I got to spend last weekend at Fourth Street Fantasy Convention last weekend, for the first time in several years. For those readers who aren’t familiar with it, it’s a small convention focused on topics of interest to writers and serious readers of fantasy. It’s often more like a seminar than a typical SF convention, at least as far as the programming goes.
I had a good weekend, though I missed the main part of Saturday’s programming due to an inconvenient migraine. The panels I did get to were excellent, even the first one on why isn’t there more fantasy about ordinary people where I disagreed with about 85% of what the panelists said (though I have to add that at Fourth Street, disagreeing with the panelists, especially if they’ve come to a consensus, is not at all unusual for me).
The next panel went to the other extreme: the effect that actual, provable deities have on a story, and what you have to do to keep them from obviating any need for the protagonist to do anything heroic. What you have to do boils down to three possibilities: 1) you can make them part of the story, making them essentially powerful, larger-than-life people who interfere with humans but who also have their own agendas and internal politics, like the Greek and Roman pantheons; 2) you can limit the gods’ ability to affect the world directly (Lois Bujold’s Chalion books came up several times as an example,), so that they have to work through people like your protagonist; or 3) you can make them ineffable and unconcerned with the things mortals think are important.
The juxtaposition of opposites continued to thread its way through the rest of the panels I got to. Sometimes, it was explicit, as in the Saturday morning panel on high culture vs. low culture; other times it was more implicit, as in the Sunday panels on death in narrative and on fiber arts in a pre-industrial society, especially one that is also pre-spinning-wheel.
The first Saturday panel, on high culture vs. low culture, was thought-provoking for me for the same reason as the first panel on ordinary people – namely, I kept mentally disagreeing with panelists because I kept thinking of books that were examples of things they said were rare or non-existent. The second panel, Representation without Endorsement, was a lot more interesting than I expected it to be for me personally, because it got into discussing how writers can get the effect they want when writing about a difficult subject. The first step being to realize that no matter how weird or counter-intuitive an interpretation of a piece of fiction may be, some reader will not only make that interpretation, but defend to the death the idea that it is what you really, truly meant.
I missed the monster mashup panel, the one on “pure” bloodlines and languages in fantasy, and the one on non-written “messages” like the Bayeux Tapestry, all of which were Saturday afternoon when I was off getting rid of the migraine (successfully, meaning I could attend the Sunday panels). I also missed the one on narratology, which I can’t even define, on Saturday evening. The reports I had from folks who were there made me really sorry I’d missed them.
Sunday included fascinating panels on fiber arts (which I think would have been useful to any writer writing about pre-industrial societies, even if they weren’t interested in knitting or spinning or weaving or dying or etc.) and death (not the personified version) in narrative, including a structural analysis by one of the panelists (I am unsure which, as I didn’t write down who said what) on the different effects that a death has on the protagonist depending on when in the story it happens. (If I remember correctly, she said that at the start of Act I, a death provides motivation to get the protagonist moving into the story; at the end of Act I, it’s the point of no return; in Act II, it raises the stakes and/or represents the cost of whatever the protagonist is doing; and at the end of the book it is part of the price the protagonist pays for success.)
One of the best and most interesting panels (to me) was the last one. As is traditional at Fourth Street, the topic of the final panel was decided at the last minute, chosen from a melting pot of suggestions and topics that came up during the other panels. This year, the question was “what is the difference between magic and science?” or possibly “How do you tell whether something is magic or science?” The panel had a huge scope, mostly focused on the fuzzy gray line where (for instance) real-life alchemists (whom we would consider as attempting to do something magical) made real-life chemical discoveries (which we would consider science). They also spent time shooting down various possible definitions, which was fun.
So I had a great time, stuffing my head with ideas and information, and reconnecting with people I haven’t seen in a couple of years. I didn’t have nearly enough time for the latter – I only had about five minutes each with most of them. I blame that on the migraine. I’m already looking forward to next year.
I have to admit that I didn’t even realize you were there until the last panel! I desperately wanted to bring up the Frontier Magic books during the discussion of spells to do practical, everyday things, but they ran out of time for questions before getting to me.
Now I’m curious about “why isn’t there more fantasy about ordinary people?” It raises a further question in my mind: What is an ‘ordinary person’? In particular, what is an ‘ordinary person’ in the context of an exotic or fantastic setting?
That puts the finger on the two points that had me muttering under my breath all panel. First, they never did define their terms, and second, there are tons of novels that use or showcase domestic magic and “ordinary people” (i.e., not nobility). I think it is disingenuous to consider a modern-day musician “extraordinary” just because she happens to get mixed up with the Fae, or a girl who makes a living baking killer donuts “extraordinary” because she gets mixed up with a vampire.
Getting mixed up with a vampire is not ordinary.
But in most of my high fantasy, the characters are upper-crust, though the lower ranks, because that’s the degree of freedom I need for the story in question.
I’d say it depends on the setting and on the definitions used. Thus the mutterings of Our Gracious Hostess at the panel.
If it’s unusual and noteworthy for a worker at an all-night doughnut shop to not know any vampires on a first-name basis, does that make the worker extraordinary or ordinary?
Ordinary people don’t have adventures, especially fantasy adventures. Kind of by definition, an adventure is an extraordinary occurence; ordinary people may imagine adventures, may read about them and think how cool that would be, but those things don’t *really* happen. So if someone’s in a book and having an adventure, that automatically makes them not-ordinary, and the question defeats itself.
I suppose you could write a book about people just getting on with their ordinary lives. You might get something like A Closed And Common Orbit, which despite the SF trappings is mostly just people dealing with their day-to-day normal existance. A lot of people liked it for that; I found it very frustrating, because for the one adventure-like thing the characters do go on, the climax of all the back-story that’s been built up through the book, the resolution happens entirely off-screen, and all you see are the characters going back to their day-to-day lives afterward.
If all I want is people making dinner and paying bills and watching vid-entertainment — well, that’s what I get when I *don’t* read a book. 😉
“Ordinary people don’t have adventures,” I find I disagree with this by means of at least two examples.
1. Zillions of “fairy tales” (using the term loosely) that begin with a young man going out into the world to seek his fortune. He may be changed by his adventures, but he starts out bog-standard ordinary.
2. _Close Encounters of the Third Kind._ Toward the end of the film, somebody (Lacombe, I think) says something on the order of* “These are ordinary people faced with the extraordinary.” See above.
*I would have to get the DVD out and watch it to get the exact wording, and I don’t think I’m going to have the time today. 🙁
My point was more that, by the very nature of adventures, the character becomes not-ordinary the instant they start having one. The young man who goes out to seek his fortune isn’t ordinary, because ordinary young men stay home and work on the farm or go into the family business. The very fact that we choose *that* young man to tell a story about indicates that he’s different from the run-of-the-mill youngster; else, why pick him?
Ditto _Close Encounters_; it’s been eleventy-billion years since I’ve seen the film, but by definition, extraordinary things don’t ordinarily happen to people. The instant extraordinary events land on those characters, they become extraordinary people — because if they were ordinary, they’d still be driving to work, or worrying about the mortgage, or grumbling about the player who dropped the ball in the big game, not trying to figure out how to talk to aliens.
Yes, to some extent that’s an argument of semantics, but I think it points out a fundamental flaw in the panel question itself. Most people’s lives aren’t stories, they’re a chronological series of events. If you’re having the kind of life that makes for a good story, you’re already outside the ordinary.
On the topic of conventions, I would like to recommend Life, the Universe, and Everything. It’s held in Provo, Utah around President’s Day. The next one is February 13-15, 2020. See ltue.net.
“Life, the Universe, & Everything: The Marion K. “Doc” Smith Symposium on Science Fiction and Fantasy originated at Brigham Young University and has grown and changed a lot over the last thirty years. LTUE is a three-day academic symposium on all aspects of science fiction and fantasy. Comprised of panels, presentations and papers on writing, art, literature, film, gaming and other facets of speculative fiction, LTUE is a place to learn all about life, the universe, and everything else you love.”
I keep hearing about LTUE, and it does sound fascinating. I’m going to have to see if the con budget will stretch to Utah one of these years.
If we’re recommending other conventions, I do have to mention there’s one coming up in a couple of weeks in Minneapolis…. http://www.narrativity.fun