Through a Genre Darkly

I had fun waffling about cyberpunk in the last post, so here’s another one, this time harping on another genre I like to talk about: grimdark fantasy.

Much like cyberpunk, it’s a genre that is both long-lived and has recently enjoyed something of a revival, thanks to the televisual kinomatic extravaganza that was HBO’s “Game of Thrones” (about which, I’ve pontificated about here and here).

The genre itself goes back much further, of course, with one obvious touchstone being Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone stories that started in 1961, while the word ‘grimdark’ was inspired by the 1987 tag line of tabletop wargame Warhammer 40,000 “In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.” Since then we’ve had a range of authors from Stephen R Donaldson’s “Thomas Covenant” to R Scott Bakker’s “Prince of Nothing” and is there something about having the initial R that makes you a nihilist, and oh yes also Joe Abercrombie’s “First Law” series (here and here) and Steven Erickson’s numerous and ponderous Malazan books.

Grimdark fantasy is often described as the antidote to Tolkien, a gritty, dirty, messy genre for everyone who rolled their eyes every time Galadriel broke into song or Middle Earth was once again saved at the 11^th hour by the unlooked-for arrival of a flock of Very Large Birds Indeed. Grimdark is unepic fantasy, populated by angsty antiheroes, hard-faced warriors with anger management issues, villains who might have a point actually, and lots and lots of stage blood.

Iconoclasm can feel terribly clever when you are young, lord knows I was an insufferably contrarian smart-arse from age about 10 to 30 (well, probably long after that, truth be told). Realizing that, despite your parents’ admonition to tell the truth, work hard and be kind to others, it was actually quite possible and perhaps even advantageous to do none of those things and still be successful, can feel like an enormous betrayal.

Grimdark is above all an angry, hurt cry of rejection of the beautiful lies that epic fantasy tells: Life isn’t like that. Good does not always triumph. Good is boring, evil is interesting. There are no heroes, everyone is flawed. Nobody really thinks they are evil. And so on.

Hello, Kullervo

Proponents always trot out the same handful of rationalizations for the genre’s popularity. The dark times we live in, you see. As though the year of our lord two thousand and twenty were in someway harder to live through than two world wars, an influenza epidemic that killed more than the first war, the worst economic collapse of the century, the AIDS epidemic or the constant threat of nuclear annihilation.

As you can tell, I don’t think there’s anything especially new or innovative about rejecting or subverting epic fantasy tropes. Here is the most grimdark story I’ve ever read:

A boy is orphaned when his parents and family are massacred. He is brought up by his parents’ killers, rebels against them and is sold into slavery. He escapes, meets and seduces a girl who he later discovers to be his own sister (unbeknown to him, she escaped the massacre). When she realizes they have committed incest, she commits suicide. Blinded by fury, the boy returns to the family that raised him, slaughters them, and then kills himself. The end.

Pretty grim, eh?

Here’s the thing, though. That’s the story of Kullervo, a Finnish legend written down in the 19^th century, but based on a much older oral tradition. It’s also, pretty much beat for beat except with more elves and dragons, Tolkien’s story of Turin Turambar, which he first began in 1917.

To flog the dead horse a few more times: Gilgamesh is a tyrant and despot whose best friend dies, and later he fails to win either immortality or eternal youth. Achilles is a selfish arse and dies in the Iliad. Beowulf gets eaten by a dragon. King Arthur is killed by his own son. So it goes.

To my mind there’s nothing especially new or modern or even particularly anti-Tolkien about having troubled heroes who do terrible things. That is, if anything, the default to which Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is a rare exception.

I'll Show You Realism

Nor do I think there is anything innately more “realistic” about letting the bad guys win. George Martin may very well be correct, for all I know might does indeed make right, but a quick glance at history and a fall back on a slightly different idiom should tell us that he who lives by the sword dies by it. For example, let’s have a look at the Roman Emperors who were murdered by their own Praetorian Guard: Caligula, Galba, Pertinax, Julianus, Elagabalus and Aurelian and that’s not even going into all the ones murdered by their own regular troops.

The dictator who rules for a lifetime is a relatively modern invention, and medieval rulers who tried to act like tyrants and despots were more likely to find themselves on the wrong end of a hot poker enema a la Edward II (yes, probably apocryphal, but still a good story to tell).

Being a ruthless bastards isn’t any more of a shortcut to success than being virtuous, generous and kind. Honestly, it’s all a bit of a crap shoot. You always hear about successful authors who got a break because someone assistant’s wife just happened to read the manuscript and insist it must be published, or showrunners whose first-ever pitch was greenlit because they have famous parents or the man who became president of the United States mainly because his father had been too, and my takeaway is that quite frankly nobody, neither good nor evil, has the slightest fucking clue what they’re doing. Evil works sometimes, sure. So does being good. That’s the only reality.

What Audiences Really Want (What They Really, Really Want)

But of course all these claims at greater realism are a decoy, a smokescreen, because we all know fiction isn’t really about reflecting reality, fantasy fiction doubly not so. I mean, the name of a genre is a bit of a dead giveaway, isn’t it: Fantasy. Not reality.

The whole point of speculative fiction, non-mimetic writing and fantasy as a literary, marketing genre is that it draws on myth and magic, legends and fairy tales, in order to present a world which is very definitely NOT our own. Sure, you could write a story that is essentially just the real world with a couple of elves in the background, but then my question becomes why (other than the commercial reasons) is this marketed as fantasy? Grimdark fantasy, like all fantasy, is not a reflection but an exaggeration, a specific attempt to highlight and twist something we find in our world. In this case: the atavistic taste for revenge, and the desire to indulge our darkest impulses.

Fans do not flock to watch “Game of Thrones” or pick up the latest god and wizards tome because they’re looking for an accurate depiction of the human condition. Grimdark is as escapist as epic fantasy, merely in the opposite direction. It indulges all the things we’d like to do in our darker moments, the co-worker we’d cheerfully strangle, the careless driver we’d like to run off the road, the rude shop clerk we’d like to stuff inside their own till. Grimdark lets you vicariously live out those fantasies in all their visceral glory.

In that sense, the genre is regressive and conservative, not iconoclastic. Nihilism and the refusal to believe in any kind of positive change, preferring instead to indulge in revenge fantasies, is inherently pro-establishment, because they’re the ones who benefit if nobody tries to change anything. Audiences want to have their caked blood and eat it too, to feel they’re doing something rebellious while engaging in the very boggiest of standard entertainment.

(This American need to be at once both the rebel underdog and the invincible champion is probably worth exploring. Maybe next time. On the same note, I make plenty of digs at America’s expense in this blog, but to be fair, most of the Americans I’ve met have been wonderful, kind people. This kind of ribbing is just what you get for being so big and famous and dominating the discourse all the time.)

It's Not All Bad Though

The only exception I’ll admit is grimdark that is satire, either of other grimdark works or of the nihilistic mindset it supports. And to be fair, the Terry Brookses and Tad Williamses and Robert Jordanses and Brandon Sorensonsons of the genre can stand to be brought down to earth every once in a while lest they get too carried away. It’s worth pointing out that for all their medievalist and poetic trappings the modern epic fantasy is still ultimately about dudes killing other dudes with swords.

Abercrombie gets this, I think, with his alcoholic princesses, dashingly brain-dead swordsmen, manipulative mentor wizards, perfectly pleasant torturers and barbarian berserkers with a heart of … if not gold, then brass maybe. I think Warhammer 40,000 also had this, until a certain cohort of fans started taking the setting at face value (you can still see traces of humor in the dimbulb orks, for example).

In line with my unwarranted American-bashing above, I note that this kind of satire seems to be a particularly British thing. I’ve seen this elsewhere too, with reams of American publications warning you not to try humor. I think the default American mode of communication is sincerity, which is why political discourse gets so overheated, nobody can look at the topic or themselves from an ironic distance. Whereas British people seem much more keyed to look for or expect life to be absurd. But I’m digressing.

I note in closing that the “Game of Thrones” fandom has more or less evaporated now that the show is over (whimper not a bang, there) and the next book nowhere in sight (next year, says Martin, and we’ve heard that before). That suggests a lack of staying power, a lack of purchase or foothold on the imagination, and thus a shallowness to the Gotcha! adolescent epiphany that life sucks. We know, dear. That ceased to feel insightful by about age 16. These days, it’s the hopeful fantasies that feel ground-breaking and innovative.

Foe

Title: Foe
Author: Iain Reid

Junior and Hen, a couple living on an isolated farm in the near future, are suddenly informed that Junior is being conscripted into a two-year space exploration program. During his absence, the agency will provide a synth/replicant that looks just like him, to take care of Hen and keep her company. As the government agent regularly visits the couple and peppers them with strangely personal questions, Junior starts to suspect the program is not what it claims, and something more sinister is happening. At that point, I was figuring either (A) the protagonist, Junior, would turn out to have been a synth the whole time, or (B) he’d go away and when he came back his wife would have been replaced with a synth. I must be some kind of goddamn genius, because ladies and gentlemen: It’s both. For all the predictability of the twists, this is still a neat little novel that packs a punch, particularly when you go back and review the interactions between notJunior and his wife in a new light, realizing that despite Junior being the “I” of the novel the main character is actually his wife, Hen, grappling with living with this replicant imposter of her husband, with the dissatisfaction that comes when you feel your life is in a rut, everything is routine and one day blurs into the next. It’s essentially a married woman having a mid-life crisis, dressed up in SFnal trappings. The writing is sharp and snappy at first but starts to wear after a while, as all Junior’s three-word declarative sentences get to be a bit monotonous after a bit, and you kind of wish Iain would vary the pace every once in a while. The blunt droning of Junior’s inner monolog isn’t helped by the fact that aside from the two big twists, this short novel is essentially plot free, nothing much happens except !Junior argues with his wife and gets confused and irritated with everyone and everything else and—just as an aside—I empathize 1000% bro, I really do. People are all malfunctioning robots, my guy, there’s no telling what is going on in their faultily-programmed brains. Seriously, I’ve given up trying to understand my fellow human beings, you’re all aliens to me. Anyway, real Junior comes back, unJunior gets deactivated, but then real Junior and his wife fight because he’s a real selfish asshole who really left her to go off on a real two-year space program and she kind of liked the replicant better. So she ups and leaves him, but before Junior realizes what’s happened, the agency quickly subs in a replicant for his wife. Real Junior and unHen waltz off into the sunset, happy in their comforting irreality, their artificial facsimile of a happily married life. I’m not sure the plot makes a whole lot of sense once you know the ending—why tell the replicant about the space program? Why tell him that he is going to be replaced, when he already is the replacement? Why not just have it live a normal life until the real guy comes back? But I get why it’s structured that way, for that little dopamine rush when you figure it out. It’s not a book built for the CinemaSins crowd, and I get that structurally the point is to mislead the reader about what’s going on so you get that Eureka! Moment and all those weird conversations between notJunior and Hen suddenly make sense. Is the real horror the way our lives dissolve into drudgery, the way we exist in order to keep on existing, that any change no matter how dramatic eventually becomes mundane, routine, boring. Is the numbing comfort of the familiar the real foe? I don’t know, you’re the robot aliens. You figure it out.

The Quantum Thief

Title: Quantum Thief
Author: Hannu Rajaniemi
Publisher: Gollancz/Tor

For a while there you could just call everything “nano” and science fiction audiences would just nod their heads and accept anything you shoveled their way. Nanobots, sure, Nanomissiles, why not, Nanowrimo, knock yourself out. Of course, today’s audiences are far more intelligent, perceptive and sophisticated. Now, you have to call everything “quantum.” Much better, isn’t it. Quantum Thief is less a novel than the result of putting a mathematics textbook in a blender and printing whatever words dribble out the other end. Archons and cryptarchs and warminds and gevulot and phoboi and yes, whenever the writers of Bungie’s online shooter game “Destiny” had writer’s block they flipped open a random page of this book and used the first word that they saw. It’s normally at this point where I try to explain what the story is about but you know, I haven’t the faintest fucking clue. Couldn’t even tell you if the title means the thief is quantum or he steals quantum or what either of those things would entail. In any event, he’s rescued from the archons and warminds inside an infinite prison where he has to play a real-life version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, why I don’t know, by a Finnish woman, her flirtatious spaceship and the voice of God if god was an amorous Italian woman. Again, I don’t know why said rescue happens, it just does. Because of Quantum. They all fly to Mars where there’s a walking city in which everyone has physical privacy settings, communicates by sharing GIFs (no change there, then) and is immortal but periodically dies and spends time as a mindless servant before going back to being alive again and no, I don’t know why. Said city is also inhabited by a colony of “zoku” who are basically Quantum gamers. The thief goes to the walking city to steal something, what I’m not clear on, in order to establish proof of something, again your guess is as good as mine, but also to find some of his lost memories, can’t help you there, and in the process reveals some big secret about the walking city’s past, who tf knows at this point, before the big climactic showdown with the cryptarch, shruggie dot emoji. Quantum. His Finnish rescuer hates him at first but then doesn’t, because he takes her to karaoke, and frankly this is exactly the opposite of what I find happens every time I go to karaoke with a female companion, perhaps because I’m not a dashing, debonair thief of the quantum variety, but also perhaps because I have a signing voice that sounds like a bronchial parrot with a stutter. Anyway, the effect is sort of dizzyingly amusing for the first third of the book or so but then you slowly realize there’s no getting off this quantumly wordy tilt-a-whirl and you’re going to be completely in the dark about everyone’s motivations or what they’re even trying to do right up until the final page. At which point, they proudly announced they’ve done whatever it was they were trying to do. Huzzah. Good for them. It’s all giddily, sprawlingly, psychedelically inventive, but it’s a bit Jackson Pollock painting in the way words are kind of splattered across the pages and you fucking figure it out. The protagonist is more annoying than raffish, the detective on his trail sherlockian without putting any of the deductive effort into it, the gamer zoku are a hoot but in the book far less than they should’ve been, an the two main female characters don’t do much except get exasperated with the hero and occasionally try to kill him until at the end when they don’t and do the exact opposite instead. Quantum.

Wither Cyberpunk?

Hello and welcome back. Today, we’re taking a break from milquetoast white middle class takes on socio-political issues and getting back to what I’m really good at: Nonsensical waffling about deeply nerdy shit. That’s right, today we’re going to talk about cyberpunk.

Here’s what I said about the genre back in March:

Cyberpunk is a wonderful genre, so fun, so full of cool gadgetry, bass-ass mofos, gangsters, mercs, techno-blitzkrieg action, neon, rain and bare buttocks gyrating to electronica. I love it, really I do. But damn is it a limited, self-referential genre.

It is. It’s a narrative straight-jacket capable of telling about three possible stories, all of them involving a hacker, a gun-toting mercenary and a prostitute with a heart of gold. Spoilers: They all die and live happily ever after.

That said, it’s surprising how long and how well the genre has survived since it downloaded itself into the public infosphere back in the early 80s. In the 90s it was rebooted through Neal Stephenson’s books and the Matrix trilogy, the Shadowrun RPG as well as William Gibson’s Bridge trilogy (peak Gibson, to my mind), then saved from the Y2K bug by things like the “Blade Runner” sequel or Richard Morgan’s “Altered Carbon” series (covered here, here and here), which later became a Netflix series (here and here). Everything from “Black Mirror” to “Love, Death and Robots” owes a deep debt to this genre.

And it keeps going. Pandemic willing, we are currently four months away from the November 19 release of CD Projekt Red’s latest game, “Cyberpunk 2077” (which I wrote a little about here) and its promise of infinitely customizable genitalia. A tie-in anime has also been announced, slated for release in 2021. Cyberpunk has never been hotter, or cooler, or whatever your desired ambient temperature may be.

The question is, Why?

Why does this genre, so evidently a product of a very specific place and time (my bedroom, circa 1990) continue to enjoy such popularity?

Part of the reason cyberpunk is enjoying a revival, as British author Adam Roberts suggests in his blog Morphosis, is probably because kids like me who grew up in the 80s are now in positions to make creative decisions about what gets made, and we’re all feeling a little nostalgic for some babes, bikes and Blade Runner.

Another part of the reason may be pure fashion. Black never goes out of style. William Gibson’s seminal novel “Neuromancer” published in 1984 gets a lot of the credit for kicking off the genre, but it’s worth pointing out this was actually two years after both Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga series “Akira” (movie-fied in 1988) and Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner”, which together established a set of aesthetics that have survived the intervening 30 years as a shorthand for effortless dystopic cool.

It’s the aesthetics that have stuck with us more than anything, but I’m not sure those alone explain the longevity of such an (apparently) niche genre. To be sure, the fact that cyberpunk gives artists a fig leaf to cover the fetishization of gratuitously bloody gunplay and large-breasted girls is attractive to some. That doesn’t explain, for example, Altered Carbon’s use of the genre to explore themes of resistance to power and control though, or Blade Runner: 2049’s more mournful contemplation of the definition of self.

There is, I think, an ideological core to cyberpunk which still resonates with us, even 30 years later. The concerns the genre raises have not gone away, and indeed, have become ever more pressing.

What is the cyberpunk manifesto? Let’s have a look.

Tenet 1: Technology will become increasingly ubiquitous and invasive

The first and most important assertion cyberpunk makes about our future (looking forward from the 80s) is that we will become dependent on technology in every aspect of our lives.

Information networks will become connected and regulate everything from finance to consumption to politics.

In parallel, technology will also invade the body, leading to physical enhancement or even the total separation of mental and physical selves, but also a growing alienation and loss of control over ourselves. As your mind and body become increasingly digitized, you will suffer the same vulnerabilities as all digital devices—subject to manipulation and hacking.

Tenet 2: Privatization of everything and societal collapse

Cyberpunk’s corollary to the increasing colonization of every aspect of society by technology is that such technology will make it easier and easier for wealth and power to be accumulated in private hands, while public institutions grow weaker and weaker until they are effectively useless.

The lawless vacuum their collapse creates will be filled with private armies, mercenaries and assassins, drug dealers, sex workers, gangs, especially the yakuza, cyborgs and killer robots.

Tenet 3: It’s up to the lone-wolf antisocial rebel hero to save the day

The governments, the police, the corporations, and pretty much every institution you can name is either powerless or corrupt or more likely some neon-blended combination of the two. As a result, it’s up to individuals to fight back against oppression, exploitation and evil.

Okay, so that didn’t happen

At first glance, it seems easy to dismiss many of the predictions cyberpunk tried to make about the future of society.

Cyberspace, for example, has not become an immersive VR experience, but instead a Matryoshka collection of nesting screens growing paradoxically both smaller and more intrusive.

Governments have not collapsed, as electorates and oligarchs have increasingly turned to “strong men” clamping down harder and harder the more they sense the world is slipping from their grasp.

Japanese corporations, far from continuing to buy up larger and larger swathes of North America, have gone into retreat. Indeed, the 90s yellow-peril specter of Japanese domination (see Michael Crichton’s “Rising Sun” and Tom Clancy’s “Debt of Honor”, ’92 and ’94 respectively) now seems positively quaint.

Yet if you stop for a moment and look past the surface aesthetics and focus instead on what cyberpunk is actually saying, it’s clear many of these issues are very much still with us today.

Has technology invaded our lives? Are we dependent on it?

Ooh you betcha. Uploaded consciousness or total body prosthesis is still the realm of SF, but come on.

We all carry little rectangles of plastic and wiring that connect us 24/7 to a global information network of reaction gifs, porn, unhinged political tweets and inanely niche blogs. Social media is in the process of monetizing every aspect of our private lives. Facial recognition software and surveillance technology mean we are never truly alone. Your phone might be listening to everything you say. Your car is evaluating how well you drive, and telling your insurer. Your TV is talking to your fridge, and they think you’re a loser.

Technology has never been more omni-present in our lives, and despite appearances, I don’t think we’re any more comfortable with it than we were 30 years ago. We’ve just adopted a kind of learned helplessness, accepted that there’s nothing we can do to avoid it.

Have social institutions weakened? Are corporations becoming laws unto themselves?

I mean, come on. High-tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple or Microsoft are effectively ungovernable. Septuagenarian senators haven’t the faintest clue what these companies even do, much less how they might be regulated. Meanwhile health costs skyrocket, education fails to deliver either basic life skills or post-graduate employment, families are divided across Facebook battlezones, and ununionized workforces trapped in the gig economy Uber-drive in their spare time just to get by.

While corporations themselves have not accumulated power into the hands of faceless boards, that role has instead been played by the charismatic hero-CEO, the Jeff Bezos, Zuckerbergs and Musks of the world, the infamous 0.1% against whom even the wealth of the 1% pales into insignificance. Cyberpunk is worried about the way technology creates an inequality of information that in turn accelerates the inequality of wealth, and this is perhaps the defining characteristic of late-stage capitalism.

Lawlessness has absolutely been the result, as people slowly realize the way in which traditional power structures have been co-opted to operate to service the elite. Our cousins in the good ole US of Americuh are one month into nation-wide protests against the perceived failings of their police and judicial system. Just before that, gun-armed protesters were storming state capitals to demand a lifting of restrictions on economic activity. There is an increasing sense that systems don’t work, and it’s up to people to take matters into their own hands.

And I think that’s why we still have cyberpunk. The core unease, the sense that Joe, Jane and Gennefer average has lost control of the technology we use, and by extension of the societies we live in, has not gone away. It’s here, and it’s stronger than ever. And so is cyberpunk.

This Is How You Lose the Time War

Title: This Is How You Lose the Time War

Authors: Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar

Publisher: Saga Press

I’ve pined and pined for a new science fiction and fantasy prose stylist, a writer like William Gibson, Cormac McCarthy, Kurt Vonnegut or Iain Banks, someone whose books are not filled with dry, dead ideas, but instead with words in all their vivid, chaotic glory.

Well, I’ve found two, and what a hollow victory it is.

“This Is How You Lose the Time War” is a slim novelette, a hair under 200 pages in my edition, and that’s even when they’ve done the sophomore thing and fiddled with the margins. It is a celebration of words, the language of love, an epistolary tale told in messages exchanged between “Red” and “Blue,” two agents on opposite sides of the “Time War” of the title.

I love it and hate it.

Love it that here is a novel that cares what words mean and how they sound and feel when lined up next to one another. Much of the modern SF&F genre seems taken up either with sterile “thought experiments” where the only thing that matters is the magic system, or else grimdark adventures that are an exercise in shoehorning as many expletives and disembowelments as possible into the least amount of text.

Instead, there’s a wonderful inventiveness to the scenes and descriptions, a sense of playfulness with words, puns, rhymes and near-rhymes. Whatever else I’ll say about the book, some of these bits are just plain fun to read.

There's also a kind of giddy inventiveness to the ways the two agents come up with to leave each other their secret missives--encoded in the growth-rings of ancient trees or engraved in the long-buried bones of pilgrims, for example. 

Last but not least it avoids the trap other overexcited stylists often fall into—I’m thinking of Yoon Ha Lee mainly, to be honest, though I’ll have to delete this if I ever get an agent—of regurgitating their Book of Obscure Terminology all over the page and calling it art. It is flowery without being baroque, descriptive without being a chore. 

I’m also happy to see that this is one of those rare books the literary awards and I can agree on. It won a BFSA Award and a Nebula Award just recently. No, I won’t link to the page. We’re in a backwater of an eddy of a distributary of that great river of data that is the world wide web, nobody cares about my sources. Just take my word for it.

So, what’s the problem?

Well, having escaped the clunk, it’s gone too far in the other direction, if you take my meaning.

Hate is perhaps too strong a word, but I can’t help but be disappointed how hollow the whole exercise is. The two protagonists spill lyrical rivers of ink describing their surroundings, their mission, their admiration for one another, but it’s not really in the service of anything other than the authorial-patting-self-on-the-back of “Hey, aren’t these words great?”

The two sides in this battle, the technological Agency and the Gaia-esque Garden, are hinted at, but what they’re trying to achieve and how is left rather vague so it’s not clear what the stakes are—indeed, there are none for about the first chunk of the book, until the two agents commit the transgression of falling in love with one another.

Give your audience somebody to root for, experts say, and sorry but I don’t. Red is introduced to us as a mass-murderer. I could care less if these two soulless automata manipulating entire civilizations for their own benefit find love or not. These aren’t relatable people. I wonder if making them both ostensibly women (though it’s clear they can change shape and gender at will) is supposed to make them more sympathetic. Sorry though, a romance between killers isn’t any more palatable just because they are, in some abstract way, lesbians. 

I don't entirely buy the love story at the center of the tale, either. It might be the nature of a romance told in letters, but both characters seem far more in love with themselves and their own cleverness than one another. It takes a certain kind of narcissism to believe that others should be intimately interested in your every thought and feeling, much like dedicated diarists, for example, there has to be some unshakable belief that your experience is uniquely worth sharing. (He said, on a blog, yes I know) 

The format imposes a kind of monotonous repetition as well. Red describes a scene. Discovers that they have been thwarted by Blue—but lo! Blue has left a message. Red reads the message. Next chapter, the roles of writer and reader are reversed. Next chapter, same deal, reversed. Next chapter.

You see? A bit mind-numbing.

And it reinforces the fact that all the beautiful text is mere window-dressing, a lead into the actual heart of the story, the letters being exchanged. None of the places or people being described in these vignettes matter, either to the two main characters or to the narrative, so really, why bother, you won’t miss anything if you skip ahead.

Finally, some of it is just a bit smug and lazy. There’s a crack about Ontario being awful. Really? Screw you, too. This is how you lost an otherwise sympathetic reader.

Much as it pains me to admit, great prose in the service of nothing but its own greatness is not a satisfying read, and in the end the book just comes across as entertaining but a bit self-indulgent, two writers deciding their letters to one another are terribly clever and should be worth $20 for anyone else to read. 

The one about canon

I’m in a spouting nonsense mood, and the target of today’s spout is the concept of canon. Particularly as the term applies to the concept of the fictional ‘facts’ of a fictional universe, as portrayed in various works of fiction.

The facts of fiction. Right. It’s fundamentally an oxymoron.

Canon in its modern meaning didn’t really matter until properties like Star Wars and Star Trek expanded beyond their home bases in movies and TV respectively, into books, comics, video games and tabletop games. The idea was to ensure consistency in plot and world details, even as you had dozens, scores, if not hundreds of different writers working on different stories in different media more or less at the same time.

The hardcore fans of pretty much anything love it. Love it, love it, absolutely love it. Lap that stuff up like it’s liquid ketamine. Can’t get enough of it. Canon makes the whole phenomenon of gatekeeping fictional properties possible. There are few things that warm their hearts more than telling each other they’re wrong about the canon. Few things they cherish more than pointing out errors and inconsistencies in canon, or endlessly fan theorizing about it, constructing great cathedrals of meaning out of throwaway lines published in, like, a children’s picture book.

And they shouldn’t. By god, they shouldn’t. If you really love Star Wars, or Star Trek, or, lawd, I don’t know, My Little Pony, you should absolutely be against the idea of canon. Reboots, remakes, retellings, alternate and parallel universes, mashups, all of the things that destroy canon mean you get more of the property you love. You get more and more varied stories. You get to experience it more, fresh and new again. You should love it when content creators throw canon to the wind.

Yet we don’t, and I’m not sure why. I don’t think there’s anything inevitable about canon. In fact, it’s a little weird that people cared.

There’s no obvious reason why they would—after all, the one modern entertainment medium where multiple writers had long worked on a shared universe was comic books, where characters live, die, appear to die but don’t, are reborn, reincarnated, rescued from alternate dimensions or future timelines as a matter of course. Spider-Man has been through more incarnations than a Hindu with a death wish, there have been more Batmans in history than there have been presidents of the United States of America and the X-Men’s Jean Grey has been killed and resurrected at least twice a decade since the 70’s.

Looking back at history, there too we find the concept of fictional canon is notable mainly for its total nonexistence. Disney’s efforts to the contrary, there is no one single, canonical version of any of the fairy tales, nor of Achilles, nor King Arthur. There’s evidently nothing inherent in fiction that requires or demands that there be a canon.

Plenty of modern properties also ignore the whole concept altogether—there’s no Mad Max canon, although some have tried to write one, Doctor Who’s time-traveling shenanigans make mincemeat of the very concept at anything but the most basic level, Dungeons and Dragons novels largely get around the concept by having enough alternate worlds to give Schrodinger’s cat an anxiety attack.

While there are sound storytelling, narrative objectives in ensuring consistency among your various story lines, it’s not hard to see there are less pure motives at work, too.

There are obvious commercial reasons for the property holders’ love of promoting the idea canon. Together with copyright, it is one more lever that ensures they maintain control of, and can profit from, the shared universe. Property holders alone get to determine what counts and what doesn’t, giving their own products a seal of legitimacy and banishing all others to the despised realm of fan fiction.

Gatekeeping is another obvious motive. Collecting, memorizing and categorizing facts makes a lot of people comfortable, gives them a sense of order and control that is otherwise often missing from our lives. Knowledge of canon can be used to browbeat other fans and make yourself feel smarter, more important in whatever fan community you’re a part of. So it’s rooted in insecurity and fear, too.

The good news is, I think the idea of canon is going to wither away slowly but surely. The most popular franchises at the moment, Marvel and Star Wars and Star Trek, are all reaching the limits of what they can do within a single, supposedly internally consistent continuity. Star Trek has already rebooted both its movies and streaming properties (calling it a TV show sounds anachronistic now, doesn’t it?) New Star Wars properties sound like they’ll be set in different time periods, precisely to get away from problems with canon. The original actors in Marvel movies are reaching the ends of their contracts.

You see long-term, canon is simply unsustainable. I’m a fan of the BattleTech games that have been around since the 80s, and my God, the canon is a useless mess. It just accretes, gathers more and more mass, weighing down everything about the property until you can’t write anything new about anything in this universe. It calcifies everything, ossifies it, fossilizes it. Nothing new can be done, nothing can grow. It kills the property.

As we move more and more into more oral styles of storytelling, I think this will accelerate the trend. We’ll want the same stories retold over and over, which will kill the whole purpose of canon.

It’s time for canon to end.

This post is full of spoilers!

On an online discussion forum, someone recently asked about Joe Abercrombie’s “Last Wish” series (I reviewed the first two books here and here), to which I replied they were an inversion of common fantasy tropes. Right? Right. Pretty basic stuff.

 

Oh, but no. That’s a spoiler, you see.

 

Not five minutes later I had two users passive-aggressively bitching at me for spoiling the series. Yes, I know, boo-hoo, woe is me. I’ll live, I’ll survive. But for fuck’s sake, can we knock this shit off?

 

(The girl in The Crying Game is transgender.)

 

The spoiler crusade probably grew out of a sympathetic impulse—to prevent online assholes (“trolls,” sorry) from deliberately trying to ruin books and movies for other people—and like all our good impulses it was immediately taken up and wielded by the worst sort of literal-minded, unimaginative, killjoy people on the planet to stifle virtually any media discussion that doesn’t cater to their fragile paleo-diet sensitivities. Spoiler warnings are the emotional support dogs of Internet Karens constantly screaming for forum managers. They are the “Do Not Iron While Wearing Shirt” product warning labels of people too stupid to take care of themselves.

 

(Kylo Ren kills Han Solo.)

 

If you haven’t guessed, I’m not too keen on spoiler warnings.

 

(Kevin Spacey is Keyser Soze.)

 

Partly, I think the structure of a lot of modern media is to blame, and partly it’s part of an online outrage culture that rewards vigilantism over actual discussion and thought.

 

(Bruce Willis was dead the whole time.)

 

Now there are some stories in which the big reveal at the ending is the point. The mystery genre is an obvious example—the whole story revolves around unraveling whodunit. Revealing the end in that case would, of course, lessen your enjoyment of the story. No question there.

 

(Jesus comes back from the dead.)

 

The problem is, with the popularity of shows like “Lost” and “Battlestar Galactica,” the rise of the “mystery box” and “subverting expectations” approaches to storytelling have exported these techniques to genres where the whodunit isn’t, or rather shouldn’t be the point at all. In the bid to ensure every property is must-see “appointment television” that you have to watch as soon as it is released or miss out on the zeitgeist forever, more and more entertainment is being drained of repeat value, turned into a pump-and-dump one night stand that’s forgotten the next morning.

 

(Oedipus kills his dad and marries his mom.)

 

Take the Star Wars franchise: “The Force Awakens” is a prime example of mystery box storytelling, but for fucks' sake why? Star Wars is space opera, not Agatha Christie. Sure, the movies have always had surprises … just, that was never the point of the movies. The twist that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father is a surprise, but your enjoyment of the franchise doesn’t hinge on not knowing this fact. Hell, the entire prequel trilogy depends on you knowing this fact, otherwise its relationship to the original three movies would be utterly baffling.

 

(Oldboy is her dad.)

 

Another example would be Game of Thrones, which did a lot to popularize the use of shocking twists: Ned's execution or the murder of the Starks at the Red Wedding are also surprising, but let me tell you I and thousands of other book readers knew exactly what was coming and loved every minute of it.

 

(Beowulf kills Grendel.)

 

Those aren’t spoilers, you see, they’re just plot points. Those are things that happen in the course of the story, not the central point of the story itself. If you call those spoilers, then literally every fact about the book or movie, the names of the characters, the genre, the gist of the plot, they’re all spoilers. Every trailer, poster, announcement or review is a spoiler. "I liked it," is a spoiler. If you want to wander in into a movie theater and plump your whining arse down completely unspoiled, you’d have to be blindfolded and led inside without even knowing the title.

 

(Soylent green is people.)

 

Even overlooking that point, any narrative that is only enjoyable once and never again because now you know the details is shit. Worthless. Insulting, condescending entertainment that has nothing of value to offer and nothing to say other than “Fooled you!” It’s an admission that there is nothing but plot—no characters, no setting, no mood, no drama, no tension. Just plot. And that’s a shallow, shallow way to approach entertainment.

 

(Tyler Durden doesn’t exist.)

 

For an example of the opposite approach, let’s look at Chris Nolan’s movie, “Memento.” There’s a fairly complicated plot. Like almost all Nolan movies, it screws around with time, this time by putting you into the amnesiac main character’s head by having events play out in reverse chronological order, so you don’t know what’s happening, either. At the end, turns out the amnesiac is responsible for his own wife’s death and keeps cynically hunting for people to get revenge on as a way of giving himself a reason to live. Now you can go back and watch the movie, and see how that all gets set up. THERE IS MORE THAN JUST PLOT. You can still enjoy every single moment of it. Because the point is the nature and malleability of memory, not whether or not this loony bastard has killed anyone or not.

 

Journey, not the destination, people.

 

(Macbeth did it.)

 

The other aspect of this narrative nannying is that it plays into social media’s tendency to reward grandstanding and style over substance. People are upvoted for reposting a funny picture, not for making one. They are praised for making posts like “Can we all appreciate X…” rather than, you know, everyone actually appreciating the person directly. Spoiler-whinging is part of this, too. The finger-wagging for mentioning spoilers means, of course, that the finger-wagger has already consumed the media in question and is thus being outraged on some theoretical other’s behalf.

 

(Achilles dies at the end.)

 

It’s white-knighting, only for the supposed lambs wandering innocently into movie or book discussions blissfully unaware that a movie or book discussion might contain details of the movie or book in question. They aren’t actually defending or protecting anyone, they’re just performatively demonstrating how pure and noble they are, in return for watching a small digit on their screen display a slightly larger number.

Listen: I saw an online book discussion in which the plot of the Iliad was deemed a spoiler. The Iliad. A three thousand year old poem. A tale in the oral tradition whose impact relies on the audience being familiar with the plot.

Listen: People want to spoiler tag the plot of Dune. A 60 year-old novel that has already been adapted to the screen twice, and (as of this writing) is scheduled for a third trip to the silver screen. 

 

(This isn’t a spoiler. Aha, made you look.)

 

Arguing or attempting to publicly shame someone online is designed to draw more attention to the point in question, to get more people to see the spoiler, not less (Otherwise, how else will everyone see how brave the spoiler defender is being).

 

In this sense, it’s part of the same trend towards worshipping lore over story, the desire for exclusive control over how media is consumed and enjoyed. Just as lord nerds insist that fictional facts fit their stores of hoarded trivia, so spoiler queens insist that experiences with fiction fit their ideals. Everyone must watch or read in the spoiler purist’s approved way—no others are allowed.

 

(This post ends after the next paragraph.)

 

So what perhaps once began as a genuine attempt to improve everyone’s online experience has now been cynically twisted into a self-serving attempt to show what a great guy you are. It isn’t for anyone’s benefit but the complainer. It’s petty, it’s childish, and it’s time for this shit to stop.

Canadian Fantasy Two-fer: Guy Gavriel Kay

Titles:   Children of the Earth and Sky

              A Brightness Long Ago

Author: Guy Gavriel Kay

Publisher: Berkley

 

I’m reviewing two books at once here, a feat made possible by Kay’s transformation of himself into a kind of brand, much like Stephen King, Dan Brown or John Grisham, a reliable if predictable producer of a very specific type of fantasy fiction. Although the details differ, the two books—and indeed pretty much anything published by Kay after about 1998—are more or less interchangeable.

 

The world in both books is a mildly fantastical version of our own, with events, places and people existing in more or less a 1:1 correspondence with things in the real world: Byzantium becomes “Sarantium” and Rome, “Rhodias,” Christians, Jews and Muslims become “Jaddites,” “Kindath” and “Asharites,” Sarantium falls to the Asharites just as Byzantium did to the Ottomans, and so on.

 

The protagonist (as always) is a male artist, a painter in “Children of the Earth and Sky” (2016), a bookseller in “A Brightness Long Ago” (2019). He exists at the periphery of and observes the lives of the great—the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in “Children…” and Italian mercenary captains Frederico and Sigismondo in “A Brightness…” In this, the main character is aided by spirited and independent women, often doctors or healers, and returns home, burdened with wisdom and bittersweet experience.

 

Everybody emotes with apocalyptic intensity. Kay is not an author to use one emotion when three would be more dramatic. They are perhaps best thought of not as novels, but the modern prose equivalent of Shakespearean plays, with characters striding about the stage, loudly declaiming their motivations and desires to the audience. They love! They hate! They beat their breasts and weep!

 

American author Elmore Leonard famously advised that “If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.” Kay’s works exist as a shining beacon for all of those who curse such advice as the basest, vile calumny. I keep half-expecting Kay to start referring to me as “gentle reader…” Every sentence here practically deafens you with the writing-ness of its writing.

 

The theme in both books is the one Kay started expressing in “The Last Light of the Sun” (2004), the idea that there is nothing predictable or inevitable about the course of history or people’s lives, and that both events and lives are changed by split-second decisions taken in moments of rage, panic, fear or ecstasy.

 

There is, at least, a unity between the prose and the theme then. Both are infused with melodrama and a kind of mournful, weeping acceptance that the world is a cold, cruel, capricious place whose grey is brokenly only intermittently by beauty or art.

 

After about half a dozen novels like this though, all the emoting feels more polished than passionate, like a veteran musician playing a well-known piece, technically proficient yes, comforting in its familiarity perhaps, but not especially innovative or surprising.

 

To an extent, I suppose this is just the realities and necessities of the publishing market. With so much choice out there, an author needs to carve out a recognizable space for themselves in order to win recognition and repeat readers.

 

Pretty much everyone does it. I recently downloaded a sample of Joe Abercrombie’s latest, “A Little Hatred,” and it’s exactly the same kind of thing as he was writing in “The Blade Itself,” in 2006 (If I had to sum up his style in a single sentence, it’s be something like: ‘“Fuck, I’ve shat myself,” swore the princess.’) You always knew what you were getting in an Iain M. Banks Culture book or Terry Pratchett Discworld novel.

 

Still, while a recognizable style is standard for any author, I do think that Kay has carried this even further, going as far as to make his characters and their arcs and themes more or less identical each time. I miss the inventive Kay of books like the “Fionavar Tapestry” (1984-86), “Tigana” (1990) or “A Song for Arbonne” (1992).

 

And yet as a marketing strategy it’s undeniable effective. I scroll through my Amazon dot com recommendations these days and I’ve no idea who most of these authors are, what their books are like and whether or not they’re any good (Amazon further muddies the waters by inserting its “promoted” books into searches, but that’s a gripe for another time). So I end up retreating to the familiar, to Kay, Abercrombie, William Gibson and a couple of others who may not surprise and delight, but who are at least guaranteed to deliver what I expect.

 

I’ve you’ve read one Kay book then, you know what to expect from these two. It’s more of the same, emotionally overwrought, purple of prose, well-crafted but eminently predictable. But you know, sometimes that’s not a bad thing.

Agency

Title: Agency

Author: William Gibson

Publisher: Berkley Books

I find it hard, in this the year of our Lord two thousand twenty, to take seriously any novel in which President Hillary Rodham Clinton is painted as a hero who will avert nuclear catastrophe.

No, I didn’t like this much, which is a shame, for although I find the plots of most recent Gibson novels a bit limp, he’s always been an interesting writer at the level of word choice, sentence structure, paragraph and chapter. A master stylist, if not a masterful storyteller. But his latest effort I found just a bit drab, filed with recycled plot elements from his better books and without any of his linguistic flair, where characters do very little but go around in circles while the plot resolves itself for them. For a book titled “Agency,” pretty much nobody exerts any, which might be the point I suppose, but makes for a dull read.

“Agency” revisits the world of 2014’s “The Peripheral,” in which people in the 22^nd century have discovered they can digitally contact people in the past, but only in alternate or parallel realities (since such contact didn’t occur in their own past). A group of such future-humans then begin to manipulate the course of these realities, some for shits and giggles, others to try to make them “better” by avoiding the disasters the “main” timeline endured.

While alternate reality in “The Peripheral” was a late-stage capitalist version of the USA, in which the only jobs are fighting in America’s imperialist wars or selling drugs, “Agency” is set in an alternate 2017 in which Hillary Clinton won the Presidential election and the UK voted to remain in the EU.

A woman in alternate 2017 named Verity is supposedly an “app-whisperer”, which is the kind of unspecific but cool-sounding technological super-ability we saw in “Pattern Recognition” yet which is never mentioned after the first chapter making you wonder why Gibson bothered, but anyway, this Verity is hired by a tech start-up to field test a responsive virtual agent (hence Agency, geddit), which turns out to be a stolen full-blown military intelligence AI.

What follows is pretty much just the emergent AI creating the circumstances for its own birth (giving her “agency”, geddit) plot that we saw in “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” only told with much less verve or invention.

Verity and a small cast of characters (including many from a people-following Agency, geddit) spend the entire novel driving around in circles in LA and San Francisco at the direction of the AI while being menaced rather unconvincingly by shadowy operatives whose objectives aren’t especially clear, other than to menace the main characters from time to time. As in, I’m not really sure why these people keep trying to kidnap a woman just for talking to a stolen AI—it’s not like she physically carries it around or anything. 

Anyway, in the end the AI is okay, no thanks to any of these people.

Meanwhile, the threat of nuclear annihilation looms in the background as Russia and the US come to blows over the Middle East. This plot line, as mentioned above, is also resolved without anyone doing anything, thanks to President Clinton.

Yet a third strand involves the future humans in the 22^nd century, who apparently (and off-camera) instigated the plot by getting the start-up to hire Verity. In their own time, they are threatened by a Russian oligarch pissed that their meddling in past realities tends to be aimed at creating conditions where Russian oligarchs have less power. This plot line is resolved by someone going to an all-day breakfast restaurant three times for 10-minute conversations.

As I think I wrote in my review of “Zero History,” I like Gibson less the more he writes about the present-day. Back then, it was the brand name-dropping that irritated. Now, it’s the overt focus on modern US politics, especially his support for Clinton and evident disdain for Trump (though he is never mentioned by name). To be transparent, like most non-Americans I find Trump to be a patently corrupt, vain, narcissistic, sub-moronic windbag whose presidency effectively annihilates any claim Americans might ever make to moral superiority about pretty much anything. So I agree with Gibson’s assessment, just putting it into the story so baldly seems crude. As I wrote in yesterday’s braindead thinkpiece on here, it feels like part of a trend towards incredibly literal moralizing and messaging in SF. Nothing is allowed to be metaphor and interpretation, there’s only text, no subtext.

What are we to make of the characters’ odd passivity and inability to influence the plot? If this is by design, it comes across as fatalistic, suggesting there’s nothing people can do to avert nuclear war or climate catastrophe other than pray a Strong Leader like, hum, er, Clinton, or else some benevolent AI will rescue us. Which might well be true, but doesn’t really fit the triumphant and uplifting tone of the end of the novel, where the AI reveals itself to the world (yes, spoilers, go fuck yourself). That sounds like a recipe for apathy rather than activism to me.

The other sour note I found was Verity’s ex-boyfriend, a mega-rich tech maverick named Stets, whose enormous wealth is essential in arranging all the complex gadgetry required to help Verity stay one step ahead of the bad guys. This man is unfailing portrayed in a positive light, charming, intelligent, perceptive, flaunting the law to help his friends, all for the greater good!

Contrast this to the Russian oligarch subplot, in which those nasty rich Russkies try to trip up our heroes just so they can stay rich and, er, Russian. Now, to me it feels like pure American exceptionalism to suggest there’s anything different between Stets and the Russian oligarch. One happens to be using his inordinate wealth and influence to help the protagonist, the other to hinder, but in each case we’re talking about a class of people whose wealth has effectively rendered them above the law.

As with the emergent AI line, it feels like I’m being asked to celebrate something that strikes me as deeply, deeply disturbing. The only people capable of exercising agency in this world of ours are the mega-rich or artificial intelligences. Luckily ours are nice and not nasty at all. Hooray, I guess?

It’s a bit like “Waiting for Godot” if Godot showed up in Act II, announced he was actually an immortal all-seeing God, but a nice one, and all the characters went hope happy. 

“Agency” has a strangely positive ending for a book apparently about our powerlessness in the face of technological and socioeconomic change. All of that, I think, encapsulated by the bit at the end where the characters celebrate World War III being averted by that benevolent God, Hillary Clinton.