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CONTENTS
Article: Elven Blades and Zero-G Ki, by Rachel Manija Brown
Article: Interview: Maureen F. McHugh, by Pat Stansberry
Article: Spirits, Art, and the Fourth Dimension, by Bryan Clair
Article: Interview: Brad Strickland, by James Palmer
Article: Guillotines and Body Transplants: the Severed Head in Fact and Fiction, by Fred Bush
Fiction: Comrade Grandmother, by Naomi Kritzer, illustration by Marge Simon
Fiction: Rhythm of the Tides, by Lisa A. Nichols
Fiction: Wantaviewer (part 1 of 2), by Michael J. Jasper
Fiction: Wantaviewer (part 2 of 2), by Michael J. Jasper
Fiction: Coyotes, Cats, and Other Creatures, by Karen L. Abrahamson
Music: Interview: Blöödhag, by Victoria Garcia and John Aegard
Poetry: All Those Bleached Bones ..., by Andy Miller
Poetry: The Children of the Moon, by Heather Shaw
Poetry: Mr Hyde's Daughter, by Mary Alexandra Agner
Poetry: The Garden of Time, by Lorraine Schein
Poetry: A Bestiary: Plate Spinning, by Tim Pratt
Review: John C. Wright's The Golden Age, reviewed by David Soyka
Review: Alan Moore's Promethea, reviewed by Laura Blackwell
Review: Jeffrey Ford's The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories, reviewed by Amy O'Loughlin
Review: China Miéville's The Scar, reviewed by Sherryl Vint
Review: George Zebrowski's Swift Thoughts, reviewed by Walter Chaw
Elven Blades and Zero-G Ki: The Evolution of Martial Arts in SF and Fantasy
By Rachel Manija Brown
9/2/02
Their new weapons they hung on their leather belts under their jackets, feeling them very awkward, and wondering if they would be of any use. Fighting had not before occurred to them as one of the adventures in which their flight would land them.—The hobbits, upon receiving blades from the Barrow-Downs, in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring.
The Lord of the Rings is a microcosm of the evolving role of martial arts in SF and fantasy. In Tolkien's 1954 trilogy, the hobbits are given weapons but are never taught how to fight with them. The quote suggests that the hobbits have never even worn a blade before. But when the time comes for the hobbits to fight, they do so, apparently instinctively. In Moria, even Sam the gardener manages to kill a spear-wielding orc. I can suspend my disbelief enough to accept that a tiny hobbit could kill a huge orc, but Tolkien stretches it to the breaking point when he adds that the hobbit has never even used a sword before. It's a curious omission from a writer so focused on practical details that he never neglects to say where his characters are getting their food and water.
Both film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings add training sequences. Ralph Bakshi's 1975 Lord of the Rings animated film shows the hobbits being taught sword-fighting in Rivendell, and Peter Jackson's 2001 The Fellowship of the Ring has Boromir coach Merry and Pippin on the use of their blades.
This is not just the usual variation between page and screen—it marks a sea change in the attitude of fantasy authors in writing about fighting and martial arts. (For this article, I'm defining “martial arts” as coherent systems of unarmed or armed [excluding firearms] combat, which may or may not be Asian or “traditional.")
Lord of the Rings comes from an early period in the development of the fantasy genre. At that time, the convention was that the only thing necessary to make an ordinary person into a warrior is a weapon. Similarly, in C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, the gift of non-magical swords and bows endows English schoolchildren not only with battlefield competence, but with mastery.
Genre conventions have changed, and now the “training sequence” is almost obligatory in novels in which previously untrained characters end up fighting. Mirroring the evolution of the wizard from ancient Merlins and Gandalfs of mysterious origin to Ursula K. Le Guin and J. K. Rowling's youngsters in wizardry schools, writers began paying attention to how warriors, those other standbys of fantasy, learned to do what they do.
A cluster of historical events made a very basic knowledge of martial arts, and the necessity of having to study them before one can achieve competence at them, become part of the collective Western consciousness. And once the knowledge became widespread, writers began to write about it.
The spread of martial arts knowledge
While Asian martial arts had been taught outside of Asia for many years—a Kodokan judo school was established in Seattle in 1904—the schools where they were taught were few and not widely known. But after World War II Asian martial arts schools began opening across America and Europe. Soon anyone who was interested could find one. A number of the people who were interested were or became SF writers.
As martial arts are now and were then a voluntary study, and one undertaken more for personal satisfaction than for necessity, the people who pursued such training did so because they loved it—and the things that writers love have a way of appearing in their books.
While a handful of people were experiencing martial arts first-hand, far more were getting a second-hand taste via television and movies. “Kung Fu,” which debuted as a TV movie in 1972 and continued as a TV series until 1975, brought basic martial arts concepts into living rooms across America. And in 1973, the kung fu movie Enter the Dragon catapulted Bruce Lee to international stardom.
On a smaller scale, but of major significance to fantasy, the Society for Creative Anachronism began with a medieval party and tournament at Berkeley, CA, in 1966. The party was put on by a group of fans, including Diana Paxson and Marion Zimmer Bradley.
The SCA is now an international organization which re-enacts the Middle Ages “not as they were, but as they should have been.” Its members often practice medieval (or medieval-inspired) martial arts. Tournaments may include archery, Elizabethan fencing, and single combat and group melees in which participants wear armor and fight with rattan swords.
A number of SF and fantasy writers, such as Poul Anderson, Randall Garrett, Jerry Pournelle, Gordon Dickson, and Fritz Leiber, joined the SCA in its early days. That gave them the opportunity to practice or observe recreations of medieval martial arts.
Media portrayals and the new availability of martial arts training had a profound influence on writers and readers. By the early 1970s, there was an entire generation of writers who were also martial artists. They knew from experience what it's like to be kicked in the head, or how hot armor gets when you fight in the sun. Such details naturally began to creep into their books. And they knew that their readers were already familiar with martial arts, from the show “Kung Fu” if nothing else, and would find it hard to believe that characters could win a duel the first time they picked up a sword.
I don't mean to say that Tolkien and Lewis really believed that sword-fighting was instinctive; but only that depictions of martial arts training did not become a convention of modern fiction until the knowledge of martial arts was widely disseminated in the west.
Western martial arts, like boxing and fencing, have always been part of Western culture. But fantasy i
s the literature of the outré rather than the ordinary, and generally of the past rather than the present. It took the presence of “exotic” Asian arts and the revival of past Western ones to inspire fantasy writers to connect the fights in the stories they were writing with the fighting styles they now knew. Boxing may seem incongruous in a high fantasy novel and old-fashioned in SF; but elegant sword forms and deadly Asian-inspired striking arts fit right in.
Martial arts in SF and fantasy
Merriam-Webster dates the term “martial arts” to 1933. The first use of the term I found in an SF story was in Roger Zelazny's 1963 “A Rose For Ecclesiastes:"
If they had refined their martial arts as far as they had their dances, or, worse yet, if their fighting arts were a part of the dance, I was in for big trouble.
Zelazny, an aikidoka (practitioner of aikido) who later edited Warriors of Blood and Dream, an anthology of SF martial arts stories, was, as usual, ahead of his time.
As the knowledge and availability of martial arts training spread through the West, the depiction of martial arts evolved. I would like to trace three stages of this evolution. These stages are as much a matter of content as of copyright date—at least one third stage novel was written when nearly everyone else was writing first stage novels, and first stage novels are still being written today.
In the first stage, martial arts are limited to a brief mention, or as a bit of extra color in a fight scene. The term “martial arts” is rarely used, though individual styles may be named. Most importantly, no one trains and, while there may be fight scenes, there's no sense of a coherent system of fighting in use.
When Asian martial arts appear, they are often used as a spice of exoticism in the Western hero's background, as in Sherlock Holmes’ use of “Baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling” on Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls in the 1903 “The Adventure of the Empty House.” (Baritsu, also known as Bartitsu, was based on judo and invented by E. W. Barton Wright.) Asian arts also appear as the alien skills of a supporting character from the Far East. For instance:
Saburo, whose knowledge of ju-jitsu had taught him everything there was to be known about nerves and nerve-centres, touched a spot in the scout's neck, and he went over as though he had been poleaxed.—The House with the Red Blinds, by Trevor Wignall, 1920.
Evidently the Japanese originated the Vulcan nerve pinch.
Early works of fantasy, from epics like Lord of the Rings, to children's books like The Chronicles of Narnia, to sword and sorcery like Robert E. Howard's Conan, belong to the first stage. Sometiems the characters in these books are already great fighters when the story begins, and their training is not mentioned. When, like Tolkien's hobbits or Lewis's children, the characters rise from humble beginnings, their training begins and ends with a gift of weapons.
It could be theorized that Tolkien's hobbits and Lewis's children, like Galahad, have the strength of ten because their hearts are pure. (Conan is a force of nature, and to inquire about the state of his heart or where he learned his skills is like asking questions of a tornado.) Walter Jon Williams, a writer and martial artist whose own work will be discussed later on, suggests that Tolkien and Howard's books are in the Romantic tradition, and as such, their characters fight effectively because it's their nature to do so.
But Lewis chose to focus on children, as Tolkien did on hobbits, because they're unlikely heroes: small, frightened, and traveling in foreign lands. Their strength is moral, not physical. They have to learn to use a tinder box or address a king, and complain when they can't get a decent breakfast. Their fighting prowess cannot be entirely ascribed to a lack of realism, or to the idea that right makes might, or even to the Romantic notion of character, poised as the books are between Romance and modern fantasy.
The children and hobbits are beneficiaries of the writing convention of the time, which was to leave training in the category of going to the bathroom: presumably it happened, but off-page. So though they suffered many hardships, at least they never had to listen to a smug sensei make enigmatic pronouncements, then smack them with a wooden sword.
In the second stage, one of the most prominent aspects of martial arts—the idea that combat proficiency requires extensive and lengthy training—becomes important in the fiction. Training sequences become a near-obligatory part of books featuring characters who begin not knowing how to fight, but who will later have to. Martial arts are treated in greater detail. But they are not a primary focus, nor do they illuminate theme. They are there to provide realistic detail and entertainment value, and to serve the plot.
The Bakshi and Jackson Lord of the Rings films belong to this second stage. Both movies include training sequences, and the Jackson film has a sophisticated understanding of how martial arts differ by culture, and how similar fighting styles vary subtly depending on the personality and body type of the fighter. (The weapons and fighting styles of men, elves, dwarves, and orcs are quite different; Boromir's sword-fighting emphasizes strength as much as Aragorn's does agility.) But in neither film are martial arts a central or thematic concern.
In second stage works, the reasons for training are practical—to fight the war, to get revenge, to avoid rape by bandits—and don't go beyond the practical. Training brings skills but not emotional changes, except perhaps some mental toughness.
Martial arts may also be used to denote character, often by revealing hidden depths. In Robin McKinley's The Blue Sword, Harry's unexpected aptitude for fighting and riding is the first hint that she has a Destiny; in P. C. Hodgell's God Stalk, the amnesiac heroine's martial skills make her identity more apparent to others than to herself.
The third stage denotes books in which martial arts are no longer a mere convention, but are an integral part of the story, are explored in depth, and are used to illuminate larger issues common to fantasy and SF. This can be a rich and rewarding blend of genre with subject, for the central issues of SF and fantasy are often central issues for martial artists as well.
The thematic uses of martial arts in fantasy and SF can be broken into four general categories: practical, extrapolative, transformative, and transcendental.
Martial arts for practical purposes: self-defense, revenge, war, or as part of a gentleman's education
This is the most common use of martial arts in fiction. In addition, self-defense is one of the most common real-life reasons people start training. This is also virtually the only role for martial arts in first and second stage books. But in a third stage book, it goes beyond being a plot device. Martial arts, in both third stage fiction and real life, have a sneaky way of changing one's outlook in ways one hadn't bargained for.
This category is often explicitly or implicitly linked to feminism. I have read at least twenty fantasy novels in which a woman who has been raped, lost her family to pillaging Vikings, or is otherwise oppressed, finds a wise martial arts teacher, and, in learning to wield a sword or her fists, gains personal power and autonomy.
Martial arts are designed to make skill defeat size and strength, to give the underdog a chance; and no one is more of an underdog than a woman in the patriarchal cultures that are common in fantasy. When a small woman defeats a big powerful man, it's often a metaphor for the overthrow of the patriarchy by the collective power of women. In Marion Zimmer Bradley's Thendara House and Doris Egan's Two-Bit Heroes, women who learn self-defense from female teachers shake off their victim consciousness with every elbow strike.
The wooden blade caught [Arya] high in the breast, a sudden stinging blow that hurt all the more because it came from the wrong side. ‘Ow!’ she cried out. She would have a fresh bruise there by the time she went to sleep, somewhere out at sea. A bruise is a lesson, she told herself, and each lesson makes us better.
Women have few rights in the brutal world of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice And Fire. The tomboy princess Arya is too young to articulate this, but she's not too young to resent it. In what could be interpreted as a message that women need men's help,
or merely as an unsentimental acknowledgement that sisterhood wasn't popular in medieval times, no women support Arya's desire to fight—but some men do. Her half-brother gives her a sword, her father hires her a fencing master, the fencing master teaches her and fights to the death for her, and a mysterious man helps her kill her enemies.
Still, Arya spends most of the series cold and miserable and under others’ control, lulling herself to sleep with a recital of the names of the people she wants to kill—a list which keeps getting longer, even though she occasionally manages to cross one off.
It's hard to tell how good she is with her sword Needle; most of what she does is to, as her brother suggests, “Stick them with the pointy end.” But her teacher encourages her to be determined and independent-minded, and that proves as valuable as any amount of skill. Like the Braavosi sword style she learns, all nimbleness and evasive action, Arya uses her physical and mental agility to make the best of the perils she encounters.
In contrast, her obedient, feminine sister is beaten and abused, and the wolf to whom she's telepathically bonded is killed. (Arya sees this coming and makes sure her own wolf escapes.) In the end, Arya's training is less important than the spirit that made her want to train in the first place. As my own sensei Stan Uno says, “The hardest thing you'll ever do at this dojo is to walk through the door for the first time."
Martial arts as extrapolation: projecting the future of martial arts and using them to examine wider changes
The main thrust of SF is extrapolative: how do people and their arts and technology and society evolve, and how do they stay the same? Martial arts are also in a constant tug-of-war between adapting to keep up with changing times, and being preserved as a cultural tradition and link with the past.
A number of works speculate about the future of martial arts: mastery in a chip in The Matrix, non-lethal weapons which provide the means for a humane rebellion in Steve Perry's The Man Who Never Missed, and the Might-Sword of China Mieville's The Scar, a probability device which enables a skilled wielder to select from all the myriad ways a fight might go, and choose the reality in which every strike is a kill.
Strange Horizons, September 2002 Page 1