wisb-Guardian-Express

I'm teaching a course called "Dystopia and American Anxiety" this spring.  The idea came to me while brainstorming with friends on Facebook.  Because dystopia is a genre the frequently plays upon our fears and anxieties, it seemed fitting to put together a course specific to the American side of the skill.  The following is the reading list for the course:


Novels
The Iron Heel by Jack London
The Gold Coast by Kim Stanley Robinson
Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison
The Female Man by Joanna Russ
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

Short Stories
"A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation" by Oliver Bolokitten
"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson
"The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster
"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin
"The Calorie Man" by Paolo Bacigalupi
"I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison
"Bloodchild" by Octavia Butler

Non-Fiction (critical texts, newspaper articles, and excerpts from various books)
"Theses on Dystopia 2001" by Darko Suvin
"Evidence against the views of the abolitionists:  consisting of physical and moral proofs, of the natural inferiority of the Negroes" by Richard H. Colfax
"Introduction:  Dystopia and Histories" from Dark Horizons by Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan
"New Maps of Hell" from Scraps of the the Untainted Sky by Tom Moylan
"The Dystopian Turn" from Scraps of the Untainted Sky by Tom Moylan
"Overpopulation Threatens World" by Ralph Segman
"Overpopulation Called Deadlier Killer Than A-Bomb" by Unknown
"Monsanto's Harvest of Fear" by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele
"Farewell Address" by President Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Interview w/ Noam Chomsky" by David Barsamian
"Profits of War:  The Fruits of the Permanent Military-Industrial Complex" by William Hartung
"The Delicate Balance of Terror" by Albert Wohlstetter
"Soviets to Renew Testing A-Weapons; Kennedy Sees Nuclear Holocaust" by Chalmers M. Roberts
"Smart Machines, and Why We Fear Them" by Astro Teller
Gender Trouble by Judith Butler

Thanks to everyone who helped with suggestions!

The 2013 WISB Awards are fast approaching, but I want to know what your favorite reads, views, and so on were this year.

So this post is for you, dear readers.  Let me know what you loved reading, watching, listening to, and so on and so forth.  Go on, leave a comment!

But why fantasy?

Is it enough to say that people the world over (including myself) have been fascinated with elves and dragons since Tolkien published his master-work and so we can simply continue in his footsteps? Haven’t many authors have done exactly that?

Surely, fantasy is an easy field to write – and do well in?

After all, the scientific understanding for writing, say, hard sci-fi is not necessary. And, because fantasy isn’t exactly high-brow, knowledge of fancy literary theories isn’t necessary, either – in fact it may even be a hindrance.

I’d argue that fantasy is hard to do decently precisely because of the reasons above.

So many people have done it to death, that the reader is jaded by the recycled materials. There is no powerful central scientific concept to bedazzle the reader, nor is there the fig-leaf of fancy
techniques to cover up the fact that a book sucks. An entire house of leaves might not be enough, in fact*.

There is only story, and the writer’s skill in creating a believable world wherein the reader can suspend disbelief in a fantastic reality. My aim when writing is precisely that: to weave a world around the reader, starting with the mundane, and slowly stirring in the spice of magic.

I’m a fan of the (slightly) slow start. Tolkien did it with the hobbits of Hobbiton, and Donaldson did it with the gritty reality that Thomas Covenant faced as a leper … before pulling out the big guns in the form of the Ringwraiths and Lord Foul, amongst others. It is all about the suspension of disbelief and achieving it before moving on with the story.

The story should have wonder built into it. It’s the writer’s responsibility to reveal enough of the plot to the reader so that she doesn’t feel lost, so that she feels that there is a sense of where the story is going … but not so much that the reader closes the book in disgust because it is so predictable. There needs to be, especially in fantasy writing, a sense of mystery, of something otherworldly just beneath the fabric of the mundane - if only we know the right mystical words to speak, or symbols to draw.

Oddly enough, many of the best writers of horror get this right. A particularly powerful scene that still stays with me was from Stephen King’s The Shining. One of his characters was busy clipping a hedge, and the hedge animals come to life, stalking him. King crafts the scene wonderfully, animating the creatures in tiny stages, drawing the reader along from where the character thinks the altered hedge-animal is a trick of his mind to where the hedge – lion actually sticks its paw out of its tended patch and the reader experiences a little climax of horror together with the character.
In my opinion, the worst sort of fantasy is the sort that pulls a new over-powered hero or villain out of a hat every chapter, and each absurd twist in the plot features the writer wracking her brain for some way to top the previously unbeatable new character. What is the point of that? The reader can practically see the gears moving behind the crudely cut-out stage props as they lurch across the page in the guise of characters that we are supposed to care about. Now, I don’t mind a good zombie story, but I prefer my characters a little more rounded.

In The Man from the Tower, there is really only one (two at the outside) character that is ‘overpowered’ – and this is only in the context of the book, since there are other fantasy universes that he’d be a wimp in – and that’s the primary antagonist.

Part of the fun of writing it was to take a pretty ordinary hero, stick him in way over his head, and watch as he tries to flounder in deep waters without a deus ex machina courtesy of the author, to save him.

If you’d like to see whether I managed to get it right or not, post a comment on this blog. I’d like to give a copy of The Man from the Tower in .pdf form to the first five posters that have something to say.

Thanks for reading.

* Although, writers like Atwood have shown themselves adept at both utilizing literary techniques AND weaving a good story. I do not pretend to belong to that stratosphere.

When I presumed to make Yeshua bar Yosef (Christ) a character in my recently released time-travel novel TimeWarp, Inc., I had to make numerous decisions regarding how to portray him.

The physical part wasn't as difficult as one might imagine.  Though the New Testament leaves us with no physical description of the man, Isaiah 53:2 described the coming Messiah as rather ordinary looking.  No Max von Sydows or Jeffrey Hunters here.  I set aside the classical image of a blond-haired, blue-eyed European-looking gent for a swarthier dark-brown or black-haired fellow more in keeping with the Jews who inhabited Lower Galilee at the time.  Short-cropped hair and beards were the style among Jewish men then, so goodby to the luxuriant locks seen in so many paintings and movies.  One more fact: most skulls unearthed from the first-century holy land were rounder than the traditional long-faced image.  Decidedly so.

I also made my character well-formed.  Physically powerful, even.  This was not the namby-
pamby weakling depicted in Renaissance art.  Jesus was in the building trade.  That's hard work, especially back then.  Mathew 13:55 describes Jesus as the son of a tekton, while the Gospel Mark 6:3 calls Christ himself a tekton, the classical Greek term meaning, among other things, a builder or artisan.  That's a skilled jack-of-all-trades, rather than the translated "carpenter" we're accustomed to reading and hearing about.  In short, a tekton worked with wood, stone, even metals.  And, since the Romanized capital of Galilee, Sepphoris, lay only a few miles from Jesus' village of Nazareth, he and his father Joseph must have traveled there for the kind of gainful employment a village of four hundred people could not provide.  Greco-Roman cities were constructed largely of stone--black basalt from Capernaum in this case.  By necessity, Jeshua bar Yosef undoubtedly possessed masonry skills.  Strength too.  Ever try to lift a stone block?

Maybe I should say something about TimeWarp, Inc.  It is basically the story of an agnostic ex-soldier from the 21st century who travels back in time, where he meets and becomes Christ's best friend during the latter part of the "lost years" between Jesus' birth and ministry.  The Jeshua bar Yosef the reader meets is a year or so from going out into the world to proselytize.  He is a young man, not yet thirty.  Reading between the lines of the Gospels, it's easy to picture a Jesus who not only had his share of friends but also possessed a keen mind and sense of humor...which is exactly how I portrayed him.

What else do we know about Christ?  Here again, we must look between the scriptural lines.  We've read about his knowledge of the Torah in Luke, but what else can we be sure of?  (One) He spoke both Aramaic and Hebrew, as was common among Jews in Roman-occupied Palestine.  (Two) He probably also spoke Latin and possibly Greek.  Plying his trade in Sepphoris, Jesus would almost certainly have had to converse in the Roman tongue, and don't forget Greek was the trade language of the region, plus Alexander the Great conquered the area about 200 years before Jesus was born.  Also, most educated Romans were bilingual, speaking Greek fluently.  Moreover the Gospels were originally written in Greek.  (3) Christ had a keen understanding of human nature.  If the Gospels tell us anything, they tell us that.  (4) Jesus was almost Lincolnesque in his ability to tell stories or, in this case, parables: simple, easy-to-remember, image-filled allegories.  But, unlike our 16th President's tales, which were usually communicated for the sake of humor, Jesus' stories were meant to convey a subtle message central to the man's teachings.  If you want a good laugh, check out the practice parable the pre-ministry Jesus comes up with in Chapter Fifty-One.

That leaves one glaring question about my character.  Was he divine?  That is left pretty much up to the reader.  TimeWarp, Inc. is not a biblical supplement.  It is a story, a novel about time travel, after all.  Jesus, though painstakingly researched, is one of many characters, some from the 21st century, others from the time of Herod Antipas.  I will say, however, that the question of Jesus' divinity is a running argument among the time travelers--particularly my agnostic hero and his Christian girlfriend--throughout the book.

About the Book
When historian Gwen Hoffman first meets time traveler Mike Garvin, an ex-Special Forces weapons sergeant back from ancient Gaul where he was embedded as a centurion in Julius Caesar's elite 10th Legion, she is more than a little put off. Scarred and dangerous-looking, the man appears more thug than time traveler. Yet he is the person TimeWarp, Inc. is sending back in time to protect Jeshua bar Yosef (Christ) from twenty-first century assassins; the man Gwen was assigned to prepare for life in first-century Galilee. Gwen, of course, has no idea she and Garvin will become lovers. Nor does she realize she herself will end up in Roman Palestine, where she will not only meet Jesus but face danger alongside Mike in the adventure of a lifetime...

You can find out more about the author and the book here.

There are a lot of things I don't remember about finding out I had cancer in 2002.  But I do remember the day I began treatments:  today.  That's right.  Two days before Christmas, I had my first round of ABVD (adriamycin, bleomycin, vinblastine, and dacarbazine -- a.k.a. four ways to poison yourself in order to get healthy).  One of these drugs (vinblastine), as it turns out, is a kind of orange-red, which runs through your system and turns your pee, well, orange.  The doctors like to tell you this beforehand, because usually orange or red pee means something has gone seriously wrong with your innards.  Ironically, peeing orange after a treatment of vinblastine still means something is going on in your innards, but in a kind of good way (good bad?  Grey.  We'll go with that).  This was one of the few things I laughed about when I went through the chemo process.  After all, it is kind of hilarious, no?

In any case, I had my first treatment on Dec. 23rd, 2002 and spent Christmas feeling somewhat like garbage.  I'm fortunate in that most of the immediate side effects attributed to ABVD were fairly mild.  There was no intense vomiting (though I'd get a little nauseous at times).  I did feel like I'd gone to a party the night before, drank enough alcohol to kill a horse, and then woke up the following morning feeling pretty much as you'd expect:  extremely exhausted with a side of craptacular.

Beyond that, I don't remember much.  I remember that the nurse who worked at the oncologist's office was an incredibly nice lady with a lovely attitude and that my mom sat with me through most of the treatment (I owe a lot to my mom, if I'm being honest -- she took the brunt of all the financial stress, scheduling, and so on while I tried to combat my disease; she's a hero in my book and a testament to how important it is to have family (however you define it) during times like this).  And I remember feeling like crap while the drugs were funneling into my veins.  You literally feel them eating away at you, like those overnight effects of a nasty cold where you just know that you're going to wake up feeling awful.  The only good thing about chemo, I guess, is that they give you good pain killers and a lot of excuses to sleep and sleep and sleep.  I slept a lot... Oh, and you can pretty much eat whatever you want, so long as you get the necessary nutrients.  Why?  Because chemo ruins your appetite and tends to eat away at your body mass.  Anything to keep your weight from crashing and your body from completely eating itself alive is generally OK.  I made a lot of fruit smoothies...

So there you have it.  I'll blog about how I was diagnosed in the future.  But since today is kind of a milestone -- ten years, baby -- I thought I'd blog about it.  Plus, I recently had my ten year "checkup," in which my oncologist in Florida basically said "well, it ain't back, so you're good to go."  I like such appointments!

There's much more to tell, for sure.  I'll do my best to collect my memories.

P.S.:  Earlier this year, I was inspired by Jay Lake to blog about my experiences with cancer.  Jay has shared many of his experiences on his blog and was kind enough to talk about how terminal cancer affects him as a writer on my podcast.  He's an extraordinary human being.  I recommend you check out his books.

Would you clone yourself if you have the opportunity to do so?  I sometimes think it would be strange to clone myself (the scifi kind of cloning, where clones are literal, full-grown copies).  What kind of strange conversations would we have?  Would we each develop differently over time so that the only resemblance between us was physical?

Science fiction writers have asked these questions for decades.  Why?  I don't know.  Maybe we're secretly narcissists?  Or maybe there's just something fascinating about the idea that humanity is duplicable.  After all, if science fiction is, as many suggest, a genre deeply concerned with the human condition, then cloning is merely a "new" avenue through which we can interrogate what it is
that makes us human.  Cloning rests alongside intelligent robots, aliens, androids, and all manner of intelligent non-humans to remind us that whatever it is that makes us human and unique is hard to pinpoint.  If our minds and bodies can be duplicated, then what makes you "you" and me "me"?

This is why I find narratives about cloning, androids, aliens, and so on compelling.  Dawn by Octavia Butler, for example, considers whether humanity still exists when its genetics have been tampered with by an alien race (even for its own good).  Butler's narrative is rife with deep questions about human existence:  Is there something inherently wrong with humanity on a genetic level?  Do we cease to be human if we fix those genetic errors and mix ourselves with other species?  Does humanity deserve to exist if its genetics lead it toward self-destruction?
Or there are books like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, Marseguro by Edward  Willett, or Tobias Buckell's Xenowealth Saga.  Each interrogates the human condition in unique and vibrant ways, from questioning our compulsion towards enslavement and extermination (Dick) to the place of genetic modification in the human spectrum (Willett) to the integration of humans with machines and computers (Buckell).  Science fiction loves these sorts of questions.  It thrives on them, more so now than ever before -- because we're already asking ourselves these questions in real life.  If you clone a person or modify their genetics, are they still human?  Why or why not?  When we create artificial lifeforms with free will, do we have to rethink our legal framework?  If so, how do we change it?  If we're not already asking ourselves these questions today, we will have to sooner or later.  Humanity will have to change as we "play God."

And so I have to ask myself what I'd think if I met a clone of myself.  Would I react with violence, as so many humans in SF narratives have done, or would I react with philosophical confusion and curiosity?  I don't know.  What about you?

Fact One:  Apparently button-up shirts, nice ties, nice sweaters, and nice slacks are my new thing.  They're so much "my new thing" that I'm wearing them even though I have no intention of leaving the house (I'm currently sitting at a table on a houseboat that overlooks the Columbia).

Hello!  I'm a houseboat on the Columbia.  You'll have to excuse me for not having anything green growing.  It's winter, which typically means that nature decides to hibernate...unless you live in Florida, where nature is constantly trying to kill you...

There's still time to get to the shops and buy that special gift for your estranged husband or twice-removed cousin.  Okay, let's face it.  You're not buying gifts for them.  If you've popped onto this page, it's for one of three reasons:

1. You read this blog.
2. You told me to write on this topic.
3. You've got a weird scifi and fantasy geek child or friend and you have no idea what to get them.

The news that Game of Thrones is "in production" is nothing new.  That doesn't mean this little video from HBO isn't exciting!

Enjoy!

Now the most important question of the day:
How much are you looking forward to Season Three?

Guess what?  My coalpunk short story, "In the Shadows of the Empire of Coal," was recently published in Issue 1.11 of Bruce Bethke's Stupefying Stories!  I'm super excited about it (duh) and how you'll all snatch up a copy ($1.99 on Kindle or Nook -- iTunes links pending still).

If you really love me, you'll buy a copy and write a review.

Excuse me while I go squee in the corner!

I just donated, and you should too.  Need I say more?

Fine.  I will.

Triumph Over Tragedy is an SF/F anthology containing short stories from Elizabeth Bear, Robert Silverberg, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Tobias Buckell, Alex Bledsoe, Timothy Zahn, Philip Athans, and about two-dozen other folks.  In other words, there is a lot of freaking stuff in this book from a lot of freaking great folks.

The best part is that all the proceeds go to the Red Cross to help victims of Sandy.  R. T. Kaelin (the editor) is trying to raise $10,000.  They're at $1,234, with 27 days to go (that number will probably change by tomorrow).

So go donate.  December is the month of giving.  Some folks need $50 more than I do.

No long introductions necessary.  The following are all of Pixar's feature films in order from favorite to least favorite.  I've grouped the films into degrees of "great" for a specific reason:  almost all of Pixar's films are good by any measure.

Note:  I have left Brave off the list because I have no seen it yet.  I cannot possibly judge a film I have not seen, now can I?  I'll edit this list in the future.

Here goes:















And that's that.  Please don't shoot me...

I've been re-watching X-Files lately and it dawned on me how strange the world looked back then. For example, in one of the 1st season episodes ("E.B.E."), Scully walks right into an airport terminal and purchases two tickets (one with her credit card and one with cash). The desk lady says to her "You can catch your plane right over there," pointing to the actual gate at which Scully would board her plane.

Think about that for a moment. When was the last time you could do that in an airport? Granted, some of you are older than I am, so you have better memories of the pre-9/11 world. I, however, didn't do a lot of flying pre-2001 because I was a) not quite an adult yet, and b) not financially well off (by that I mean my mother didn't have a lot of money, as we spent part of my youth on welfare
and the rest as lower middle class). So while I have some memories of flying pre-2001, more of my flight memories take place after.

For me, then, seeing someone waltz into an airport, do something fishy, and then get pointed to their gate without having to go through a giant x-ray machine or without TSA agents staring them down is a little bizarre. That world doesn't exist anymore (and in a somewhat ironic way, it's the exact world Mulder and Scully were fighting against...only their "terrorists" were aliens and their agents, not human beings with a political/religious agenda of destruction). I'm not even sure that world can _ever_ exist again. How could it? The world Mulder and Scully fought in died on 9/11 (one of my professors actually sees the end of the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11 as two rupture points in U.S. history, framing, I would argue, a long-not-quite-decade of utopian thinking).

Has anyone else had this experience? You're watching some show from the 90s or whenever and realized that things are different. Not because the cars are from a different era or they have strange hair or use different slang, and so on and so forth, but because the ideological landscape is almost alien.

I wonder what the world of film will look like in 20 years...

My "The Dystopian Tradition and American Anxiety" syllabus is finalized and submitted to the English department for approval.  Good news, no?  In the meantime, I'd like to share the reading list for this course, just so everyone can see what I've assigned for these poor little undergrads to read.  There are still a few gaps, which I will mention at the end.  If you have any suggestions for historically relevant essays and the like to fill those gaps, please let me know in the comments.

Here it is:

Novels
The Gold Coast by Kim Stanley Robinson
Make Room, Make Room! by Harry Harrison
The Iron Heel by Jack London
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
The Female Man by Joanna Russ

Short Stories
"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin
"The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster
"The Calorie Man" by Paolo Bacigalupi
"Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut (with a screening of 2081)
"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson
"Bloodchild" by Octavia Butler
"I have No Mouth and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison
"The Funeral" by Kate Wilhelm
"A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation" by Oliver Bolokitten (excerpts)

Historical Documents
"Evidence against the views of the abolitionists:  consisting of physical and moral proofs of the natural inferiority of the Negroes" by Richard H. Colfax (1833)
"Overpopulation Threatens World" by Ralph Segman
"Overpopulation Called Deadlier Killer Than A-Bomb" by Unknown
"Monsanto's Harvest of Fear" by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele
President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address
"Interview w/ Noam Chomsky" conducted by David Barsamian (excerpts)
"Profits of War:  The Fruits of the Permanent Military-Industrial Complex" by William Hartung

Critical Readings
"Theses on Dystopia 2001" by Darko Suvin
"Introduction:  Dystopia and Histories" by Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan
"New Maps of Hell" by Tom Moylan (excerpts)
"The Dystopian Turn" by Tom Moylan (excerpts)

The Gaps
Historical readings I need:

• An anti-socialism propaganda piece from pre-1909
• A reading on nuclear war fears (such as a newspaper article articulating the terror of nuclear war); alternatively, a really good short film about the nuclear scare / red scare would be great (from the era, mind you)
• A reading on the fear of AI

Readers of this blog, or folks randomly appearing on the home page, will notice that my last post was on Oct. 8th.  That's a long time not to post so much as an update.  Surely I must have a good reason, right?

Actually, I do.  The last month has been one of the heaviest work periods of the semester, in part because October is the month of midterms.  Since I am a teacher, that means I've been grading papers for the past three weeks.  My grading pile only recently dropped below 100 papers (excepting in-class writing, which doesn't take as much time as essays and response papers).

But that's not all I've been up to.  This semester is also the last time I will ever take a graduate-level course, which means I made the conscious choice to ask for the one course I knew would load me with a lot of reading and writing work (this professor happens to be on my committee).  Throw in podcasting duties, personal life nonsense, the paper on the film adaptation of Cloud Atlas I have been working on, and other miscellaneous stuff like voting, etc. and you'll have a good idea why blogging has taken a side track for the time being.  In all honesty, I am probably working close to 80 hours a week, on average, which includes prepping for seminar, prepping lectures for five classes, grading papers for five classes, and so on and so forth.  Let it never be said that we teacher people don't work our asses off.

That said, I am not quitting.  Quite the contrary.  November is a considerably lighter month, since there are numerous holidays and the like here in the States.  I just wanted everyone to know that I didn't disappear into the night.

On that note, how is everyone doing?

(Disclaimer:  If you are easily offended by the proper spelling of the words hinted at in my title, then do not read beyond this point.)

As a postcolonial scholar, I've become familiar with what Homi Bhabha calls the "ambiguity of colonial discourse."  In short, Bhabha suggests that colonialism attempts to recreate indigenous minds/bodies in the image of the colonizer, but only to an indeterminate line that allows the colonizer to differentiate itself from the "other," since its existence as "colonizer" requires an opposite from which to draw its identity.  Within that ambiguity, Bhabha argues, is where the indigenous can launch a different kind of resistance.

I've often wondered if this same idea might apply to words like "nigger" or "bitch" (and their various spellings).  While I won't call myself a feminist scholar or race historian, it seems to me that it is within the realm of possibility that women or people of color could reclaim the words previously used against them by a particular dominant group.  Otherwise, I'd have to look at a site like Smart Bitches, Trashy Books with a certain degree of contempt.  Likewise, I'd have to view any use of the word "nigger" by people of color as inherently derogatory, even if within a particular cultural context, it means exactly the opposite.  Are some of these instances moments of resistance / reversal / reclamation?  How do we know?

That's where I want to leave it.  A wide open question for the general public to explore.  So have at it!

Several weeks ago, I taught William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying in my Survey in American Literature course. Of all the texts I've taught since the summer before last (when I started teaching literature courses), this one may have been the most difficult.  For those unfamiliar with the book, it is told almost exclusively in a stream of consciousness manner, spanning across more perspectives than you can count on a single hand, each one intensely personal and subjective.  The plot, insofar as it has one, follows the Bundren family as they make their journey to the birthplace of their deceased mother so that they might bury her there.  In other words, As I Lay Dying is a "dark" book that isn't so much a story as a radical de-centering of experience -- multiple minds, multiple experiences, and multiple reactions.

But the book itself is not what I want to talk about today; rather, it serves as the context.  What I
want to talk about is skulls.  At some point at the end of our discussions of Faulkner's novel, my students managed to get us onto the subject of "darkness" (tonal).  Specifically, they were comparing Faulkner's As I Lay Dying to Nathanael West's "Miss Lonelyhearts," both of which have been described as dark comedies.  My students didn't quite agree with this, noting that much of the thematic content of As I Lay Dying is difficult to make fun of even when a comic genius is involved (I'm paraphrasing their arguments, of course).  "Miss Lonelyhearts," however, seemed rather amusing in retrospect.  They thought that while much of the story hadn't seemed funny when they were reading it, West's narrative had, in fact, grown on them.  I suspect part of this has to do with exposure to Faulkner, which is such a contrast to West that it's hard to fully argue that "Miss Lonelyhearts" isn't at least half funny.

It was at this point that my one and only Russian student matter-of-factly stated, "When I was a kid, we used to play with the skulls of dead Germans."  I can't recall the exact context in which these words were spoken, unfortunately.  What interests me about this announcement isn't whether it makes sense in my recollection of events, but rather how it was stated:  as if there is nothing strange about playing with dead German skulls.  In subsequent conversations with this student, she provided considerable detail of the catacombs in which she and her friends would play (somewhere in the Eastern edge of what was Soviet Bloc territory -- I cannot recall where at the moment).  Apparently these bones and skulls were left there after the war; nobody bothered to pick them up and bury them (or do whatever you do with the bones of dead Germans).  And so, my Russian student grew up playing with the skulls of dead Germans.

Think about that for a minute.  Imagine what it must have been like growing up in a world in which playing with dead German skulls is just plain normal.  A hard world to imagine, no?

Excuse me while I file this in one of the weirdest teaching experiences I've ever had, right alongside the time one of my students said that whenever they thought of me, they imagined me as the woman being chased by the werewolf in Michael Jackson's "Thriller."  (Among other weird moments, of course.)

Somewhere in Thailand, a mind-controlled ant climbs a tree.  She moves in jerks and starts, her body no longer her own.  Alone, she staggers to the underside of a leaf, and bites the thick central stem.  Her jaw locks.  Her chitin bulges and bursts.  A long gray tendril rises from within, unfurls to three times her length, and pops to release a cloud of spores.  Away on the breeze the spores float, to possess any other ants unlucky enough to remain within the blast radius.

The fungus is called Ophiocordyceps camponoti-balzani.  The fungus infects an ant, takes over the victim’s brain, forces it to move to a high place near other ants--a place where spores will spread--and explodes.

That’s real.

If you work for a corporation or a non-profit, you’re part of a functionally immortal entity whose life is governed by laws more theological than biological—a being that draws strength from desire,
faith, and sacrifice.  When corporations emerged in the High Middle Ages, jurists compared them to angels: immortal, immaterial, mighty.  And every angel is terrifying.

That’s real, too.

You read these words on a screen lit by lightning, which we harnessed either by burning hundred-million-year-old plants and plankton (and a few dinosaurs), by wrestling rivers like Achilles, by binding the wind or the shifting tide or sunlight or subterranean fire.  Building your screen required labors that would make Hercules blanch.

How can we tell stories about that kind of world?  A world that’s not straightforward, a world with diversities of wonder, justice, injustice, horror, majesty, and sheer scale to beggar the wildest opium dreams?

We can tell some stories by zooming in.  The earth seems flat to most human beings, most of the time.  Newtonian physics works fine for objects about the size of people, moving at people speeds.  A character who calls her former lover to console him after his father’s death doesn’t need to think about cellular towers, satellites, digital audio, or call routing, let alone the Chinese mine that produced the rare earths used to make the phone (and the people who worked there).  By focusing on dramatic structures of everyday life and emotional politics that haven’t changed much since Murasaki wrote Genji, a storyteller can avoid much of reality’s weirdness.

Or the teller can embrace the strange.  Break open the common surface of our lives and expose the machinery beneath.  Show characters who engage with the mad mess of their setting, who are elevated by it or ground to dust or both.  Pull out elements of our daily weird, hold them to the light, and watch them spark.

Some people accuse fantastic literature--science fiction, fantasy, horror, and all their permutations--of escapism.  And sure, some of us come to genre tales for the rich fantasy lives, for the grand open vistas and the capital-E Evils which Must Be Stopped.  But I think the richness of the genre lies in confrontationalism, not escapism: its ability to address the fundamental strangeness of the natural world, and the world we’ve built, and the world being built around us.  The freedom to tell stories out of this world can offer the freedom to name more precisely the world where we live.

And that world is wild, and needs naming.

(Details about The Indigo Pheasant, Mr. Rabuzzi, and his blog tour can be found below the post.  Go buy the book!)

Historians of medieval Europe would be surprised at the pallid, static and simplistic depictions of their subject in the work of many modern fantasy writers.  In the past fifty years, medievalists have overturned Western Renaissance and Enlightenment assertions that the “middle time” was an opaque, undifferentiated hiatus endured between the glittering peaks of Rome and Modernity.

Equipped with digital tools, platoons of medievalists today are able to mine, compile, sort, and index more data about medieval people and places than any prior generation.[i]  Advances in aerial archaeology surveys, underwater excavations, and isotope analysis -- to name but three-- have dramatically expanded our knowledge of daily life (everything from how bricks were made to how bread was baked), migration and settlement patterns, trade routes, funerary practices, and much more.[ii]

A willingness to use methods from anthropology, geographical studies, and other social sciences
-- ­epitomized by the widely influential Annales school in France, the Cambridge Group for the History of Population & Social Structure in the U.K., and the Quaderni storici in Italy -- ­has buttressed our new interpretations of the era.[iii]   Above all, medieval studies has­ -- to great advantage -- wedded its traditional strengths in manuscript analysis and paleography with modern literary critical approaches and semiotics, framing our questions in entirely new ways and forming new understandings from materials previously neglected or ignored.[iv]

I hope we might see more variety, more dynamism and more nuance in the pseudo-medieval settings adopted by many fantasy authors. Transposing modern analogues, or what we perceive as similarities, won’t work.  We need to rasp, file, chisel and mallet ourselves back to another reality, before we can use it for our modern fabulistic purposes.  We must translate ourselves, in the word’s literal Latin sense of carrying over, of  removing from one place to another.  And then the real work begins.  Even medieval concepts we think we know, after having laboriously scrubbed off the verdigris, will betray us because the context is gone.
For instance, where is a modern fantasy novel based on Saint Maurice, one of the most widely venerated in the European Middle Ages, bearer of the holy “Spear of Destiny,” and the patron saint of the Holy Roman Empire?  He is routinely depicted as an African in full knight’s armor­ -- the oldest image we have of St. Maurice is an imposing 13th-century statue in the Cathedral of Magdeburg, right beside the tomb of Emperor Otto I.  He is portrayed elsewhere conversing as an equal with the Pope.  Bridging the centuries and the Middle Passage (and surviving Katrina), there is a St. Maurice Church in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans.

I want fantastical epics that take as their point of departure the life of the Jewish community documented by the Geniza repository in Cairo, or of Muslim merchants in Aleppo and Damascus establishing a foundation or school via waqf deeds.[v]  I seek spec fic based on the adventures of Malian mathematicians and astronomers, and on the exploits of sastra of jyotisa practitioners in India.[vi]  How about using as a setting the embassy King Harsa of Kanauj in India sent to the T’ang emperor T’ai Tsung or the mission King Pulakesin II of Badami dispatched to the Sassanian emperor Khusru II?[vii]  Imagine riding with the spec fic counterpart of the great Muslim admiral Zheng He on his seven epic voyages for the Chinese emperor in the early 15th century, reaching as far as East Africa -- ­focusing on the common sailors.  Delve into fictional versions of Sundiata’s empire, or the adventures of Oranyan, a prince of Ile-Ife, who followed a serpent as was foretold and thereby founded the Yoruba Empire.  Or explore Cambay in Gujarat and Calicut on the Malabar, and Aden, which 10th-century traveler al-Muqaddasi described as “the anteroom of China, entrepot of Yemen, treasury of the West, and mother lode of trade wares.”
Why indeed limit ourselves to medieval Europe (and a truncated Europe at that) when crafting the backdrops for fabulistic literature?

Feminist perspectives, postcolonialist approaches, and frameworks established by scholars from within the African Diaspora have each revolutionized literary, historical and cultural studies in the United States. [viii]  Insights gained from the study of modern history are helping us identify the thorns in the romance of the rose.[ix]   For instance, Sharon Kinoshita observes that “many of the best-known works of medieval French literature take place on or beyond the borders of ‘France’ or even the French-speaking world,” and argues that the origins of vernacular French writing is “inextricably linked to historical situations of contact between French-speaking nobles and peoples they perceived as their linguistic, religious and cultural others.”[x]

Geraldine Heng makes a similar point:

“Allowing fantasies of race and nation to surface with remarkable freedom, and to flex themselves with astonishing ease and mobility, medieval romance becomes a medium that conduces with exceptional facility to the creation of races, and the production of a prioritizing discourse of essential differences among peoples in the Middle Ages.”[xi] 

From essentializing the Other to erasing the Other altogether is all too often a small step in the medieval European tradition, and in the later scholarship about the Middle Ages.  Erasure is sometimes a part of creating the canon upon which -- unknowingly or not -- ­the modern fantasy genre rests. (I am reminded of how medieval scribes would use pumice stones “ad radenda pergamena,” i.e., “for scraping parchment.”)  Maria Rosa Menocal gives a classic example when she notes that the root word for the quintessential medieval figure of the troubadour may be Arabic, not Latin, and that until recently the Arabic possibility was mostly ignored or obscured.[xii]   Ananya Jahanara Kabir discusses how nostalgia can similarly erase and reorder the past to justify current power dynamics, using as her example 19th-century Britons building a history that showed medieval England inheriting leadership from Rome and in turn bequeathing the right to rule to the Victorians.[xiii]
Commentators on the social imaginary of spec fic have begun to query both the medieval and medievalist assumptions of the genre, and challenge both the inherent and subsequently introduced lacunae, erasures, and distortions.  Such queries and challenges include Michael Chabon’s concept of “imaginary homelands,” Nnedi Okorafor on “Stephen King’s Super-Duper Magical Negroes,” Samuel Delany’s “Racism and Science Fiction,” Nalo Hopkinson & Uppinder Mehan’s So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy, Hopkinson’s “Reluctant Ambassador from the Planet of Midnight,” John Rieder’s Colonialism and The Emergence of Science Fiction, Saladin Ahmed’s “Is Game of Thrones Too White?,” Laura Miller’s “If Tolkien Were Black,”and other recent explorations of race in The Lord of the Rings and in digital role-playing games. [xiv]

I close with two voices that may point us where I believe we need to go ­one voice from the medieval era but strikingly “modern,” the other modern but translating our oldest desire.

The first is the provost Wolmarus, writing to his friend the abbess Hildegard of Bingen near the end of her life, fearing that the lingua ignota would go untransmitted:  “Where, then, the voice of the unheard melody? And the voice of the unheard language?"  And, in fact, the secrets of the hidden language and the mystic melody died with Hildegard...but we can resurrect them -- ­translate them -- through our speculative fiction today.
The second is Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni in her novel The Palace of Illusions, giving voice to the Princess Panchaali, the famous Draupadi, later wife of the Pandavas brothers in the Mahabharat.  Here is Draupadi:

“Through the long, lonely years of my childhood, when my father’s palace seemed to tighten its grip around me until I couldn’t breathe, I would go to my nurse and ask for a story.  And though she knew many wondrous and edifying tales, the one I made her tell me over and over was the story of my birth.”[xv]

[i] “Medievalists and classicists have, over the past twenty years, taken up the use of computers in their work more eagerly than almost any other group of academics working in the humanities” (Marilyn Deegan, “Computers and Medieval Studies: Points of Convergence,” special issue of Literary and Linguistic Computing, 6:1/1991).  The fervor continues undimmed today.
[ii] For a good introduction, see the U.K. Society for Medieval Archaeology, http://www.medievalarchaeology.org/, and the U.K.’s Archaeology Data Service, http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/
[iii] See Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge University Press, 1989), chapters 6, 7, 12; Sheila McIsaac Cooper, “Historical Analysis of the Family,” in M. Sussman et al. (eds.), Handbook of Marriage and the Family (Plenum: 2nd ed., 1999); Edward Muir & Guido Ruggiero (eds.), Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe (Selections from Quaderni Storici) (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991; trans. E. Branch).
[iv] Gabrielle Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Derek Pearsall, ed., Manuscripts and Texts: Editorial Problems in Late Middle English Literature (Boydell & Brewer, 1987); William Marx, ed., Sources, Exemplars and Copy-Texts: Influence and Transmission (Trivium vol. 31, 1999).
[v] Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 26-27.
[vi] Timbuktu Manuscripts Project, http://www.sum.uio.no/research/mali/timbuktu/project/index.html ;  David Pingree, “The Logic of Non-Western Science: Mathematical Discoveries in Medieval India,” Daedalus 132:4 (Fall, 2003).
[vii]  Daud Ali, Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India (Cambridge University Press, 2004),  p. 32.
[viii] Representative works: Toni  Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness & the Literary Imagination (Random, 1992);  Benjamin Alire  Saenz, “I Want to Write an American Poem: On Being a Chicano Poet in Post-Columbian America,” in R. Gonzalez (ed.), Currents from the Dancing River: Contemporary Latino Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry (Harcourt Brace, 1994); Jose David Saldivar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (U. California P., 1997);  Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House (Oxford U.P., 1993);  Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity & Double Consciousness (Harvard U.P., 1993); Okwui Enwezor, “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition,” in Enwezor et al. (eds.), Antimonies in Art & Culture (Duke U.P., 2008);  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind (Heinemann, 1986); Edward Said, Orientalism (Random: 1978).
[ix] Examples include:  Linda Lomperis, “Medieval Travel Writing and the Question of Race,” Journal of Medieval & Modern Studies, 31 (Jan., 2001); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England,” ibid.; Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (Princeton University Press, 1993), esp. chapters 8 & 9 ref. “race relations on the frontiers of Latin Europe”;  Maghan Keita, “Saracens and Black Knights,” Arthuriana 16.4 (2006).
[x] Kinoshita, Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 1.
[xi] Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (Columbia U. Press, 2003), p. 7.
[xii] Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (U. Pennsylvania Press, 1987).
[xiii] Kabir, “Analogy in Translation: Imperial Rome, Medieval England and British India,” in Kabir & D. Williams, eds., Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages; Translating Cultures (Cambridge U. Press, 2005).
[xiv] Chabon, Maps & Legends: Reading & Writing Along the Borderlands (Harper, 2008), pp. 157-179;  Okorafor, “Stephen King’s...,” Strange Horizons, October 25, 2004;  Delany, “Racism and Science Fiction,” New York Review of Science Fiction, Issue 120 (August, 1998); Myles Balfe, “Incredible Geographies?  Orientalism and Genre Fantasy,” Social & Cultural Geography 5:1 (2004); Ahmed’s essay is in Salon, April 1, 2012; Miller’s is in Salon, November 9, 2011; Anderson Rearick, “Why is the Only Good Orc a Dead Orc? The Dark Face of Racism Examined in Tolkien’s World,“ Modern Fiction Studies 50:4 (2004); Christopher Warnes, “Baldur’s Gate and History: Race and Alignment in Digital Role Playing Games,” Digital Games Research Assoc. conf. proceedings, 2005; Margaret Sinex, “ ‘Monsterized Saracens,’” Tolkien’s Haradrim, and Other Medieval ‘Fantasy Products,’” Tolkien Studies 7 (2010); Hopkinson & Mehan, So Long Been Dreaming (Arsenal Pulp, 2004); Hopkinson, “A Reluctant Ambassador from the Planet of Midnight,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 21.3 (2010); Rieder, Colonialism (Wesleyan U.P., 2008).  See also:  Nisi Shawl & Cynthia Ward, Writing the Other: A Practical Approach (Aqueduct, 2005), Helen Merrick, The Secret Feminist Cabal (Aqueduct, 2009), and the Sheree Thomas Dark Matter anthologies.
[xv] Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions (Doubleday, 2008), p. 1.

About the Book:
London 1817. Maggie Collins, born into slavery in Maryland, whose mathematical genius and strength of mind can match those of a goddess, must build the world's most powerful and sophisticated machine - to free the lost land of Yount from the fallen angel Strix Tender Wurm. Sally, of the merchant house McDoon, who displayed her own powers in challenging the Wurm and finding Yount in The Choir Boats, must choose either to help Maggie or to hinder her. Together - or not - Maggie and Sally drive to conclusion the story started in The Choir Boats - a story of blood-soaked song, family secrets, sins new and old in search of expiation, forbidden love, high policy and acts of state, financial ruin, betrayals intimate and grand, sorcery from the origins of time, and battle in the streets of London and on the arcane seas of Yount.
About the Author:
Daniel A. Rabuzzi studied folklore and mythology in college and graduate school, and keeps one foot firmly in the Other Realm.

ChiZine Publications published his first novel, The Choir Boats: Volume One of Longing for Yount, in 2009, and in 2012 brought out the sequel and series conclusion, The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount.

Daniel's short fiction and poetry have appeared in Sybil's Garage, Shimmer, ChiZine, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Abyss & Apex, Goblin Fruit, Mannequin Envy, Bull Spec, Kaleidotrope, and Scheherezade's Bequest. He has presented at Arisia, Readercon, Lunacon, and the Toronto Speculative Fiction Colloquium. He has also had twenty scholarly and professional articles published on subjects ranging from fairy tale to finance.

A former banker, Daniel earned his doctorate in 18th-century history, with a focus on family, gender and commerce in northern Europe. He is now an executive at a national workforce development organization in New York City, where he lives with his wife and soulmate, the artist Deborah A. Mills (who illustrated and provided cover art for both Daniel's novels), along with the requisite two cats.

Novel preview links:
The Choir Boats: http://chizinepub.com/media/choir-boats/TheChoirBoats-Preview.pdf
The Indigo Pheasant: http://chizinepub.com/media/indigo/indigo_preview.pdf

Book page links: 
The Choir Boats: http://chizinepub.com/books/choir-boats.php
The Choir Boats Facebook Page:  http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Choir-Boats/67307451458
The Indigo Pheasant: http://chizinepub.com/books/indigo-pheasant.php
Daniel's web site: www.danielarabuzzi.com
Daniel's Twitter: @TheChoirBoats
Deborah's web site: http://www.deborahmillswoodcarving.com/Our blog tour for The Indigo Pheasant kicks off, with guest posts, interviews, and giveaways!

Tour stops include:
Sept 11 - Small Beer Press/Not a Journal
Sept 14 - Civilian Reader
Sept 17 - Fantasy Book Critic
Sept 18 - Bibliophile Stalker
Sept 24 - That Artsy Reader Girl
Sept 26 - Layers of Thought Book & Yount greeting cards giveaway.
Sept 27 - Dark Wolf's Fantasy Reviews
Sept 28 - So Many Precious Books, So Little Time Book giveaway.
Sept 30 - Disquieting Visions
Oct 4 - Charlotte's Library
Oct 5 - The Cozy Reader
Oct 11 - Jess Resides Here
TBS - Grasping for the Wind
TBS - Bull Spec's new Wednesday feature "The Hardest Part"