On matters of meaning and a golden age of fantasy – at Babel Clash.

On Babel Clash.

At Babel Clash.

Over on the Borders Babel Clash blog, I’ve been putting forward the idea that it’s time for fantasy and SF to go their separate ways:

It makes me wonder, though, if it’s time for fantasy and SF to dissolve the marriage of convenience. They came together in an age when there was a limited number of speculative fiction books on the shelves and the two genres huddled together for support. But as Charlie Stross points out, they’re very different in outlook – one stares out to the world, one peers into the unconscious.

Of course, members of the SF community who speak openly about that kind of thing might find it a double-edged sword. Fantasy thrives in sales terms, and those big secondary world epics that Charlie Stross mocks give a lot of bookstore cover to what may be perceived as the more challenging of the SF fare – especially at a time when three senior editors (two in the US, one in the UK) tell me they’re no longer really in the market for SF for sales reasons.

For the next two weeks, I’m going to be guest-blogging at Borders’ Bookshop’s Babel Clash alongside acclaimed SF author Justina Robson.

For a start we’ll be talking about putting the reality into fantasy, but after that we could go everywhere and anywhere.

You don’t want to seem like a nutter when you’re on public radio. So when the host asks me – as they always do – where do you get your ideas from, I steer clear of the truthful answer: “psychic connections through the aether” or “hypnagogic messages dictated by our mysterious overlords“. I usually mutter something about stumbling across an interesting fact. Always go for the boring option. It keeps you out of the coats with no arms.

But we can speak honestly here. We all know about the mysterious connections in life. The stuff that goes on behind all those scientific processes. The weird, inexplicable occurrences lurking in the corners of day-to-day existence. The gods and imps and fairies and demons that we like to call other things because, you know, that whole coats with no arms thing…

When I say “the universe speaks to me”, I mean it speaks to all writers, all musicians, all artists. We each tend to put a different face on it, but it’s the same voice. So where do my gods and fairies and demons lurk?

In pubs with stone and timber and glowering locals and beer with strange names. In deep rural life which city folk think is backward, but is wild and dangerous and so removed it might as well be another planet. In bands that you might stumble across in the back rooms of pubs and never hear from again. In stone circles, crumbling ruins, lonely pools, old houses. Across those city liminal zones – industrial estates under sodium at 3am, empty, broken-windowed factories and wasteground with rainbow-streaked puddles. In black-faced, mirror-glassed morris men and biker gangs. In snatches of music heard after midnight. In moots and meets and markets held under moonlight. These are the places where stories are born. These are the locations where my writing gods live.

And for a specific example, here’s one of the inspirations for Age of Misrule…

The Dancing Did remain one of my favourite bands, a quarter of a century after they split up. Characterised as “neo rustic pagan bop” or “a cross between The Clash and Steeleye Span”, you can find out more about them here.

Their album, And Did Those Feet, is little-known but essential, particularly if you like fantasy or any of those things I listed above. The lyrics are clever, witty and poetic and deal with ancient things encroaching on the modern world – listen to ‘The Wolves of Worcestershire‘ or ‘Charnel Boy‘. A remixed version with a booklet and additional tracks is available from Cherry Red.

The Dancing Did’s thematic equivalent today may well be Cornish collective Kemper Norton though the music is very, very different. I came across them through the regular ravings of Warren Ellis, another fan. More inspiration. I bet they never imagined they’d be dragging a story about Elizabethan spies and Faerie into the light…

Mark Charan Newton, actually.

Over on his blog, Mark has incited a firestorm with the posting “Why Science Fiction is dying and Fantasy Fiction is the future”, which has attracted fierce responses from Charles Stross, Richard Morgan, Adam Roberts and many others.

Here’s my response:

Surely there is no finer sport than ramming sharpened stakes into the cages of the SF community!

So really when we talk about SF vs fantasy, we’re talking about SF vs secondary world fantasy. That undercuts the initial argument even more, because I was told by a publisher very recently that sales of secondary world fantasy are also in decline – slow, certainly, at the moment, but consistent. Fewer secondary world fantasies are going to be bought. The argument then becomes, which is declining faster – “fantasy” or SF, and that’s not a very fun argument at all.

Part of the sales decline is due to the intense, and accelerating, change in society, where communities are breaking down into increasingly small self-identifiable units. It’s something the music and TV industries have already wrestled with – there are no “rock” fans any more, but a vast number of tiny tribes that shelter under the rock banner. Viewing figures for TV shows plummet as the makers increasingly have to micro-target.

The challenge for the big publishers is how they’re going to build a business model that is acceptable to their shareholders when genres continue to fragment (in fantasy, say, to apocalyptic fantasy, heroic fantasy, magic-based fantasy, historical fantasy) with less and less boundary crossing and subsequently a lower ceiling of potential sales (ans: they can’t). It’s an issue that smaller publishers like Solaris and Angry Robot were specifically set up to tackle.

But in this area, I think, SF is better placed to thrive in the long term because its community is broader and more cohesive, and there is much more micro-boundary crossing to keep sales up.

Publisher and always-readable genre commentator Tim Holman reveals the full scale of the change that is sweeping through fantasy in his blog The Publisher Files. A lot has been made of how fantasy book sales are booming, but it now seems that the vast proportion of this is down to urban fantasy. Definitions are always hard to come by when you get into the sewers of genre classification, but I think what we’re talking about here is the books of, say, Charlaine Harris, which are burning up the charts in the UK on the back of True Blood, as opposed to traditional fantasy in an urban setting.

Not only that, but the trend is increasing. With sales of urban fantasy rising, Tim makes the point that it’s only natural that publishers will follow the dollar/pound/euro/whatever and buy less epic fantasy and more of the thing that most readers want.

Genres always move in cycles. Stories get tired and readers get jaded as publishers heap on more of the same. But for me, urban fantasy is really the new horror – the successor to the Stephen King-fuelled horror boom of the eighties, and drawing in some of the same kind of readers who walked away when that cycle died.

Which does cast an interesting light on next year’s World Horror Convention. The convention seems completely to have ignored urban fantasy and opted for a celebration of horror that is rooted firmly in the distant past, if the guest of honour list is anything to go by. At the least it’s a missed opportunity. At the most it’s a comment on why horror is perceived as a dying genre by many in the industry.

For all you sword and sorcery fans, here’s some rare footage of fantasy great Michael Moorcock joining space cadets Hawkwind to intone his Elric poem/lyrics on stage.

Moorcock was a part of Hawkwind for several years, and the band’s Chronicle of the Black Sword album was heavily influenced by his work. Cherry Red records recently secured the rights to release all of Hawkwind’s material, which had been unavailable for many years. More details at the Cherry Red site.

The British Fantasy Society has announced the guests for its annual Fantasycon convention, this year to be held in Nottingham, UK, over the weekend of September 18 – 20. They are:

Jasper Fforde, the genre-blurring author of the Tuesday Next series and the Nursery Crime series

Brian Clemens, the TV legend behind The Avengers, The Persuaders and Thriller.

Gail Z Martin, author of the best-selling fantasy Chronicles of the Necromancer series

The Master of Ceremonies is Ian Watson, author of many acclaimed SF novels including The Fire Worm and Whores of Babylon

To me, that looks like a great line-up. Fantasycon is one of the highlights of the UK convention calendar and is certainly worth checking out. For more information go to www.fantasycon.org.uk.

Pyr editor Lou Anders discusses “the New Fantasy” in the latest Agony Column podcast from Rick Kleffel. Here’s the direct link.

The New Fantasy is a catch-all title for a specific, grittier kind of fantasy by Joe Abercrombie, Tom Lloyd, Joel Shepherd, James Enge, Justina Robson, Matthew Sturges, Chris Roberson and yours truly, according to Lou. Listen to the podcast to get the full picture.

I’ve written a short appreciation of Robert E Howard’s Puritan adventurer, Solomon Kane, at Speculative Horizons.

UK national newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, asked me to write an article on fantasy for those not familiar with the genre. The result is here.

There’s a review of Jack of Ravens here which raises some very interesting issues.

What I’ve been working on for the last few years is an epic story covering more than two thousand years of human history, numerous mythologies, a huge cast of characters with complex motives and inter-relations, an enormous range of antagonists, monsters, creatures and Fabulous Beasts, each with their own history, and a fair smattering of mysticism, psychology and philosophy thrown into the mix.

Unlike, say, The Wheel of Time, where the books are successively numbered so you know exactly which one to read next, I’ve told this fantasy tale over a trilogy of trilogies – the Age of Misrule, Dark Age and Kingdom of the Serpent sequences.

I’ve attempted to provide background information so new readers can drop into the story pretty much anywhere, but I think I’ve got to face up to the fact that they can’t. If you’re a new reader to Jack of Ravens, you’re just not going to get the depth, subtelty and interplay unless you’ve read Age of Misrule. You’ll certainly get a rattling good yarn, but it will lack what I intended as the author.

The problem is, the trilogies have each been packaged in such a radically different way that the casual reader would find it hard to tell that they’re all part of this massive canvas – although the excellent design for the Age of Misrule Omnibus has brought it in line with Jack of Ravens.

What I think I need to do now is get the word out more that this is one big, sprawling story. I’d hate for a reader to come to the books under the false pretences of thinking they’re starting a standalone trilogy (and only in fantasy can you use those words…) and be disappointed.

New Line Cinema has finally come to its senses and allowed Peter Jackson to oversee the making of two films based on The Hobbit. (New Line co-chairman Bob Shaye not so long ago: “Peter Jackson will never make The Hobbit on my watch”. Hand that man the silver-handled revolver.)

But…two films? Compared to The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit is essentially a pamphlet. Either we’re going to get lots…and lots…and lots of shots of Bilbo meandering across beautiful New Zealand scenery, or it’s going to be less of an adaptation and more of a jumping off point. There isn’t even an obvious spot in the book to break so the first film ends on a satisfying note.

Having said that, I have every faith that Peter Jackson will ensure a great experience that is both faithful to the spirit of the book and meet the demands of story-telling in the film medium. Unlike some spineless directors who cave in at the first sign of pressure from the philistine impulses of the Hollywood money-men (Chris Weitz, I’m looking at you), Jackson has proven that quality will never be compromised.

Philip Pullman is one of the greats of modern fantasy, not just for his exuberant imagination, but because he is one of the few fantasists prepared to confront serious matters. It is impossible to dismiss his work simply as escapism. As a writer with something to say, he can compete in the wider arena of ‘literature’ and that makes him an important figure for all those interested in imaginative fiction.

This movie adaptation of his book Northern Lights crushes the best of Pullman beneath the weight of spineless, bone-headed, superficial and incompetent direction. The sheer scale of its ability to suck the magic out of a book so brimming with a powerful sense of wonder is almost breathtaking. American Pie director Chris Weitz lumbers from disconnected scene to disconnected scene with no sense of how to build character, develop drama or menace, or draw out any of the magic that is inherent in Pullman’s inventions. Instead, every frame shouts out that it is a monument to the producer’s vision that only thick people watch these kinds of films, people who would throw their popcorn at the screen if time was wasted on developing character or mood, or who would walk out in anger at the travesty of character interaction when they simply want to gorge on fast-food spectacle – which Weitz also manages to ham-fistedly destroy. The final battle on the northern ice field is so poorly framed it looks like a dust-up in a provincial shopping precinct on a Saturday night.

Weitz was involved in a little fantasy invention of his own when he said in the film’s pre-publicity that for all the changes he made, he stayed true to Pullman’s original vision. He didn’t. Cut through all the Gyptians and warrior polar bears and dust and golden compasses, and this story is about one thing: the ability of organised religion to control people and their thoughts. The brooding, monolithic presence of Pullman’s Magisterium is barely evident in the film. The book’s great theme – the thing that raises it far above a simple children’s story – is diluted to such a degree that it is barely evident, and in the end only contributes to the incoherence that corrupts the entire movie. (And as an aside, Christian journalist Peter Hitchens wants parents to know that, ‘If you buy this book for your children, don’t imagine for a moment that you are handing over a neutral story; this author has a purpose’. As if a neutral story is a good thing. You know what: parents should be warned The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is not a neutral story; the author has a purpose…)

The really depressing thing about The Golden Compass is that it is blessed with such an excellent cast, all of whom are operating at the top of their game. Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra does a good job portraying a charismatic heroine, even though she occasionally stumbles over Weitz’s lead-footed dialogue. Sam Elliot as flying cowboy Lee Scorsby burns up the screen with the power of his presence, even though he too has dialogue which is cliche heaped on cliche. But the real revelation is Nicole Kidman as Mrs Coulter who does great work. In one scene she carries a huge weight of emotion, presence and back story in a simple glance that is quite electric (and the one point where Weitz shows he can actually direct).

The weight of the actors and Pullman’s imagination takes The Golden Compass above the screen adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, with its wooden leads and ineffectual set-pieces. But it remains a crushing disappointment, stolen from us by people aiming for the lowest common denominator.

Every country gets the fantasy it needs, it seems, whether that’s elves and wizards in the UK, US and Australia, or fantasy more rooted in the real world in Germany and Greece. I always thought fantasy was pretty much a universal genre, with many of its tropes based in ancient story-forms.

But a correspondent, Julian Wilson, pointed me in the direction of the Uncertainty Avoidance Index used in cross-cultural communications theory to map a society’s tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity.

The index indicates how much a society tolerates the new, the unknown and the different. Germany, which has a relatively high uncertainty avoidance index, is a society which relies on rules and regulations and tries to reduce its risks to the minimum. The US and particularly the UK have relatively low scores on the index.

In Cultures and Organisations: Software of the Mind, Geert Hofstede says, “Marieke de Mooij has pointed out that cultural values can be recognized in both the subjects and style of literary fiction produced in a country. As examples of world literature from high-UAI (Uncertainty Avoidance Index) countries, she mentions Franz Kafka’s The Castle from Czechia and Goethe’s Faust from Germany. In the former the main character is haunted by impersonal rules; in the latter the hero sells his soul for knowledge of Truth. Low-UAI Britain has produced literature in which the most unreal things happen: Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.”

Later in the book he suggests that countries which have low uncertainty avoidance are more likely to have “literature dealing with fantasy worlds” and those with high uncertainty avoidance are more likely to have “literature dealing with rules and truth”.

So if you live in Greece, Portugal or Guatemala (high UAI) or Denmark, Jamaica and Singapore (low UAI), let me know if this is just another example of Academics Gone Mad or if it has some bearing on the tastes of fantasy readers around the world?

The science fiction community is global, committed and very vocal. But is there a fantasy community? And if not, why not?

Nick Cirkovic has a few thoughts, specifically, “It may be indeed that writers are by profession a solitary bunch: they sit alone in a room and write, lots. They each have a small number of writer friends and confidantes, some of them may not even be writing in the area of genre they themselves do. Again, generally a healthy thing. It may also be that there is such a wide and varied set of sub-genres with the tag ‘fantasy’ that such healthy cross-breeding precludes a concentration of the one ultimately self-destroying inbred strand.”

It’s interesting that science fiction is a smaller genre than fantasy in terms of book sales, yet fantasy essentially remains subsumed by science fiction in terms of community, booksellers and marketing, as it has done since the days when there were only two fantasy books on the shelves compared to a hundred SF ones.

Fantasy and SF for the connoisseur or for mainstream tastes: which path should a publishing house follow? That’s an interesting debate which the ever-erudite Lou Anders has raised on his blog. When founding the excellent Pyr imprint, Lou and his team took the conscious decision to publish what Norman Spinrad called “science fiction written specifically for experienced and intelligent readers of science fiction, with a bit of fantasy more or less in the same mode thrown in”.

I think that’s an excellent policy for Pyr. It’s certainly a truism that the more you indulge in a particular taste the more refined that taste becomes (which can also be a problem for critics, who, as Stephen King puts it, “lose their taste for pizza”). The core readership of fantasy and SF – the fans, although they probably don’t categorise themselves that way – deserve some gourmet dishes.

But there is a wider debate here. On The Genre Files, Ariel gives a smart overview of marketing genre books in the 21st century, a post that all authors and publishers should read. And in a separate article, editor George Mann writes about Solaris’ choice of traditional covers for their genre titles.

Both these articles get right to the heart of trying to sell books to a fragmented audience in the 21st century, and it’s something the music industry in particular, and TV and Film, are all struggling to deal with. Do you go for the hardcore fan or reach out to the wider audience? There are pros and cons for both. It seems that Lou, Ariel and George are all swinging towards an approach that caters to the dedicated reader, and I think that’s a business model that will work very well for Pyr and Solaris.

But if it was applied to the whole industry I would have real problems. In the music industry, where I worked for a while, the marketeers have struggled. By focusing on the tribalist music fan that has emerged over the last twenty years, they have had trouble gaining breakout hits from genres. Attention shifted to marketing bland fare that would appeal to all tastes to gain those mainstream hits, and sales have fallen dramatically (yes, I know there are many other factors, but this is a core concern).

The comics industry in particular has faced a great many problems because of the loss of its mainstream audience. That was caused by the collapse of its distribution network in the late seventies and early eighties and the shift to specialist comics shops. But the comics producers then found that to maintain sales in this rarefied atmosphere required stories that excited the jaded palates of the core fan – and were nigh-on incomprehensible to the casual reader. Sales fell further, the core fan market had to be shored up to a greater extent, and a desperate retreat from the centre ground took place, that is still damaging the industry.

The issue of covers and marketing is not just an industry issue. I’ve had several readers complain about my move away from traditional illustrative fantasy covers to the latest design-oriented ones. I’ve had just as many applaud the move. These covers are a personal choice. I like design; they work for me. And, I have to say, sales have been much, much better. But I don’t think you can extrapolate too much from that for the wider market. If all covers were designery, mine wouldn’t have had the same impact.

I love fantasy, science fiction and horror. I believe these three genres are appealing to mainstream tastes, if some way can be found to communicate their values to the casual browser. I’m afraid that an across-the-board retreat to the ‘core fan model’ will ghettoize them even further and lead to a long-term decline. The best way for the industry, I think is – to use music industry analogy – hardcore labels for the purist, and general labels to attract new users.

But that is a fiendish and crippling trap for the writer. Once you establish yourself in one pool or the other it will be very hard to crossover and gain, on the one hand, the new readers and wider sales that sustain your career, and, on the other, credibility that is just as valuable a commodity in the internet-empowered world.

A lot of people have been talking about my post suggesting that the more rationalist a society gets, the less it needs rationalist fiction like SF (with poor old Richard Dawkins thrown in as the whipping boy, for a spot of humour). Some have been predictably getting hot under the collar. Others were more receptive.

I grew up reading SF. The first adult ones I remember were Heinleins when I was nine or ten, moving on to Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. During my teens I expanded into fantasy and horror, with Moorcock, Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, and I still read right across the core speculative genres. In those days, SF was the powerhouse of imaginative fiction, influencing mainstream thought, whether high-brow or low. Fantasy as a genre – even with Tolkien behind it – was clutching on to the coat-tails, and horror was barely seen.

But now things have changed. The tribalist SF readers like to proclaim that although influence and sales have declined, they still have the high ground – the better writing, the more rigorous ideas. And the better literary pretension, of course. Yet fantasy is now much more effective at communicating with a wider readership, and reaching out to people from different walks of life.

There are numerous, complex reasons for changes on this scale. One is indeed that people read books to get what they don’t have – new ideas, information, experience, and, increasingly, irrationality. Another is certainly that in some areas SF has grown more insular and inward-looking, like a group of gourmands sneering at everyone else eating pizza. But one important reason is that a significant part of SF has forgotten what is the engine of communication in story-telling – emotion.

I’m also a screenwriter in the TV industry, and at every script meeting, the cry goes up, ‘emotion, emotion, emotion’. The emotional heart of every story is the point of connect for viewers or readers, and allows them to take on board the big ideas, the themes, that lie within. Big ideas alone are not enough. Everybody in TV today understands this. It’s the reason why the current series of Dr Who has been such a success. Russell T Davies, the show runner, received his TV training on soaps, and took the decision to infuse emotion into the core of the new series concept. It’s the reason why Battlestar Galactica is such a success, and the reason why most TV and film SF connects with a wider audience.

Fantasy – which comes more from the heart than the head – instinctively understands this too. So does horror. But SF has always loved its big ideas and these days in the literary world, I feel, is loving them much, much more than the humanity it wants to care about those ideas. This isn’t really a different argument to the ‘rational society needing irrational dreams’ one. It’s about the balance between head and heart. People don’t want an academic lecture. They want to feel why they should care.

I used to get that in my early SF reading – maybe not so much in Asimov, but certainly in the broad thrust of the genre. Or am I misremembering? Or perhaps modern SF really is concentrating on humanity and using emotion to piggyback those big ideas into the minds of the wider population, and I’m just not reading those books. Put me right…I’m sure you will…