two hundred public words 15/30

Damn it. Well, whatever, I'll post twice today. At least I am not subject to perfectionism, huh? 'Cuz otherwise, I wouldn't continue.

In my last entry, I left a few authors out in the cold in terms of YAF fantasy writers, just because there are so many. I guess it's not so surprising that I know a lot of YAF fantasy, old and new; it was the sort of thing I read semi-obsessively around age eight, nine, ten, eleven. I have a visceral, all-five-senses memory of going down the line of shelves in the myths and fairytales section -- Dewey Decimal System, 398, Folklore -- Beyond the Grimms' Bros. and Hans Christian Anderson, there were the Lang Fairytale books, in their spectrum of colors, the Blue, Red, Green, Yellow, Pink, Grey, Violet, Crimson, Brown, Orange, Olive, and Lilac (thanks, Wikipedia) -- all published between 1889 and 1910, and collections of myths and folklore of other cultures, from Greece through Scandinavia, Japan, and the Americas and Africa. I think I very likely read them all. I know I was au courant with Anansi, the West African spider trickster character, long before he was de rigueur in mid-seventies classrooms and textbooks.

Anyway, it was natural to move from those tales to original fantasy stories, from ... well, from whenever. Here are the remaining (male) authors I intended to talk about:

J. R. R. Tolkien

C. S. Lewis

Edward Eager

The order here is one of chronology of writing, with overlaps. Women are in the next entry.

I read Tolkien -- at least, The Hobbit -- when I was about thirteen. Part of me was geekily drawn by the invented language, and I appreciated the quest format... but something about the tangled gnarl of his writing put me off continuing on with The Lord of the Rings literally until the movie came out. Then, however many years ago -- deep into adulthood -- I finally read all three of those novels, and enjoyed them very much. I think, not long after I read The Hobbit, I saw a cartoon movie based on it, which I wasn't that into... that may have influenced me against further Tolkien, too. I think that I recognized a lot of his source elements (I'd read various versions of Beowulf, and he calls on the Lang fairytales, too, to create his Middle Earth. But I don't know. There was just something... maybe too insular or too Heroically Male about it to interest me. Actually, that may have been it. There aren't any female characters to identify with, and that was often very important for me, though apparently not in Mark Twain... hm.

C. S. Lewis, I struggled much more with. I read and sobbed over The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, along about age ten, which was when I had my own spiritual crisis and considered converting from my inborn atheism to Catholicism or Judaism. I figured it should be one of the two heavy hitters, which is how I conceived those two religions... the ORIGINS, if you will, of Judeo-Christian culture... plus, I had a great aunt who was a Franciscan nun, and lots of fellow students who were Jews... it is a matter of some pride to me that the girl I asked to help me with my exploration of Judaism -- basically, she taught me the Hebrew alphabet and told me a fair amount about holidays and basic precepts... though not more about either of those than I had gotten from Sydney Taylor's All of a Kind Family series -- later became a Reform Rabbi.

Anyway, that was a good moment at which to start the Narnian chronicles, but my religious frenzy didn't last more than a few months in fifth grade, and when I decided more firmly on atheism I had a reaction -- Aslan is SO CHRISTIAN. That whole series, from its Jesus sacrifice in the first book to the veiled anti-Muslim xenophobia in The Horse and his Boy with its sneering derision of Tash (Allah), to the nasty anti-atheist diatribes in the apocalyptic Last Battle, where the materialist dwarves (apparently, the industrial working class) reject heaven and god and therefore are condemned to survive or die in a filthy stable with muck and dung covered straw... it offended me. And then, a couple of years later, I read the Cold War Christian trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength... oy. I was entranced by the imagery of Mars and the idea of philology -- the study of language, something I had a yen for, myself, but dimly suspected might be mostly accomplished already -- but I was furious at the endless religious intent and at how Lewis painted modern science as twisted and totalitarian, of necessity. The heavy doses of class snobbery didn't make it an easier pill to swallow, either.

Edward Eager, though immediately after Lewis in chronology, is miles away in lack of seriousness. He wrote his series on everyday middle class American children encountering magic, in early 1950s, because he wanted something to read to his own kids. They're enjoyable light fluff, with time capsulized white bread culture and a heavy debt to E. Nesbit and P. L. Travers. The series, from Half Magic, through Knight's Castle, Magic by the Lake, The Time Garden, Magic or Not?, The Well-Wishers, and finally, Seven-Day Magic all employ humor, siblings, a conceit -- whether it's a magical coin, a lake, a period of time -- which limits the extent and potential of the magic encountered, and often, a question about how real anything actually is. They're enjoyable books, and were republished fairly recently. They're written for somewhat younger kids -- pre-teens, let's say -- and the language is a lot easier than many other fantasy books.

two hundred public words 16/30

And, the women.

Madeleine L'Engle

Ursula K. LeGuin

Nancy Farmer

In my mind, Madeleine L'Engle goes well with C. S. Lewis. I can't get beyond her religion and her politics to appreciate her as a writer. I mean, I've read most of her stuff... not being able to forgive authors for their politics and their religious ... evangelism... doesn't stop me from reading them, and liking parts of it, evidently. But I reserve a deep well of doubt and reluctance, somehow.

L'Engle is most famous, I imagine, for A Wrinkle in Time, and I will admit that in one way, she was outstanding with this, in that the main character, Meg, a) is a girl who is a science geek, and therefore an outsider, and b) that the science is serious, and hard, and interesting. I was always very resistant to math, myself, but I bet that the notion of a tesseract deeply influenced a certain proportion of girls who might never have become theoretical physicists otherwise. Or philosophical mathematicians. I actually know of such a girl, an exact contemporary of mine, for whom this was certainly one influence on her way to being such a person -- the kind of theoretical mathematician where doing actuarial science is a summer job in college because it's so easy and remunerative. Her other influence was her early computer science father, so I'm sure she was bombarded from all sides, but still. I have no doubt that Meg was in there, somewhere.

For me, I couldn't read that book without (as with C. S. Lewis) seeing the parallels to the Cold War, which, when I was 11, 12, 13, 14 was still in full swing. In middle school social studies, 7th grade, or 8th grade, we had a Unit (everything was taught in Units... I wish I could do that) called "Socialism, Fascism, Totalitarianism" -- because my teacher thought that was all one continuum. She honestly did. At the time, I tended to ascribe that to her heritage as the granddaughter of a White Russian officer, in the Russian Civil War. Now, of course, I wonder whether that wasn't the Illinois state social studies curriculum during the last hurrah of the Cold War. In A Wrinkle in Time, the main character's father is a scientist working for the government (which in my household was more a scary, CIA-linked thought, than anything wonderful) and in his researches on space travel, he is caught up in a tesseract (no, I can't define that... it's... a wrinkle in time. And space, I guess) and then taken prisoner by essentially the same totalitarian disembodied-brain (Communist) villain as exists in C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength. But a firm grasp on love and compassion and self-sacrifice (much as in C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, with Meg's little brother Charles Wallace being brainwashed, somewhat akin to Edmund in the Lewis story -- and Meg fulfilling the Lucy/Susan role of at least witnessing sacrifice) help to defeat the atheist and materialist forces of evil and identikit modern suburbs.

I think I probably sound somewhat mean-spirited. As I say, I've read all of the Kairos chronicles -- the Murry and then O'Keefe novels which deal with fantasy elements... and religion. And I've only read a few of the Chronos novels, which deal with the Austin family, and are more (mostly, not entirely) realistic. In fact, I may only have read A Ring of Endless Light, among those. So even if I struggle with them, and argue with them, I still engage more with the heavily religion-saturated series. The O'Keefe family books -- especially the Time Quartet -- comprise A Wrinkle in Time, The Wind in the Door, Many Waters, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet (though Many Waters was published well after the other three, it takes place BEFORE the finale of those first generation books). definitely caught me. Many Waters was particularly interesting to me because it came out of the immediate post-Cold War period, and was more openly Biblical -- it is set literally in Biblical times, as L'Engle conceives them, with miracles and angels, just before the Flood, with Noah. Kind of a fascinating window into that world. It is amazing to me that Christians protest her work... they're crazy.

Ursula K. LeGuin And now for someone completely different. I love Ursula K. LeGuin. She's an anarchist. Her father was the anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, who wrote about the last Yahi Indian to grow up completely outside Anglo, white culture, Ishi (ca. 1860 - 1916). I've read LeGuin's mother's treatment of that experience, Ishi: Last of his Tribe, and given that Theodora Kroeber got that published in 1960, it is a sensitive and fascinating (and depressing as hell) piece of anthropology. Anyway, LeGuin is one of the most flexible, radical fantasists of all the ones I've written about in these LJ posts. She is amazing on gender, on anti-imperialist themes, on ecology, on political economy. And despite being fascinated by those themes, she also writes deeply engaging fantasy. In terms of YAF, undoubtedly her best known novels are the ones set in the pre-industrial (and magic) archipelago world of Earthsea: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore... and, after a long interval, a kind of feminist reinterpretation of Earthsea, with Tehanu and The Other Wind. There is a collection of short stories set in Earthsea, as well. I loved the first three books, around age 12 or whenever, but I did recognize that they were male quests. It was a great relief to read her much later addition, Tehanu. To be honest, I haven't yet read The Other Wind, though from the Wikipedia description, I want to. What has influenced me more by LeGuin, though, are her other sci-fi novels, starting with The Left Hand of Darkness, which is one of those books that produced a shift in my young mind, as Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time did.

The Left Hand of Darkness was groundbreaking in that the main characters in the cold planet Winter (Gethen) are -- well, the Wiki article describes them as androgynous, but I think actually intersexed, or hermaphroditic, is closer. They are both sexes, one at a time, depending on chemistry with a partner, once a month. That's very complicated. Hm. Most of the time, they have no sexual urges or desires at all (something already almost impossible to imagine, which creates great difficulties for the Ekumenical Mobile, Genly Ai, a Terran) but once a month they are in kemmer, which means they are sexually attracted and attractive, and migrate to one or the other end of the biologically male/female spectrum. Either end. So the theme is not really homosexuality, which can't even really exist, biologically, on this imagined world, but the embodiment of both genders and thus the questioning of rights that pertain to one. Along with all of this to think about, there is also a great deal of deep emotion in the book.

I could write for a long time about LeGuin -- her meditation on anarchist society affected me for a long, long time -- not necessarily positively. That's her novel The Dispossessed. And The Word for World is Forest shows an ACTUAL anti-imperialist revolt that Cameron clearly ripped off for Avatar. Finally, her Always Coming Home is one of those future dystopia/utopia books -- this one set in a future California that is much darker yet more successfully neo-Native American than, for example, Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing -- which I read, reject, think about, read again, get more used to, then love.

Nancy Farmer brings us back more explicitly to both YAF fantasy, but remains consciously political, at least to a certain extent. Farmer is white, but because (this is according to her own interviews on the subject) she spent 17 years in Africa, at first in the Peace Corps and then because she married a (white) guy she met at the University of Zimbabwe, she set most of her earliest fiction in Africa, whether it is science-fictional future Zimbabwe (The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm), or contemporary Africa (A Girl Named Disaster), or whimsical fantasy somewhat akin to the Disney movie Madagascar, (The Warm Place). These are all compelling, well-written, fascinating reads, which take their setting for granted, in a sense, not as a place which is Other and Exotic, but as the place that simply IS, for that story. I was so used to this, in fact, that it took me a long time to recognize that her more recent dystopia, The House of the Scorpion, was more inspired by the War on Drugs and Aztlan, than Africa -- and that her most recent triumph is a trilogy of 'troll' novels pulled straight from Norse mythology.

I have to admit that I haven't read The House of the Scorpion yet, though I own it... but have devoured the first two of the troll trilogy -- The Sea of Trolls, and The Land of the Silver Apples... and look forward to getting the third, The Islands of the Blessed. I do feel a little cognitive dissonance in reading stuff taken so clearly from Norse traditions, and reconciling that with stories whose folktale allusions have more to do with southern Africa. The African stories have greater emotional depth and general intensity to them; the Norse adventure/quest trilogy has more obvious tropes, though its humor and the character development of the main female character, an orphaned Viking shield-maiden, is quite modern and relatively feminist-ish. She's a good writer, and I look forward to more of her stuff. My own students seem to prefer the troll trilogy, as it fits better with the magic and fantasy current in Harry Potter and in the Percy Jackson series.