In casting about for a topic for this year's Magic Realism Blog Hop (and thanks to Zoe Brooks for organizing once again!), I reviewed a list on Goodreads of books purported to fall under the category of magic realism. Not too far down the list, I spotted Neil Gaiman's American Gods.
I read the book several years ago, before I'd really begun studying mythology, and thought it was pretty weird. I mean, I liked it, but a lot of it seemed surreal. And confusing. I was fairly far into the book before I twigged to the fact that (spoiler alert!) Mr. Wednesday was Odin, the Norse Allfather.
So when I saw the book on that Goodreads list, I hesitated. I remembered several key scenes from the story -- the "Russians" living in genteel poverty in Chicago, the car in the lake, the hanging tree -- but not much else.
And then I remembered Starz had recently created a series based on the book. So I began to stream the episodes, in order to refresh my memory, and discovered -- oh haha -- season one don't cover the whole book. There's going to be at least one more season. Welcome to video storytelling in the 21st century.
Also, I was right -- American Gods is weird. But is it magic realism?
We've had our share of "what the heck is magic realism?" posts on this blog hop over the years. For the purposes of this post, I'm going to use Merriam-Webster's definition:
A literary genre or style...that incorporates fantastic or mythical elements into otherwise realistic fiction.
If that's strictly what we're going by, then I suppose both the series and the book qualify. The main character is Shadow Moon, a black ex-convict who runs into a mysterious con man named Mr. Wednesday. Wednesday hires him as his personal assistant. His duties become increasingly weird as things around him get more and more surreal.
Eventually, we figure out that Wednesday is a god, that a whole lot of gods immigrated to America with their followers, and that new gods -- the media and technology -- are staging a takeover. In the America of the story, gods survive only so long as people believe in them.
But back to the show.
The question for me is not whether American Gods is sufficiently fantastic; the question is whether it's realistic enough. It's set in America, but much of the action seems to happen on a different plane of existence. For example, Shadow suffers a pretty severe beating and lynching in episode two. But apart from a nasty torso cut that requires staples, his wounds seem pretty minor. Why isn't his face swollen? Is it because the whole thing happened on a different plane? Or is that just TV not being realistic? (I don't watch a lot of TV, so you'll have to tell me.)
Gaiman has written a number of great books, including some wonderful magic-realism novels. I'm not sure, though, whether American Gods qualifies as magic realism. Fantastic, yes; surreal, for sure. But magic realism? For me, the jury's still out.
What do you guys think?
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These moments of magically real blogginess have been brought to you by Lynne Cantwell and the 2017 Magic Realism Blog Hop. Please check out the other posts in this year's hop!
Every now and then, a blog post topic whacks me upside the head. This might be one of those times. (There's a different topic that's been whacking me upside the head, too, for the past several weeks. But I need more time to gather my thoughts on that one. Maybe next week.)
Earlier this week, I think it was, I got into a discussion about political correctness with some of the guys at Kevin's Watch. For those of you just joining us, the Watch began as a message board for fans of fantasy author Stephen R. Donaldson, but over the years we have added several forums that have nothing to do with either Donaldson's books or fantasy in general. It's been a big part of my online life for more than 15 years, and it's brought me a ton of real-life friends.
Among the non-fantasy forums is one for political discussion. I'm told the tone in there is mild compared to other political forums on the intarwebz, and I guess I can see that, after having read some of the comments on political stories at various online publications. But still, people have strong opinions, and we've all known each other long enough that folks know where to sink the blade if they're in the right mood.
In any case, as I said, this particular discussion was about political correctness. One of the guys asked how much society should be asked to bend to accommodate transgender individuals, who make up a relatively small percentage of the population. I turned the tables and asked him, if he himself had some rare condition, would he want others to respect him enough to cut him some slack?
That set off another of our regulars, who wanted to know why he had to respect someone whom he disagreed with, or whom he just plain didn't like. Basically, his question was, "If I think you're an idiot, why should I respect you?"
And I responded that I thought everyone deserved respect, by virtue of the fact that we're all human beings.
Then a few days later, along came this meme on Facebook:
And I thought to myself, if Neil Gaiman gets it, that's good enough for me.
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This post is late because I've spent most of the weekend writing like a madwoman. Book 4 of the Legacy series is just under 35,000 words as we speak, and I'm hoping to get another 5,000 on the virtual page tomorrow. With any luck, I'll be able to finish the first draft by the end of next weekend. I won't promise it'll be out by the summer solstice, but I think the 4th of July is doable. And surely by then I'll have settled on a title, don't you think?
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These moments of respectful blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.
This year's haul is noticeably smaller than in years past.
Warning: If you're looking for nuggets of writing advice, they're here -- but you'll have to put up with a fair amount of fantasy-fiction name-dropping and some fangrrl squeeing before we get there.
Sorry that I'm a day late in posting this week. Today is my World Fantasy Convention hangover day. I've been to enough of these now that I've learned to build in a post-convention day off, to help ease my re-entry into the normal world. This strategy first paid off after the WFC in San Diego, where guest of honor Neil Gaiman was treated like a rock star. I described this to an attorney I was working for, whereupon she said, "I don't know who that is." If we'd had that conversation the day after convention's end, I might have broken down sobbing. As it was, I was able to feign a simple case of mild surprise. (The sobbing came later, in private.)
This year's convention felt kind of thrown together from the start. There were fewer than the usual number of communiques from the organizers before the convention, and the book bags were a lot smaller than usual. At past conventions, I'd received between twelve and fifteen books in my bag -- some ARCs (advance reader copies), some overstocks, some because the author was a guest of honor. My hardback copy of Gaiman's American Gods came in my book bag in San Diego. This year -- well, reference the photo above. I bought the Donaldson volume in the dealers' room; four of the others came in my bag, together with a paperback copy of a book I got in hardback last year (David Baldacci's The Finisher) and a mass-market paperback of a book I'd received in my bag a few years ago (Peter Brett's The Warded Man). I picked up the Novik from the book exchange table. The author of Without Bloodshed, Matt Graybosch, told me his publisher had ordered enough books for every bag, but never heard where to send them or when the deadline was.
(The peppermint pig wasn't in the bag, either. It was a freebie at the registration desk.)
Anyway. As a member of Broad Universe, I participated in their Rapid Fire Reading Thursday afternoon. I had about five minutes to read, and chose the scene from Dragon's Web in which Rafe first meets Sage's father at the pizza place. I was gratified that the audience laughed in all the right places. (Note to authors: Broad Universe has a special rate at NetGalley, and you don't have to be a speculative fiction writer -- or even a broad -- to take advantage. The rate is $25/month for members and $45/month for non-members. Full details here.)
Once my reading was over, I was able to relax and be a fangrrl. Of course, that meant attending every panel Stephen R. Donaldson was on, and first up was a geek girl twofer: Donaldson interviewing guest of honor Steven Erikson, whose ten-book Malazan Book of the Fallen series is well on its way to becoming a classic of the grimdark subgenre. (Yes, grimdark is an actual thing.) Erikson's books are doorstop-sized tomes, running a thousand pages or more. He explained that he kept his editor from cutting them down to size by insisting that this scene here in book A was crucial to understanding a scene in book G -- which may or may not have been true. Donaldson (who has been known to say, of his own ten-book series, "internal consistency is a bitch") wanted to know how Erikson keeps all the details straight -- to which Erikson said, "Oh, please - when one character changes gender? Twice?" Turns out he has great intentions about note-taking, but lousy follow-through; the assistant he hired to organize all the details of Malazan discovered 50 or 60 notebooks, each containing about three pages of notes.
I ran into YA fantasy author Sarah Beth Durst in the elevator, and later saw her on a panel with Donaldson about whether quest narratives are in or out of fashion. Sarah, bless her heard, said she really enjoyed The Martian because everyone in it was so nice -- prompting Donaldson to blurt, "I was so bored!" He then invoked the spirit of Lester del Rey, who ran the Del Rey imprint at Ballantine in the 1970s and '80s. Donaldson said del Rey believed there were three types of conflicts in fiction -- man against others, man against nature, and man against himself -- and that while just one will make a good story, you need to include all three for a great story. Clearly, in Donaldson's estimation, The Martian fell short.
The other "quest" panel I attended was not nearly as interesting. Moderator Jeanne Cavelos, who runs the venerable Odyssey workshop program, kept a tight focus on the topic of what to take on a quest -- even though authors Carol Berg and Catherine Cooke Montrose kept trying to steer the discussion away from a packing list into more interesting territory. After all, the key element of any quest is the questers themselves: not the physical things they bring along, but how they survive, what they find, and what they bring back with them -- and that includes self-knowledge and maturity as much as it does whatever McGuffin the party has been sent off to fetch.
Finally: Walking back from the art show Saturday night, I stumbled across an impromptu concert featuring six or eight convention attendees (one of whom, I learned later, was Charles de Lint). Among the songs they sang was one called "The Family Car". I didn't get a video, but here's one of some other people performing it on "The Prairie Home Companion" a few years back.
Yes, there's irony in people who work in traditional publishing singing heartily about the car as America's safety net. Publishing is a tough business, no matter how you do it.
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These moments of convention-addled blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.
We'll get to our post in a moment. But first, the news:
The Land, Sea, Sky Trilogy is now live at Amazon. This omnibus edition includes a new author's note and the first chapter of Seized, just in case readers get to the end of the book and want to know why Antonia treats Naomi like a rock star. If you enjoyed the Land, Sea, Sky books -- or if you have been meaning to get around to reading them -- now's your chance. And not that I'm encouraging anyone to wait...but starting this Thursday, the omnibus will be on sale for 99 cents. I hope you'll check it out, and tell all your friends, too.
I received an e-mail this week from the organizers of this year's World Fantasy Convention, notifying me that "A Man's Got to Do What a Man's Got to Do" has been selected for inclusion in Unconventional Fantasy: A Celebration of Forty Years of the World Fantasy Convention. The anthology will be recorded on a thumb drive and given to everyone who attends the convention next month. I happen to know that a whole bunch of my fantasy-author heroes also have pieces in this anthology, so I am fairly giddy about being included.
Which segues nicely into this week's post, in which I reprise (with a tweak or two) a thing I wrote for Indies Unlimited a few weeks ago.
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I don’t mean to brag, but I had 850 people show up at my first book signing.
Okay, they might have been there to see Gene Wolfe, or Stephen R. Donaldson, or Elizabeth Bear, or Peter Straub, or Patricia McKillip, or…well, you get the idea. But I was there, too!
“There” was the 2010 World Fantasy Convention, in Columbus, Ohio. This annual convention travels to various venues around the world – last year’s was in Brighton, England – and is geared toward speculative fiction in general and fantasy in particular. Membership is capped at 850, and many of the attendees are authors, agents, and editors.
Watchers with SRD in 2010.
I went with some friends from Kevinswatch, and we all went because Donaldson was going to be there. But one of the questions on the sign-up form was, “Are you an author?” This was right after Calderwood Books had published The Maidens' War, so I checked “yes” and put in the Calderwood
Books website since I hadn't really started blogging yet. Not only did the WFC
organizers believe me, but they put me on a panel. And they let me sign
books with the big guys on Friday night.
I've mentioned the mass autographing session here at hearth/myth before. It's a World Fantasy Convention tradition, and it’s pretty crazy. They set up long tables in a ballroom-sized conference room, and they give you a table tent with your name on it. Seating is first-come, first-served, and the lines to get a popular author to sign books can be long. When Neil Gaiman was an honoree in San Diego in 2011, the line to see him wrapped around the ballroom. There were, in fact, so many people in line that he couldn't get to everybody; the convention organizers had to set up a second signing later in the weekend just for him.
Then there are the dealers, who set up outside the room with crates of unsigned books and send runners with stacks of books into the autographing session. The runners stand in the lines, get the books signed, and bring them back to the dealers – who, of course, charge more for autographed books.
There was no line in front of my table, alas, and none of the runners had The Maidens' War in their stack. But my friends gathered around my table, had me sign their copies, and chatted as if I was an actual somebody. One of my buddies even took my picture as I signed his book. I caught at least one passer-by eyeing my table tent to try to figure out who the author was who had attracted such a crowd.
It was really hard to go back to the day job the following Monday, let me tell you.
I'm not expecting such a rousing success this year. For one thing, I won't be a starry-eyed newbie. Well, okay -- I'll still be starry-eyed (I mean, jeez, Guy Gavriel Kay is a guest of honor!), but at least I won't be a newbie. Still, I'm looking forward to this year's shindig. For one thing, my travel and hotel costs will be minimal, as it's happening ten minutes from my house. For another, I get to be in an anthology with Donaldson. "Nearly famous," indeed!
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This post originally appeared in a slightly different form at Indies Unlimited.
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These moments of nearly famous blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.
