Yeah, Write

"Why is it, with all the histories available to build a fantasy, all we ever get is medieval Europe with dragons?"

"Gluten-Free Fantasy" was a panel about a panel.¹ In the course of the original panel, Scott Westerfeld -- who asked the question above -- mentioned that so many of the things considered standard in modern fantasy² are not really necessary: swords, horses, a "hearty stew" bubbling in the fireplace, even bread. His final words were something along the lines of "Wheat is not necessary for fantasy."

At that point, the original con-goers rose up as one and smote the entire panel, leaving nary a soul alive. They sheathed their swords, mounted their horses and rode into the sunset in search of dragons, chomping loaves of whole-wheat bread.

My words will not express how funny this panel was; you really had to be there. What I'll try to address is the very real problem of cookie-cutter fantasy. Everybody wants to be Tolkien. Or rather, everybody wants to read Tolkien.

Karl Schroeder said, "As China Mieville will point out at virtually every dinner party, fiction is about consolation. It's about feeling good at the end of the day." Jim Frenkel called it the Fear of the New. At a certain level, fiction is comfort food. If we buy a gallon of milk that turns out to be full of California Merlot, we feel ripped off and betrayed even if we like Merlot, because that's not what we wanted when we bought it.

Scott noted that the writers with the biggest followings are not the best writers, they are the ones with the strongest "contract" with their readers. When you pick up a John Grisham book, you know you are getting a lawyer drama with lots of moral angst.³ When you pick up a Stephen King novel, you know you're getting expertly-drawn regular folks beset by malevolent evil forces with gruesome consequences.

Scott suggests that fantasy is actually more conservative than SF. We don't see dogsled fantasy or China fantasy or archipelago fantasy. What we do get is more medieval Europe with dragons.

Is this really because what fantasy readers want is "the same as last time, only different" as Patrick Nielsen Hayden put it? He quotes his wife Teresa as saying "Nobody ever walked into a bookstore looking for a 'sensitive new voice'." Patrick thinks the disconnect stems from the fact that writers are neophilic⁴ but most readers are not.

So how do we get Gluten-Free Fantasy? How do we draw from a sourcebook like A STORY AS SHARP AS A KNIFE , tapping into the wild dream-world of Native American culture, or do what Lian Hearn did with his TALES OF THE OTORI series and base a fictional world on feudal Japan?

Jim Frenkel pointed out that it's hard to sell an editor on a radically-different kind of book, and once you've gotten them on board, it's hard to sell to the public. However, once you've gotten a book "like that" out there, it becomes much easier to pitch something similar. He himself has published what he calls "some very whacked out books" because he believed so strongly in them and some of them become perennials, but it's a risky endeavor.

I brought up a concept I read in Malcolm Gladwell's fantastic THE TIPPING POINT that there are different sorts of people involved in spreading something new and helping it catch fire. You've got your early adopters, who are often socially-isolated but very tuned-in to new things. They can't spread the idea, because they don't have very many friends. The second group is what Seth Godin called "promiscuous sneezers",⁵ who don't discover new things except through their friends who are early adopters, but they evangelize what they like to gobs of people because they are the sort of people who know everybody. They are the ones who "unleash the ideavirus" as Godin phrases it. I wondered aloud whether the problem is that fantasy lacks these promiscuous sneezers.

Scott was adamant that at least in the YA genre, exactly the opposite was true. His fans are constantly online and exchanging opinions, spreading the word about new books and authors they like. The Net has given them the opportunity to be both early adopters who prefer to hang out in their room alone as well as the sneezers who have dozens or hundreds of friends: online.

Karl Schroeder says he has a list of 3 blogs he uses to find out what's cool in the world: Cory Doctorow, Tobias Buckell, and John Scalzi. He knows that if he has the three of them out there looking, he's not going to miss much.

This gives me hope for the future of Gluten-Free Fantasy. The only growth area in SF/F right now is among the young, and they're the ones who've taken their opinions into their own hands. They've taken it upon themselves to be rainmakers for their favorite books, their favorite authors. We can only hope that some of them are getting tired of Europe with dragons.

Last but not least, only the cockroaches -- and John Scalzi -- will survive.

1. I believe it was from back in 2004 [↩]
2. ie, post-Tolkien [↩]
3. With a few poor-selling exceptions [↩]
4. They actively seek out new things [↩]
5. Which got a huge laugh from the assembled [↩]

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 2nd, 2008 at 5:40 pm and is filed under ConFusion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.