Stage the Future: The First International Conference on Sci-Fi Theatre (Saturday 26th - Sunday 27th April 2014)

Here's a heads-up for this forthcoming event: there's still time to sign-up for it. It's happening at my gaff, Royal Holloway, University of London at the end of April. Keynote Speakers: Dr. Jen Gunnels (New York Review of Science Fiction) and the brilliant Dr. Nick Lowe (Royal Holloway, University of London). This event brings together scholars, critics, writers and performers for the first international academic conference on Science Fiction Theatre. You can find out more, including the schedule, at the end of this link.

Rob Latham (ed) The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction (forthcoming 2014)

I have a chapter in this. An email from the editor informs all contributors that its publication date is now September, and passes on this (rather handsome) cover art. Looking forward, I am.

21st-Century YA Fantasy: the Meaning of Victoriana

A few weeks ago, Jenni Hill at Orbit sent me an ARC of Charlie Fletcher’s forthcoming new YA novel, The Oversight. This was kind of her, and I enjoyed it very much: it’s about a secret society who police the borders between the mundane and magical worlds in a richly imagined Victorian world.

I liked the way it refused to talk-down to its audience: from characters speaking untranslated French to one another to a series of properly macabre and chilling set-pieces. It is Gothic as all get out, with a splendidly eerie sense of the way the unearthly lies cheek-by-jowl with the mundane, and with cheerable goodies and grotesque baddies. It’s possible the publishers hope that it will coast to success on the Potter slipstream—the young adults (now adults; plus of course the older adults) who loved HP and are looking for the next iteration of it; the youngsters, whose life-experiences are presumably not that different to the previous generation who fell in love with Rowling’s world, and who might just as easily fall in love with a well-realised and busy world in which magic and mundanity interpenetrate. In which your p.o.v. characters get to fight old evil. In which the utilitarian ugliness of modern life is overlaid with something more elegantly styled, something a little more old-fashioned.

I don’t know about that—it’s a good novel, and might do very well; but I have a poor record of predicting such things. Still, thinking about it has got me pondering the particular logic of YA Fantasies that have been so culturally dominant recently. I reach, metaphorically speaking, into the great stream of the many hundreds of books published this century and aimed at this market and grasp in my hands the ones—series, all of them—that seem to me to have had the biggest cultural impact. And this is what I throw, wriggling, on the riverbank: Potter; His Dark Materials, Unfortunate Events (poorly named ‘a series’, since the books read more as if wired together in parallel); Philip Reeve'S Mortal Engines tetralogy, sometimes called the ‘Predator Cities Quartet’ (2001-06);  Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series (2001-12); Horowitz’s Alex Rider books (2000-present); the Spiderwick Chronicles by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black (2003 onwards); Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus Books (2003-05); Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses series (2003-8); Collins’s Hunger Games books (2008-10; also relevant are her Underland novels, 2003–2007); Meyers’ Twilight trilogy (2005-07); Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books (2005-09) and Cassandra Clare’s six Mortal Instruments books (2007 onwards).

That’s a pretty diverse list of titles, of course; but a couple of obvious points can be made with respect to them all. The main one is the way almost all of them are predicated upon a dynamic between the mundane and the magical—they are, to one extent or another, Fantasy. (Alex Ryder is a James Bond fantasy, which is a fantasy of a slightly different kind; and there's no 'magic' in Blackman's alt-reality. But otherwise Magic and Fantasy are the dominants here). I think we can pull out Potter, Pullman, Collins, Meyers as the four authors who have had the biggest cultural footprint over the last 15 years or so; but I’d say that in a smaller way Unfortunate Events, Bartimaeus, Mortal Instruments and maybe Artemis Fowl have also made big splashes. What does this mode of fantasy say about 21st-century children’s literature—or about 21st-century children?

Well, the first thing to note is that older modes of Genre Fantasy are still current: kids are still reading (and watching) Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and Narnia. And that helps us sketch out a broad cultural chronology of 20th- and 21st-C Fantasy writing. There are many precursors, of course; but Tolkien is the keystone. Not so much the original appearance of these books in 1952-3, but their discovery by the 1960s generation, set the terms for the explosion in 1960s-90s Fantasy writing. There’s lots to say about this, but the thing I want to concentrate on at the moment is the particular kind of historical nostalgia the books embody. Middle Earth is, broadly, medieval and older. Narnia likewise. In both worlds, elements of 18th/19th Century bourgeois respectability exist as a kind of leaven, to connect the pre-Modern world of the story with the (necessarily) Modern world of the readers. The great tide of post-Tolkien Heroic Fantasy titles carries this on: we read about worlds that are more magical and colourful than our world, and they are presented as being those things because they are less Modern than our world.

For Lewis (and also for Tolkien, though for different, more theological, reasons) the medieval world was—simply—to be preferred to the Modern. Where the 20th-C was mechanised and brutal and ugly, medieval art and literature opened the mind into a world more beautifully conceived. This has at least two layers for Lewis: both that the medieval world appealed to him, and that he found in the medieval world a validation for the  pleasure of looking back in time, rather than concentrating on the present, as such. In The Discarded Image, Lewis describes the delight such backward and forward gazing into other times gave Medieval Man:

Historically as well as cosmically, medieval man stood at the foot of a stairway; looking up, he felt delight. The backward, like the upward, glance exhilarated him with a majestic spectacle, and humility was rewarded with the pleasures of admiration.” [187]

A little later he notes ‘other ages have not had a Model so universally accepted as theirs, so imaginable, and so satisfying to the imagination … I have made no serious effort to hide the fact that the old Model delights me as I believe it delighted our ancestors. Few constructions of the imagination seem to me to have combined splendour, sobriety, and coherence in the same degree’ [216]

Well, I’m not here to say he was wrong in that; although I tend to think he was. I’m more interested in the way Fantasy as a contemporary mode has been, is being, shaped by the kick-back against Tolkienian-Lewisian medievalism of conceit. This kick-back has taken several forms. One of the least successful, I think, was Mike Moorcock’s insistence that Tolkien, so far from being Medieval/Anglo Saxon, was on the contrary too bourgeois—too safe and cosy and middle-class. That Lord of the Rings represented, in his resonant but misleading phrase, ‘Epic Pooh’.

It’s not that Moorcock misses the target with this jibe; it’s that Tolkien's conception of Fantasy was in a precise sense pre-bourgeois, pre-Modern, closer to fascist reappropriations of the heroic warrior code of a rigidly hierarchical society. Modern post-Tolkien Fantasy as a mode has stampeded towards the Bourgeois, of course; because it knows its readers. But that's a different argument. Grimdark represents a different critique: in effect, it says ‘Tolkien and Lewis believed the medieval to be better than the modern, but it was much worse; not elegance, splendour, sobriety, and coherence, but violence, violence, violence and more violence—a war of all against all of truly dystopian ghastliness.’

The problem with the medieval focus is that it exists at too distant a remove from modern life. If a work of literature, after all, says nothing to me about my life then how can I engage with it? ‘Medievalism’ becomes escapist—dressing up, Disneyland, an imaginative act whose point is precisely its removal from the present.

How then to engage with the present? Realism, it seems, doesn’t cut it; we don’t need the actual present, we need the present interpenetrated by magic—and this is precisely the problem, because we are Modern but magic is pre-Modern. Magic is what has been usurped in the Modern age by Science. The difficulty a writer of Fantasy faces, therefore, is in bridging the pre-Modern and the Modern. The Lord of the Rings was amongst other things one attempt at a solution to this problem, constructed by braiding together modern perspectives (the cosy Edwardian hobbits, with their pipes and steam kettles and gardening) and pre-modern (the medieval Gondor, the Old English Rohan), not only in terms of story but style—the hobbit chapters are of course written with a kind of early-20th-century contemporaneity of narratorial voice, where the later sequences inhabit a more antiquated and high-flown idiom, full of inversions, dated vocabulary, invocative and rhetorical stiffness, although at the same time rather splendid and suitably heroic.

But it's surprising how few writers have attempted to imitate Tolkien's stylistic strategy in this, although of course they have stolen plenty of other things from his writing. There are other ways of tackling this problem: for instance, rather than sacrifice a modern style many Fantasy writers have given up the medieval setting: there's clearly no problem with using a 19th-century novelistic voice to describe a basically 19th-century world, as in the work of Ian MacLeod and China Miéville.

I’d peg the fountainhead of this mode of Fantasy with Mervyn Peake—a writer Moorcock praises in proportion to the amount he pisses on Tolkien. It’s not hard, of course, to trace the Peake influence on Moorcock’s own fantastical writing.

In one sense the Gormenghat books are ‘nineteenth-century’ is style and form, because of the cod-Dickensian prose and characterisation that Peake deploys. But at the same time, the castle itself has a more ancient and timeless feel to it; because the point of the Gormenghast fantasies is that its world stands outside history. I remember my startlement when, reading through the original trilogy as a youngster, a motor car rolls up in Titus Alone. Say what?

Adult Fantasy as a genre has ploughed (via Terry Brooks, Stephen Donaldson, Robert Jordan, Branden Sanderson and so on) a pretty deep Tolkienian furrow; and reactions against Tolkien, like G R R Martin and Joe Abercrombie, are still marked by that from which they so ostentatiously depart. Latterly (as I mention above) the Weird has attempted to relocate the ‘past’ into which Fantasy hurls its plumb line from sunny Medieval to smoggy nineteenth-century. This in turn is connected to a broader resurgence, or indeed surgence, of interest in Neo-Victoriana. I’ll come back to that in a moment.

A similar shift is evident, I think, in children’s literature—which brings me back to Fletcher’s Oversight. For a while Children’s Fantasy rode the post-Tolkien wave: I’m thinking in particular of Ursula Le Guin’s peerless Earthsea books (1968-72, with later additions), or Lloyd Alexander’s marvellous Chronicles of Prydain (1964-68).

But to look at the list of the major 21st-Century YA Fantasies, up there, is to see how little interest there seems to be in all that. (Incidentally: this is one of the reasons I’m pretty convinced Disney’s gigabudget blockbuster Maleficant is going to flop, big time).

This is probably the place with some general observations about the Neo-Victorian phenomenon. Here’s a quotation from the book that put that field on the map, critically speaking (at least: in an academic sense of critically speaking):

Neo-Victorian literature is more than historical fiction set in the nineteenth-century … it must in some respect be self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and revision concerning Victorians’ [Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009 (Palgrave 2010), 4]

It goes back a long way. The Beatles were dressing as rainbow-recoloured Edwardian soldiers in the mid 1960s. Even if we stick just to the novel, Lin Pettersson traces the rise in ‘Neo Victorian’ lit from John Fowles’s French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984), through A S Byatt’s Possession (1990) and up to a detailed reading of the aesthetics of voyeurism manifested in Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002).

‘Although neo-Victorian literature could loosely be defined as contemporary fiction set in the nineteenth century—in part or entirely—the term needs further attention, as it is a complexly revisionary highly metafictional and intertextual.’ She argues that the key thing is that neo-Victorian texts are crucially about ‘approaching the Victorians from a different viewpoint; and especially by ‘includ[ing] the perspective of previously marginalised characters to bring to view eclipsed narratives in order to give voice to the silenced.’ [Lin Pettersson, ‘The Private Rooms and Public Haunts’: Theatricality and the City of London in Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White’, in Sian Adiseshiah and Rupert Hildyard (eds), Twenty-First Century Fiction: What Happens Now (Palgrave 2013), 98]

It would certainly be hard to over-stress how ubiquitous a cultural style the neo-Victorian and neo-Edwardian is, now. Steampunk is one iteration of it; Dr Who another (for what is the Doctor if not an Edwardian English gentleman who happens to possess super-advanced alien technology); the resurgence (once, twice, thrice) of popular fascination with that most Edwardian of gentlemen, Sherlock Holmes. Pettersson’s focus on The Crimson Petal and the White pinpoints one of the ways this fascination works. The Victorians take cultural force from being more elegant and refined than us moderns, but also from being more repressed. The thing that links books like The French Lieutenant’s Woman and The Crimson Petal and the White and Fingersmith is the seemingly paradoxical one that by writing a more sexually repressive world liberates erotic charge. Look how Faber’s novel is marketed, for instance:

That only seems a paradox, of course. Freud knows very well (and Foucault has excavated the Victorian age according to precisely this logic) how repression works to magnify libido, not to eliminate it. Neo-Victorian art becomes a way of engaging with the past, of exploring previously marginalised voices, but above all it becomes a way of representing sex.

But presumably this isn’t the reason why children’s literature has so fallen in love with the neo-Victorian. And fallen in love it has; after making her name with contemporary-set kitchen-sink narratives of remarkable emotional power, Jacqueline Wilson, has recently hit it big with a series about Victorian urchins (2009 Hetty Feather, 2009; Sapphire Battersea, 2011; Emerald Star, 2012; Diamond 2013).

Speaking comedically, Gideon Coe’s The Pirates in an Adventure with … series has done very well; as have the Horrible History series, of which the ‘Vile Victorians’ is one of the best.

But it’s in Fantasy that the Victorian/Edwardian vibe comes through most potently. Look back up at that list of the biggest impact YA series of the century so far. Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus Books books are set sort-of contemporaneously; but it’s a ‘now’ in which wizards have seized power and held back societal development at more or less 19th-century levels—Crystal Palace is still standing, for instance (it’s where the denouement of the first book takes place). Philip Reeve Mortal Engines books are set in the future, after a devastating war; but all the props and settings are core Steampunk.

Pullman’s Dark Materials opens in a gloriously steampunky-Edwardian Oxford.

Clare’s Mortal Instruments books are set now (their gimmick is: humans and angels interacting); but she has followed the initial books’ success with a series of Victorian-set prequels: Clockwork Angel (2010), Clockwork Angel (2011) and Clockwork Princess (2013).

Twilight of course is set nowadays; but Bella’s love, Edward, was born 1901 making him strictly speaking a Victorian (in this I suspect Meyer was influenced by Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

That leaves two of the biggest, of course: Rowling’s Harry Potter and Collins’s Hunger Games. Here the circumstances are not, I think, Victorian in any meaningful way. But both series are historically backward looking, and that (I’d say) is the crucial thing. In Rowling’s novels we muggles inhabit the modern world, but the wizards and witches live a kind of posh 1950s, or perhaps posh 1930s realm—old fashioned, a bit antiquated, but with a style and charm and (in a very literal sense) breeding simply not present in 21st-century existence. In the Hunger Games we’re notionally in the future, and there are some SF-nal futuristic plots; but the majority of PanEm lives a nightmarish reversion to the low-tech, dust bowl poverty of 1920s-30s America. And, actually, this point is reinforced if we consider Koushan Takami’s Battle Royale, the 1999 (written in 1996) Japanese novel from which, almost certainly, Collins drew [UPDATE: people in the comments take exception to this claim, with good cause]. There schoolchildren are shipped to an island; an elderly teacher issues them all with weapons or tools and tells them to kill one another. Which they do, in a series of gruesome ways. What’s going on here, I suppose, is a the younger generation’s sense of how the older generation is obsessed with violence and death. Takami was born in 1969; his parents’ generation fought World War 2. That’s what’s behind the symbolic logic of the novel’s extraordinary violence.

These two texts bring me to my thesis, the argument I want to make. In a nutshell it’s this: what these YA Fantasies all share is a fascination with history not as history, but as a way of conceptualising the parental generation. Tolkien-Lewis’s far distant medieval pageant has no relevance here: it is too far back. ‘Victorian times’ might seem a little remote too—but the key, I think, is that these fantasies operate by the symbolic rather than chronological logic. The Victorian-Edwardian period is a style (of dress, of machinery); a code (repressive and authoritarian, if elegantly so) and embodiment of ‘past-ness’ itself. The key conceptual perspective here is Jameson’s Postmodernism (1990), and his argument that one of the features if postmodernity is the replacement of history as lived experience with history as a pastiche of empty visual styles (of dress, of architecture and so on) that are then shuffled about by culture.

Nostalgia films restructure the whole issue of pastiche and project it onto a collective and social level, where the desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past is now refracted through the iron law of fashion change and the emergent ideology of the generation....Faced with these ultimate objects -- our social, historical, and existential present, and the past as "referent" -- the incompatibility of a postmodernist "nostalgia" art language with genuine historicity becomes dramatically apparent” Instead of genuine historicity, postmodern art conveys pastness … through stylistic connotation” [Postmodernism, 18]

The Victorian age styles ‘the older generation’, and the real focus of all these YA fantasies is the absence of, or failings of, the parents. Books either, like Percy Jackson, style themselves as explicitly about the absent but divine parent figure; or, like Potter, they dramatize the peril in which the children find themselves (and from which they must extricate themselves) as the consequences of what their parents’ generation were unable to finish; or like Twilight, more perversely, the (great-grand) parental generation furnishes the heroine with her lover-husband—and integrating the past into the present becomes a kind of lived pharmakon (because it will make Bella immortal, unless her pregnancy kills her first). In Philip Pullman’s more complex symbolic orchestration of this trope, the children—in Subtle Knife the only creatures ‘pure’ enough to be able to travel between the worlds—must negotiate a complex, dangerous path between their actual but hidden parents (as with Lyra, Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter) and the divinities, Metatron and the Authority, whose real business is shown to be—that they must die, in order to enable the next generation to flourish. This business, the appalling strangeness and glory of coming into individuality that we call ‘growing up’, is tangled up with the origin-points of that individuality—parents as people, and parental culture as authority and ‘the past’—in fantastically powerful and dialectical ways. These ways cannot be well captured by ‘mimesis’, I think; and because the psychological forces at work as so immanently forceful ‘magic’ is the symbolism that most writers have lighted upon, to articulate it.

BICEP2 discovers evidence of exponential growth in the universe's first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second

Story. You know what I love about that image? It's the way there's clearly a great big blue question mark in the middle of it.

Malorie Blackman, Noughts and Crosses (2001)

We can thumbnail this famous novel as 'Romeo and Juliet in an alt-reality UK where black people are the ruling caste and white people the oppressed minority'. The story itself concerns the star-crossed love between on the one hand young Sephy Hadley, a dark-skinned 'Cross', (the daughter of a wealthy and influential politician called Kamal Hadley), and on the other Callum McGregor, a pale-skinned nought. Blackman's world used to be a slave owning one; and although slavery has been abolished at the time the book is set, society is structured via a strictly enforced Jim Crow apartheid. It's a novel primarily about the intensities of teenage feeling, and more generally it's a book about the monstrous scale of unfairness that institutional racism entails. The stylistic and narrative strokes are fairly broad, the style occasionally a touch crude, and the characters are given to rather melodramatic posturing; but then again that's what it's like being a teenager, and falling in love, and feeling intensely how unfair everything is. And it can't be denied that Noughts and Crosses generates real affective punch: it sets out to work upon the readerly emotions and it succeeds powerfully.

Concentrating on this, the first novel in the trilogy, we have to say that Blackman's world is not built, exactly. The students on my Children's Literature course were surprised when I described it as 'science fiction' (though they shouldn't have been: basically I view EVERYTHING as science fiction apart from a few French naturalist novels of the later 19th-century). And in a sense they're right: Blackman does not do what many SF writers would, by way of explaining at length how this alternative historical circumstance came about. In later novels it is intimated that this is a world in which Africa conquered Europe rather than the other way around, which if pushed too hard would turn the novel into a fable about colonialism. Blackman's ambition is broader than that, I think: she less interested in the sorts of historical circumstances that give rise racism, and more in the human as-it-were existential wrongness of racism as such. Her novel accordingly reads as a thought-experiment made flesh: imagine the racist society of 1950s America (except imagine it in Britain, because, I suppose, that's the world Blackman knows best), and then swap the skin colours. This does a couple of things that resonate well for YA audiences, although things that may strike older readers as perhaps a tad over-simplifying; and amongst those things are: 'See how arbitrary racist prejudice is!' And, to white readers, complacent in their own privilege: 'see how it could be for you! Imagine if the boot were on the other foot -- you wouldn't like it, would you?' I don't mean to snark: these strike me as both not only dramatically effective but also a worthwhile hermeneutic for younger (and for that matter, older) readers to undertake. The problem is it tends to diminish the novel's capacity to generate a sense of the density and heft of actual lived experience. Of the two prior examples of this conceptual gimmick, both sciencefictional (because, for me—well, see above), it reminded me more of the slightly airless Trek episode, 'Let That Be Your Last Battlefield' (1969):

And less of Heinlein's closer-in-concept Farnham's Freehold (1964).

(To digress for a moment: The New York Times blurb, there, says: 'Robert Heinlein wears imagination as if it were his private suit of clothes.' I've genuinely no idea what, or even if, that means.)

Anyway, that Heinlein novel is considerably more deplorable, ethically and ideologically speaking, than the Trek treatment; but it does come unforgettably alive on the page. The Trek episode comes across as a good-hearted sermon about the pointless arbitrariness of racism.

I don't mean to make heavy weather of the book's worldbuilding, by the way. It's fine; fit for purpose, narratively speaking. It falls foul of the Jared Diamond Guns Germs and Steel argument; but there are plenty of people who don't like that book. Me, I do like it, and for one reason above all. Prior to Diamond there were two main theories as to why Europe conquered Africa America and India and not the other way around: one, that it was a mere matter of chance that history shook out that way, which isn't a very satisfying theory; and two, that white Europeans were in themselves 'superior' to the black and brown peoples of the world. The problem with this latter theory is that it is clearly bollocks. Diamond's theory at least explains the historical narrative without stooping to racism.

When race comes up in discussion I generally say that I don't believe in it, much in the same way that I don't believe in Father Christmas. I mean this quite literally: I don't think there's any such thing, and more specifically think it was invented more or less out of whole cloth by a group of 19th-century scientists determined to cloak their hatred and will-to-oppress in pseudo-scientific jargon.

Influential classifications by Georges Buffon, Petrus Camper and Christoph Meiners all classified "Negros" as inferior to Europeans.[44] In the United States the racial theories of Thomas Jefferson were influential. He saw Africans as inferior to Whites especially in regards to their intellect, and imbued with unnatural sexual appetites, but described Native Americans as equals to whites.

There's no biological or scientific basis to this at all; it makes as much sense as the 1735 theory of Carolus Linnaeus (of 'zoological taxonomy' fame), when he divided the human race Homo into four 'sub-species' (Europaeus, Asiaticus, Americanus and Afer) on the basis of the exploded Galenic notion of the four humours, sanguine, melancholic, choleric and phlegmatic respectively. (Not that Linneaus wasn't racist too; he was actually racist as all get out. 'Homo Sapiens Europaeus' was, he insisted, active, perceptive and adventurous; whereas 'Homo Sapiens Afer' was 'crafty, lazy and careless'. Boo to that.)

People sometimes react badly when I say I don't believe in race, because they think I'm trying to Podsnappishy sweep away behind me the fact of racism. Not at all. I'm with Adam Kotsko on this: the fact that race is a social construct makes it more malign than if it were merely a biological datum:

One often hears people declare something to be “just a social construct” as a way of dismissing its reality or relevance. In reality, the fact that something is a social construct makes it infinitely more powerful and difficult to escape than if it were, for instance, a biological brute fact. We get around biological brute facts all the time. Social forces regulate our eating, drinking, defecation, urination, sexual pairings, etc., etc. Social forces can drive us to suicide — meaning they have overcome the most fundamental biological drive of survival. Biology isn’t infinitely pliable, of course, but it is hardly destiny.

By saying that I don't believe in race I'm very specifically not saying that we should stop talking about race—for example I'm not suggesting that we should replace discussion of race with discussion of 'ethnicity' (something in which I do, as it happens, believe. 'What distinguishes race from ethnicity? Ethnicity tends to emphasise matters of culture, language and religion: part of the legal definition of "malay" in Malaysian law is that one is Muslim. Race, on the other hand, emphasizes easily recognised physical characteristics (such as skin colour) and tends to rely on a folk theory of biological origins' [John Monaghan and Peter Just, Social and Cultural Anthropology (OUP 2000), 96]). But we need to keep talking about race precisely as a made-up thing to begin to understand the way the 20th-century was so comprehensively blighted, and the lives of billions of human beings wrecked and ended, in the service of a purely imaginary Cthulu-like entity. Race continues to cast its malign spell.

The history of the way this concept has been constructed is extremely important to understand, too. The word 'racism' was invented by Ruth Benedict in 1943 ('Racial prejudice,' she wrote, 'makes people ruthless'). That date's not a coincidence. The 20th-century was the great epoch of race-inspired massacres. Contrast the tendency of previous centuries (from the Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572 through to the Armenian genocides of the 1890s) to focus such mass-murder onto target-groups defined by their religion. But the 1940s saw the increasing influence of 'race'-based ideas come to terrible fruition (UNESCO's issuing of The Race Question, July 1950, can be taken as the beginning of the 'official' global kick-back against racist ideas). That modern Fantasy begins around this time, with the racially conceived (though, I'd say, not therefore necessarily racist in the Nazi sense of the word) Middle Earth setting a kind of genre template is also not a coincidence; although the way Fantasy as a whole picked up the idea that difference should be represented 'racially' and ran with it (via Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft and a thousand Tolkien imitation fat fantasy novels) is in itself a fascinating topic for analysis.

***

Analysis for another time, though. The point of this rather meandering digression on race is to lead into a discussion of the way Blackman adapts her Romeo and Juliet source text. Because, of course, that's what Blackman does with Shakespeare's play: she racialises it. We could start by asking, of Romeo and Juliet: why do the Capulets and Montagues hate one another so much? In the play it seems that it's just one of those inter-family squabbles. It's certainly not that they come from different racial or ethnic backgrounds. WS.'s play starts off by specifying ‘two households, both alike in dignity': but the ‘noughts’ and 'crosses' in Blackman's novel are certainly not alike in dignity. The noughts are deprived of social dignity and equality. Presumably the point is to relocate this ‘dignity’ to a human level.

The midway text, I'm thinking, is West Side Story (1957), a text which racialises the familial hostility along Puerto-Rican/Polish lines (casting the icily beautiful but very Russian-American-looking Natalie Wood as the Puerto-Rican Juliet 'Maria' in the 1961 film complicates this racial logic in interestingly, though inadvertently, twisted ways I think). Still, R&J is a significant 'tragic' template to choose. As David Bevington notes, there was something ‘new’ in the play; what he calls ‘a sense of the anomalous’:

The idea of tragedy came with the sources [for Romeo and Juliet], and is not one which either the Fall of Princes or revenge tragedy provided a formula. Nor does the pattern owe anything to classical and neo-classical theories of tragedy … [Bevington, ‘Tragedy in Shakespeare’s Career’, in Claire McEachern (ed), Shakespearean Tragedy (Cambridge 2002), 50-68; 54]

Both the 'prince's fall' and 'revenge' models of tragedy are problematic in the context of dramatizing ‘race relations’, I think. I suppose the 'fall of princes' relates distantly to the overthrow of blancitude hinted at, in turn, by Blackman's subplot about the old-history terrorist/freedom-fighter rebellion against white rule in the novels. And I suppose 'revenge', or the ethical imperative to avert it, is behind all the ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ style stories coming out of the new South Africa. But better to follow the doomed love story logic to its end. Which is what Noughts and Crosses does.

Spawny Dagon (Weird Tales, July 1938)

'Despite only having one arm, I shall yet strive to rescue that damsel from Eric Pickles and Norman Lovett.'

Also, looking more closely: is the big bald feller wearing a nipple tassel on his right boob?

Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion (1981)

I re-read this recently, and it's much better than I recalled (by 'better' I mean: less narrow and theoretical-doctrinaire). Here's a chunk from later in the book, that I'm currently mulling over.

‘Semantic changes of literary fantasy from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century can been explained by shifts in ideas and beliefs. A gradual displacement of residual supernaturalism and magic, an increasingly secularised mode of thought under capitalism, produces radical changes in interpretation and presentation … these shifts record a move away from orthodox demonology towards psychology, to account for difference and strangeness.

Theology and psychology function in similar ways to explain otherness. They have become substitutes for the sacred, or, as Jameson writes, strategic secular reinventions of it … “the search for secular equivalents of this kind seems to have reached a dead end, and to be replaced by the new and characteristic indirection of modernism, which, what in Kafka to Cortázar is henceforth termed the fantastic seeks to convey the sacred, not as presence, but rather as determinate, marled absence at the heart of the secular world” [Jameson, ‘Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan’ (1977), 145].

Fantasies express a longing for an absolute meaning, for something other than the limited “known” world. Yet whereas “faery” stories and quasi-religious tales function through nostalgia for the sacred, the modern fantastic refuses a backward looking glance. It is an inverted form of myth. It focuses on the unknown within the present. … Religious or spiritual epiphany becomes inconceivable: matter is merely matter, unredeemed, yet strangely hollowed out, insufficient in itself. Without meaning, without transcendence, modern fantasy still functions as if meaning and transcendence were to be found. It uncovers mere absence and emptiness, yet it continues its quest for an absolute.’ [157-9]

My specific focus is on the big YA Fantasies that (we have enough perspective, I think, to say this) dominated the late 90s and 21st-Century noughties: Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games and to a lesser extent: Pullman, Lemony Snicket. It's striking how un-theological these books are, and to how pronounced a degree their 'magic' (or in the case of the Collins and Unfortunate Events, their fantastic elements: the battle royale set-up in the former, the Great Unknown sea monster in the latter) stands in for and externalise the psychological dynamic of our interiority.

Rossgate

Nobody is waiting for my opinion on Rossgate (that link is to  Foz Meadows' roundup of the slapfight; it is worth reading first, and indeed, perhaps -- since I'm about to disagree with her take on it -- instead). I recognise that as a white male writer I have a less worthwhile perspective on the whole brouhaha than many; and I also recognise that too many pixels have been splurged on the topic already. Since I won't link to this post; and since random traffic to this blog is low, I don't feel I'll thereby be thrusting my obnoxious opinions too bullishly on the world. On the other hand, and since my attitude to it all has undergone pretty much a 180-degree about turn, I'll jot down why.

My first awareness of the whole circumstance was Farah Mendlesohn's resignation note. Now Farah is a friend of mine of many years standing, and one of the single most principled and conscience-driven people I know. I applauded her note, both for the stand she was taking and for the scrupulous way she orchestrated her separation from the Loncon committee (with which she found herself in disagreement) so as not to compromise the many worthwhile practical things she has done by way of setting stuff up for the convention. My sense at that time was: SF has been through a particularly intense Sexismfail turmoil over the last several months, and the efforts to make Cons welcoming safe spaces for women is an ongoing, intensely worthwhile activity. I assumed (making an ass of me, I know, I know) that Ross was doing the gig for a fat fee. Since I'm not plugged into comics culture especially closely I was not really aware of his fan credentials, and it seemed to me that Farah had a point. Then, as we all know, Twitter exploded. Ross withdrew. The whole SF community polarised and started shouting.

I've been following the ensuing kerfuffle, off and on; and the longer it has gone on the more I have found myself thinking: Adam you are an ass. Ross offered his services for free. He is, it seems clear now, a genuine geek with a real love for the genre. He would certainly have raised the media profile of the event and so on -- all these questions have been rehearsed many times of course. But the tipping point as far as I was concerned was Kameron Hurley's post on the whole thing. I urge you to read it. She compares the fight to a disagreement she had with a three-year-old. Said three year old went to punch his mother; Kameron Hurley raised her voice; the three year old was outraged since it is rude to shout and such shouting 'hurt his feelings'. Hurley's position is that yelling is justified to prevent a greater evil.

Until she applied her analogy to the situation, I was honestly unsure whether Hurley was troping the three-year-old as Ross or as Fandom. That's the trouble with double-edged allegories. Clearly, nobody was suggesting Jonathan Ross was going to rock up at the Hugos and literally hit the nominated writers. Hurley's point (I take it) is that words can be like blows. But the problem here is that only thing we have in this sorry case is words: the words people imagined Ross would use (based on the precedence of the words he has used in his day-job as a television presenter) and the words people actually used about and to Ross and his family. All hurtful.

For Hurley, Ross is the petulant 3-year-old, and fandom is the 'OK, maybe I could have been a little more cool-headed in the way I reacted, but look: I had to speak in a way that hurt your feelings to stop you punching your mother.' Which is to say, since the punching is a metaphor: ' .... but I had to speak in a way that hurt your feelings in order to stop you speaking in a way that would hurt feelings.'

The whole force of Hurley's post hinges on the imbalance of power it assumes: relatively powerless massed fandom, super-powerful white male TV celebrity. 'When did the privileged become victims?' she asks.

OK. So: one unintended consequence of reading her post, for me at least, was to wonder how the actual punching conceit might work.

Imagine a world-famous professional boxer who happened to be a massive genre fan -- an alt-reality Muhammed Ali, say. Let's say he was proposed as host, and people objected 'we can't have him as host! He will literally punch all the nominees in the face! That's what he does!' How would you respond? Let's try: no he won't. Punching people is what he does in his day job; he's here not as a boxer but as a fan whose boxing happens to have made him world famous.

Jonathan Ross's day job is: comedian. His style (like it or loathe it) is comically confrontational rather than mild and agreeable, but that's his day job. He agreed to host the Hugos as a fan, not as a television presenter.

His day job involves him interacting not with privileged people (people like me); but with super-privileged people ... folk of staggering wealth and power, movie stars, rock stars at the like. His modus operandi is: not to give these super-privileged people too easy a ride ('when did the privileged become victims?')  These people do not agree to appear on his show out of the kindness of their hearts; they do so because they intend to parlay the media exposure into even greater reserves of wealth and power. To make their blockbuster an even bigger hit, or sell even more copies of their album. Ross could, as some TV interviewers do, treat these entitled megarich celebrities with fawning deference, and thereby get as little in the way of them selling their shit to us as possible. He doesn't do that. Here's the thing: him 'not doing that' is him doing his job. You can of course object to it; but it seems to me you can't object to it on the grounds that by doing so he is picking on the disempowered or underprivileged.

Here's one scenario: Ross comes to the Hugos, makes fun of all the cowering fat boys and fat girls, laughs in their faces and then drives away in his open-topped sports car with a cigar jammed in the corner of his smug, laughing mouth. Thank heavens we have averted that dire possibility.

Here's another scenario: Ross agrees to host the Hugos for free, because he's a big genre fan. He is immediately attacked by many other fans on the grounds that he is a sexist misogynist, and not wanted, and he can take his working class speech-impedimented masculinity and his fat geek wife and their fat geek daughter and fuck off, basically (I paraphrase). He reacts testily online, and soon enough withdraws. His wife deletes her twitter feed because she finds the tweets she is receiving so upsetting. All the stuff that has actually happened.

This, to revert to Hurley's analogy, is two sides raising their voices. One side, though, is raising their voice as a proxy for raising their fists. Which, though?

I'm not suggesting that the metaphorical playing field is level, where power and influence are concerned. But I am suggesting that the victims of Ross's discourtesy, the people who have been the butt of Ross's public jokes -- the people instanced as the reason why he is The Devil in this context -- are more stratospherically privileged not only than the average SF fan, but than Ross himself. As Frankie Boyle (is he free to host the awards, I wonder?) once put it: you think these megacelebrity filmstars and rockstars are 'like' you, or want to be your friend? You don't realise that they would throw themselves under a bus if they had to live your life for so much as one afternoon? When did the privileged become victims?

So, yes: I've changed my mind on this issue.

'This Is Just To Say' by William Satan Williams

I have eaten
the soul
that was in
your brain

and which
you were probably
hoping Jesus would save
for Heaven

Forgive me
it was delicious
so small
and screamy.

Willy Ley and Wernher von Braun (with illustrations by Chesley Bonestell), The Exploration of Mars (1956)

'So,' my wife said in her "disapproving" voice, as I brought this back from the charity shop: 'you've bought another Nazi book, I see.' I could have pointed out that German rocket scientist Willy Ley fled to the States in 1935 precisely because of the rise of the Nazis; but she would then have countered with 'and von Braun?' and I would have been silenced. Nonetheless, this is a lovely book indeed, with 16 gorgeous full-colour plates (and 5 black and white ones) by the peerless Chesley Bonestell, dozens of line drawings in the body of the text, and a splendid can-do attitude by the authors with respect to what they think will be, within a few years, the actual 'two year and 239-day' mission to Mars and back. (The images below should all embiggen upon clicking, I think):

But mars, man! Mars! Look how excited these tiny spacedudes are on Deimos, gambolling and leaping like giddygoats.

Ditto Phobos:

Now THIS is what a rocket ought to look like! --

On the left, assembling the Martian spaceship in orbit (check out the tiny ur-2001-A-Space-Odyssey wheel space station in the distance). On the right, 'the hardy lichens of earth could probably live under the severe conditions of Mars.' I'm a big fan of the Hardy Lichens, actually. I especially like A Laodlichen and The Moss of Casterbridge. Not forgetting the one about how happy Gustave drove all those people crazy, Fun Gus, the Madding Crowd:

Beauteous double-page spread of the Martian ground station! --