catsittingstill

The Sharing Knife: Passage is coming out soon. I have already ordered my copy from Amazon. 8 days and counting :-)

There's a review here, along with an interview of Lois McMaster Bujold. She brings up a very interesting point--I think I'll just use her words for it:

I have come to believe that if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, F&SF are fantasies of political agency. (Of which the stereotypical “male teen power fantasy” is again merely an especially gaudy and visible subset.)

I'm not sure I'm understanding it right. But I'm interested in trying. Are science fiction and fantasy stories "fantasies of political agency"? I would take that to mean that the political results of the characters' actions are sort of the point of the story--the way in a romance the development of the relationship is the point of the story, and in a mystery, the discovery of the truth is the point of the story.

I'd always thought of science fiction as being stories about inventions or discoveries of scientific principles. Some of these stories are about how they play out in a social arena (like part of the whole story of Wildside is how the government reacts to discovering that the main character has a Gate To Elsewhere, and how the characters deal with that). I hadn't really thought about this being the point of the story, and certainly not about the political subset of the social being the point of the story, exactly, but I'm having trouble making a case that it's not, either.

Or take another book I'm reading because it was free: Lord of the Isles. It's about several characters who are magical in one way or another. And their magic certainly gives them a lot of potential to change events around them. And some of that has political implications. I'm not done with the book yet so it's premature to state that the political changes (or the potential for them) are the point of the story. But they certainly add to the sense that the characters are important, and that their choices and achievements matter. (Also parenthetically I had expected to not like it, but started reading because what the heck, I got it free. It turns out to not be great--as one person pointed out, pretty much any baddie has short legs and long arms; why is that?--but it's not lousy. I might like that author's military fiction a lot less, but the straight out fantasy isn't so bad.)

Whereas if I think of a non F&SF book--say Pride and Prejudice, the point of the story is the relationships between the characters. Yes, they live within a social world that is not entirely apolitical, but I don't get the impression that the character's choices will change the political landscape.

Hmm. Interesting. Anybody want to help me think about this, for example with examples of books that support or fail to support the proposition that F&SF are fantasies of political agency?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From: (Anonymous)

Hi Cat!

To answer some of the other comments below, my observation (which should perhaps be read in its more complete context) is not based so much on a perusal of my bookshelves, but on a perusal of my readers. If you pop over to Amazon.com and read the 87 reviews of _Beguilement_ one after another, you'll see for yourself the pattern start to emerge pretty quickly. One skiffy-minded reviewer after another says, "And in the second half of the book, nothing happens."(*) Romance or character/social-study-minded readers see it almost the other way around. All are reading the same text, mind you. The bifurcation of perception is very marked.

Another way of phrasing the same thing might be, "F&SF readers tend to favor books that supply fantasies of political agency." (The term "political agency" being chosen for being the broadest way I can express what I'm trying to get at.) In other words, the remark is is not so much about the books, as it is about the book-reader relationship. You can see it in also in reviewers who extol books which tackle topical-politics-du-jour, as though the highest function of fiction were social engineering -- tales as a tool to adjust readers' thinking to match, and presumably support, the writers' political agendas: books as arguments. But it exists at all levels of discourse when readers decide what is or is not "important" or "interesting" (or the reverse) about what the characters in any given story are doing.

Certainly there are F&SF books that escape this political bent -- the set includes many of my favorites. But the overall trend, especially when all the mil-SF and mil-fantasy is included, is kind of overwhelming, once one starts to notice it.

Ta, Lois. (Here through the magic of Google-search and book-launch-week distraction.)

(* -- Grant you, in the original plan of the book that section was the mid-book breather before the next big push, but still. World-weaving. Fate. I keep harking back in my mind to a blithe quote from that feckless young male character in Heyer's _The Reluctant Widow_ -- "I really don't know what those women can be finding to do about the house all day." From my point of view I would say, "In _Beguilement_ Chapter 18, the world is changed," but then, my point of view is from the privileged vantage of the end of Vol. 4. I really did think more folks would have twigged to the "One spins the thread, one measures it, and one cuts it off", though.)

From:

catsittingstill.livejournal.com

:-) Hi Lois! Pleasure to "see" you "here!"

I had not looked through the Amazon reviews--at the risk of sounding fangirly, I confess I bought the first "Sharing Knife" book at first glance, on the strength of the author's name. I'm intrigued by the observation that readers seem to be splitting along "want more monsters!" / "want more romance!" lines. I'm a little puzzled, though, as I would have thought the romance/family aspects would blend into the political perhaps more than they seem to do in the minds of readers.

I have to admit that I'm not used to the use of "agency" in this context (as in "fantasies of political agency"). I've been interpreting "agency" to mean "capability to do important stuff;" I hope this is a reasonably close approximation of what you meant.

tales as a tool to adjust readers' thinking to match, and presumably support, the writers' political agendas: books as arguments

There is a simple pleasure in reading books whose views (including political views) align with one's own. I enjoyed _God Is Not Great_ and _The God Deusion_ (*finally* someone sticks up for atheism as vigorously as religion is usually promoted) but I know there are people that seem to me to be normally reasonable and fair who neither enjoyed the books, nor found in them any convincing arguments for the views expressed in them. They're not F&SF books, and are arguably liked or disliked under different standards, but I know when I read a book that expresses political views I find tiresome, I'm more likely to stop and pick holes in plot or characterization or consistent worldbuilding. Surely the books whose political views align with mine can't *really* be significantly better at these things, but it does feel that way.

(Here through the magic of Google-search
I'll be doggered. This post is on the third page of results for "Sharing Knife: Passage" Um. I would have thought Google would take longer to pick it up, if it picked it up at all in the relentless internet "noise" (i.e. there are so many people posting so much stuff I'd have expected most of it to not be noticeable). Well, live and learn.

From: (Anonymous)

Heh. You come up even quicker if one limits one's search to "posts in the past 24 hours". And then there's the recognition factor. ("Thank god! A familiar face in this mob!")

"Agency" as defined as "capability to do important stuff" is roughly what I mean, yes, but watch out for that phrase "important stuff" -- important to whom? Who gets to say what's important and what's not? That's where the hook lies.

You are dead on in your observation about whether readerly agreement with an author's views help make a book easy reading, hard slogging, or a projectile. (Or, in the case of older views, a historical curiosity.) It's something folks tend to notice more when they disagree than when they agree, but it's always there; it's part of what I'd call author-reader worldview match. http://www.dendarii.com/collide.html for an early pass of mine on these notions.

(Heavens, that essay's getting elderly. The light-brown-on-light-gray text may be made more readable by increasing the text size in one's browser, btw.)

You say: "I'm a little puzzled, though, as I would have thought the romance/family aspects would blend into the political perhaps more than they seem to do in the minds of readers."

Bingo. And in fact, the underlying argument of the series-as-a-whole is pretty much on just that subject, as it turned out. (I should state for clarity, I do not start with an agenda, and then write a book to demonstrate it: I set my characters in motion, see where they go, look it all over at the end, and thus find out what I think. Kludgy, I know.)

Ta, L.

From: (Anonymous)

Thought on the stair...

... and now I'm wondering if the large audiences some romance writers pull in isn't a side-effect of excluding such exclusionary politics from their tales. If your book, say, can be read with pleasure only by Democrats or only by Republicans, well, you've just cut your sales in half.

I've long been conscious of this effect in F&SF along gender lines -- I do try to write books equally accessible to both genders. Because this genre is already small enough.

Ta, L. (Still musing.)

From:

catsittingstill.livejournal.com

"Thank god! A familiar face in this mob!"
:-) I'm flattered to think you remember not just me but my lj "handle."

"Agency" as defined as "capability to do important stuff" is roughly what I mean, yes, but watch out for that phrase "important stuff" -- important to whom? Who gets to say what's important and what's not? That's where the hook lies.

I was thinking in terms of me, the reader, getting to say what I think is important, though I think I'm quite willing to be guided by the book as to what's important within the given society.

(from the essay you reference above)
Second, the world-views can collide. In this case, the reader will find his world-views denied or disconfirmed by the text, which can be unpleasant, uncomfortable, or even infuriating. The reader will in this case heap scorn on the book, and sometimes its author, as when a left-leaning reader rejects the political scenarios in a book by a right-wing writer or a woman derides a book by a man who portrays women in ways she finds idiotic.

Oh yeah. I remember stamping around the house shouting at an author (not that he was present at the time) "Do you know any women? Like, have you ever *met* one?"

(more from the essay)
World-views may be so incompatible as to be mutually incomprehensible,
ozarque had an interesting post in her journal that referenced "Shakespeare in the Bush" (at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/home/idris/Essays/Shakes_in_Bush.htm) in which the tribal elders of the Tiv explain to an anthropologist how she has been misunderstanding _Hamlet_ all this time.
Boy, I'd never looked at _Hamlet_ in quite that way before.

(one last thing from the essay)
Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, the reader's world-view can be expanded.
Yes, and I love this when it happens. In some ways, this is what I read for. Though now I wonder if the "learning the rules of the book's world" is really as unique to science fiction and fantasy as I thought when I wrote the response to "Film at 11" below....

And in defense of the essay, I wouldn't say it is elderly. It's not even ten years old, and it still has interesting things to say. You now write other things besides science fiction, but that's the only way it seems to me to be even arguably out of date.