I’m late to report this news as I was out of town when it happened, but the great John Crowley died last week at the age of 83. He was a writer of fantasy and science fiction who utterly transcended the genre.
If I asked you to make a list of the hundred most popular writers today in any genre–or the thousand most popular–I would feel easy saying that Crowley was every bit as good as any of them (and better than all but a few of them). His novel Little, Big was a revelation to me, a big, sprawling, multigenerational family drama written with all the skill and nuance of George Eliot or Charles Dickens, but in a thoroughly original fantasy mode. I can’t remember what reviewer called Little, Big a secret history of America, but the appellation fits: the malevolent demagogue Russell Eigenblick is a scarily accurate portrait of Donald Trump, written almost forty years before Trump rode down his golden escalator like a meteor striking the earth.
There are many wildly popular books today that will slip into oblivion before you know it: I doubt a single person will be reading Dungeon Crawler Carl or Legends and Lattes a hundred years from now. But there is a good chance people will still be reading Little, Big in the year 2126. In any just world, at least, that’s how it should be.
For much of my adult life, I would have said swords & sorcery was a guilty pleasure, the adolescent male libido-fueled stuff of Conan the Barbarian and Frank Frazetta chainmail bikini posters.
Schwarzenegger’s Conan–swords and sorcery for the Reagan years.
But I’m learning to give up on needless guilt. Early in my friendship with Carlyn, I said some music I was listening to (I don’t remember what) was a guilty pleasure of mine. She replied “I intend not to feel guilty about my pleasures.” It was about the wisest thing I had ever heard anyone say. Reader, I married her for that reason as much as for any other.
So, swords & sorcery–morally complicated pulp fantasy. Less heroic, more hard boiled. Lots of fragments, at least the way I’m writing it. The city where my story is set, Kyrenaikos, is as noir a place as Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar, Raymond Chandler’s LA, or Adventure Time‘s City of Thieves.
I’m learning, too, to feel comfortable with pulp fantasy’s one sentence paragraphs, bane of my career as an English teacher.
And my story is definitely post-Conan: the protagonist is nonbinary, and the main badass is three and a half feet tall. I’m trying to draw more on the weirdness of Michael Moorcock’s Elric and the sass of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, leavened with my classic Pitkin open endings and wry asides.
It’s also a classic Pitkin career move for me. Swords & sorcery is one of the least popular subgenres of fantasy today. Today all the buzz is around romantasy (think Sarah Maas), cozy fantasy (think Legends and Lattes), LitRPG (e.g. Dungeon Crawler Carl), and the Critical Role Industrial Complex. I definitely know how to spend dozens of hours writing something the market never asked for.
But I believe swords and sorcery is the right subgenre for the Trump years. Not just because of the noir qualities of the moment, the chaos and corruption and amorality and incompetence of the times (though for those reasons, too). Not just because Elon Musk seems almost literally to be an evil sorcerer of overwhelming power. But even more, I want to exhort readers, or maybe just myself, to (in the words of an old bumper sticker) remember who I wanted to be.
Swords & sorcery, like its sister subgenre hard boiled detective fiction, follows flawed people in corrupt situations who have a tough job to do. The protagonists of these stories may be conflicted; their motives may be impure, even mercenary at first. But they always seem to find that their moral universe cannot simply be handwaved away. The protagonists of swords and sorcery may be immoralists, but they are not amoral.
I am (like many of you) a lackluster moral example, certainly not the kind of person you’d want to rely on to restore the American republic. But we’re all we’ve got. So I teach community college by day, volunteer for Indivisible on the weekends, and write about more or less good people fighting to keep their moral compass under impossible circumstances.
And even if swords & sorcery wasn’t the right genre for this cataclysmic, corrupt moment in American history, I’m having more fun writing this story than I’ve had in a long time. I commit to taking my joys where I can find them today.
My quick take on Chistopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, now that I’ve finally seen it:
The movie is a thoroughly modern take on the ancient epic, and that’s a good thing. Homer’s poem, which I love and have taught, is steeped in Iron Age values, looking back nostalgically towards mythical Bronze Age values. Nolan takes much about what is timeless about the story—the iron law of hospitality, the value of craft, the primacy of solving problems with the mind—and leavens it with a modern acceptance of trade-offs, with our struggle with unintended consequences.
I can see why some (especially those who would prefer to return to a Bronze Age world of rapine and plunder and tribalism) would dislike the casting choices or the ending of the movie, which is a significant departure from the poem. But to me, Nolan’s movie is as successful a remix of this ancient cultural touchstone as Madeline Miller’s Circe or the Coens’ Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?
My wife and I went out last weekend to see a Canon Shakespeare Company production of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus on a whim. I loved that a small scrappy company was taking it on—I had never seen the play, though I once taught the text at my college 20+ years ago. It was wonderful to watch nine actors with little more than a stage dagger and a bunch of borrowed library books for props conjure up this Renaissance classic in a theater called, appropriately, The Wyrd Hut. It was a very Portland experience.
While I often classify Marlowe and Shakespeare together because of the period in which they wrote, every time I actually encounter a Marlowe text, I am reminded that he is no Shakespeare. Comparing the two feels to me a little like comparing Georg Phillip Telemann with Johann Sebastian Bach: they were contemporaries and worked in the same stylistic language, but the depth of Shakespeare’s characters is simply of a different order than Marlowe’s.
Still, for as clunky as some of the characterizations and plot elements are in Doctor Faustus, I realized only on later reflection how perfect that play is for these times. Faustus, the German medieval genius who has grown weary of all the books and fields of knowledge that litter his desk, has decided that his real future is in magic. Why not summon the devil? Why shouldn’t he pledge his soul to Lucifer in exchange for unlimited magical power?
Sound familiar? I was reminded the next morning of Sam Altman’s infamous 2015 quip (which was apparently not a joke) “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.” It’s easy enough to dredge up similar self-regarding twaddle from Altman’s nemesis Elon Musk: “In less than 20 years, working at all will be optional… like a hobby pretty much…” and “If AI has a goal and humanity just happens to be in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course.”
Faustus shows the same mix of (apparent) brilliance and extreme lack of introspection. And his use of the powers that Mephistopheles lends him has the same disconnect between lofty goals and tawdry, even ridiculous, triviality. Faustus’s dream is to rule the world, to remake reality for his purposes:
FAUSTUS. How am I glutted with conceit of this!
Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please,
Resolve me of all ambiguities,
Perform what desperate enterprise I will?
I’ll have them fly to India for gold,
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the new-found world
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates;
I’ll have them read me strange philosophy,
And tell the secrets of all foreign kings;
I’ll have them wall all Germany with brass,
And make swift Rhine circle fair Wertenberg;
I’ll have them fill the public schools with silk,
Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad;
I’ll levy soldiers with the coin they bring,
And chase the Prince of Parma from our land,
And reign sole king of all the provinces;
Yea, stranger engines for the brunt of war,
Than was the fiery keel at Antwerp’s bridge,
I’ll make my servile spirits to invent.
And yet, once he has the “servile spirit” of Mephistopheles to do his bidding, much of the action has all the gravitas of a Three Stooges short: Faustus becomes invisible so that he can steal the Pope’s hat; Faustus places cuckold’s horns on a mouthy knight; Faustus presents Emperor Charles V with a deepfake of Alexander the Great and his paramour.
And by the end? This brilliant doctor who once dreamed of liberating his country and altering the course of the Rhine has decided to enter into a romance with an illusory Helen of Troy. I am reminded of all of us LLM users in this moment, contemplating a servile spirit that will “read [us] strange philosophy,” unless of course we just want to use all that water and electricity and compute to cook up an AI girlfriend instead.
No spoilers (or no more spoilers), but the play doesn’t end well for Faustus. I’m more guardedly optimistic about how our Mephistophelean AI servants will treat us, as well as how the world may improve for all humanity over time. But we’d be wise to look to Faustus, that brilliant, self-deluding renaissance nerd who sold his soul and got nothing real in return for it.
Today, after a peer critique of the fifth or sixth fantasy story we’ve seen this quarter, I asked my fiction writing students how many of them were into fantasy. All but three of them raised their hands.
Then I asked how many of them had read A Wizard of Earthsea. Not one of them had.
Every once in a while, I’ll wonder what I’m doing, what inner problem I’m attempting to solve by working at a community college. Then I’ll have a moment like this, and I’ll realize that if my only contribution to my students’ lives is that I turned a few of them on to Usrula Le Guin–a woman who wrote practically all her books just a couple miles away on Thurman Street in Portland–I will have done something good with my life.
And you, dear reader, do you like fantasy? Have you read A Wizard of Earthsea? If you haven’t, go pick up that little book and check it out: you’ll see something that isn’t a hundredth as famous as Lord of the Rings, and which didn’t make a thousandth as much money for the author as Harry Potter did for J. K. Rowling, but Earthsea is better than both of them. Read it, and then contend with your desire to sue J.K. Rowling for plagiarism.
And as a bonus, if you aspire to be a fantasy or science fiction writer yourself, read just the first paragraph of A Wizard of Earthsea and see how much Le Guin accomplishes without a scintilla of infodump. What’s a dragonlord? you may ask as you read that first paragraph, What’s an archmage? The answer is who knows? It won’t matter, because you’ll already be hooked.
As you may remember from former posts, I’m a big fan of the book site Shepherd. And, like many of the writers on that site, I was invited by Shepherd founder Ben Fox to talk about my three favorite books of 2024. I was game, partly because I’m happy for any opportunity to link to my own book of this year, Exit Black–I believe it’s one of this year’s best thrillers on economic inequality that you’ll read this year.
I’m not sure what my choices say about me besides the fact that I do a lot of reading outside the genres I write in, but here were my three faves of this year: Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, and Laurent Binet’s Civilizations. Why did I love them so? Check out my Shepherd page to find out!
I was invited recently to present a workshop at one of Oregon’s wonderful creative writing conferences–the Compose Creative Writing Conference at Clackamas Community College (perhaps the hosts tried to come up with a seventh word starting with c- for the title, but six must have been all they could fit in). After the honor of being invited wore off, I realized that I would have to actually, you know, present something at the CCWC at CCC.
I decided to present a session on reducing infodump in speculative fiction. Did I choose this topic because I’ve been widely praised for my taut, sleek stories? I wish. Actually, if anything the opposite is true: during the early years of my fiction career, I got so many rejections along the lines of “this story is well-written, but it takes forever to get to its point. There’s so much infodump here that I was barely able to get to page 8.”
The best thing I can say about infodump in my writing is that editors don’t complain about it in my stories nearly as often now. So I figure that I’ve either learned to deal with it or editors are just tired of giving me notes on it.
As you probably know already, infodump refers to bogging down the flow of a story with tedious explanation. And, while writers of any genre can fall into the habit, it’s an especially common problem in speculative fiction. If you’ve ever read a bad fantasy novel (or watched a bad sci fi movie), you have surely seen some infodump along these lines:
Scientist: I sequenced the DNA sample you brought me. Whoever provided it has some snips that I’ve never seen in a human genome before.
Captain: Snips?
Scientist: ‘Single nucleotide polymorphisms.’ As you know, captain, all sexually reproducing creatures on Earth–including humans–inherit two copies of each gene, one from the mother, and one from the father. These genes determine everything from eye color to explainexplainexplain continue explaining for four pages explainexplainexplain I hope you did well in middle school biology…
For me, infodump is even worse in fantasy than in science fiction. In SF, there’s at least the possibility that what’s being infodumped actually will teach you something real about how planetary motion works or what the principle of competitive exclusion is. In fantasy, the infodump often amounts to nothing more than 20 pages of the author’s fever-dream journal entries about a fictional queen who lived 800 years before the story takes place and what she did to curse the elven sword that is the McGuffin for this whole heptalogy of novels…
What causes infodump? Why should you be wary of the phrase “as you know” in your writing? And how do you reduce infodump in your novel? Well, if you want the whole story, come see me at the CCWC on Saturday the 18th! Or, if you’re not a Portland person, drop me a line: I’m always happy to talk F/SF with book clubs, writing groups, bookish nerds, random drunks, and people on a secret mission.
For now, I’ll just say that two factors that contribute to infodump are 1. writers’ mistrust of the reader’s ability to follow along, and 2. writers who get lost for hours (or months, or decades) in worldbuilding before they ever get around to actually writing their story.
I may say more on the subject soon, but as you know, I have been working on reducing my infodump.
I’ve been hunting for years for a better book recommendation system than Goodreads (and its corporate owner, Amazon). One site that I think really shows promise is Shepherd: it’s better-curated, less compromised, more values-driven. And I’m honored to announce that I have been invited to make a Shepherd recommendation myself. Mine is called “The best fantasy-science fiction books that explore class and inequality,” and I’d love to have people take a look at it.
I’m grateful to have a website taking on the Goodreads/Amazon juggernaut. Goodreads is one of those ideas that struck me as having so much promise when it came out: it seemed (at first, anyway) a place where everyone could share ideas about the books they love. But, far from being a democracy of bibliophiles, Goodreads is a crass book marketing system that has proven easy to game and to abuse, from review bombing to pay-for-reviews to careless and anonymous one-star reviews just for the lulz.
And, while my Goodreads reviews for Exit Black have been decent–more good reviews than bad, and a number of reviews from people who must have actually read the book–I am a little suspicious of a review site where The Martian has a higher rating than Madame Bovary and where only 42% of Anna Karenina reviewers gave that book 5 stars. Seriously?
Cartoon credit: Kate Beaton, Hark! A Vagrant
I accept that for better and worse, Goodreads and Amazon are the ways that authors have to market their books. I don’t have to like that state of affairs, but I do accept it. However, I’m always on the lookout for something better, something more humane, something not yet made grubby by millions of people on the make for a quick buck or trash-talking for the dopamine hit of a bunch of likes. Shepherd might not last. But for now, I really like the way they approach books and the people who write and read them. I hope you’ll go check it out!
I had every intention of publishing my interview with fellow Willamette Writer (and fellow community college teacher) Avis Adams when she published it almost two weeks ago. Then the end of winter term descended over me like a weighted blanket made of student essays and departmental emails. Now that I have finally wriggled out from under its sweaty embrace, I can give a little more attention to this blog, to promoting Exit Black, and to all things literary.
So, many thanks to Avis for cooking up some delightful interview questions and for offering such a warm reading of my book. Check out her review and my interview at her wonderful blog, Your Next Favorite Author.
When I was writing it, one of the ideas that guided my upcoming novel Exit Black was that it was to be “Die Hard in space.” Those may have been the exact words that my publisher and my agent used when describing the project to me.
They couldn’t have known when they pitched the project to me that I was not a fan of Die Hard. Practically every one who was a young man in 1988 America loved Die Hard. How could I have hated the most iconic action movie of all time?
The answer to that is mysterious to me. One might think that because of my Quaker religious practice, I blanched at all of the violence in Die Hard. And maybe I did somewhat. However, there are a lot of violent movies that I love–some of them (like Fargo) are arguably more violent than Die Hard. And I loved most of the people in Die Hard--Bruce Willis was really doing something new in action movies with his portrayal of a sometimes panicked, self-doubting John McClane.
I think if I had to pin down my early dislike of Die Hard, it was the studio’s use of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in the trailers for the movie. That piece of music was a touchstone for me even in my youth–I hated the studio’s use of a sacred cultural treasure (one whose main theme is of peace and universal brotherhood, no less) to sell an action movie about killing a bunch of common thieves (spoiler–sorry). I only watched A Clockwork Orange once in my life because of the same cognitive dissonance around Beethoven’s 9th.
But I was excited to work on a project with my agent and with this publisher, and when they proposed Die Hard in Space I thought I’d better give the movie another look. On watching it again, I was still turned off by the celebration of violence, and there were a number of other elements that I had forgotten but which haven’t aged very well over the last 35 years. But I also saw something there that I hadn’t noticed the first time.
I saw the antagonist, Hans Gruber, with new eyes. He was cool, self-possessed, brilliant but not a blowhard the way a James Bond villain would be. Of course, it was also impossible on this later viewing not to see the arc of Alan Rickman’s career stretching off before him as he glowered like a panther, snarling in Hans Gruber’s faux German.
While I didn’t come to like Die Hard on this second viewing, I was entranced by Hans Gruber. I wanted to write a cool villain like that. I wanted to make a character who readers would hate but who also they would find fascinating, perversely compelling. I wondered if I could build a novel around an antagonist like Gruber, perhaps even someone who would be more antihero than antagonist, like the character of Satan in Paradise Lost.
And that was how I decided to take on the Exit Black project. While even now the book is being marketed as a kind of Die Hard in space, I often tell people I tried to write something more like a Coen Brothers remake of Die Hard: a story with all the ironies and regrettable choices of a Greek tragedy, focusing on a noble, hubristic, ruthless, chillingly violent antihero at the center of the story. Exit Black is a space age remix of the old movie, a kind of Die Hard: The Hans Gruber Story.
I hope the book will appeal to all of those perpetual teenagers typing away with a portrait of Hans Gruber stuck to their cubicle walls:
D&D friend, fellow unionist, and cubicleman Mike Carlip with portrait of Hans Gruber. Photo credit Carlyn Eames.
The Subway Test 