urth-urth.net Digest, Vol 3, Issue 8

<(Gee ... I hope you're male under that name...) What if I'm a girl? I'm not but we really can't tell under the internet. This is kind of a joke, and I'm not suggesting anything that you do, but I have noticed some people feel its dishonest to pretend to be the opposite sex online, not that I've ever pretended to be a girl. But unless you are going to meet in person, I dont know if it matters. I do think bodies are important, but in text we are genderless. I can't remember but I don't think Gaiman wrote an article on Lewis but he talks about him at length (for Gaiman) in the live journal, which I read for about a year when American Gods came out and when I decided that Gaiman really wasn't a very good novelist. He also talks about him in "An Early Life Furnished in Michael Moorcock". Gaiman does like Chesterton Dunsany Lindsey and Wolfe, but is almost completely silent on Tolkien, and I can't remember how he feels about Morris and Macdonald. <That much is clearly true. In fact, there are times when he comes <parlously close to Poughkeepsie, to borrow Le Guin's trope. What is poughkeepsie??? Le Guin is a very interesting person with a very interesting family history. I'm kind of repeating myself, butt... I do think military sci-fi is very conservative, a lot of it is also Cold War. And yes sci-fi does have a big conservative vein, but I dont think it dominates the genre or that Christian writers should just be labeled conservative in the fundamentalist, spooky way American like to define conservative now, which has nothing to do with small government or tight budgets, even for the Republicans. I don't consider Tolkien or Wolfe to be conservative writers by the new definition but perhaps as far as small government is concerned. I think they write about war, because it is so horrible. I can't remember if Wolfe was in a war but I think he was in the military, and Tolkien was at the Somme, and most of his friends died in the war. I think that informs his work more than anything, with his relationship with his wife a close second. I don't want to get into a long discussion on what allegory is, but I think it is unavoidable. My idea of allegory is very limited, it must be didactic, 100% translatable into an ideology, and ultimately robs the narrative as being able to take place in a possible world. That is, it steals the story from the text. <but both seemed to have first and foremost <in their minds the process of telling a story; This depends on what you mean by telling a story, if we want to think of people sitting around a camp fire talking to each other, I'd still say the same thing. I don't think Spenser cared very much about story in the Faerie Queene. I think Tolkien cared more about story than Lewis. But I think story is entangled with how much you believe in the construction, how much complexity you assign it. Allegory for me is the shallow end of the spectrum when treating the narrative as a virtual world, and I think this is often very proportional to wanting to tell a story, at least with very long stories and no parables or fables. To imagine that world is to a certain degree to believe in it as a possible world, no matter how improbable and whether it is realized or not, because that is how we attempt to reconstruct the real world from our sensory input, through imagination. In this sense all known worlds are virtual worlds, and so I think Tolkien believes in Ea more than Lewis or Spenser. Spenser's allegory may be a collection of platonic forms in what he thought of as the real world but it is not a collection of what he thought of as people or natural processes. < ... well, not the question of "what it means to be a nonhuman <person," but all the others I am talking about Tolkien and Wolfe more than the others. Whether it's talking animals, androids, gods, or aliens they are still nonhuman persons. It is impossible not to anthropromorphize them, though. Tolkien in the Silmarillion wanted to write a narrative history of a nonhuman species, the elves, and then during the writing of the later Quenta S. despaired at being able to accomplish such a thing. Elves in many ways are very similar to human, but to say that they are human in another guise, is to accuse Tolkien of allegory, and Tolkien would say no elves are independent of humans, what I can't describe is not their fault but mine, the limits of my imagination. This is all in Morgoth's Ring. I think Tolkien did think about the socio-political though not as much the economic situation in Middle-Earth during the Third Age in depth. Back to the racial complaint, if you look at the military technology of Sauron's human soldiers, the Haradrim, Corsairs of Umbar, Southrons, and Easterlings they are very similar to Zulus, English privateers, Indians (of India), and Mongols. With the exception of the pirates, South Africa, India, and China were all British colonies. Sauron's chief servants are black Numenoreans, which represent Atlantis, the hypothetical mother culture of Indo-europe, just as the Quenya language was supposed to be to a certain degree an imaginary reconstruction of Indo-european. Sauron is if we must make comparisions, industrialized, imperial, colonial Britain, where everyone is either a wage slave, an actual slave, or a bureaucratic and elite slave. In fact Sauron's most powerful servant and commanders, the Nazgul, are the greatest slaves. Of course Tolkien believed in free will and not social determinism and so they are culpable (but so are the free peoples in their isolationism) people have been lied to, coerced, and enslaved by a stronger force. Tolkien is not a luddite though, in several essays he distinguishes between two "magics" which also apply to culture and technology, Art and the Machine, and I don't know what else to call magic but benign technology which works with rather than against natural forms. It seems information technology, nanotech, and genetics can create the extremes Tolkien is talking about. The Lord of the Rings, though was written before all of these ideas, but it has a cybernetic feel to it. I believe Wolfe to a large degree bridges this gap. As for Mieville. This is simplistic but lt's look at Perdido Street Station. Isaac is obviously Isaac Newton with his unified field theory to replace religious cosmology, at the beginning of the novel Isaac basically says religion is the opiate of the masses or rather the last bastion of the weak when talking to the water manipulating slug about his god, rationalism and science. His lover has a scarab's head, Lin?, and represents an interracial or intercultural forbidden relationship outisde of marriage of course. The intellectuals, artists, and scientists are pitted against a fascist government masquerading under philanthropist venture capitalists and captains of industry who only want to develop certain technologies which will allow them to maintain control. New Crobuzon is present day New York and 19th century London, I think it depends on the situation. I do not know what the remade are, and every government makes terrible weapons, but maybe he thinks "real" socialists wouldn't. I know he has a phd in socio-economics or something like that and wrote several papers on Marx. I haven't read any good articles discussing his work but I've read some articles he has written and one interview. I haven't read The Scar yet, just a little bit of King Rat and PSS. I dont know if I want to read anymore of his work, not because of his ideology, but just how heterogenous and manic his style is of writing is. I think he might be churning out books too quickly. I am biased towards books that take longer to write, but I dont think that's always the case, but for instead. Wolfe is an exception for me. So far Ive liked everything Ive read, and he is very prolific. Some people can get away with it I guess. He is a very patient writer, and I like writing that is subtle and restrained and often leaves out the most dramatic bits. That is a convention of romance, of obscuring the most important parts, because they are inexpressable. EOT;

The it should have been Brava! not Bravo! Matthew

[...]

Ah. Well, gender doesn't generally matter in text - my parenthetical remark was a sort of grammatical joke. I'd just greeted you with a "Bravo! Bravissimo!" and if you were female, "Brava! Bravissima!" would have been the correct form. Nothing more, honest; no intent that the Urth list should be a "he-man woman hater's club" or any such - that would exclude a few of our most valued contributors.

I'll have to go check out his webjournal - I hope that bit is still on line. And I agree that NG is not a "very good" novelist - he has written some good prose fiction but he's very uneven, and he's too busy avoiding commitment to anything in a sort of postpostmodern-ironic way for my taste. [...]

A town in New York where (if I recall correctly) IBM has or used to have its main offices or somesuch. Le Guin wrote an essay back in the '70s called "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie," in which she basically trashed Katherine Kurtz's "Deryni" novels as an example of commercial "fantasy" that wasn't really fantasy - basically on the grounds that, though there was magic and whatnot, the concerns of the plot and characters was fundamentally mundane, and the book could as easily have taken place in Poughkeepsie as in a fantasy world. For a number of fantasy fans and critics, as a result of this essay, "Poughkeepsie" has come to be something of a shorthand for mundane pseudo-fantasy, especially of a kind that concentrates heavily on political pragmatism.

... yes, and?

Grin. Absolutely. And that's because almost all of it is written by people who grew up thinking that Starship Trooper was just the very bestest book ever written - people like J*rr* P**n*ll* and D*v*d Dr*k* and so on.

That drives me absolutely batshit. These people are not conservatives; they are "neoconservatives," followers of a radical political programme (laid out by the "New American Century" document, our own homegorwn Mein Kampf) and standing in almost diametrical opposition to the great conservative tradition. Grumble, growl.

(I'd like to give the Republicans a tight budget.) [...]

Korea.

I'd put these third and fourth, after his linguistic obsessions and his desire for a "truly British" mythology. Also somewhere in the mix is his Catholicism, possibly even before his relationship with his "Luthien."

H'mmm. I think that's too limiting; it seems to me that both the Narnia books and Tolkien's own "Leaf by Niggle" are both quite clearly allegorical. (One could I suppose argue that neither Narnia nor the world in which "LbN" takes place are "possible," but I think that's limiting "possibility" far too much.)

This, and the rest of the paragraph (which I'm cutting for brevity), seems to me to suggest that "story" to you is primarily a matter of world-building? Whereas to me it is a matter of relating events that matter to the audient (whether reader, listener, or viewer). The most common, but not the only, way of making them matter is by narrating them through the eyes of characters who matter to the audient, and having the events matter to those characters. Worldbuilding is fascinating in its own right. It places the characters and events in a context in which they can matter - but (again) that's not the only way to do it. Classic fairy-stories like "Red Riding Hood" and "Cinderella" take place in a world that's so generic it hardly exists at all; their events matter to the audient (if they do) because the audient is able to identify to some extent with the character. In this case, the vagueness of the world-construct is actually a help - it has allowed the stories to remain accessible to audients in a wide variety of cultural matrices (though not all), rather the way a more abstract and "cartoony" style of rendering often makes it easier for audients to identify with characters in comics and animation. (Incidentally, your comment that "In this sense all known worlds are virtual worlds" strikes me as very close to what I most dislike in postmodernism, its willful rejection of the concept of reality.) I certainly agree with your point about Tolkien and nonhuman persons ... he seemed to be hungry for contact with something other-than-human. (If he'd been born a bit later and a bit less intelligent I suspect he might have made a good UFO cultist.)

H'mmm. I think I agree here; the problem is that people seem to accuse him of giving no thought to the economics of Middle- earth, and that's blatantly false. There are farms, merchants, and so on sneaking around the edges of the War of the Ring. It's truer of the Silmarillion, I must admit, but the S is written on a stylistically elevated level where I wouldn't really expect economics to enter the picture - or perhaps it does, but Elvish economics are so alien that we can't recognize them? (It's hard to imagine Elves farming!) Your point about the similarity of "Sauron's human soldiers," to

has some merit, but is I suspect less a deliberate analogy or allegory than simply a failure of Tolkien's imagination (horrible though this is to say) to exceed the ethnoracial stereotypes he'd absorbed in the boy's books of writers like Wilkie Collins as, well, a boy.

Ummm, no, not really. Quenya and Sindarin were patterned after Finnish and Welsh, though I can never seem to remember which was which. It is the root language for all the Elvish and High Human (i.e., Numenorian and related) tongues of Middle-earth. As such it bears a relationship to those tongues similar to that which the hypothesized and hypostasized Indo-European tongue that so fascinated philologists of Tolkien's generation must bear to the modern languages of the I-E family - except, of course, that Quenya was still a living spoken language among the Eldar of Middle-earth, and the Elves and Ainur of the True West.

Tolkien's distinction reflects the medieval (and Catholic) distinction between magia and goetia, one of which was the summoning and binding of demonic (or other spiritual) entities to gain power, while the other, which would include such studies as astrology and alchemy, was the manipulation of natural "influences" to achieve desirable results. The one was inherently evil; the other was good or evil depending on the results sought and the means used.

Pretty much, yeah. And you know that Saruman has really fallen because he's stepped beyond this, from magic into sorcery, so to speak, in his desire for power (reified in the Ring and in his evil con/de/structions). Comments on Perdido Street Station skipped; I would have to reread the damn thin to really follow them, and I'm not prepared to do so at this time.

Oh my goodness, yes.

Well, it helps to keep in mind that he's been publishing for over thirty years now. He seems to average about a book a year, plus short stories; but he also writes full-time, and definitely takes the time to do multiple, careful drafts of his work.

Yes, I agree - it's something that (for example) Cabell did a great deal. And both Cabell and Wolfe occasionally go just a bit too far for my taste, refusing to narrate key points of the narrative - but for very different reasons. Cabell, for example, seems to have avoided a description of Dom Manuel's "blasphemous communion" precisely because it would have been unpublishable under the Comstock laws that were in effect when he wrote. Wolfe seems to be censoring what his narrators cannot bear to look at. --Dan'l

Good grief. I feel like I'm drowning in ideas.

I buy this. I'm not sure what he's getting at, except that your name isn't exactly flowery. Also, I don't think people like genderlessness; The Left Hand of Darkness derives power from it precisely because the idea is so inhuman. I think we assign genders to people in our imagination if only to comfort ourselves.

The only time I've ever heard of Poughkeepsie was in the film The French Connection, where Popeye Doyle says, "When's the last time you picked your feet, Willy? Who's your connection Willy? What's his name?...I've got a man in Poughkeepsie who wants to talk to you. You ever been to Poughkeepsie? Huh? Have you ever been to Poughkeepsie?" Ursula LeGuin wrote a book called From Elfland to Poughkeepsie. I can't find a summary of what it's about, but you can buy it here for the reasonable price of $400. http://www.arcadiabooks.org/leguin/bibliography/abebooks_titles_editions/1973-from_elfland-Pendragon-1973.htm Speaking of buying books, has anyone gotten this one yet? http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0618517650/103-3599354-1920666?v=glance

When I said that Tolkien didn't consider his politico-economic background, and framed some potential questions, I was trying to present Mieville's viewpoint, and not my own. Honestly, although I like some of the things said here about his world, I could care less. Analyzing The Lord of the Rings for political, economic, and social models seems to me to be like studying each facial feature of a woman from a distance of one inch. I'd miss the beauty for looking too closely. You really lost me here. I can get behind most of what you're saying, except for that business about magic as benign technology and the cybernetic feel to LotR, but I can't follow your train of thought. Did you just want to get back to Wolfe by any means necessary?

Hear here. Also, his stories aren't very satisfying.

He has been prolific over a long period of time. It seems that he writes short stories very quickly, but he works on his novels patiently; I remember reading that he did four passes on Book of the New Sun, tying everything together.

I like the way you said that.

I think I can see where Leguin derived the idea of using the idea of Poughkeepsie in this way. You see, there's a saying I've heard employed many times paritucarly amongst political pundits when a concept, or work may have broad and mainstream appeal, one says, "That'll play in Peoria." However, there is a lesser known variation one hears, "That'll play in Poughkeepsie." As to why these places are singled out to represent the mainstream, I think it's largely a matter of alliteration of course. But there is a geographical element as well no doubt. In the case of Poughkeepsie, one must realize that it is about 60 miles north of Culture Central, NYC. I'm reminded of the way Ichabob Crane in the person of Johnny Depp leaves the city and travels north by coach into what Tim Burton would have us understand is the wilds of Sleepy Hollow, a journey that takes him a whole day, but is far enough out there for figures like a Headless Horseman to become possible. This despite the fact that Sleepy Hollow is only about 30 miles north of the city. Point being, once out of the city, aw shucks, it shooor does get darks at night way out there, and to a city person Poughkeepsie must have seemed like a whole other world. All this could hardly be further off topic, for which I apologize, but this point has always interested me, particularly since I make my living working in that very same Poughkeepsie, protecting its children. Alan

{ 20041130 | Nathan Spears } "Also, I don't think people like genderlessness; The Left Hand of Darkness derives power from it precisely because the idea is so inhuman. I think we assign genders to people in our imagination if only to comfort ourselves." some of us on this list are intersexed. this is definitely true, which makes it a fertile but near-untouched topic. has anyone else read emma bull's absolutely amazing "bone dance"? unfortunately, none of the URTH works with which i am familiar deals with the subject of gender/sex in any way that is not standard trope (i.e. dorcas). sIkOzU ***************** You know what I blame this on the breakdown of? Society! - Moe, The Simpsons

Well, I don't believe that in the case of "The Long Sun" (albeit I admit I'm something of an ideological hermit on this count). But if you chose to adopt my radical (but true) viewpoint, then perhaps it could improve your enjoyment of the novel. I say Incus is a woman passing as an augur, Chenille is a clone of Tussah derived from only his X chromosome, and Hyacinth is not a woman except in her soul (although I can't decide from my 4 or 5 available choices exactly what she is). ~ Crush

{ 20041130 | turin } "As for Mieville. This is simplistic but lt's look at Perdido Street Station. Isaac is obviously Isaac Newton with his unified field theory to replace religious cosmology, at the beginning of the novel Isaac basically says religion is the opiate of the masses or rather the last bastion of the weak when talking to the water manipulating slug about his god, rationalism and science. His lover has a scarab's head, Lin?, and represents an interracial or intercultural forbidden relationship outisde of marriage of course. The intellectuals, artists, and scientists are pitted against a fascist government masquerading under philanthropist venture capitalists and captains of industry who only want to develop certain technologies which will allow them to maintain control. New Crobuzon is present day New York and 19th century London, I think it depends on the situation. I do not know what the remade are, and every government makes terrible weapons, but maybe he thinks "real" socialists wouldn't. I know he has a phd in socio-economics or something like that and wrote several papers on Marx. I haven't read any good articles discussing his work but I've read some articles he has written and one interview. I haven't read The Scar yet, just a little bit of King Rat and PSS." The Scar is an amazing work IMHO; I'm a big Mi?ville fan because he really hits interesting topics, although like our URTH-writer few of his characters are people you'd want to know. An example of his topics: Isaac's lover is really alien; their relationship reminds me of the ones from Chip Delaney's "Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand". The setting of New Crobuzon is fascinating; the plot and the setting are intertwined and almost incomprehensible to the reader in terms of (again) alienness. "The Scar" has the same features: a plot seriously shaped and about geography (the kingdom of the Ab-Dead! the ship itself! the underwater world!). And the latest book is All About Geography and how it makes the people in it. Mi?ville tries not to write preachy works, but perhaps he rubs people wrong as Wolfe sometimes does me because of his personal interests. If there is One Book to Rule Them All for each author (as is being discussed herein, also forgive the metaphor please), then for Mi?ville it is a struggle of the individual against societal limits (class, race, gender - but, interestingly enough, not religion) AND a kind of sacredness of geography, whether manmade or natural. He doesn't idealise either nature or manmade but sees both as potentially harsh and ugly as well as beautiful and liberating. Also, without spoiling things, the anti/hero of the latest book, "The Iron Council", clearly shows that he thinks "real" socialists do Very Bad Things. I don't think he labours under the misapprehension that any one group has The Truth, although clearly some political views are more favourable in his opinion, i.e. socialistic/communalistic movements against monarchies and oligarchies such as happened in the nineteenth century. I do think he remembers those times as when good things happened because of anarchists, rebellions and socialistic movements; he's not wrong, as that is how we got, say, the weekend off from working. strikes and labour movements might not seem very "fantasy", but frankly i welcome his works. Someone on this list mentioned pamphleteering being, in England, that annoying bought-into-communism-in-college thing. I guess I take a different view of "Runagate Rampant" and similar publications, thinking of the zine movement in the US and abroad as well as the rampant private publishing rants that characterised the era of the American Revolution and, before that, the time of great upheaval in seventeenth-century England. I think of Smith and Locke, both of whom were published as leaflets. Perhaps we don't have that kind of leafletting here in the US; I certainly had no modern equivalent in my head when I read about the paperings but rather thought of the early modern era (1600s-1900s). Anyway, I know this is a Wolfe forum, but I thought the opportunity to discuss Mi?ville, who is one of my favourites, was too much to overpass. em0 http://waitingfordorothy.blogspot.com ***************** Never send a monster to do the work of an evil genius.

When you've seen Mi?ville selling the "Socialist Worker" outside the London School of Economics "Runagate Rampant" brings that to mind far more than Smith and Locke. :) Matthew

{ 20041201 | Matthew Malthouse } "When you've seen Mi?ville selling the "Socialist Worker" outside the London School of Economics "Runagate Rampant" brings that to mind far more than Smith and Locke. :)" do you have a photo? i want one! BTW i'm glad he lost his election bid that time b/c he'd've had no time to write "the scar" or "IC" if he were spending all his time giving a fruitbasket to the PM. (is that phrase an americanism?) -em0 ***************** You know what I blame this on the breakdown of? Society! - Moe, The Simpsons

Ah, but is Dorcas so standard? The sick, secret joy of incest? Of having become the lover to a child who may be your ancestor? Of having become the father (by way of ressurection) to your lover who is your ancestor? I think that there are gender complexities (the hierogrammates) and others, but they are cleverly disguised as common genre conventions. But, I may be wrong too. No, I haven't read the the book you mentioned. I'll keep my eyes open, however. eric A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes. - Gotthold Ephraim Lessing