I’m a bit miffed by the lack of early modern settings in fantasy. Since most of the “medieval” tropes in your standard western fantasy series actually come from the Renaissance, you would expect gunpowder and other technological innovations to follow. Yet while shipbuilding technology tends to go the opposite direction, jumping far ahead, we’re often left with a noticeable absence of guns. For those, you’d best look to steampunk or gaslight romance; secondary-world fantasy often remains pre-modern in character in at least one aspect, an inability to discover gunpowder, even if early modern in others.

This isn’t a problem in historical fantasies, where we expect historical baggage to go along with the chosen time period. Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series has riflemen mounted on dragons, no less. And there are a growing number of industrial settings in fantasy (such as Mieville’s Bas-Lag) that allow for flintlocks, though by this point the early modern aspects are gone completely.

Sometimes we can muster up a reason. The nameless city of Ellen Kushner’s Riverside tales is a mix of various eras and places from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Among the nobles, life is much like in Regency-era England; among the poor, Renaissance-era Italy. I found the lack of pistols odd, but the focus on sword duels between hired swordsmen as an official means to resolve disputes in high society did, in fact, seem balanced on a lack of firearms. Pistols duels don’t require nearly as much finesse. As well, the country had united some time ago and faced no external threats; nothing appreciable in the way of wars would lead to military innovation.

More often than not, however, there’s a sense of societal and technological stagnation in fantasy. Lack of gunpowder is only a small symptom, really. Even during the Middle Ages there were times of great upheaval, and Europe in the early fifteenth century looked a great deal different than it did in the sixth. Yet I’m all to used to seeing a prologue tell of some event 1000 years prior the events of the main narrative, and by the time we reach chapter one, no appreciable change has occurred, not even a mouldboard plough. The world, as ever, has remained exactly the same.

Yet there is a draw towards the Renaissance and early modern period for a certain kind of romance (in the old sense of the word)—courtly intrigue, natural philosophy, swashbuckling rogues, pirates, voyages of exploration, war galleys, a remarkable variety of quite elegant swords, and even more elegant clothes. The advent of the printing press and the spread of ideas, the rising popularity of theatre, mass upheaval, revolution. The contact of various cultures at a scale unprecedented; galleons racing across the world.

And, of course, there were guns. The Ottomans with their giant cannons, Europeans with matchlocks, wheel-locks, flintlocks. The pike-and-shot era giving us a mix of pikes and halberds and swords and muskets. In Eastern Europe a rather glorious blend of eras out of synch: Tatars still using bows and arrows across the steppe, still carrying shields, Winged Hussars in heavy armour, sabres, ostentatious costumes, feudal magnates.

There’s a lot of fun to be had here, and I dub works that fall on this period for inspiration as “black powder fantasy.”

There’s been a bit of it. Lloyd Alexander’s Westmark trilogy had an Enlightenment flavour, and Dianna-Wynn Jones dabbled in introducing guns and printing presses. Patricia C. Wrede did some as well, though she veered more towards historical fantasy in that regard (Sorcery & Cecelia comes to mind). But in my reading, the rapport of guns has been strangely silent. I’ve seen some comments to the effect that the introduction of gunpowder is a no-no, a way to break immersion; though this seems more rooted in preconceived genre expectations than in anything incompatible with firearms or other innovation in fantasy itself. Even Tolkien included some explosions, after all.

Folks, this viewpoint must be rectified!

I’m kidding, of course, since taking on a renaissance or early modern-style fantasy does depend on the themes you want to express. My on-hiatus book centres on the ideas of intellectual upheaval and colonization, the fading of belief in the supernatural and the overthrow of an ancien regime. Naturally, my influences gravitate around the starkest historical period for these sorts of questions. Guns and printing presses are more than just window-dressing for what I’m trying to express. As always, authors should choose the milieu that fits them best.

Still…rapiers and wheel-lock pistols are pretty cool, don’t you think?

“Revisionist” theories of the crusades go a long way to secularize the whole affair; but at this point, the revisionist explanations for the origin of the First Crusade (or any Crusade, really) have become the dominant discourse in the western world.  What was once taught as noble now reduced to social and economic factors with religion as only the catalyst or enabler for a movement with far different aims.  Later movements: colonialism, Imperialism, racial discourse and so forth get reflected back in time.  While we can see the dim origin of the mechanisms for these later movements lying in the Crusades, these sorts of reductionist narratives necessarily deny the complexity of the crusading movement.

Perhaps the worst part being the lack of religion.  Religion as a front for trade & conquest rather than embedded within the act of Crusading. 

There’s an unexpected side-effect with projecting a secularist narrative back into the religion-drenched world of medieval Chistendom.  By reducing the importance of Christianity as a motivation for knights to leave Europe on the long journey to the Levant, you end up with a bunch of materialist-minded folks with no stock in superstition.  Unsurprisingly, Muslims are rarely portrayed this way in such popular narratives.  Only they are capable of Holy War, it seems, playing into an entirely different modern discourse that’s just as distorted.

Never mind that many knights gave up wealth and title to head eastward, obviously it was just an investment in the loot and plunder from a land they knew little to nothing about, on an expedition without guarantee of success unless one actually believed in support from the divine.  Of course it was all about the money and land; our proto-capitalists were already gearing up to start off the British Empire and pave the way for the ascendency of the west.    

This is what makes Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven such an odd watch–seeing all these secular humanists dancing around Medieval Europe and Palestine.  While the major characters bear the trappings of religion, none of them actually seem to believe in Catholicism, even those belonging to the Holy Orders.  Instead you find Enlightenment philosophy alive and well.  Even the villains are hypocritical in their approach to religion.  The only people with any deep faith are, of course, the Muslims.  

While these sorts of films, books and popular histories emphasize the wonders of Islamic civilization in terms of architecture and learning, rarely do they let these achievements stand on their own, but instead frame them in opposition to the rising west.  The brute crusaders whose descendants would later colonize their lands.  These narratives claim that we, the children of the Enlightenment, are the true inheritors of that noble civilization while the actual descendants have become the barbarians on par with our medieval ancestors.  The Victorian narrative of the noble, chivalrous knight out to reclaim the Holy Land from wicked occupiers was a misrepresentation, but what has replaced it in current popular crusading discourse is scarcely any better, and just as insidious.

Further Reading:

John Riley-Smith.  What were the Crusades?  London: Macmillan, 1977.

Jessalynn Byrd.  “The Crusades: Eschatological Lemmings, Younger sons, Papal Hegemony and Colonialism.”  Misconceptions about the Middle Ages.  Ed. Stephen J. Harris and Bryon L. Grigsby.

One reason I haven’t bought an e-reader is my fascination with the book as a physical object. That, and because I buy nearly all my books used. Each one has a story separate from what’s contained within its pages. A book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with a note from 1915 inked on the inside cover. A 1919 edition of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. My copy of Howard Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (probably the single most important book in my life) has pencilled scribbles in the early chapters—my dad’s Polish translations of various words from back when he was learning English; he remembered the Polish translation of the novel so well he thought it would carry over. He still has his Polish copy somewhere.

I’ve kept Klechdy Domowe (Domestic Fairy Tales) on my shelf, a collection of Polish fairy tales and legends. The book was a present for my sister in 1989, though I’m the one who ended up with it. Most notable are Zbigniew Rychlicki’s handsome illustrations, which have an oddly Slavic air about them.

Slavic fairy tales have a much different history from western ones. It took far longer for the tales to become associated specifically with children, usually the stories were told after children went to bed. On another level, Slavic folklorists respected such tales because the last remnants of old Slavic customs and religious beliefs remain within them. Records are much more faithful, collectors and anthologists were much less likely to tweak the tales in order to make them more suitable for children and the like. There’s good reason for this: whereas we have plenty of records concerning Celtic, Germanic, Nordic and Greco-Roman myth cycles, we know far less about pagan Slavic myths due to a lack of written accounts, even though paganism persisted far longer in Eastern Europe than in the west and south. Pre-Christian religious beliefs and practices are mostly lost; what we have of folk-belief was already long integrated into Orthodox and Catholic Christianity. Supernatural Slavic spirits were flexible in this regard; domovoi (or, as I knew them, domowice) were nothing but accommodating towards the religion of a household. But of the old gods—Trzygłów, Perun, Swarog, Czarnobóg, and the like—we know little. Accounts are muddled and neo-Pagan attempts at re-creating indigenous Slavic belief (which differed significantly from region to region) only confuse matters further by inventing a great deal. The last traces of old Slavic belief systems lie in our fairy tales and legends.

There’s also a different in scale, as many Slavic tales feature heroic quest narratives not quite as common in western fairy tales. Mention of old gods persists in tales like “The Queen of the Baltic”, where the titular queen’s amber palace is destroyed by Perun, god of thunder, explaining the amber that washes up on the Baltic shore. Other figures, such as the Baba Jaga or Kościej the Deathless, had some sort of religious significance before becoming stock characters of such tales. Duellist interpretations have had an unfortunate effect: the Baba Jaga both helps and hinders our heroes and heroines in Slavic tales, yet western retellings often show her as an exclusively evil figure. In the Polish stories, as well, we often find more than one such crone (“The Frog Princess” has three, all dwelling in houses on chicken-legs). Białabóg’s insertion into the Slavic pantheon comes from the same misreading of Slavic mythology—a white god to oppose the black god, Czarnobóg. Except that we have no evidence that Białobóg was ever a member of the pantheon, and the actual relationship between gods as well as the overarching cosmology is hazy and evidently alien to Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian or Celtic sensibilities.

Peculiar to Poland are the great many basilisks roaming the land. The Warsaw basilisk is the most famous, but there are many other tales and accounts, including one of a wicked queen turned into a basilisk as punishment for her sins and (as all these stories end) met her end via her own reflection. Dragons were easier to dispatch, a shoemaker defeated the dragon of Kraków by stuffing a sheep with sulphur. The dragon ate the sheep, then drank so much water it exploded. The basilisk is obviously not something from old Slavic beliefs, though its importance in Polish tales is curious. Of more ancient pedigree are the rusałki, creatures that have captured my imagination—the spirits of drowned young women who thrive, succubus-like, on the lives and love of those who cross their path, sometimes leading people into wild circle dances. During Rusałka week in early June, they were at their most active, and swimming was strictly forbidden since they had a penchant for drowning people, too. And most terrifying of all, they could lure you with their songs and tickle you to death.

It’s annoying to see that English writers drawing from Slavic myth and legend tend to be so cavalier about it all, often only snatching out the more recognizable figures for use in their own stories, nearly always transplanting them into outside contexts. The aforementioned Baba Jaga-as-dark-lord syndrome is one example. My annoyance at China Mieville’s use of vodyanoi (Wodnice) stemmed from the word itself, which essentially means “water-thing” but no one in Bas-Lag seemed to know Russian. And finally Guy Gavriel Kay’s Riselkas in Tigana, which borrow the look of rusałki and the name, and nothing more. Through such appropriation, they often became diminished.

The more expansive Slavic wonder tales have more in common with Beowulf than Cinderella. They are the last drum of the Slavic epics still beating along after all these years.

Links of Interest:

Helen Pilinovsky, “Russian Fairy Tales, Part I: The Fantastic Traditions of East and West” (2004).

A.J. Glinsky, Polish Fairy Tales (1920).

A.H. Wratislaw, Sixty Folk Tales from Exclusively Slavonic Sources (1890).

While The Lord of the Rings is a more complex and serious work, I’ve found Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain more personally affecting.  A recent re-read of The High King reinforced my love for Alexander’s vision (and I was delighted to find that my map holds true!).  Plenty of “traditional” fantasy lies caught in concepts of noble birth: the farm boy is nearly always of a far more august lineage than once assumed.  We can chalk this to medieval romances, since tales of hidden ancestry were common enough.  Worth was tied almost exclusively to ancestry within feudal societies.

Lloyd Alexander’s message was quite different.

(The following discussion necessarily involves spoilers, so consider yourself warned.)

Taran begins as a lowly Pig-keeper with a shadowed past.  Over the course of five books we watch him  mature from a foolish boy yearning for adventure to a mature and wise young man.  His ancestry is always in question: while the culture and politics of Prydain are far looser than strict feudal practices found in continental Europe during the High Middle Ages, blood is still important.  Taran’s growing affection for Eilonwy, the princess of Llyr, is problematic because of Taran’s humble beginnings (and the social expectations pressed on her also run contrary to what she wants to do in life).  The sword Dyrnwyn, while a a supposedly powerful artefact, is nearly useless for Taran in The Book of Three.  According to Eilonwy’s translation of the old runes on the scabbard, “only those of noble birth” can draw the sword.

In Taran Wanderer, our hero spends the book’s entirety trying to find out about his past; a near-obsession with discovering the truth of his bloodline.  However, we never find out who Taran’s parents were.  

Because it doesn’t matter.

That was one Lloyd Alexander’s overarching lesson in The Chronicles of Prydain, perhaps the most powerful.   Eilonwy’s translation is wrong.  The actual inscription on Dyrnwyn’s scabbard reads “only those of noble worth”, and that makes all the difference—in The High King, Taran can draw the sword (it is, in fact, vitally important for him to do so) because he is worthy of it, not due to lineage.  Through his own growth and development, Taran shows himself to be the worthy successor to Gwydion as High King of Prydain.  His heritage means nothing.  Neither does a prophecy.  What does matter is his own worth, his own wisdom…elements he can shape.

The end of The High King is similar to The Lord of the Rings.  The passing of enchantments.  The departure of the sons of Don to the Summer Country.  But Lloyd Alexander uses this situation not as a shallow copy but as a moving response: Taran’s decision is the opposite of Frodo’s.  He rejects the prospect of immortality in the west because he loves the land of Prydain and feels a deep responsibility to those who don’t have a chance to leave.  He remains to heal the land after Arawn’s defeat, and it is that decision, above all others, that demonstrates his right to rule.

I know I can’t be Aragorn.  But Lloyd Alexander showed us we could all be Taran.    

The year ends. Some reflection is in order. Mostly concerning writing and literature, because that’s just what I do.

My first published short story appeared in print earlier this year. There’s nothing quite like seeing your work bound and typeset and all. Actual squeeing occurred when the contributor’s copies appeared in the mail. Frustration increased over the remaining months, however, as I failed to sell anything else. Fast fading thoughts of a springboard for my glorious career, though I knew that isn’t how writing works. Still, I really do want to recapture that feeling of accomplishment.

As for writing, I spent the first half of the year working on a book. Then dropped a little over half of the draft—126 pages, gone—because it just wasn’t working. Especially with the 280-some page goal I had in mind. While subsequent chapters have rolled out at varying intervals, I haven’t come even close to my earlier output. I’ve only just inched up to c. 50,000 words by now. You know, what NaNoWriMo participants write in a month. But I’d like to think those were good words.

One unfortunate side effect of worrying myself over something major is that I haven’t done much short story work, decreasing chances of any success in that area as well. And, of course, I’ve been faffing about the whole year actually writing, um, content for this blog instead of just posting silly pictures as I did before. Which has probably also had an impact.

Of course, I’ve also been reading. Reading a lot, and I haven’t really kept track. There was the Guy Gavriel Kay reading project, and I did end up reading everything by him (see details here), even his poetry collection. I read Dealing with Dragons due to repeated mentions by female friends and found out that yes, I do like Patricia C. Wrede. I’m also absolutely certain I wouldn’t have enjoyed that novel at all when I was in elementary school. Going further into YA, I tore though all the unread books by Lloyd Alexander at the local library except Time Cat. The Arkadians stands out as a Prydain-like take on Greek mythology. There was also Airborn, by Kenneth Oppel, perhaps the best zeppelin adventure of recent memory. Skybreaker was also immensely entertaining, but Starclimber took things into outer space and quickly lost me due to lack of zeppelins. Leviathan and Behemoth by Scott Westerfield did a desielpunk/biopunk run-through of World War One. While I’m swept up enough to seek out the last of the trilogy, these suffered far more from the usual YA problems than Alexander’s books and I found the illustrations often more interesting than the text itself. As well, the reduction of World War One into a backdrop for a boy-and-girl adventure story is inherently problematic.

This is also the year I lost my complete adoration for steampunk, after realizing that “Ticker Hounds” by S.M. Peters was the only piece that really did anything for me. The Difference Engine is one of those books I just don’t know what to make of; it’s uneven and muddled and while there’s some great moments of writing, taken as a whole it’s an utterly impenetrable work. I’m not sure if Boneshaker belongs to this year or last, but it still sticks clearly in my mind as a deep frowny moment (here’s why). As does Mainspring. A recent attempt to start on Stephen Hunt’s The Court of the Air did not get all that far; I believe the first mention of the “Queen of Whores” was enough for me to decide there were other things waiting that I’d rather read.

In terms of classic texts, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars tops that list. Though the prose is often…not good, and the plot slapdash, there’s just too much in the way of spectacular flying machines and utterly awesome names (Kantos Kan!) to not enjoy a story as gloriously silly as this. Silly is not an insult. It’s a good kind of silly and I loved it very much.

I also got around to reading A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons be George R.R. Martin after a few years away from A Song of Ice and Fire. I’m not entirely certain why I quit reading A Storm of Swords early on the first two attempts, since it is without a doubt the best book in the series. Unfortunately, A Feast for Crows was a book in which almost nothing happened over a great many pages. While A Dance with Dragons made up for all that, I’ve read far better novels this year.

Such as:

The Road and Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. The Book of the New Sun (consisting of The Shadow of the Torturer, The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor and The Citadel of the Autarch), Pirate Freedom, and Soldier of Sidon by Gene Wolfe. The Last Light of the Sun and Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay. I was insanely happy to find The Fall of the Kings by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman at the used bookstore. While the beginning was a little slow, the novel makes for an ultimately satisfying conclusion to the Riverside stories. I’m also more than a bit amused at how much Kushner seems to know my taste; Swordspoint had duellists with rapiers! The Privilege of the Sword had a girl with a rapier! The Fall of the Kings had…academic historians at a university! Neil Gaiman’s Stardust also makes the list; a fun little novella inflated by publishers into a 300-some page book due to typesetting magic. The Last Hero, by Terry Pratchett—also a novella accompanied by some lovely illustrations; the tale of Cohen’s last quest makes for a natural conclusion to the Discworld series and I would like to think that this is it where it all ends. As an honourable mention; Jack the Giant Killer by Charles de Lint belongs to 2010, but its sequel Drink Down the Moon, belongs to this one. After a shaky start, it managed to be just as good as its predecessor by the conclusion. Could have used more Jacky Rowan, though, because she just cracks me up.

That’s about it, really. Time for a…

New Year’s Resolution:

Finish the first draft of this damn book before I leave to do my Master’s Degree in 2012.

Happy New Year, everyone.

The only other Prydain map I know of lies in The Dictionary of Imaginary Places.  While the descriptive text is excellent, as are all the entries in the Dictionary, the actual map is beyond awful.  The cartographer places the Marshes of Morva directly west of Caer Dallben, sticks Annuvin south of the Great Avren River, and plunks the Forest of Idris there as well.  These placements are completely out of whack, and it seems James Cook hadn’t even paid attention to the entry itself.  The map is also, unfortunately, a full-page spread, so there really isn’t an excuse for such sloppiness.

In light of my disappointment with the Dictionary I went searching for a complete map of Prydain.  Eventually I stumbled across a post concerning Prydain geography.  Lotesse created a composite map from the four extent maps of Prydain to help get a better grasp on the place.  After seeing that, I thought: why not draw my own map of Prydain based on Eveline Wells’s maps, Lotesse’s work and my own knowledge of the novels?

The task turned out to be more difficult than I initially imagined, and ended up eating two evenings and quite a few sheets of paper.

Here’s the final result:

Some considerations:

1. We know Prydain vaguely resembles Wales.  The Great Avren River is clearly based on the Severn River, though it meanders a great deal more eastwards, and that the Ystrad roughly follows the Wye.  Using an actual map of Wales as a base, however, would result in an incredibly squished finished product–there was no way this would accurately represent what happens in the books, and most of the geographic features of Prydain simply don’t exist in the real world.

Nevertheless, my map follows the Welsh Coastline and rivers far more closely than Wells’s maps.

2.  In the forward to The Caste of Llyr Alexander stated that the Isle of Mona was the old Welsh name for Anglesey.  See above, however; using the real location of Anglesey doesn’t fit with the text.  Thus the location here, roughly the same as Wells’s placement.

3. I wasn’t ready to dive deep and actually try to work out a scale.  Distances are therefore conjectory, but relative distances should be more or less correct.

4.  The Llawagadarn Mountains were tricky, and Wells’s maps didn’t help any (they are indistinct from the Eagle Mountains in her maps).  However, knowing their proximity to the Free Commots led me to believe they lie roughly to the south-east of the Eagle Mountains.

5.  Lotesse inserted kingdoms mentioned in the text into her composite map even when the locations were fuzzy; I’ve only included places where some geographical information was available.  All we know about Ffleweddur Fflam’s Kingdom is that it’s a few days’ journey east from Caer Dathyl; I’ve marked its approximate location on the map.

6. The Forest of Idris always struck me as stretching quite a ways, unlike the tiny western forest in the map of The High King, so it’s shown here as growing on either side of the River Tevyn.  I don’t think this conflicts with the text, but feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

7. Avren Harbour…we don’t know where it is, except some place at the mouth of the Avren.  It doesn’t appear to be subject to Cantrev Caddifor, so I placed it on the southern bank of the Great Avren (as Lotesse did).

All in all, I’m quite happy with my map of Prydain.  A more accurate one would require a re-read of the series.  An, well, that’s a perfect excuse, isn’t it?

I tried to do something vaguely art nouveau-ish with her hair, but didn’t go far enough.  Ah well, still happy with the result.

Thomas Disch’s The Dreams Our Stuff is Made of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (1998) might have received praise from the likes of Harold Bloom and John Clute, but other scholars have been far less kind. Carl Freedman’s review “Lies, Damned Lies, and Science Fiction: Thomas M. Disch and the Culture of Mendacity” (Science Fiction Studies #78) voices many of my problems with Disch’s study, though not all of them. For one, the title is misleading; Disch never even mentions Stanislaw Lem and the Brothers Strugatsky, and thus ignores their large influence on western science fiction, nor does he pay any attention to authors outside of the United States and England except for Jules Verne and Capek. This is not about how science fiction conquered the world, just the Anglo-Saxon one, and the United States in particular.

Disch’s myopia could be forgiven if it was only cultural and geographical (actually, it wouldn’t be, but for the sake of not stopping the article here, let’s suppose so). He continues the great tradition of Hans Joachim Alpers by taking a supremely ignorant pot shot at fantasy:

In published SF, the product has diversified to fill various new marketing niches as they became evident to the marketers. The first significant marketing subgenre was that of sword-and-sorcery, which budded off the main body of SF in the mid-‘60’s, spurred by the success of Ace Books’ unauthorized edition of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkien imitators were easier to mass-produce and to market than SF, since what readers of sword-and-sorcery wanted was another ride on the same merry-go-round rather than novelty. Sameness is what marketers want us to want. (210-211)

Disch’s spurious use of the term “sword-and-sorcery” is only the beginning. The subgenre of sword & sorcery came out of the pulps in the 1920s and 1930s, as a specific kind of fantasy. Few would describe The Lord of the Rings as Sword & Sorcery, neither was it the first fantasy novel to hit the field—modern secondary-world fantasy traces back to the mid-nineteenth century, and emerges from a tradition stretching back even further. But even then, Disch dismisses all fantasy as derivative, formulaic, conservative tosh. As if Mervyn Peake, Ellen Kushner, Charles de Lint, Lloyd Alexander, Guy Gavriel Kay, and a whole host of important and original fantasy writers never existed; or else authors that he mentions in a sf context (Ursula K. Le Guin, Gene Wolfe, or Michael Moorcock) who are well-recognized as fantasists never wrote fantasy at all.

Truth be told, this was exactly what led me to me to write “Spaceship, Blaster, and Science (!)” earlier this year. Disch regurgitates elements from Alpers’s essay: that heroic fantasy emerges directly from sf as an inferior, regressive form of literature worthy of scorn. Science fiction’s Other. While “Loincloth, Double-Ax and Magic” has faded from memory, the ideas within about heroic fantasy live on in books such as this one.

That out of the way, Disch also has a bizarre fixation on Ursula K. Le Guin, painting her as some sort of feminist Satan. He devotes an entire chapter (titled, Can Girls Play Too? Feminizing SF) to whinging about her sneaky feminist ideology, attempting a poorly structured character assassination. Observe:

Le Guin’s feminism is less overtly phobic of the male sex than that of Andrea Dworkin, but it is no less absolute. She requires nothing less…than the abolition of Western civilization as we’ve known it and the (re)institution of a benevolent, holistic, shamanistic matriarchy. (125)

Funny, I could have sworn I would have noticed such a thing in my readings of Le Guin. But please, do go on.

Ideology breeds nonsense, and, in the second and third generation, pernicious nonsense. In the course of the two decades since the publication of her most accomplished novel, The Dispossessed (1974), while Le Guin’s work has undergone a gradual PC ossification, her reputation among feminist critics has increased by inverse proportion. (127)

Oh, perish the thought! Disch then goes on to call feminist literary criticism “Orwellian duckspeak” (128), insults Jessica Amanda Salmonson for being trangendered, and dives headlong into sexist rhetoric that would have likely earned a punch from Robert E. Howard.

If this really was the best sf criticism had to offer (as some of the cover blurbs enthusiastically claim), we’d be in a sorry state indeed. Fortunately, we can put it on the shelf with Wizardry and Wild Romance as another faux-academic work by an author who really should have just stayed away from sf criticism altogether.

A poem

Is not a sentence

Composed by

Pressing the “Enter” key

At random intervals.

Please

Remember this.

I’ve talked plenty about Mr. Kay on this blog before, and it’s no secret that I think he’s one of the finest Canadian fantasy authors writing today. There’s no doubt Kay cares deeply for language and knows how to craft a sentence, and his historical bent immediately puts him in line with my own interests. However, instead of deep analysis, I thought the best way to mark the occasion was a flippant survey of Kay’s various books done with something less than literary rigour. This time, it’s all about what I thought about these books, just to make things clearer if I reference Kay’s novels in the future.

So without further ado…

The Fionavar Tapestry

I’ve already written at length about this trilogy before. As a restatement: at its worst, it reads like The Once and Future King – The Lord of the Rings crossover fan fiction…but really good The Once and Future King – The Lord of the Rings crossover fan fiction.

What I didn’t go into was my annoyance at the sheer middle-class-ness of the main characters drawn from our world into Fionavar; they end up becoming different people, but while stuck with them at the University of Toronto, I found I had a hard time identifying with these folks. Not only were these young people who already enjoyed class privilege, they also got to go on a grand adventure! So much for personal wish-fulfilment, since it seems Fionavar’s only open for “the normals” and not for a poor ol’ immigrant like me.

Tigana

So, this one’s often praised as a masterpiece, while out of all of Kay’s books, I enjoyed this one the least. I appreciate that Kay tried to engage with the idea of historical memory, but I don’t think he actually quite got there. He also starts showing a tendency to go off on long tangents describing the vast import of some historical moment, which gets annoying. We’re all too often told how to feel, and get hit with overwrought reminisces on the lost province of Tigana. It’s all so very maudlin, and all so very boring. This is very different from the often lean prose of The Fionavar Tapestry, and pushes the page count up considerably. The histrionics feel entirely forced and the novel’s middle section meanders in a thoroughly unenjoyable fashion. Few of the characters managed to hold my interest, either, due to their tendency to wax emotional at inappropriate times. It all tumbles to a conclusion that adequate, but also dissatisfying. Suffice to say, one female character that should have stayed dead, lived, and one female character that should have lived, died.

Really, I think the novel fails because the focus is too vague, the issues and history leaning too much towards the universal, the characters leaning too far towards the archetypal. I might, however, just be annoyed at how Kay presents rusalki here, which don’t match in anything but looks to their Slavic source.

A Song for Arbonne

It wasn’t the novel I hoped for; instead of interplaying politics in the Albeginsian Crusade followed by appalling destruction, we get a lot of build up and a single battle. The protagonist here is a lot easier to get behind than in Tigana—he’s a straight-talker annoyed with courtly manners, but for all that, he’s still a noble. Once more, we get a cadre of “witty” characters laughing over jokes that aren’t particularly funny, but the novel’s worth it for its descriptions of ersatz Provence. Those are, indeed, quite beautiful.

The Lions of Al-Rassan

Here, Kay moved from the vaguer historical inspirations of Tigana and The Song for Arbonne to a specific historical moment: the Reconquista. The main changes are twofold: one, the timeline has been collapsed into a single generation; two, the three major monotheistic religions have been replaced with ones centred on astral deities (I’ve talked about this before, too). Despite the name swapping, there’s no magic here, it plays out like a historical novel. That is its chief failing, in fact: the religious stand-ins are massively underdeveloped and deep religious motivations become trivial. It’s a secularist spin on the Reconquista that’s just a little distasteful, though I appreciate that here, at least, you can see how shallow secularist interpretations of the Middle Ages can become.

Also notable for some clumsy narrative devices, especially towards the end. (Spoilers to follow). We are not told who winds the final fight, and the verbal trickery in the epilogue that hides the result until the last possible moment just to play a joke on the reader concerning one character’s marriage was really tiresome. Kay uses the narrative veil very effectively early on in the novel, he just ended up using it way too much.

An intriguing novel, anyway, but not nearly as good as the duet that came after it, set in the same world…

The Sarantine Mosaic

Two books—Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors. Crispin is a mosaicist commissioned to work on the great dome of the basilica at Sarantium. Crispin is a huge breath of fresh air in comparison to Kay’s earlier characters: he’s not an aristocrat, but a craftsman. Not a shaper of history, but a spectator to it. He can also be genuinely funny, and never wallows in his own cleverness—in many ways, he goes to prove that the witty folk aren’t so clever after all.

This was my first introduction to Kay and I think it’s the right “gateway” book to start with. The setting is clearly the Byzantine Empire during the reign of Justinian, but with some magic thrown in—strangely, the magic only affects Crispin and a few others on a highly personal level, and has almost no influence on the course of history at all. The re-imagined Byzantium-as-Sarantium is extraordinarily well realized, and the plot is, well, Byzantine. There are a few stutter-stop moments in the first volume completely rectified in the second, and my only complaint is the sheer transparency of Kay’s lifting. Swap around the names to their proper ones, and this is a historical novel with some slight alterations to history—like any other mainstream historical novel. The Sarantine Mosaic was far more historically accurate than say, Byzantium by Stephen R. Lawhead and another all-but-forgotten novel of the same name about much the same thing. Anyway, Kay already explained himself on that score, but…

Bassanids? Bassanids? Really, Mr. Kay?

Ysabel

A semi-sequel to The Fionavar Tapestry that is almost entirely unrelated beyond sharing two characters. Not the main character, however. Ned is a 15 year-old son of a famous photographer working in Provence. Wandering around a monastery uncovers a three thousand year old love triangle that plays out at regular intervals through history; it’s a tale of the past bubbling into the present, told with poetic simplicity. Unfortunately, Kay’s background becomes a hindrance again: the present-day characters are aggressively upper-middle class. Ned even listens to Coldplay, and it’s hard to make me sympathize with someone who listens to Coldplay. If there’s any band that expresses the worst elements of the middle class in the western world…it’s Coldplay.

Also notable for a sequence at the end that made me just slightly uncomfortable, where a 20-some year old prepositions Ned. If the genders had been reversed, this wouldn’t have been acceptable. As is, it’s still Not Okay.

Still a lovely book, though.

The Last Light of the Sun

Kay’s finest work. Kay’s ornate style is cut down here to a much rougher use of language rife with sentence fragments and strong images recounting the frozen north. It’s also, for Kay, a surprisingly brutal novel, featuring characters far off from civilization with no pretensions towards aristocratic mannerisms or even the cleverness so often stressed in Kay’s previous work. The tone is far more respectful than The Lions of Al-Rassan in regards to the Christian stand-in Jaddite religion (The Sarantine Mosaic was also much more nuanced, but not to this extent), and also delves into Celtic and Norse myth. Our third outing in the world of two moons takes us to not-Britain during the not-Viking conquest, but with one important difference: all the deeply held beliefs of the people in question are true. In terms of historical fiction, this is the way to go: the characters think in ways that are alien to us, and they are never judged for their seeming irrationality because the world actually is like that.

Also has one of the most beautiful closing sentences I’ve encountered anywhere. Highly, highly recommended.

Under Heaven

And, unfortunately, after restraining himself so well in The Last Light of the Sun, Kay released all his pent-up need for self-indulgence in this novel, reaching near-Tigana levels of obfuscating on life and philosophy and the historic moment while completely ignoring the narrative at hand. The setting this time is Tang dynasty China during the An Lushan rebellion; well, except China is now called Kitai (I don’t really like this swap, as Kara Khitai was a real place), and An Lushan, also known as An-shi, is now An Li. Shen Tai, at least, is a character of extraordinary dignity: I liked him, as well as his poet-friend Sima Zian (A.K.A. Li Bo in our world), but Kay’s digression became distracting. Too much “then he knew this was the moment that would change his life forever” moments from too many people. Also features swords-on-backs (nooooo!) and far too many sexy Asian lady-assassins—the Kanlin, who have no real historical precedent and don’t really fit the landscape of the novel. And the matchmaking at the end makes no sense. At all.

That said, Kay does indeed depict an Asian society without importing a white person for the audience to “identify” with, which is a welcome change from just about any other historical novel written by a westerner that’s set in China. It’s also better than Tigana, has some interesting bits, and is fairly sensitive in its depiction of Chinese history…except for the Kanlin.

In any case, I’m eagerly awaiting his next book. This is probably my Last Word on Guy Gavriel Kay.  I’d love to do a similar run-down of Charles de Lint, but my God, there’s so many books by him! SO MANY!