by Gene Wolfe
“Now the problem is that a clear distinction has been drawn between horror and everything else, but no marketing distinction is being made between genre fantasy and what I continue to call contemporary fantasy (even though that’s a bad label, misleading in many ways). There really isn’t any way the reader can tell what’s going to happen between the covers …”
That last’s pretty much a mixed bag, isn’t it? Trouble is, every writer’s lord of his own lands, and some have two or three. Or lady of her own, for there’s many a lass: Judith Tarr, Sherri Tepper, Barbara Hambly, and Esther Friesner. Real maenads every one, divinely mad on any fine evening. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s their queen, and Andre Norton’s the queen mother. Yes, a lady, Alice Norton to you.
Jane Yolen’s everybody’s war-chief; and I’d say she’s Hans Christian Andersen, too, back from Death to save his people.
Over on Merlin’s Isle, there’s Tanith Lee and Diana Wynn Jones. Jo the Arrow-Maker says Fantasy’s been looking up there since Corgi published David Eddings’s The Belgariad with smashing covers, though three quarters of what they read still comes from our Western Land. Century Hutchinson’s committed to hardcovers, with Ramsey Campbell, John Maxim, and Chris Rowley. Macdonald (Futura) is launching a hardcover fleet this August. W. H. Allen (Star) seems to be concentrating on splatter—terribly violent Horror, don’t you know; Collins paid Clive Barker half a million pounds for an unwritten book. Gollancz, which has published in hardcover forever, will be publishing C. J. Cherryh, the Duchess of Oklahoma, hard and soft.
Which reminds me that there’s The Women’s Press over there; most of the women are Yanks like Suzette Hadin Elgin and Joanna Russ. Then too, Jo’s own Headline House is committed to Fantasy. That’s why the clever chaps hired Jo.
Have I mentioned Anne McCaffrey, across the sea in County Wicklow? She writes Science Fiction, though I’ve seen her folk riding dragons; her books sell by the case, whichever.
Confused? ’Course you are. Just pull off that hat if you pass A Wizard of Earthsea, and you’ll be all right. Now, here’s a guidebook for you, The Language of the Night. Mind you fold back the maps.
All women? Not on your luck! Didn’t I tell you I grew up in Fantasy? Jack Vance brought me, with The Dying Earth. He’s still rolling The Green Pearl. Clark Ashton Smith brought him, I’d imagine, and Mike Moorcock and Steve Donaldson have brought thousands.
What’s going on in Fantasy now? Say, you’d make old Bottom laugh! You mean you haven’t noticed Fantasy’s invading your own place? It is. You might write your kin; tell ’em to put food away. Have a look at The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars; The Mask of the Sun; and New York by Knight. Every one’s laid right in your own world and your own time.
Who reads it? Who don’t! I asked Robert of the Vineyard Mountain—oh, you understand that, do you? See how wise you’re becoming? I asked Bob and many another bookseller, and that’s all the answer I could get. Horror’s mostly ladies and Science Fiction’s mostly men. But Fantasy gets them all, from the teenager you think might mug you to the retired schoolteacher.
Why’s it going so strong since Tolkien? Maybe that’s the wrong question. It’s old, I told you—old as writing, anyhow, and maybe old as talk. When you see a lad come out of the mall with a Jack Chalker book, you probably don’t consider that he’s going to read the sort of thing Caracalla relaxed with in the bath, but he is. Next time you get to Walden’s, ask yourself what’s there that would make Brian Boru and Richard the Lion-Hearted think of home. Perhaps the question’s not why Fantasy’s doing well now, but why it wasn’t doing better before, when it’s done so well since the Stone Age.
My theory’s that Tolkien woke something, poking around in the old sagas. I see you don’t think much of it; maybe you’ll think again when you have been here longer. Preparation’s what some say, for there’s many coming home to Earth that’s never really been here. No, it wasn’t a writer told me; I’ve been looking into Scientific American, about gene-splicing and suchlike.
But the best explanation might be what Algis Budrys—John Sentry he is—said about stories of the other sort in Fantasy and Science Fiction: “A compulsive denial of the supernatural so staunch as to be an affirmation of its power; a testament to the terror loaded into any overt thought that apparent reality may be transient, and that the correct rules of behavior may have become ineffectual at any moment. That is, descriptive fiction may largely be an insane art, serving to lend a meretricious permanence to a self-circumscribed universe.” He’s editor of the Writers of the Future series; makes you think, don’t it?
You’ll want to read the papers. Locus and Science Fiction Chronicle are both good. Fantasy Review’s college professors mostly, but some like it. Avalon to Camelot sticks with Malory, T. H. White, and Mary Stewart, by and large—the Round Table Circle; but it’s fine for them. The British Fantasy Society’s worth joining just to get the publications.
Good-bye, and a safe passage to the Grey Havens. You can point your feather with that sword, if you’ve no knife. But ‘ware the knives of others! For the manner, study the masters; for the matter touch none but your own. Blood blacked with smoke’s a good ink, but the blood must be yours, mind. Work hard, and recollect you’ll be measured against Homer.
How Science Will Conquer the World for Fantasy
(1982)
For most practical purposes, we (now) can be divided into five: Poets, Alchemists, Kings, Dragons, and Churls. It has been a lot like chess, but simpler.
Churls make up the largest group—well over ninety percent—but they have the least influence. They are the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the tenders of machines, the soldiers in the tanks and the clerks and clerics in the ranks. They are those who serve without love, and never of themselves question the service. The young man in Scotland I read of recently, who has been out of work for more than two years but who has never even considered starting some sort of enterprise for himself that would employ him—shoveling snow, say, or going door-to-door offering to wash cars or windows—is a Churl.
Dragons they are whose primary thoughts are of Gold. If the young Scot had begun that car-washing, and if he had soon employed others and advertised in the Yellow Pages, he would probably have become a Dragon.
Kings are those whose thoughts are of Power. Most Captains of Industry (as they used to be called) are Dragons, but some are Kings. Most military officers are Churls, though a few are Kings—Alexander Haig was a fine example. Not all Kings have crowns, or even much power. Archie Bunker, the loading-dock foreman whose great concern was exercising authority over his little family, was a King—an unsuccessful King, but a King nevertheless. Every politician who attains high rank is a King, with only minuscule exceptions. Paradoxically, the only way for a nation to avoid being ruled by a King is for it to set up some such system as hereditary monarchy. Then the result is liable to be worse.
Alchemists are those who seek Truth. Judges, scientists, and philosophers (who are a kind of scientist, though they have forgotten it), and even a few clergymen are Alchemists. So are most engineers, and many physicians.
Poets are such as love Dream. Since you are reading this, you are presumably a Poet.
Clearly no one is confined to a single category. A man may be a King on the job and a Churl at home. A woman may be a Poet in love and a King in marriage. (But most people are Churls and nothing but Churls throughout their lives.)
For as long as tongues have wagged, they have said that Kings rule the world. They do not, and they never have. What they have ruled has been the narrow circle of human affairs, and for the most part they have ruled that only as a queen bee may be said to rule the hive.
Human nature does not change at the edict of a King, and most certainly the storm does not blow or cease upon his word. Nor do geese aim their arrow to the south for any human being. If Alexander in fact wept because there remained no worlds to conquer, he should, like Canute, have ordered back the tide; he would have discovered that this world of
Earth had yet to feel so much as a pinprick. (In the eighteenth century, sages remarked that the only thing princes learned to do well was ride; a horse does not care about the rank of the man on its back. Alexander, who loved his horse Bucephalus more than any man or woman, would have understood that, at least.)
How foolish it sounds to speak of conquering the world. It summons up two images: the madman ranting at the wind; and that of the first wise woman who, moved by what genius no one can now say, scratched the soil and scattered the seed of edible grasses. Let me say at once that the madman is correct, however mad; and the wise woman mistaken—if we unwisely suppose her bent, with her stick, upon conquest. To shout orders to the moaning wind is not to conquer the world; but if the world is ever conquered, its conquerors will hear the wind obey. To grow wheat, dam rivers, and tame the fierce force of the primal guinea pig is not to conquer the world. To shoot or cage the last wild tiger is not to conquer the world either, only to impoverish it. Most certainly, to overgraze a plain until it turns to desert is not to conquer but to be conquered.
Earlier I said that no one was confined to a single category. Nearly all of us—Poets, Kings, or what have you—are nature’s Churls. It has always been so, but it need not remain so much longer. The next century is apt to see the end of meteorology as a predictive science and its beginnings as a manipulative science. Merely as an example, consider what might be done today with the space shuttle. A thin cloud of light-absorbent particles in orbit high above the desert of the Southwest could readily lower the summer temperature there by several degrees, which in turn would mean less evaporation and more condensation, and thus more water. Such a cloud would disperse slowly of its own accord; it would probably be unnecessary to remove it at the approach of winter.
If reflective particles were used instead—say, aluminum dust instead of carbon—it would even be possible to position a cloud that reflected heat and light toward Minnesota while it shadowed Arizona. Hurricanes, like just about every other sort of meteorological phenomenon, depend upon temperature gradients. By controlling the amount of sunlight striking the appropriate part of the earth, it should be possible to control them, and that is something that could be tried not in 2001 but next year.
Thus the Alchemist, or at least one kind of Alchemist, will become that fantasy figure, the weather wizard. (Finns, you know, can call up storms and whistle for a wind—but then Finns are all warlocks anyhow.) Soon, however, there will be no need to send up the shuttle every time some storm is to be calmed or caused; that work will be handled by permanent weather-control satellites. These in turn could be instructed by observers at or near the affected area by radio.
What difference now between a weather wizard and a controlling meteorologist? Only that we know—or rather, that we think we know—how the latter will do it. We shall probably continue to think so until a few of us are unlucky enough to gain control of his equipment and turn sorcerer’s apprentice. Will the ranked thunderheads march to the quickening tempos of Dukas? In our minds, very probably; musicians are Poets, after all.
All this is minor, of course, though not beside the point. As every Churl knows, the genuine stuff of fantasy is monsters, trolls, elves, and unicorns. Particularly unicorns. It would be old (pointed starspangled) hat for me to insist here that genetic engineering will soon permit any devoted hobbyist to put a narwhale’s tooth on a horse’s head. I have said that already in “The Woman the Unicorn Loved” and in a published interview.
Yet it is so. The technology is on our doorstep. If I may be permitted to repeat myself just once, Columbia now offers undergraduate training in gene-splicing. The will is certainly present—the World Fantasy Convention felt it necessary to ban unicorns from the art show, charging them with terminal banality. In the interview previously referred to, the interviewer (Joan Gordon) asked if I did not feel the genetic manipulators would use their knowledge to create mere kitsch and corn rather than recognizable mythical beasts. Alas, most recognizable mythical beasts are kitsch already, and corn, too.
But where—even now the plaintive question sounds—will the unicorns graze? Where will the chimeras lair and the fauns skip? The answer, as we might expect, is already there, in a thousand fantasies and a hundred thousand fairy tales: in the wet, wild wood, the great untamed singing forests of the world—the forests at the ends of the earth.
Did I hear you say, Churl, that there are no such forests? Or that those we now have—the jungles of the Amazon basin, for example—are already being cut for lumber? Ah, but there shall be such forests, the forests of Faerie, soon. Weather control we have talked of already; the world’s hunger will gnaw like a rat as fossil fuels are exhausted. Furthermore, the burning of fuels of all types is increasing the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide to levels that are already dangerous—even now the early returns are coming in from the polar ice. Carbon dioxide can be readily removed from the air by growing plants, which retain the carbon and excrete oxygen, vital both for supporting combustion and for sustaining animal life. For fifty years or so, science fiction has suggested gardens in spaceships, generally favoring plants that would add zest to the astronauts’ diets.
Earth herself is on a long space flight, and her conditions are ideal for the employment of such plants—there is no need to generate artificial light for them, for example. One variety in particular is particularly well suited to the purpose. Trees do not need weeding or annual replanting. They supply food (though it has received no publicity, one of the more promising projects for genetic engineering is the development of an oak that will bear edible acorns; but even the present wild varieties supply excellent forage for swine), fuel, paper, building material, and feedstocks for a whole host of chemical processes. They prevent erosion and enrich the soil. Vast stretches of Australia, North Africa, Central Asia, and North and South America are available for conversion to forest—all that will be necessary is a little less sun and some wet winds driven ashore.
The unicorn and the hippogriff will not be the only residents of these forests (and the existing forests of places like romantic Canada and far-off Pennsylvania). And they certainly will not be the only interesting ones. One of my favorite bumper stickers is SUPPORT YOUR RIGHT TO ARM BEARS; but of course bears do not really need assault rifles or Saturday-night specials—bears are very well armed already. What bears need are better brains (“Oh, that sort of bear!”). They will get them, and so will deer, rabbits, and just about every other kind of animal that is not already rare, and that is soft and cuddly in infancy or possessed of large and melting brown eyes. All that will be necessary is to graft the genes governing frontal-lobe development in human beings into the genetic structure of the appropriate animal in such a way that the trait will be a Mendelian dominant. Heroes of old licked the blood of the great worm or the enchanted fish from their fingers and understood the speech of beasts; the beasts themselves are about to lick it at last.
If what I have been writing here sounds revolutionary to you, you are out of touch with the scientific progress of the past few years. But now I am going to say something truly revolutionary, something that so far as I know has not been said before by anyone. It is that the landscape of fantasy is no more the landscape of myth (as is often alleged) than it is the landscape of Medieval Europe or of Attic Greece; that it is a landscape of the future, and no very remote future at that. We will have it, and we will have it because we want it—or rather, because we Poets have taught so many Alchemists to want it, planting the suggestion in stories and in essays like this one.
What of the hi-tech future envisioned by science fiction? We will have that too, indeed we have a great deal of it already. We will have it in the new cities of education and technology. (The old cities will be abandoned to the werewolves and their allies, I think.) We will have it in orbiting space colonies and in cities on the Moon and Mars. But in the rest—and that rest will have a thousand times the area—we will have meadows and woods, beast-fable, centaurs, and “magical” weapons. (No,
I am no satirist. I am serious—a serious satyrist, if you like.)
The game of chess has been the Game of Life until very recently. You can even think of the Kings as kings, Dragons as queens, Poets as knights, and so on. There is another game, however—appropriately enough called fairy chess—in which the players can invent new pieces and even change the shape of the board, imagining a cylindrical one, for example. But the game we are preparing to play in now will be like none ever seen. It will be a game in which the pieces invent new pieces (pieces that may prove to care little for Gold, Power, Truth, or Dream) and even control the shape of the board.
And if that is not a world of fantasy, Alice never slept.
From a House on the Borderland
(1987)
Last column, I said I might talk a bit more about fans and fan conventions; and in this one I’m going to do it. Since then, I’ve attended Readercon, a small Boston convention that can be used to illuminate some of the good (and bad) points of what are usually called science-fiction conventions, or simply cons.
Readercon was a throwback to the origin of such conventions in get-togethers of fans who had “met” in the letter columns of pulps like Astounding, Startling, Thrilling Wonder, and Amazing. I have before me as I write (I’ve been longing to use that line for years!) the May 1940 issue of Weird Tales. I want to quote a sentence or two from a letter in “The Eyrie,” as that letter column was called. I omit the name and address of the writer, though they were given at the beginning of her letter.
“Having read in your March issue of W.T. of the ‘Outsiders’ in Washington, D.C., and of the ‘Insiders’ in Los Angeles, and also having noted your suggestion of forming other Weird Tales clubs throughout the ‘imagination’; I should like to say that here in Syracuse, N.Y., where the population averages around two hundred and fifty thousand, would be an excellent place to have another such club … . I suggest that if you could find a spot in your column for this note and state that those who are interested call me at my home … or drop me a postcard at my home address … .”