WE'LL BE RIGHT BACK

As Musk continues to set Twitter ablaze with blind glee and Discord is too ephemeral, I've decided to resurrect this stillborn blog as a place to jot down some thoughts about film, fiction, and games. I will attempt (but make no promises that I will succeed) to write thoughtfully and cut down on the noise out here in the vastness of cyberspace.

Welcome aboard.

ONE SMALL STEP

Neil Gaiman once said that the idea for his stories often begin as a seed. A singular isolated... thing. It could be anything really: a feeling, a piece of dialogue, a refrain from a song, a question.  But it needed to be striking and memorable. Something that he could only exorcise by working on it until it was fully formed in reality.

CORALINE, for example, happened because he misspelled Caroline in a letter and paused, thinking, "Huh. Coraline. That almost looks like a real name."

For Kenneth Hite, author of NIGHT'S BLACK AGENTS, it was a blink-and-you-miss-it moment of imagining Jason Bourne holding a wooden stake instead of a magazine in a fight scene in THE BOURNE SUPREMACY. 

So, here is my image. Done as a concept art piece in as part of a Photoshop class project, I couldn’t cast it aside afterwards. It is rough around the edges, far from complete, but… can you hear the noise? The hiss of coils and steam. Distant shouts as engineers and workers clear the pad.

In a crowded room, someone clears their throat. A woman with graying temples leans forward towards a mic.

“T Minus 10…”

IN DEFENSE OF FANTASY

Science Fiction and Fantasy are often maligned as lesser fiction; cast somewhere between genre fiction and trashy consumerist escapism. In the past, I've struggled to explain its merits -- for instance, how removing a contemporary and familiar setting can allow us to bypass previously unnoticed hardstuck biases through allegory -- and why its authors deserve as much praise and recognition as those who work in capital L Literature.

Turns out, cleverer minds had already worked out the answer long before me:

"Terry Pratchett interview", The Onion, Madison, WI. 1995

O: What’s with the big-ass hat?

Pratchett: Ah… That’s the hat I wear. I don’t know, it… It… That hat, or types like it, I’ve worn for years and years. Because I bought one, and I liked it. And then people started taking photographs of me in it, and now, certainly in the UK, it’s almost a case of if I don’t turn up in my hat people don’t know who I am. So maybe I could just send this hat to signings. I just like hats. I like Australian book tours, because Australians are really, I mean that is the big hat country, Australia.

O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?

Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.

O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.

P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre.

O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.

P:  (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.

Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different iconography, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.
(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.
I’m looking forward to buying myself a cheese hat. 

O: Back to the hat.

P: Let’s go back to the hat… Everybody needs an edge, and if the hat gives you an edge, why not wear a hat? When you get started writing, you’re one of the crowd. If the hat helps, I’ll wear a hat— I’ll wear two hats! In fact, I’m definitely going to buy a cheese hat before I leave here. We’ve never heard of them in the UK, and I can see it as being the latest thing in fashion.

Okay, you can turn the tape back off again.