Tales After Tolkien Kalamazoo 2014

I'm organising a session for the Tales After Tolkien Society at the Kalamazoo International Conference on Medieval Studies, May 8-11th 2014. Here is the CFP.

The Real Genre Middle Ages

How does twenty-first century genre-literature engage with the history and literature of the Middle Ages? This session invites submissions which explore genre medievalisms from any angle. How do contemporary social and cultural trends and concerns intersect with the medieval in genre fiction? Are shifts within a genre or across genres discernable? How do genre conventions shape the use of medieval material and vice versa? Do modern works reflect medieval history or literature? How do authors approach the Middle Ages and medieval material? What roles do audiences and/or publishers play? How important the idea the a work reflects historical reality, and to whom does it matter? What is the role of research? These are just some of the questions papers might consider.

Papers addressing works first published in the twenty-first century, including ongoing series which may have begun earlier, are sought. They may address individual works or series, the corpus of any author or broad trends in any popular genre including, but not limited to: fantasy, science fiction, crime, westerns, children and young adult fiction, horror, historical fiction and cross-genre works.

The session is sponsored by the Tales After Tolkien Society www.talesaftertolkien.org which supports all scholarly work on medievalism in genre literature.  All submissions should be directed to Dr Helen Young via Helen.young@sydney.edu.au by 31^st August 2013. They should conform to conferencepolicies and be accompanied by a Participant Information Form, available here,

More Thoughts on Genre

With some interruptions, I’ve been working more on the conference paper I was putting together last week. Really what it’s about is the dynamics of Racefail 09 and many of the other debates around race that I’ve been working on this year. I see them as contests over the genre – and as reflecting similar situations in culture and society more broadly. Fantasy has a bad reputation for being racist. Like any generalisation that ignores the diversity of the texts and people who are part of the genre, but it also hasn’t come from nowhere. The World Fantasy Awards were announced recently. For the second year in a row the award for best novel went to an author who wasn’t a white man from the USA or UK: Lavie Tidhar, who is Israeli-born won for his novel Osama. Last year it went to Nnedi Okorafor, an American woman with Nigerian heritage, for Who Fears Death. The awards started in 1975 and have gone to white Anglophones 32 times by my count (I’m basing this on online photos and biographies of the winners so my sincere apologies if I’ve miscounted or misrepresented anyone – please let me know so I can correct this if I have). 26 times they were white Anglophone men. Patrick Suskind, born in Germany, won for Perfume in 1987, and Japanese author Haruki Murakami won in 2006 for Kafka on the Shore. I wonder if it’s significant that neither of those works was marketed as fantasy or would ever have graced the shelves of the fantasy/sci-fi section of a bookshop?

Fantasy texts, authors, publishers, marketers, critics, awards and audiences have a habit of whiteness (and I can’t exclude myself from that as my photo attests). It’s a habit that’s being broken more often in recent years than it was for a long time. Racefail 09 seems to me something like an intervention; habits can be addictions as well as traditions. The argument, the contest, is as much about defending long-held positions of privilege as much as anything else – sometimes by flat-out denying that they exist. That privilege is multi-dimensional, it’s not just about race or ethnicity or diversity (or lack of it). I’m suspicious of generalised claims that the internet has changed everything by making culture participatory, but it’s certainly added new dimensions to occurences like Racefail. Authors, editors, and publishes have historical been somewhat insulated from audience reactions, but blogs and fan forums and the rest change all that. The voices of intervention aren’t so easily marginalised or ignored. It’s time for fantasy studies to catch up with contemporary thinking on genre and recognise that ‘fantasy’ isn’t just a set of texts to be read and interpreted, but is also cultural systems, groups, individuals and their interactions.

Thinking About Genre

I’m currently working on a paper for the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference at the University of Sydney in early December. It’s partly an attempt to solidify, and articulate, some of the ways I’ve been thinking about fantasy as a genre in this project. Being from a literary studies background means I come to it from a perspective which depends very heavily on texts, and on critical theory about them. This is problematic – it’s widely acknowledged that fantasy is more tricky than most genres to define this way. Or at least that critics have struggled to do so, which isn’t necessarily the same thing. Right from the beginning of this project I knew that just doing textual analysis wasn’t going to be sufficient to really understand all the different ways in which race and fantasy intersect – I’ve always planned to talk to authors and fans and have spent a lot of time this year reading blog posts, fan forums etc.

Reading and thinking around fan studies has been useful for me lately. Even if fantasy fans haven’t been the subject of a major work (yet, it’s in my head for when the current project ends), science fiction fans have always been a significant topic. I’m thinking of Celia Bacon-Smith and John Tulloch here, although there are plenty of others. What I’m finding most helpful at the moment though, is work on popular music genres. Jason Toynbee’s term ‘genre-culture,’ from Making Popular Music (2000) offers a framework for thinking about genre as a process that is socially constructed, not a fixed category. Studies of popular music also tend to take into account or at least acknowledge the role played by marketing and publishers, as well as fans and artists. Literary critics of fantasy – even those who defend it – tend to make derisive comments about boy wizards and vampires and have little else to say about the mass-market side of things. And as Steven Erikson pointed out in the New York Review of Science Fiction earlier this year, scholars have a tendency to fixate on Tolkien, but there’s far more to the genre, even to genre fiction, than that. It seems likely to me that a disjunction between critical engagement and what’s actually being written and read, is one reason it’s so difficult to taxonomies fantasy. Form and content necessarily depend on what is written, published and read, particularly in a genre that is as popular as fantasy at the moment.

Alternate History, Historical Fantasy, and Alternate Worlds

In some of my earlier posts I used the term ‘alternate history’ rather loosely. As a technical term, AH revolves “around the basic premise that some event in the past did not occur as we know it did, and thus the present has changed” (Hellekson, 2000, 247). It’s usually considered a science fiction genre, and, as Hellekson also points out “concerns itself with plausible relationships” (247). It also has, as Amy Ransom points out a “scientifical approach to mimesis”(Ransom, 2010, 260). Draconic intervention in the Napoleonic Wars – as in Naomi Novik’s books – doesn’t fit.

Magic, mythology and anything else outside the mundane world – except sometimes time travel – are outside the bounds of the genre.

AH extrapolates forward from a changed event, or series of events – a Nazi victory in World War II or victory by the South in the American Civil War are the most common divergences. Books like Novik’s extrapolate backwards from the present, asking what would have had to be historically different for the present to be altered. That they employ ‘the fantastic’ to do it doesn’t necessarily make the process less logical. As I said in my earlier post about Novik’s books, dragons make European militaries comparable with those of the rest of the world, resulting in much altered attempts at imperialism particularly in Africa, South America, and Australia. If AH asks ‘what if,’ Novik’s question is a ‘what would’ have altered the history of western expansionism around the globe.

Books that intertwine history with fantasy elements in various ratios and combinations are often, not very imaginatively, labelled Historical Fantasy – although this is more a term used by publishers and audiences than scholars. Novik’s Temeraire is currently at the top of the Goodreads Popular Historical Fantasy list, ahead of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell, and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon. Guy Gavriel Kay features in the top 20, as does Diana Gabaldon, Cassandra Clare and George R.R. Martin. Historical Fantasy is really only useful as a very broad term – there are major differences between these works. Jo Walton’s article "What is historical fantasy?" on Tor.com is indicative of its very broad application as well (Walton, 2009). Moreover, scholars of fantasy don’t tend to define it, although they use it. There’s no definition in John Clute and John Grant’s The Encyclopedia of Fantasy for example (Clute & Grant, 1999).

Ransom offers Historical Fantasy as a term for works like Kay’s The Lions of Al-Rassan (which she invokes as an example) or Novik’s which differ from AH in that “more than one event and the plausible extrapolation of its consequences must be altered; rather everything must change” (275). I’d suggest that Historical Fantasy is a very problematic term to adopt from a critical standpoint because it is already used so widely, and in such varied ways, by publishers and audiences. John Clute lamented the tendency of publishers to mis-use ‘Epic Fantasy,’ saying that the term “has lost its usefulness” (Clute & Grant, 1999, 319), and this sort of problem is endemic in fantasy criticism – even in the difficulties of defining ‘fantasy’ itself. For Historical Fantasy to be critically useful, it would need to be disentangled from commercial and popular usage.

I would suggest that Alternate World has more potential to be useful in delineating fantasy which engages with (by altering) a specific aspect of the real world’s past, often although not always with the intent of critiquing both that past and the present. In the kinds of works I’m thinking of, something about the world is different – whether its sentient dragons or real magic or myriad other options – and this changes the course of history as we know it. This draws on the critical history of the term. Clute, drawing on Brian Stableford in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction offers this in his definition: “an alternate world is an account of our world as it might otherwise have been” (21). Clute excludes works like Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula because they intervene in and “violate” history, although as I haven’t read the book I’m not sure if I’d agree on that distinction (more on this at a later date). Alternate World resonates with AH in productive ways: it invokes the thought experiment questions that underpin AH, suggesting that an Alternate World is more than mere revisionism or nostalgia, and it can be used to separate out some of what it lumped together under the banner of Historical Fantasy.

Clute, J., & Grant, J. (1999). The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. London: Orbit.

Hellekson, K. (2000). Toward a Taxonomy of the Alternate History Genre, Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 41(3), 247–256.

Ransom, A. J. (2010). Warping Time: Alternate Histories, Historical Fantasy, and the Postmodern uchronie quebecoise. Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 51(2), 258–280.

Walton, J. (2009). What is historical fantasy? Tor.com. Retrieved August 2, 2012, from http://www.tor.com/blogs/2009/07/what-is-historical-fantasy-anyway

Medievalism and Colonialism

I have been thinking about colonisation, medievalism, and fantasy all at once in the past couple of weeks. One of the things I’ve noticed is that fantasy stories that critique colonisation and imperialism very rarely do it in medievalist settings. Robin Hobb and Naomi Novik whose work I’ve mentioned in other posts don’t use them. Neither do Terry Pratchett in Nation or Snuff (which is in part about indigenous peoples), Nora K. Jemisin in her Inheritance trilogy, or (from memory) any of the authors in Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan’s So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy. This is a quick, and definitely not exhaustive list. And there are a lot of people whose writing isn’t part of the western publishing genre that I’m working with.

Hobb, Pratchett, and Novik all use nineteenth-century-type worlds; the latter two creating alternate histories (in Nation for Pratchett, Snuff is a Discworld book). There’s some logic to this: the nineteenth century was the heyday of European imperialism around the globe, what better time to draw on for a critique of the practice? None of the works I’m thinking about – or have mentioned here, are Steampunk as such, but the discussions that have been going on around that sub-genre and its ability to critique and be transgressive are reasonably applicable. Like medievalism, Steampunk has been accused of having inherent racist nostalgic leanings – of yearning for a time of ‘white power’. And not without some justification. Although I won’t link to them, there are white supremacist web-forums which praise both for their supposedly monochrome visions. But Steampunk also has its defenders. Probably the most active is Jaymee ‘Jha’ Goh, a self-described steampunk postcolonialist who blogs here.

The decision not to use medievalist settings is uncommon enough to rate comment. Readers who reviewed Hobb’s Soldier Son books on Goodreads, for example, often commented on the unconventional setting. I wonder how much the use of non-medievalist setting to critique imperialism is a deliberate tactic on the part of the authors. Whether they turn to a ‘Victorianist’ setting or not, they certainly tend to turn away from medievalist conventions. Looking at my list of examples in the first paragraph, this probably isn’t surprising – none of those authors are genre hacks; most if not all are known for being unconventional. Even if none of them made conscious decisions to be non-medievalist, the settings are telling. They work against genre expectations on multiple levels. I’d really like to know if there are books out that use a medievalist setting but are significantly engaged in critiquing colonisalism.

Tales After Tolkien: Medievalism and Twenty-First Century Fantasy Literature

I am organizing a panel for the 2013 International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

CFP: Tales After Tolkien: Medievalism and Twenty-First Century Fantasy Literature

Panel at the International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo. May 9-12, 2013 http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/

For a work of contemporary fantasy literature to be compared with those of J. R. R. Tolkien can be either compliment or condemnation; the juxtaposition might suggest a major, original contribution to the genre or imply a work is merely derivative. Yet if Tolkien had one of the first words on fantasy and medievalism he did not have the last. Author Steven Erikson recently described himself and other writers of epic fantasy as “post-Tolkien” in The New York Review of Science Fiction and lamented the tendency of some scholars to not realise that “we’ve moved on.” This panel seeks papers which explore the ways in which twenty-first century fantasy literature deploys ‘the medieval’ with all its relics, forms and incarnations. Papers may or may not directly contrast and compare with Tolkien’s practice. The panel asks, for example, how contemporary trends in technology, society, politics, and culture intersect with and influence contemporary writers, readers, and critics in their re-imaginings of medieval material. Are there shifts in the genre as a whole? Tolkien drew largely on the European Middle Ages as do his imitators; is this changing as Eurocentric views become increasingly problematic and the world is ever more globalised? How do technological developments and the explosion of multi-media fantasy products including film, television and video-gaming engage with literature? How do representations of race, gender, and class intersect with medievalism in contemporary fantasy? Is the idea of an ‘authentic’ Middle Ages important? How do writers research the past and approach their sources? Papers which address these or any other topic related to the theme of the panel are invited. They might address short stories, novels, comics and graphic novels, series, authors and/or their oeuvres, or the genre as a whole, as well as adaptations for or from film, tv, gaming, and fandoms including fan-fiction.

Please send a 250-300 word abstract for a 20 minute paper, and a brief biography, to the organizer, Dr Helen Young by 1^st September 2012. Abstracts are best emailed to Helen.young@sydney.edu.au but may also be posted to Helen Young, John Woolley Building A20, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia.