Part 20 (2/2)

Similarly, in Lynn Flewelling'sThe Bone Doll's Twin s.e.xuality is twined about the core of power. In thatwell-received novel, a prophesied princess is hidden from her murderous royal uncle, disguised as a boy.

The disguise, however, goes far beyond the traditional fairy-tale vision of a girl wearing pants and clipping her hair. Flewelling's princess is physically transformed into a male child; in a blood rite, her body is manipulated through magic. The resulting tale traces the confused princess's friends.h.i.+ps and feudal relations.h.i.+ps, yielding a complex and fascinating examination of gender politics, all wrapped up in an ostensibly traditional fantasy story of succession, usurpation, and feudal loyalty.

Even fiction that is generally marketed to children in the United States has been shaped by the examination of s.e.xual roles and mores. Phillip Pullman's acclaimed trilogy, which began withThe Golden Compa.s.s and continued withThe Subtle Knife , concluded withThe Amber Spygla.s.s . In that novel, an alien race is dying because it has lost the secret of its reproduction. Two human children are enlisted in a battle between good and evil that spans several worlds. Their innocent discovery of their own s.e.xual natures is crucial to the resolution of the novel's intertwined plots.

In each of the examples cited above, s.e.xuality is a major element of the story, woven into the plot, the characters, and even the physical setting. It is not a fillip added to a tale to otherwise attract adult readers. It is not a lurid sidelight, designed to bring in a few prurient purchasers. Rather, it is a crucial element, vital and essential to the storytelling.

As in the past, traditional fantasy provides readers a chance to explore the meaning of their worlds through very different societies. Some aspects of the genre remain stable: the vast majority of novels are published in series. The vast majority of fantasy works contain magic, with strict rules about its application and usefulness. The vast majority of traditional fantasy explores essential conflicts between forces of good and forces of evil.

And yet the field is expanding, growing, defining itself to exist in a field separate from the media, separate from the exuberant-if occasionally simplistic-youthful audience attracted by cinema. Traditional fantasy is growing up, shaping itself for grown-up readers with grown-up concerns.

DARK FANTASY.

Ellen Datlow Venerable SF editor Ellen Datlow currently edits the online magazine SCI FICTION.

I've been interested in dark literature all my life. As a child I read everything around the house from Bulfinch's Mythology to Guy de Maupa.s.sant's and Nathaniel Hawthorne's short fiction. I watched the originalTwilight Zone television series as soon as my parents would let me stay up late. Later, I readThe Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural with stories by Ray Russell, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Gahan Wilson, and a host of other names familiar to horror readers, and Richard Matheson's Shock collections. Those are the books that hooked me on horror.

I still read a lot of dark fiction-horror/dark fantasy-as my reading for the annualYear's Best Fantasy and Horror , of course, but also because I love this subgenre of fantastic literature. Just as in science fiction, there are arguments as to what const.i.tutes ” horror”-is itonly supernatural fiction, or does it encompa.s.s psychological horror? And what about terror fiction, crime fiction? I and other aficionados of the dark literary tradition embrace a dictum comparable to Damon Knight's: ”If I as an editor point to it, it's SF.” My personal rule of thumb is, if it's dark enough-if I as a horror reader and editor read a piece of fiction that gives me a certain frisson, promotes a specific unease or feeling of dread while reading it-I'll call it horror. Horror is the only literature that is defined by its effect on the reader rather than onits subject matter. Which is why great science fiction cla.s.sics such asFrankenstein by Mary Sh.e.l.ley, ”Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, and great psychological horror works by Robert Bloch and Richard Matheson (both of whom also have published supernatural fiction) fit comfortably into the horror field.

Horror has gone through growing pains similar to SF's, although unlike SF it originally began as part of the mainstream, and in the 1980s, as a result of Stephen King's popularity, it was made into a marketing category. And because many publishers decided they needed a horror line with a set number of slots to fill, a lot of bad horror was written and published, saturating a market that really wanted more Stephen King but not necessarily more horror. The horror lines crashed and burned relatively quickly, and soon few commercial publishers would touch horror-overtly-although a flurry and then an avalanche of literary/crime/psychological horror novels were published throughout the nineties.

But unlike SF, horror has never really had more than one or two professional magazines.Weird Tales , although publis.h.i.+ng dark fantasy for many years, does not publish what I consider horror. The difference?

A matter of degree.Twilight Zone Magazine and its sisterNight Cry existed for relatively short periods of time. Some of the SF magazines have published and continue to publish a bit of horror. But out of this vacuum the small press grew.

The proliferation of desktop publis.h.i.+ng and the Internet have made it possible for anyone to self-publish or publish their friends on a shoestring budget. This innovation has produced some quality magazines and webzines and a lot of dreck. The worst problem facing the horror field today is being able to distinguish between quality and junk. I don't mean entertaining junk. I mean stuff like hairb.a.l.l.s caught in a cat's throat. A lot of small-press horror magazines are just abominable, though I know the editorsmust believe in what they're doing. But not everyone can or should be an editor. Editing is a calling-not something you just dabble in-if you want to produce anything of consistent quality. I think that the young and clueless are too caught up in the gore of it.

Here we come to the negative side of today's horror field. Although horror should elicit emotion from the reader, what's forgotten by the purveyors of a tiny subgenre that's been screaming for attention-gross out/extreme horror-is that they're taking the easy way out. Eliciting disgust and repelling readers might be a charge in the short run but in the long run it's self-defeating, a stylistic choice more than a thematic one-and a dead end. They've left behind the idea that the gore needs to be integrated into a story in which you care about what's happening. They've forgotten that gore for gore's sake becomes numbing.

This sort of horror has a limited audience within the horror community and an even tinier audience outside the horror community. I believe that most of the writers writing it now will tire of it and move on-or stop writing. And if they don't move on? That just means they have nothing to say.

But whenever I feel discouraged by the shouting, I know I can cleanse my literary palate by reading the work of newer writers who excite me-voices of the dark short story such as Glen Hirshberg, Kelly Link, Tia V. Travis, Marion Arnott, Tim Lebbon, and Gemma Files-and by reading the dark stories and novellas by some of my favorite writers, such as Elizabeth Hand, Steve Rasnic Tem, Melanie Tem, Kathe Koja, Terry Dowling, Tanith Lee, Paul McAuley, Lucius Shepard, P. D. Cacek, Kim Newman, Terry Lamsley, Peter Straub, Gene Wolfe, and a host of others who are creating chilling dark fiction with verve, a graceful use of language, and imagination. And over the years, while reading for theYear's Best Fantasy and Horror series, I've read brilliant horror novels by Stewart O'Nan (A Prayer for the Dying), Jack O'Connell (Word Made Flesh), China Mieville (King RatandPerdido Street Station ), Janette Turner Hospital (OysterandThe Last Magician ), and everything by Jonathan Carroll.

Whenever you have so many writers (and others who I didn't mention for reasons of s.p.a.ce) producing and publis.h.i.+ng their best work, you've got a healthy field.ALTERNATE HISTORY Harry Turtledove Harry Turtledove has set his award-winning novels in many alternate times and places.

A friend of mine once claimed that alternate history was the most fun you could have with your clothes on. I don't know that I'd go that far-and I do suspect I could get my face slapped for experimenting-but the subgenre certainly does have its attractions.

First, of course, are the pleasures any good story offers: evocative writing, interesting characters, and a well-made plot. Right behind those is the peculiar fillip you get only from science fiction: seeing if the author's extrapolation from the change he or she has made to the so-called real world is plausible and persuasive. Though alternate history changes the past rather than the present or the future, it usually plays by the same sort of rules as the rest of science fiction once the change is made.

But alternate history also has a special kick all its own. It looks at the world in a funhouse mirror no other form of fiction can match. In it, we can look at not only fictional characters but real characters in fictional settings, bouncing what we already know about them off the paddles of a new pinball machine. If the Spanish Armada had won, what would have happened to Shakespeare's career? If the Union had lost, what would have happened to Abraham Lincoln's? If Muhammad hadn't founded Islam, what might he have done? And what would the world look like then?

Most science fiction projects onto a blank screen. You know only what the author tells you about the world and its inhabitants. Like mainstream historical fiction, alternate history a.s.sumes you know more; some of the people and situations involved will be familiar to you ahead of time. But, where historical fiction deals with pieces of the world as it was, alternate history demands more of its readers: it asks them to look into that funhouse mirror and see things as they might have been.

And it can do more than that. It can turn whole societies upside down. If a plague completely destroyed Western Europe at the end of the fourteenth century, what would the world have looked like afterwards?

Could there have been an industrial revolution? If blacks had enslaved whites in North America rather than the other way around, how might they have treated them? (Reversing roles and looking at consequences is one of the things science fiction does particularly well.) If fascism or communism had triumphed during the turbulent century just past, how might things look?

From a writer's point of view, there's one other joy to doing alternate history: the research. If you aren't into digging up weird things for the fun of digging them up, this probably isn't the subgenre for you. If you are, though, you can transpose Newton and Galileo into Central Asia, make obscure references that ninety-nine out of a hundred of your readers will never notice but that will horrify or crack up the hundredth, or make all your readers feel as if they're looking at a trompe l'oeil painting. Perhaps the finest compliment I ever got was from a reviewer who said a novel of mine made him think he was reading an accurate portrayal of a world that in fact never existed.

Jeremiads? What goes wrong in alternate history is the flip side of what goes right. Bad writing and inept characterization can and too often do afflict any fiction. But the subgenre's besetting sins are failure of research and failure of extrapolation. A few years back, there was a novel (marketed as mainstream fiction rather than SF) that had to do with Jefferson Davis's reelection bid after a Southern victory in the Civil War. Lovely-except that the Confederate Const.i.tution limited the president of the CSA to a single six-year term. There's another book about a world where the Romans conquered Germany and theEmpire survived into the twentieth century. Unfortunately, it's also a world where Roman society never changed even though the Empire had an industrial revolution . . . and a world where, despite the immense changes a successful conquest and a.s.similation of Germany would have caused, Constantine still gets born three centuries after the breakpoint and still plays a role recognizably similar to the one he had in real history.

Suspension of disbelief is probably harder to pull off in alternate history than in most other forms of fiction, not least because you're playing in part with what your readers already know. If they thinkShe'd never act that way, not even under those changed circ.u.mstances, because she did thus-and-so in the real world orEven if they had invented Silly Putty then, that doesn't mean we'd all be going around with hula hoops twenty years later , you've lost them. Once disbelief comes cras.h.i.+ng down, a steroid-laced weightlifter can't pick it up again.

Done well, alternate history is some of the most thought-provoking, argument-inducing fiction around. It also often inspires those who read it to go find out what really happened, which isn't a bad thing, either.

Done not so well, it reminds people how painfully true Sturgeon's Law is. And I expect we'll all go on arguing about what is good and what's not so good and why or why not for a long, long time to come.

FILM AND TELEVISION.

Michael Ca.s.sutt Michael Ca.s.sutt successfully writes both SF and television scripts.

In my increasingly distant youth, a science fiction or fantasy film was a rarity, either a low-budget wonder that happened to sneak out of Hollywood early one morning or, like2001 , a major studio event that got made only because a powerful director wouldn't take no for an answer.

Now, a year into Kubrick and Clarke's millennium, five or six of the ten top-grossing motion pictures of all time are science fiction or fantasy, depending on what megablockbuster has opened lately. SF and fantasy are part of the motion picture landscape-a lucrative part.

Television is also our playground, if you believe a recentUSA Today poll, in which baby boomers named The Twilight Zone andStar Trek as two of their top three favorite series of all time. More recently, several generations ofStar Trek sequels have had long, loving runs-Next Generation, Deep s.p.a.ce Nine,Voyager, and nowEnterprise . Intriguing series such asBabylon 5 andMax Headroom have come and gone.The X-Files lasted for nine seasons.Buffy the Vampire Slayer is still kicking satanic b.u.t.t.

Farscape sails on through its peculiar universe, low-rated but critically approved.

What is there to complain about? Well, for one thing, most SF or fantasy films and television are still written and produced by mainstream talents, not by SF writers who have published in the magazines or written novels. (Babylon 5'sJ. Michael Straczynski is the notable exception.) Which means that the cutting-edge concepts on display inAsimov's ,a.n.a.log , orInterzone don't make it to the screen. Well, make that rarely: there was this movie calledThe Matrix . . .

It may be that cutting-edge SF is, by its nature, limited to a more elite (which is to say, smaller) audience.

Look at the finalists for the Nebula script category, as selected by the members.h.i.+p of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America:X-Men (based on the famed Marvel comic book), the wonderful Chinese fantasyCrouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , the Coen Brothers...o...b..other, Where Are Thou?and (fromBuffy the Vampire Slayer ) Joss Whedon's television script ”The Body.”

Four fantasies. If you wanted to be tough about it, you could saythree fantasies...o...b..other is a musical comedy that continues the Coen Brothers' exploration of the American yokel.

The Spielbergposthumous Kubrick collaboration,A.I. , based on material by Brian Aldiss and Ian Watson, and emerging from the core of traditional science fiction, didn't make the cut. Nor was it particularly successful, certainly not by Spielbergian standards. It's not hard to see why: the treatment of the subject matter was slow and obvious. Worse, Kubrick's cold, unflinching, and unforgiving view of human nature fits with Spielberg's warmth and sentimentality like a shot of gin with a slice of tiramisu.

Yuck.

Perhaps the most rigorously traditional and successful SF film or television production of 2001 was Sci Fi Channel's miniseriesDune , adapted and directed by John Harrison from the cla.s.sic Frank Herbert novel.

It was not as artistic as David Lynch's critically battered (yet, by some, secretly appreciated) 1984 feature film, but it made more sense, helped, no doubt, by a six-hour running time.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the only prime-time drama series to approach the very mainstreamWest Wing in having a clear writer's voice, suffered somehow in moving from the WB to UPN for fall 2001. It would require more moral character than I possess to give WB network execs credit forBuffy 's success; perhaps Whedon and his talented staff are tired or, with the spin-offAngel series, stretched too thin.

Enterprise, which is simultaneously a follow-on toVoyager and a prequel to the original series, premiered strongly in fall 2001, though it has yet to become ”appointment” television. Well,Next Generation andDeep s.p.a.ce Nine took two seasons to find themselves.Enterprise has the outlandish luxury of a five-year, 120- episode commitment.

Syndicated science fiction continued to fill Sat.u.r.day afternoons, with varying degrees of success.Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda prospered in its second season;Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict , ran out of gas in its fifth. The superhero series.m.u.tant X arrived, aimed squarely at the audience that enjoyed theX-Men movie but was impatient for the sequel.

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