing mainstream or contemporary fiction and it’s never quite clicked for me. I always want to go off at a tangent. I spent eighteen months living in Paris, and ever since leaving I’ve wanted to write about it, but I didn’t want to write exclusively about my experiences – I wanted to add another dimension. Something dreamy and fantastical. Something unexpected. (And I did actually draft that novel, but I guess it’s going to be sitting in a drawer for a while now.) I think this is why I love Murakami so much – you think you’re in an ordinary world, and suddenly you realize you’ve landed in a whole other dimension.

  I’m a reader and writer of fantastical fiction because it’s a joy to read and to write. Because it conjures other worlds. Because it places no limits on the imagination. Because it’s full of possibility. Because you can do anything and go anywhere with it. If everyone was confined to writing what they knew, fiction would be a much duller sphere. (more…)

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• All the doorways, please.

  Why Write Fantasy?
  

  Paul Tobin

  So… why write fantasy? This was actually a big question for me, because I spent a long time screwing around with novels that I wasn’t particularly fond of, trying to write what I thought was “proper” to write… the types of novels that get featured in “Stuffy Drawing Room Discussions Quarterly” because I wanted to feel that I had accomplished something as a writer. The big change for me was when I compared what I was trying to write with what I enjoyed reading. I was writing heart-breaking slices of everyday life and then reading tales of warriors kicking dragons in the arse, and vampires holding bloody knuckle contests with ghosts, and lithe swordswomen tossing naked stableboys from their beds in order to grab up their swords when the troll busts through the wall. I was reading fiction where magic was in the mix… where others worlds were not only just beyond doorways, but there were characters and villains in the books who KNEW where those doorways were waiting, and they had the keys and the magic words to fling them wide open.

  So my interests were clearly in different genres. But why was that?

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• Musings Upon the Steampunk Æsthetic

  Steampunk

  Steampunk is, I believe, a reaction to the last 80 years of industrial design.
  Machines used to be self explanatory, to an extent. You could look at something chugging away, and see how the various pieces functioned. Ordinary people could repair their own auto mobiles. When they first came out, Mr. Ford’s machines were sold not just as a mode of transportation, but as an efficient source of power for the home, farm or small business. When you got a car, you got the parts and instructions that allowed you to put the thing up on blocks and use it to power a lathe, a well pump, or any number of useful devices.
  When we think ‘Steampunk’, we have a mental image of a factory floor from a hundred years ago, with giant gears grinding away, driving belts that loop around exposed pulleys and drive shafts that power clacking cogs or saws or incomprehensible Jacquard loom–like devices that weave, pound, stamp, and sort various other items through a cavernous gallery lined with vents spouting live steam, exposed glowing busbars and crackling Jacob’s ladders, all covered with a fine layer of coal dust.
  Thousands of these factories really existed, using first generation, improvised technology. They steamed and roared and clanked out their products at a furious rate, killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of people in the process.
  Over time, people who weren’t factory owners said “Surely it is possible to accurately pour boiling Mercury into a vat and not have to rely upon a six year old child using a paper funnel”. And machinists and inventors would re-design these systems (usually because the government forced them to do so) and the quaint and picturesque six year old child would be replaced by something a bit less prone to dying.
  Thus, over time, these changes would accumulate. Machinery became more aerodynamic. Less prone to failure. Sealed away from human incompetence and the elements. Sub–systems became more electronic and less mechanical.
  Today we are approaching the end result of this design process, which is embodied by the iPhone. It is a complex device with, to the casual eye, no moving parts at all. All very well, but to the majority of the people who own one, it might as well be magic. Not one person in a thousand knows how their phone works, and the rest probably don’t even think about it.
  However, people like to know how things work. A part of our monkey brain enjoys figuring out and being able to comprehend cause and effect.
  A device that has been reversed engineered so that you can see all the parts and understand what they do is very satisfying to people. I believe that the Steampunk esthetic plays to this. Steampunk presents us with amazing science–fiction devices, but does so in a such a way that we kid ourselves that we understand how they are done. Look over there! It is a mechanical man! From the cast iron door on his stomach and the black smoke pouring from his metal hat, it is obvious that he is powered by coal! Anyone can understand that. An exposed set of rods and pistons hiss and thump along his limbs, obviously providing for his movement. So simple! Through the ornamental glass plate we can see the gears turning and the pistons rippling as his engines of cogitation grind through his assigned tasks. Ah, the green light went on! He’s obviously just solved a tricky ethical quandry. Nonsense? Yes. But nonsense presented in such a way that the viewer thinks he or she understands what is going on.
  Compare this to the smooth, plastic manikins that are supposed to impress us by being able to climb stairs without falling over. Every moving part sealed behind proprietary layers of plastic. Mysterious. Boring.
  That is, in my opinion, is the essence of steampunk. It harkens back to a time when a mechanic was proud of the way he had solved a particular problem, and wasn’t afraid to let people see how he had done it, because most people were educated enough to be able to appreciate it. Steampunk lets us think we’re smart, because it shows us the simple things we recognize (pistons!) leaving us free to ignore the larger questions (so how does an coke furnace with feet and an iron mustache know enough to save the professor’s daughter?) because we’re too busy being entertained.
  It takes into a place where we can suspend disbelief while still having a good time.

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• Steam it Up, Steamy Steamerson

  Steampunk

  I’m late to the Steampunk party. Not even fashionably late, but couldn’t find anything to wear for ages, changed my outfit twelve times like a teenage girl, got in a fight with my wife over who forget to get what on the last grocery run, got lost on the way with no GPS or sense of direction to speak of, forgot the bottle of absinthe and had to run back to the house for it, and fully expected to find the party either deserted, busted up by the cops, or full of passed out lunatics in corsets and goggles who vomited in the potted plants or drunk flew their dirigible into the neighbor’s tree house.

  What I’m getting at is, while I’d heard of steampunk, Boneshaker and The Half-Made World were my first real exposure to the universe in any meaningful way, and both in the last year or so. Unless you count playing Arcanum (which I enjoyed, for all its quirks), or watching Will Smith’s Wild, Wild West (which forced me to wash my eyes with lye and bleach). So, I’m hardly an authority on the subject. In fact, I’m woefully ill-equipped to do much besides talk out my ass and make wildly inaccurate observations and proclamations. But that’s true of most topics and most of my contributions, so hey, why go changing now. (more…)

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