It's called irony

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts over the last couple of years, to go with the long country walks of the covid era. One of my favourites (podcasts, not walks) looks at the books and authors Gary Gygax cited as influences on D&D. But, oh my, it can be wearing to hear genre fans blunder their way through an interpretation of what an author is saying. You'd think that reading fantasy and SF would open you up to ambiguity and nuance, but instead those readers are often the most insistently literal.

Take this episode about Lin Carter’s The Warrior of World’s End. Xarda the knightrix (sic) says: “Knighthood promises a colourful and exciting life of action, such as every red-blooded woman normally craves.” (26m 23s in.) But, the presenters solemnly go on to say, Lin Carter then undercuts this with a further passage: 

“Many folks would doubtless say that a lady knight is a strange thing, or an intelligent metal bird that flies, or an old geezer who covers his face with lavender smoke.” 

Oh no, the sexist hound. One of the presenters grumbles that “it’s putting a warrior woman in the same category as a flying bird and an illusionist with purple haze over his face as though it’s just as wacky and weird!” Oh yes, agrees another earnestly, those were the deplorable attitudes of the time.

Does anyone think that when Jane Austen writes, “It is a truth universally acknowledged…” that she is expressing her own personal view of the matter? Or that Hilary Mantel’s description of the Duchess of Cambridge as "a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore” was intended as Mantel’s unfiltered opinion? Mantel should not have had to explain that she was employing irony; that is, using a variety of free indirect speech to convey and expose the attitudes she was criticizing.

I found the same thing in some reviews of my political gamebook Can You Brexit that complained about the snobbish and dismissive attitudes of the central character. Well, duh. That character was modelled on the senior Tory politicians of the day. If you disagreed with the tone of their inner voice, so too did I.

Authors do this all the time. Carter in that excerpt from The Warrior of World’s End is not telling us the attitudes of the 1970s – at least, that wasn’t his purpose. He is using a form of generalized free indirect speech to express the general astonishment at a female knight in terms that place us in the mindset of the people who inhabit his fantasy setting. The mechanical bird and the smoke-wrapped sorcerer are other characters in the adventuring “party”, incidentally, so it’s also self-aware irony on their part. But even when a sentiment like that is expressed in the narrator’s voice, it’s a technique writers use a lot, and usually to express precisely the opposite of their personal opinions. Unfortunately it seems like it’s wasted in genre fiction if the readers insist on taking every word literally.

Why it matters: you are missing nine-tenths of the value of fiction if you think that authors write simply to express personal points of view. The presenters of another podcast were vexed by how Arthur Conan Doyle could have believed in fairies having created the arch-rationalist Sherlock Holmes. "Doyle would regard seances and fairies as unknown science," theorized one. "He wasn't Holmes, he was Watson," countered the other. No, no, no. Authors aren't that careless. They don't typically just drop themselves into any one character but into all of them. I've written religiously devout characters, for example, and indeed stories that have a Christian message, despite being in real life an agnostic. Neither Jack Ember nor Estelle Meadowvane are me, though naturally they must have something of me in them.

(Incidentally, it seems like I'm really whaling on those two podcasts, but in fact they're both firm favourites of mine. They just happened to end up in the firing line when I was looking around for examples. But give them both a chance, do.)

I once wrote a vampire novel for a YA horror series. An editor at the publisher's office said, "There is a bookshop called Horniman's and the school is called Urnfield. I don't think the writer is aware of the connotations." What, I wasn't aware that those names might evoke themes of sex and death? In a vampire novel? What do publishers think authors do all day? We don't just slap this stuff down without any thought.

So, next time you're reading a book -- even a trashy fantasy adventure novel -- it might pay off to park your own assumptions and attitudes outside and dive in with the faith that the author is not simply some dope who unthinkingly uses his or her characters as mere mouthpieces for the -- shock horror! -- discredited views of the unsafe bygone era when the novel was written. Here is the finest literary podcast I know of, and one that will dispel any notion that "literature" has to mean difficult, or sombre, or even highbrow. Open your mind and even the humblest book might change your life.

A shopworn formula

Scriptwriting is increasingly about hitting a formula, perhaps because writers and studio/network execs attend the same courses that say X must happen on page Y, and so forth. And today's scriptwriters only have a very limited toolbox of tropes, it seems. Since Alien, every SF/horror movie must have a maladjusted group of squabbling malcontents. That made sense in Alien, where the ship had a commercial crew on a boring long-haul mission, a crew whose dysfunctional dynamic was exposed by the loss of the senior officers who held them together. It makes less sense if the crew is supposed to be a squad of elite marines, or a hand-picked team of top scientists.

Likewise in war movies. Everything today's scriptwriters know of war, they picked up from watching Vietnam movies. That was an unpopular, hopeless conflict fought by draftees who often didn’t want to be there, so naturally the movies written by veterans often feature disenchanted, unruly, squabbling soldiers. But it makes no sense to apply the same dynamic to the troops at Dunkirk or advancing after D-Day – except that's the only way the writers have learned to imagine war.

Star Trek's famous "lack of conflict" is often mocked as naïve, not least by its current writers, but in fact it's the same dynamic as professional astronauts describe. They don't muck about the way George Clooney's character is shown doing in Gravity, nor snit at each other like rivals in a high school movie. When I worked in game development I used to encourage a team attitude where everyone is pulling together to face the common challenges. I called it "bridge of the Enterprise" culture, the very paradigm of grown-up, ego-free cooperation. It’s getting hard to remember now, but that’s what Star Trek once stood for.

Star Trek: TOS didn't lack for character conflict, of course. Not an episode passed without McCoy and Spock having a grumble about something. But I suspect what the producers of Star Trek: Discovery mean by conflict is to have characters constantly at loggerheads like the crew of the Prometheus. Presumably they’d interpret “bridge of the Enterprise” culture nowadays as all about recriminations, secret passions, grudges and shouting matches. But if the show is to make any kind of sense that could never happen; those characters wouldn't get into Starfleet in the first place.

More to the point (because credibility in SF and fantasy is so often taken to be a foolish goal) writing high school moodiness into all the scenes is the story equivalent of putting lens flare on everything. There are other ways to inject tension into a plot, other varieties of conflict than person to person, and other tones of conflict than the shout-n-sulk.

I don't want to get sidetracked into talking about The Rings of Power (which I haven't seen, nor the Peter Jackson movies either) but from the criticism it seems it's making exactly the same mistakes as those other shows and movies. Writers who only have a very limited range of character- and story-tropes not only know nothing but how to write "piss and vinegar" characters, they even think that's somehow innovative.

I'll leave the sign-off to Ursula K Le Guin. This is from her essay "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie", which is mostly about the jarring language used by bad writers, though that's part and parcel of the same problem:

"Tolkien writes a plain, clear English. Its outstanding virtue its flexibility, its variety. It ranges easily from the commonplace to the stately, and can slide into metrical poetry, as in the Tom Bombadil episode, without the careless reader's even noticing. Tolkien's vocabulary is not striking; he has no ichor; everything is direct, concrete, and simple. Now the kind of writing I am attacking [...] is also written in a plain and apparently direct prose. Does that make it equal to Tolkien's? Alas, no. It is a fake plainness. It is not really simple, but flat. It is not really clear, but inexact. Its directness is specious. Its sensory cues—extremely important in imaginative writing—are vague and generalized; the rocks, the wind, the trees are not there, are not felt; the scenery is cardboard, or plastic. The tone as a whole is profoundly inappropriate to the subject."