|
July 2010 Double, Double, Toil and Troubleby Lee-Anne PhillipsAs my first appearance in this forum, this is probably a good time to say, “Wow!” I was immediately impressed by the broad scope — if you’ll pardon the obvious flattery — of the articles in this issue of The Broadsheet, all of which push a few boundaries in unexpected ways, but all of which also seem connected in interesting ways. Perhaps it’s the six degrees of separation syndrome, or maybe Jung was right about the collective unconscious. This issue begins with an otherworldly self-portrait by an artist now living in Switzerland, itself on the interior borderlands at the heart of Europe. Valentina Kallias calls this image Darkside of Me and it pushes the boundaries of everyday experience, allowing us to see something of the depths that lie behind her eyes, framed by the image projected by the screen on which you read this little essay. She makes me think of Medea, of Kali, of the dangerous primal forces that drive the Universe, or at least our corner of it. I'm sure her name is just an accident of similarity, but how strangely appropriate. The twin reviews of The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms by Helen Merrick, and Imagination/Space: Essays and Talks on Fiction, Feminism, Technology, and Politics by Gwyneth Jones extend this paradoxical journey into fantastical reality, and are probably the most striking for me, as they partially mirror my own feelings as a lifelong reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy. I believe, and have pretty much always believed, once I reached an age at which I became self-reflective and thought about it, that my participation as a reader was important, both for me and for the wider world, because these books, especially books written by women, exposed ideas which were almost unthinkable in the world around me. Through reading them, I allowed them to act on me, the Petri dish in which these cultures grew and took tangible form. Not all of them were good ideas, or even important ideas, but they were new ideas, and some of these new ideas eventually became a part of our common heritage, because someone dared to write about them, and other people read them. That’s part of what writers do, we write about things so people can think about them, and people do think about what they read, but may not quite yet have have the tools to do so. Authors can supply those tools. We arrange the words so that others can see the connections we do, but what the readers do with them is largely up to the recipients, not the writers. I grew up in the Fifties — with all that implies — but I grew up with books, and was a voracious reader. I quickly exhausted the resources of the children’s section of my local library, where I’d ploughed in no particular order through the Doctor Dolittle books, E.E. Nesbitt, Freddy the Pig, Lang’s Fairy Books, and Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series, one of my first (and treasured) ventures away from fantasy and into realism. I fell in love with Captain Nancy (the leader of the Amazons) straight away. Nancy Blackett was everything that Nancy Drew wasn’t, honestly courageous in realistic situations, openly defiant of the limitations placed on her autonomy by society, and someone I desperately wanted to be. Long before I’d ever heard of feminism or women’s rights, I admired Nancy Blackett, which prepared my brain, I think, for Luce Irigaray, Simone de Beauvoir, and all the rest of the latterday canon, and she was — surprisingly? — written by a man, but based, at least in part, on a real girl who really lived, Taqui Altounyan, who eventually became a writer in her own right. I’d read all the Jirel of Joiry stories by then as well, so I was well-prepared for the idea of woman as autonomous heroine, as a human being beyond a pre-ordained role of wife and mother, because I’d read those stories, and others like them. Just as we play with dolls to practise the social skills we’ll eventually use in real human interactions, books give us the opportunity to try on new ideas, and to experiment with them: Jirel of Joiry, meet Captain Nancy of the Amazon Pirates, won’t you have some tea? For the most part, I didn’t see these stories in books written by men, because they were much more satisfied by the world of the Fifties, and then the Sixties, just as men had been satisfied a few generations before with a world in which my grandmother couldn’t vote, or own property, until after she was a wife and mother. So I’m a part of the same process described in these two books, and by the musings of Nancy Jane Moore, the author of the reviews. I read Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto when it was brand new, vaguely knew Sandy Stone, Haraway’s student and friend, and read her dissertation, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age — which was supervised by Haraway — when it first came out as well. Together, these two revolutionaries split sociology departments all around the world into two factions, those arrayed against the Haraway/Stone ideas, and those who found in these new conceptualisations a systematic approach to what they could see happening all around them. Very loosely, the two camps in this debate were those still tied to print and hierarchical/patriarchal relationships with fixed taxonomies, and those who embraced the “new media,” especially the Internet, where “no one knows you’re a dog” and almost everything was fluid, where you could re-invent one’s self, and create brand new societies. Guess which side is winning. My mother was among the first generation of girls who grew up knowing that they would be able to vote, and that was the key to a new world in which I was allowed to go to college, to hold a “real” job that wasn’t an elaborated version of housewife, secretary, or mother. This was an extraordinary difference and has remained so for me, because I am a member of the last generation in the Western World with a mother for whom this was the essential boundary between herself and every generation which had gone before. The League of Women Voters was a constant presence in my life; my mother was a member, and it meant something very important back in the olden days. It was the start of what we eventually called “consciousness raising,” in which women identified the social sources of their problems and worked to change them. It was also, in a way, among the primitive origins of what we now call the “social media,” the media addressed in different ways by several others among The Broadsheet articles, and ultimately the Haraway/Stone side of an ongoing social struggle. One of the primary sources of Eileen Watkins’ excellent article on writing suspense fiction is Patricia Highsmith, perhaps less familiar than either Donna Haraway or Sandy Stone, but the pseudonymous author of The Price of Salt, writing as “Claire Morgan,” and the named author of The Talented Mr. Ripley, both of which works cross gender boundaries, and were groundbreaking in their day, arguably a part of the Haraway/Stone thesis, reaching outside the box of traditional narrative for dramatic effect. The Price of Salt especially marked an important transition point for many women, and a paradigm shift from which I and every member of Western society benefited, and the changes started there, the new ideas, are still percolating through our various cultures. Mundane Networking: Reaching Outside of Fandom and A Game of Writing: Writing Tools from Playing RPGs, both by Trisha J. Wooldridge, address breaking out of the box directly, capitalising on the same phenomenon remarked upon by Haraway and Stone, the breakdown of artificial barriers between “creators” and “consumers,” “males” and “females,” right along with the traditional publishing industry that serves this dichotomy. Roleplaying games, as I understand them, are activities which involve the collaborative creation of actual content, so the participants fulfil both roles, creator/actor as well as consumer/audience, although they may draw upon source materials created and provided by others, and in which the participants portray or enact the personas of entities which may or may not closely resemble themselves, and in which anima and animus, masculinity and femininity, intertwine and spin about like a raspberry/chocolate swirl. We see men, who may be built like the burly wrestlers on Wrestlemania, playing dainty elf maidens, or lanky adolescents playing ancient wizards with many lifetimes of experience behind them, and personality traits can be reassigned or changed almost at will. Where else can one find one’s Charisma or Strength determined by a roll of the dice? Can gender really be reassigned with a flip of a coin? What effect does sustained interaction with a world like this have on the human brain? Fandoms too are no longer mere consumers of the shows or books they like, from Xena: Warrior Princess to Star Trek to Harry Potter; they re-create new stories on top of these original creations, placing the familiar characters into the situations they want the characters to inhabit, something like a cross between playing with dolls, editing, and full creation, with many fan writers and artists carefully studying the show continuity and fitting in new episodes, where others take the stories off in entirely new directions, boldly going where no one has gone before. So we see “het,” “slash,” and “femslash” fiction, in which Xena (or a reasonable facsimile) can marry Gabrielle and stop mucking about with meaningful looks, Chakotay can have a torrid affair with Seven of Nine, and Harry Potter can finally fall in love with his fated “other half,” either Draco Malvoy or Ginny Weasley, pick one. I jest, of course, the romantic pairings in all these fandoms are many and varied, some explicit and some more focused on romance, and most (but by no means all) are written by women. What does it mean for a “professional” story when the user-created spinoffs from that story amount to ten or twenty times the original content, when the relationships between the characters are explored in depth, taken to levels that violate the show’s “book,” a type of style guide which ensures that the show never really goes anywhere, because the main characters have to be reset at the end of every episode, so the essential characters, and their interactions, always remain essentially the same? This portion of fandom accepts the characters, and the general story line, as a baseline, but then demands that the story follow the full arc of dramatic development, in which characters are transformed by their experiences, and things really happen, really matter. Should authors be listening? Carla Lee’s review of Mansfield Park and Mummies by Jane Austen and Vera Nazarian is superficially completely different, but only in the Monty Python sense. How can one not love an essay that starts out with: “First, I am not a Jane Austen fan.” When you add to that sublime introduction the word “mash-up,” which I swear I’d never heard before, but was instantaneously transparent, one of those magic words you wish you’d thought of, just after you trudge down the stairs, it really doesn’t matter whether she liked the book or not, although she sincerely tries to be kind, because she’s also talking about another form of fan-fiction, but one without the messy copyright problems that can cause take-down orders to be issued and messy legal complications to ensue. I’m sure that there are subtle rules — of which I’m completely unaware — which distinguish a Jane Austin/Mummy mash-up from a crossover fan-fiction, but both explode the box of traditional publishing, short-circuiting the process through which content is delivered to consumers, and in some cases — such as quite a few Über-Xena fiction stories, and Mansfield Park and Mummies itself, spinning back out into more-or-less traditional publishing, substituting Dar/Kerry (who are completely different — wink wink, nudge nudge — from Xena/Gabrielle) for the copyrighted characters in different settings, retaining only the general appearance and interactions, like Kurosawa’s Ran is fan-fiction for Shakespeare’s Scottish Play. [I’m sure some of you were wondering exactly how I was going to tie in the title of this piece by now, so there it is and here it comes.] This also ties in quite nicely with an article link circulated on the Broad Universe list — another form of mutual and transgressive creativity, I might add, in which members of “the public” put together ideas and words, citing external works of creativity through hyperlinks to create new works, new thoughts folded in on top of the ideas created by others — in which Cory Doctorow, in his incisive How to Destroy the Book, explains how the book, and the very process of authorship, is being destroyed by excessive extensions of copyright by publishers, for the most part, stifling, or attempting to stifle, the explosion of creativity made possible by the Internet and computers, even as all aspects of the publishing industry are changing almost beyond recognition:
This is the world we now inhabit, Doctorow’s world, the Donna Haraway/Sandy Stone world, a world in which we’re constantly re-inventing ourselves day by day, in which our relationship to our readers is gradually changing into something more like collaboration, or even friendship, than maker and customer. Some authors encourage this, and have even helped to publish the fan fiction written by their own fans, where some are still resistant to disturbances in what they see as the eternal status quo, but we’re all changing. We’re all swimming in the same cauldron these days, and the water’s heating up. Just as in Shakespeare’s day, when authors used the common threads of human creativity to weave new works based upon preceding works, the ideas and words are bubbling up and circulating quicker than ever, and the world is a better place for it. Writers are (in many cases) better off being supported by fans than they ever were by traditional slow-cycle publishers, just as many musicians can sometimes do better for themselves than they can with major record label contracts. We can look at a writer like Christine Feehan, for example, whose fans are many and enthusiastic. She writes supernatural romances aimed primarily at women, a genre usually published first and last in mass-market paperback, but her fans have managed to ensure that many of her novels are published first in hardback, a number of which make the New York Times Bestseller List, all of which have gone to audiobook, and many have been translated and re-released into other markets across the word, and some have been reprinted even in the USA. Dark Prince, for example, her first book, is available in a UK edition (respelt), Chinese, German, Large-print Hardback, and several sorts of audiobook. Look at her website: http://www.christinefeehan.com/ where she makes a lot of materials available to increase her reader’s enjoyment of the stories, including downloadable recordings of the magical chants which feature prominently in the stories, notes on the language, family trees, and other background information. It’s something of a case study in marketing, including Facebook links, a Member’s Only Section, recipes, gifts (mostly tops of one sort or another) a “book of the month” discussion group, games, screensavers (PC only, thus far, but Mac versions coming soon). In fact, the only thing she’s missed is giving away e-book versions of some of her OP titles as teasers. What’s certainly true is that every author-as-entrepreneur has the opportunity to be less passive, less dependent on working for “the man” sitting somewhere in an office, and empowered to take much more of an active role in her own marketing, finding her own niche, and figuring out how to make a living out of the creations that spring from her brain. I sincerely hope that Broad Universe and The Broadsheet may help us all to stay afloat in this new and safe green sea of women, and that the soup we help to create here has something in it for all tastes. |