Literary Explorations: Epic Fantasy = Crushingly Conservative? (A Sorta Response to Liz Bourke)

First, read this.

Have you read it now?  Good.  I want to start by briefly talking about two of the central problems that Ms. Bourke rightly struggles with throughout her post (and which many readers had issues developing or agreeing to on their own) -- definitions and the perception of their application.  For the sake of space and time -- you should read the actual thread anyway -- I'm going break this down into little, methodical sections.

I.  Definitions

The two main terms at work here are "conservative" and "epic fantasy."  The latter is somewhat impossible to define, in part because subgenres are, in effect, convenient marketing categories.  There might be something called "epic fantasy," but I don't think anyone can approach a satisfactory definition.  I tend to imagine "epic fantasy" as a matter of scale.  In most works in this class, what is at stake is not the individual so much as the entire world (or the world as the characters know it).  Thus, any actions the heroes take is in an attempt to save the world from destruction, whether literally through some kind of magic or figuratively through some

Poll: The Retro Nostalgia Film (#5) -- Pick Away!

You decide!

Retro Nostalgia: Forbidden Planet (1956) and Romancing the Science

I have never seen Forbidden Planet.  It's one of those films that SF enthusiasts say you have to see, but I have never made the time to do so.  Until now...

As a first time viewer of a now-50+-year-old movie, I find it necessary to offer a number of concessions:  1) I cannot expect the visuals to meet contemporary standards of "realism" (limited budgets + limited technology); 2) I cannot expect characters to develop in ways that are anything but consistent with a 1950s cultural milieu; and 3) I must accept pseudoscience.  That's more or less how I came into the film.  After all, if you watch Forbidden Planet, you'll become aware of the limitations of the cinematic medium during the 50s, the rampant, almost "rapey" sexism that was all too common during the "glory days," and the laughable nonsense that passed for "science" then (and still passes for "science" today).

And yet, for such a campy film, Forbidden Planet does something that only the best SF films do:  eloquently visualizes and explores the science of a future world, even if, upon further inspection, much of that science is impossible, unexplained, or downright false (it was the 50s, after all).  The

Literary Explorations: Rethinking the Classics -- Ringworld and the Golden Age (Brief Thoughts)

One of my colleagues recently asked me whether I think he should finish reading Ringworld by Larry Niven.  While he didn't say so directly, I assume that he isn't enjoying his first foray into the Known Space universe.  There are probably a lot of good reasons for that.  His research interests lean toward the last 30 years of science fiction, with special attention to works that fall loosely into the cyberpunk, biopunk, and ecocriticism categories -- authors like Paolo Bacigalupi, William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, etc.  He's made a solid effort to read the classics, though, since knowing about the history of the genre is important to the scholarship.

Personally, I think Ringworld is a fascinating book that falls prey to its age.  True, it is one of the most important works of science fiction ever written.  True, it has affected genre in profound ways.  But it is also a work that doesn't connect as well with contemporary audiences as it did in the decades immediately following publication (1970).  That said, it has not aged as much as the works

Poll: The Retro Nostalgia Film (#4) -- What's next?

You decide!

Retro Nostalgia: The Dark Crystal (1982) and the Necessity of a Remake

When I first saw The Dark Crystal over a decade ago, I recall feeling amazed by the story.  As kids, I think we have a tendency to open ourselves to imaginative possibilities that adults have closed themselves off to (possibly because adults have "seen it all").  Watching The Dark Crystal as a kid was like jumping headfirst into my own imagination.*  Re-watching the film brought back some of those mostly-nostalgic memories, in particular because the world of The Dark Crystal is a fully realized one.  There are enormous sets, moving plants and critters, unique characters, and astonishing puppetry.  It's hard not to marvel at how much effort went into making this film.

The problem?  Time has not been kind to Jim Henson's 1982 classic.  Unlike The Labyrinth, which survives its ancient green screen and sometimes stiff puppetry largely because it is a quirky fantasy flick for kids, The Dark Crystal simply doesn't hold up as well.  The stiff puppetry, a product of the time more than anything else, reminds us that we're looking at, well, puppets; to suspend disbelief, we have to trick our minds in ways we generally wouldn't have to.  This is true of

Literary Explorations: When to Re-read?

Today, I had a strange moment of contemplation:  since I don't re-read books all that often, I wondered about the criteria for re-reading and what re-reading does to our perception of the work.  Do we re-read books we simply love, or are there certain elements that compel re-reading?  And what happens to a book when we re-read it (or to ourselves, for that matter)?

But as I thought about this subject, it occurred to me that re-reading is a personal affair.  After all, my reasons for re-reading a book may not coincide with yours, in part because we're not the same person, but also because there are probably thousands of reasons why people re-read (and no two reasons are necessarily the same).  For example, most of my re-reading falls into the following categories: