Clockwork Fairies

I wanted to mention that Tor.com has kicked off their Steampunk Fortnight with my story, "Clockwork Fairies."

His One True Bride

I wanted to point Aqueduct readers at a recent story at Fantasy Magazine, Darja Malcolm-Clarke's "His One True Bride", along with Darja's commentary on the story, because I think it's an excellent, interesting, thought-provoking story.

One of the things I love about f&sf is its ability to literalize a metaphor: a story of fading love where one lover actually turns invisible, someone's career conflicts showing up on their doorstop in the form of a cartoon tiger, feelings of alienation caused by actually being an alien. In "His One True Bride", Darja dissects a gendered metaphor that has historically been important in Christianity, the idea of the nun as "the bride of Christ".

When Is Fiction Adequate?

Today I found myself wondering what quality or qualities in a piece of fiction that is less than brilliant make it adequate-- which is to say, worth my time and attention regardless of its flaws?

I imagine that many people would reply in terms of the piece's characterization, its narrative drive, the beauty of its prose style, or its thematic coherence (or lack thereof). But when I was thinking the other day about what for me marks beginning writers as promising (even when their grip on craft is tenuous at best), it struck me that this must first and foremost be their ability to create a patch of what I think of as "thereness" in whatever fiction they write, however deficient it might otherwise be. "Thereness" is what draws me into a story and holds my attention. Even when every sentence is grammatically perfect, the narrative arc follows the rules, and the characters are well-delineated, a story without "thereness" makes me itch to toss it aside the way I itch to block up my ears when forced to hear a tedious diatribe I'd do just about anything to escape. On the other hand, if the story has "thereness," I'm likely to stick with it, even as consciousness of its flaws steals over me.

Let me offer an example. The novels of an early 20th-century English writer, Mary Butts, are deeply flawed. But Butts' novels nevertheless engage me, no matter that I don't much care for her characters and find her plots decidedly lame. The other day I read a passage in Death of Felicity Taverner in which a pause sets in during the middle of an intense, deeply emotional conversation among four people. Most writers would simply say, "There was a pause." And maybe depict a small piece of business. And then resume. (Or else would say baldly, "After a long pause, X said...") The pause is depicted in this way: One of the characters raises a question that Butts follows with an em-dash and a paragraph break. The narrative continues:

There was silence again, while Scylla prepared the next sequence, and the room had its turn. Instead of four voices, the fires spoke, the voice of flames disintegrating salted wood into the quiet light of light ash. The crack of old panels responding to heat, and behind them the ground-scratch of mice. A door in the kitchen quarters opened and shut. Nanna's feet and the maid's mounted the stair. The heavy shutters bolted-out the interminable conversations of the trees. Behind these incidental breaks, the pulse of the long room in the delicate candle-light beat in time with the house and the wood. In time with its own time, a pace inaudible, yet sensible to each. Felix had said that a sonata could be written on the room's tempo, whose finale should be a demonstration of relativity.



Then the long room took advantage of their silence, and its shadowless walls seemed to move each in its own direction to some uncharted place. Happy lovers, asleep together, sometimes imagine their bed sails out, indifferent to walls, and visit those countries which lie east of the sun, west of the moon. In this second silence the walls left them behind, preoccupied with Felicity's passion and death; aware only that something was happening to the place where they sat, to describe which the comparisons of poets have been used to obscure reality. So that a literal description passes, even among poets, for metaphor, as when Wordsworth said: "as if to make the strong wind visible"; "as if" discounting what he had to say, who had seen the wind, and not dared say so...

This is a somewhat exaggerated style, true; and no, in case you're wondering, Butts doesn't typically spend that amount of time on pregnant pauses. This elaboration of a pause in the conversation follows several pages of straight dialogue without description. Since the reader already knows well the house in which this pause takes place, these paragraphs effectively evoke the moment's reality within the narrative's overall emotional logic.

My guess is that it's that evocation that lies at the heart of "thereness"-- certainly not description, per se. Description, after all, can often be so dull, so banal. (Maybe because it lacks "thereness"?) That evocation can be accomplished by other means (and often is), perhaps depending on the work's genre, perhaps depending on the author's technical strengths. One might suppose that for sf, world-building would be a prime source of "thereness." Still, even extremely detailed world-building often fails to yield "thereness." Maybe because the world-building itself ignores whole parts of what must necessarily be included any world to grant it "thereness"?

Different meanings of 'strong'

Among the many issues raised by the Wiscon panel on feminist foremothers in sff, one that resonated with something I had already been mulling over was the one about the 'strong woman character'. Quite often there seems to be a segue from the idea of a strong character in the sense of one who is written in such a way as to interest and engage the reader (sense A) to the notion of a character who has to manifest some (rather stereotyped?) notion of 'strong' (sense B).

What is meant by 'strong' anyway? I'd been thinking for some time about the tendency of writers to put in 'strong woman characters' in sense B, who are very far from being strong characters in sense A. These are usually women in some non-typical female role (leatherclad ninja amazon bodyguard, daring guerilla fighter, ship's captain): but they don't actually do anything. They're just set-dressing. Or, if they do do anything it is simply for plot purposes to facilitate the endeavours of a central male character(s).

The whole question of 'strong woman characters' generates troubling questions about what is strength in women - is it only women-in-roles-traditionally-conceived of as male who can qualify, and does strength in more traditionally female forms, for example as a matriarch, simply replicate longstanding stereotypes, or get dismissed as the kind of stock trope that figures in female and/or domestic fiction.

When women in sff are depicted in more traditional roles they often have a distressing lack of agency: this tends to be excused on the grounds that 'that is what it would be like for women in a society like that'. The remedy for this is to go away and read some history, both biographies of specific women of the past and works such as Amanda Vickery's The Gentleman's Daughter, Norma Clarke's several studies of networks of women writers and intellectuals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a whole range of works both recent and older (Alice Clark's and Ivy Pinchbeck's pioneering studies are still worth reading) that demonstrate the fallacy of simplistic notions of 'separate spheres'.

There are also issues about what constitutes a strong character in sense A: are fictional characters who are already shining exemplars of certain qualities particularly interesting, does the reader empathise and engage with them? More flawed, less perfect, conflicted, struggling characters who make mistakes or fail to do the right thing at the right time, characters who are questions rather than answers, are surely 'stronger' in this sense because more vivid, more interesting.

Literature is full of characters who remain in the memory even if the author is not setting them up as models to be imitated. Sometimes, indeed, they are meant to be an awful warning. But they are memorable because even if they are not the hero or the heroine, they are written in such a way that they have lives of their own beyond any plot-function they may be serving. They are not just a reward for the hero's quest or a self-sacrificing sidekick.

Perhaps we need another word than 'strong', with its potential for blurring the boundaries between these entirely different things, to describe this?