A View From Corona #4
Jeremy Lassen | March 12th 2002 at 10:22 am
“The solitary, steep hill called Corona Heights was black as pitch and very silent, like the heart of the unknown. It looked steadily downward and northeast away at the nervous, bright lights of Downtown San Francisco as if it were a great predatory beast of night surveying its territory in patient search of prey.”
- Fritz Leiber, Our Lady Of Darkness
This month’s issue of Locus Magazine features an interview with China Miéville. I mention this because any fan of “genre fiction” - that is, horror, fantasy and SF - should run out and read it. China makes some profound observations about fantasy, and the tradition of Tolkien’s bucolic style of fantasy. The editors of Locus put the following quote from the interview on the cover.
“The idea of consolatory fantasy makes me want to puke. It’s not that you can’t have comfort, or even a happy ending of sorts, but to me the idea that the purpose of a book should be to console intrinsically means the purpose is therefore not to challenge or to subvert or to question; it is absolutely status quo oriented - completely, rigidly, aesthetically - and I hate that idea. I think the best fantasy is about the rejection of consolation… using the fantastic aesthetic to do the opposite of Consolation.”
China Miéville is firmly committed to doing what Dennis McFarland describes in A Face at the Window (See a view from Corona #2) – attacking the status quo. While horror fiction may achieve this by confronting a PROTAGONIST of the narrative with a world that does not conform to his expectations, the kind of fiction China describes attacks the status quo by presenting the READER with a narrative that does not conform to his or her expectations.
This connection - between horror and this type on non-consolatory fantasy - is reflected in the British Fantasy Society’s annual awards. Far more so than the World Fantasy Awards, the British Fantasy Awards selections seem to emphasize that the horror genre is a subset of a larger tradition - the fantasy tradition. This is easily demonstrated by the fact that Tim Lebbon, one of the darkest, creepiest horror writers to come out of England in a long time, has won a British Fantasy Award two years in a row. China himself says at the beginning of the Locus interview “I never agreed with the idea that there’s this rigid distinction between fantasy and Science Fiction and horror. To me, they are part of the same tradition, which I generally call ‘Weird Fiction’…”
This aesthetic choice on Miéville’s part – to write non-consolatory fantasy, and to not acknowledge rigid distinctions between the genres – may explain why fans of horror fiction, who don’t normally read or care for “fantasy” (in the tradition of Tolkein) love China Miéville’s novel of fantasy, Perdido Street Station. At its core, it does what horror novels do best. It challenges the status quo… It says that the emperor has no clothes… It screams from the tops of its literary lungs, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!”
And this is kind of funny, because the last time a bunch of British fantasists screamed “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!” we ended up with the British New Wave of SF. The New Wave movement in SF explicitly addressed and attacked Golden Age SF’s themes of consolation. But it did so across SF and Fantasy boundaries. Two of the New Wave’s biggest standard bearers, Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison are probably best know for their fantasy work. It should come as no surprise that Miéville sites M. John Harrison as one of his biggest influences.
Back in the day, the New Wave writers were winning the war on one front, but were losing it on another. While New Wave writers were reaching out to SF’s existing readers and saying “No… there’s something more… SF can be more!”, Tolkien’s books were influencing an entirely new generation of readers who never read any Golden Age SF. These readers were enchanted by Tolkien’s visions of elves and hobbits… they were enchanted the same way that Campbell’s pulp readers were enchanted by visions of techno utopianism.
And so while SF publishers acknowledged this change, and began redefining what SF was and could be, the Fantasy side of their house increasingly fell under the long, dark shadow of Tolkienism. Scores and scores of never-ending epic fantasy quests became the DEFINITION of what fantasy was, and what it could be. And a generation of readers grew up never knowing that fantasy could be something MORE…
The thematic battle that the New Wave writers fought is still being fought today by writers like Miéville, but they aren’t addressing the excesses of golden age SF. Rather, they are addressing the excesses of the “Tolkeinesqe fantasy industry” which, though it has been financially rewarding for many publishers, has been artistically hollow for some time.
So, if you are a horror reader who wants to try something new… Give China Miéville a try. If you are a fantasy fan who hasn’t really read beyond the Tolkien tradition, but you want to try something new, give Miéville a try. And especially if you love the New Wave aesthetic and the authors associated with the movement, give Miéville a try. In any case, you won’t be disappointed. In person and in print, Miéville is an incredibly articulate and passionate student, historian and fan of the genre. The best compliment that I can give him is that the quality of his writing reflects this enthusiasm and passion.
In addition to China Miéville, if you want to see some contemporary British authors who are challenging the status quo, take a look through some of the recent years British Fantasy Society and British Science Fiction Association award winners and nominees. Some of my favorites include Tim Lebbon, Mary Gentle, Graham Joyce, Chaz Brenchley, Michael Marshall Smith, Rhys Hughes, Alastair Reynolds, Peter F. Hamilton, Ken MacLeod, Conrad Williams and Eric Brown. In addition to looking at the award winners and nominees, keep an eye on the UK’s small press scene. Interzone is an invaluable magazine that should not be missed, and I can recommended without reservation anything published by Razor Blade Press and PS Publishing. Keep digging for those new and up and coming authors, and if you run across somebody who seems to be doing something really special, drop me a line.
Post Script:
While writing this column, I was working at Borderlands Books and during the course of that Sunday afternoon, I sold 5 copies of various Tolkien books to people who had just seen the movie. I’ll do what I can to get them to read Miéville when they come back in…
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