Hi friends! I'm excited to announce that I have a little poem up at Protean magazine (they’re one of the last remaining great independent outlets, you should subscribe!) This is only my third poetry publication—I have one in the anthology Climbing Lightly Through Forests, and another in an online magazine that I’m pretty sure doesn’t exist anymore (this is why you should subscribe to the good mags when you still can.)
I don’t write a lot of poetry. That Protean poem was written as part of a daily challenge created by my beloved friend Cate Root, in which the participants try to write one poem a day over a designated 7-10 day stretch. Cate and the other participants are real poets; I don’t know if I am. I think I might call myself a person who occasionally writes poems. This is related to a problem I often have with author bios—whenever I have to put one together, I usually end up describing myself with words like “essayist” and “critic” but I don’t think I’m those things either, I’m just a person who sometimes writes essays and criticism. If it were up to me, I would probably say that I’m a temporarily embarrassed SFF novelist, but that’s also an embarrassing thing to say about yourself, and no decent editor would let me print it.
I write essays and criticism and newsletter posts like these because I like them, and because unlike fiction I can actually earn a little money. It’s not a living wage, but it’s more than I can realistically get from short story or book publishing, which will break your heart and not even pay for dinner. There’s no money in poetry at all, but I like it too, and it’s good practice. There are certain ways that poets use language, especially symbolist poets, which tack very close to the way that the great SFF novelists use language. On the genus/species relationships tree, science fiction and fantasy may be closer to certain kinds of poetry than they are to realist fiction. That might sound strange, but just because SFF and realism both rely on the novel or short story form doesn’t mean they’re similar to each other; a red panda might look like a raccoon, but it isn’t really that much like a raccoon in terms of genetic structure. The genetic structure of writing is the use of language itself.
To explain what I mean, I need to first talk about something that annoys me, which is my other impetus for writing criticism (and let’s be real I would complain for free.) I get very annoyed when SFF novelists—of either the temporarily embarrassed or published variety—act ashamed of their chosen genre. My queen Ursula K. Le Guin already tore this tendency to shreds in her 2015 essay “Are they going to say this is fantasy?” but nearly a decade later I still run into this attitude in the wild. Usually it takes the form of a writer claiming that their work is actually about relationships and small character moments, rather than like, dragons and wizards. Yes, the book does have dragons and wizards in it, they’ll say, but it isn’t like most fantasy—it’s well-written. It’s more like literary fiction, really: the relationships and the careful prose style are the foreground, the real appeal, and the dragons and wizards are just there to perform a few important dragonish and wizardly things (sell books to people who want to read about dragons and wizards I guess but don’t want to feel all nerdy about it.)
The thing is, you would be hard-pressed to find a great fantasy novel—I mean a really great one, not just one that’s popular at the moment—which doesn’t feature meaningful relationships, and which isn’t written in beautiful language. Lord of the Rings is such an obvious example that I don’t think I really need to go into much detail. (I am, however, issuing an official Lord of the Rings test: if you make a claim about the nature of fantasy that is instantly invalidated by the existence of what is arguably the inaugural work in the genre, your claim is bad and you should feel bad.) To take a more contemporary example, I will once again bang on your door to praise Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver, which is all about relationships (romantic, familial, social, political) and uses an astonishingly clever literary device. Spinning Silver is, by every meaningful definition, a great work of literature. But it’s also fantasy, and great fantasy too; primarily because of its use of language, which is profoundly different from the way most literary novels use language, and much closer to symbolist poetry and myth.
Many, many science fiction and fantasy writers have weighed in on the subject of language and genre before me: Samuel Delany has written about it in multiple essays (if you can find a decent copy of his out-of-print collection Starboard Wine, get it immediately.) Ursula wrote about it in a number of places, including the hard-to-find article “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie,” which I must have mentioned in this newsletter before because I’m obsessed with it. Tolkien also explored the language of fantasy in his famous essay “On Fairy-Stories,” and C.S. Lewis touches on it in An Experiment in Criticism, which is another must-read in my opinion. These writers approach the subject from different directions, and don’t all quite reach the same exact conclusions, but what they do agree is that fantasy and/or science fiction uses language in ways that are distinctly different than realist novels, and that these differences can be confusing or totally lost on a reader (or writer) who is accustomed to and expecting the language of realism. When fantasy and science fiction writers use words like “dragon” “wizard” or “robot” it’s not because these subjects are genre conventions, but because these images are used to create particular effects.
It’s not easy to describe these effects, because basically you feel them or you don’t; if you do, then you’re moved by certain words which are a spell, one which summons the fairy world or the distant impossible future or some other non-place outside literary realism. It does this through words for inhuman things and words for natural things; the spell runs through this world to take you out of it (or, maybe, deeper into it). Tolkien explains this in “On Fairy-Stories” with his usual irreducible precision: “Faerie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.” These words, these hard nouns and simple verbs, have tremendous power in English—or in any language. These are bedrock words. The specific names for non-human beings may vary from language to language, and there may be more than one word for something like “bread” or “men.” But they’re still big, old ideas, and they carry a lot of weight. They take us places that other kinds of language just can’t.
Realist novelists use bedrock words too, of course, all over the place. Physical descriptions might incorporate trees and birds, water and stone; human characters might be compared, in metaphor, to magical beings. I can’t find it right now,1 but there’s a great academic essay on Edith Wharton’s use of fairy-tale imagery in her books, the most obvious example being Undine Spragg, who is not literally a cold-blooded water witch who steals men’s souls, but figuratively, yeah, a little bit.2 The figurative use of language versus the literal use of language is one of the key differences between realism and fantasy—in realism, Undine can only be like an undine; in fantasy, she really would be a water witch, and we would watch her devour poor Ralph Marvell’s soul far more overtly than she manages in The Custom of the Country .
This kind of literalism can be uncomfortable to accept, even for people who actively want to write fantasy. It’s not literary to read about women eating men’s souls, isn’t it? (And yet somehow it’s extremely literary for world-weary maidens to sleep with gross old men and feel weird about it; I wonder what this is about and whose purposes it serves!) Fantasy is very literal, often in ways that might come across as socially perverse or embarrassing or just too much. This is partly why we see so many stabs at allegory these days, in fiction and in criticism (it’s not actually a dragon, dragons are for fairy tales, this is a metaphor for capitalism okay???) But while the images of fantasy have their metaphoric qualities, they also function as more than metaphor. Witches and dragons are really real in the world of a fantasy story; and on top of that they are connected to every other use of witches and dragons, and not just throughout the modern concept of genre but the literature before it too. They reach backwards, into myth.
This is very important to understand. These are bedrock truths, written in bedrock words. When Irina of Spinning Silver marries a king who is possessed by a demon, he isn’t just a metaphor for a bad boyfriend, a dude with a dark side, a Cat Person kind of guy; he is also a king who is possessed by a demon, and connected to every existent mythic and literary usage of kings and demons (and also wicked lordly husbands). Since in this story he’s specifically a tsar possessed by Chernobog, he’s connected to the long history of Slavic myth and images of tsars and monsters/gods like Chernobog. The sources here are very dark and deep. This also means that the images of fantasy aren’t the sole work of an individual novelist, the independent littérateur creating something new, innovating something never seen before (and judged mainly for its originality). What is new in fantasy is old again, very old, and in fact the older the better.
On top of that the words—and the work—of fantasy and science fiction don’t always take place on the page. I know this sounds crazy, so bear with me. I have read fantasy novels that, if judged sentence by sentence, were very bad. They might have been readable, and possessed a decent flow, but they weren’t careful with language and made no attempt to use similes or metaphors or other types of imagery. But that’s partly because the imagery was happening elsewhere, on a different level—generally the story level. Sarah J. Maas is the perfect example of this. Her Court novels get banned a lot in this country for their sexual content, which is ridiculous; they should get banned for the way Maas obviously does a Ctrl+F+replace changing the word “man” to “male” so she doesn’t refer to her boy fairies as men, resulting in sentences like “He was a male of peace.” (I’m not exaggerating, this is a real sentence in one of her books.) But all that being said, I love the Court novels and have re-read them multiple times. Yes, Maas might use lazy, cliched language to describe her characters sometimes, but overall—through action, through dialogue, through the events in the story—she really does write fairies well. She writes Faerie well; she successfully evokes the magic of it. With a more careful, literary prose style, Maas would be unstoppable; as is, she’s still a lot of fun.
This is a hard thing to explain, I think, to people who have been trained to judge good literature mainly on the strength of individual sentences, on artful and unexpected turns of phrase. But the imagery of fantasy happens in its characters and events as well as in its sentences, often more so than in its sentences. These sentences don’t need to be beautiful or well-turned; they just have to contain the magic words, or be about the magic words. When a fantasy novelist introduces a character as a wizard, it doesn’t really matter if they’ve done so prettily; it’s like turning over a tarot card—specifically, in this case, the Magician. The Magician is the Magician even if the card is drawn crudely. An idol is a god even if his face has weathered away.
I still think the best fantasy is the sort that is attentive to sentence-level effects, that doesn’t just plunk a mediocre Magician card on the table and assume that’s enough. I also get very annoyed at genre fantasy that deploys its images cynically in the opposite direction—the kinds of novels that were clearly written to cash in on the hottest trends in dragon-riders and courts of fairies, and have absolutely no interest in what these images are, and what they mean. This strikes me as a bad idea, beyond just flooding the fiction market with garbage. If we’ve learned one thing from fantasy novels, it’s that you don’t play fast and loose with old and powerful things, objects which are words and words which are power. You don’t fuck around with Faerie.
The essay is imprisoned on JStor behind its paywall and terrible search function, like a princess in a tower made of very annoying thorns.
The Custom of the Country is another absolute banger if you haven’t read it yet.
oh HELL yeah
this is the first time anyone's given me a good and convincing reason to try Sarah J Maas