Happy Holidays to everyone, and may peace that comes soft like mist in the morning come to us all. This year-end feels less like a conclusion and more like a deep breath before battle, but, well, let us hope for a respite and a recharge before it’s time to mobilize and occupy the trenches.
This has been Quite the Week here at the Colonial Castle Dracula. Inlaws and outlaws, parties, and the Best Guy in the World (present company excepted, of course) has been home on vacation. I need quiet to write. Himself is a bigger news junkie than I am, which means that he has been known to walk into a quiet room, snap on the television, tuned always to a news channel, and then walk out. Repeatedly. It’s the only thing we ever argue about.
So. Although I intended to have an examination about Ursula LeGuin’s vision of utopia and its intersection with anarchy, building on last week’s profound and insightful discussions, it has to wait a week. I’m not blaming Himself—this is me, and the Holidays, and way too many people around. Sorry. It happens.
Let’s consider this week an open thread. To start it off, picking up on a well-chewed bone, I propose the question of literary respect and the fantasy genre (which I want to circle around to after we’re done with utopia, since dismissing disrespect really shirks the issue, and it’s an issue deserving of discussion).
I’m currently reading Salman Rushdie’s Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, which riffs on A Thousand and One Arabian Nights and is utterly charming, but which one critic couldn’t really classify—“too good to be fantasy. If Rushdie were South American, it would be hailed as magic realism, but his writing evades classification.” And no, I can’t put my hands on that review (which I might well have used as tinder in the wood stove, I was so impressed).
Our collective opinion of fantasy as a literary form is schizophrenic. Many of us treat it like a guilty pleasure, a literary equivalent of fast food. Survey the literary criticism of GRR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and most of what you’ll read is deconstruction and appreciation of how Martin succeeds by dismantling the fantasy genre. In other words, Martin’s success depends on how much he destroys the conventions of his form. In what other genre would that kind of benchmark apply?
Himself has just come in with a smoked turkey off the grill, and I have twenty minutes to publishing time. Happy New Year, y’all.