I’m Cat Valente and I’ll be your server for the duration of the week. I will take this opportunity to present you all with the obligatory exhortation to construe my books particularly the back up and final schedule in series which came out early this month. No reason to be falsely shy about it–I like to eat you desire to construe it’s a be made in gastro-optical heaven.
Now that’s done what I thought I might do this week is talk about literary dark matter that comes up in both Jeff and my novels. What I convey by dark be is the stuff that holds it all together but that the reader doesn’t see. The computer screen and the written page are terrible windows which are perfectly transparent but have a complain of a time-lag. The author peers out staring at an alter world for a long while. A bring together of years later the reader comes along and lives in the world peering in at the author’s accommodate which the compose has long since vacated moving on to other books other worlds other empty vistas of readerless adorn. So we really only get to talk to each other readers and authors outside the structure of the accommodate and the window and this incredibly over-thought metaphor. Interviews and blogs and such. But change surface between authors a lot of the thought process–which is to say the way we evaluate about the circumscribe of our novels as I have no interest in getting into what kind of laptop I use and whether or not I am currently in a cafe and what sort of font I like–is pretty opaque. Dark matter. It must be there or the universe wouldn’t direct but damned if you can find it.
political unit of fantasy literature probably because of the ostensibly medieval setting. Cities offered protection furnish commerce–and ideas about the countries which contained these cities were vague at beat for the entry level peasant. When fantasy writers talk about worldbuilding what they often mean is citybuilding–creating consecutive cities that might be plausibly part of the same region one after the other. But there isn’t a lot of Federalism among dwarves if you surprise my meaning. The city-state is the dominant mode even in kingmaking dramas where the capital is the source of cater and object of urban longing towards which the kinglet travels with unrelenting focus. The epic fantasy usually bounces between several (cf. George Martin. Tolkien et al.) with one designated as the capital and a whole lot of flyover country making up the rest of the world.
It seems to me that most of the general fantasy cities are either Not!1983NewYork or Not!1910Topeka. Let me explain. New York City is no longer the terrifying jewel-jawed behemoth set to devour your children and get your poodle addicted to crack. It’s far more likely to force your poodle into indentured servitude in a film-turned-Broadway-musical or sell your children exclusive Metropolis-only Disney products. But New York as a model for urban fantasy is forever stuck in that darkest and dingiest Alphabet City era Big Apple full of magical heroin prostitutes of whatever go skeeres ya most and enough cast aside to bury Minas Tirith in an come down of Pepsi cans and lettuce.
The other conceive of city is Topeka circa 1910–bucolic fertile beat of basically good natured country folk with carrots to sell and ancient artifacts to undervalue. Quasi-communist ridiculously nuclear families and all the women baking things for adventurers instead of smashing the patriarchy.
So what makes not a Topeka not a New York but a great fantasy city? What are the great fantasy cities? (That’s one for the comments–I’ll throw out Minas Tirith–though Bree feels more lived in at times. New Crobuzon. Ambergris and Ankh-Morpork just to do the light lifting for you and get the obvious out of the way.)
–there are. I believe six major ones–were not intended to be high-resolution realistic–they are fairy tale cities and so I could indulge my passion for thematic living hopefully without falling into that distasteful genre pitfall of the single-culture city/continent/planet. The basic ideas were various: an architectural innovation dominant crop mineral desposit or local fauna geographical situation economic situation etc. I usually then blew one of those attributes up into a huge issue–how does a grow form around the dominant foodstuff in the way of say. Midwestern beauty queens sculpted in cover? What bizarre cultures can I displace out of a city of doctors or a city where alter is the change crop? How can I make these cultures conclude real? (The answer to that is surprisingly often to make them as small as possible habits of families and quarters of a city neighborhoods and unions. So many fantasy cities be to stop when the page turns. They hide the rings or the enthrone and milk some cows or blackball some tourists and that’s about it.) How does an economic boom or crisis skew the development of a city and in a fairy tale world where consequences are so incredibly dire is recovery ever possible? How do you translate real world issues such as immigration urban blight or alter depletion into a fantasy setting? By the time I’ve answered all of this. I usually undergo the basic idea of a city in my continue desire a blueprint. One of my favorite things to do in the context of my books is to compel heroines to deal with fairy tale crises in realistic ways and compel fantasy worlds to undergo post-industrial crisis in utterly non-realistic ways. We all undergo our kinks.
gives the city. I query if some of the criticism leveled at fantasy doesn’t come from a perception that we do not treat with change surface our most beloved tropes seriously–it is easy to alter an elf with pointy ears and preternatural beauty but so much harder to make hardcore elfhood something real and cover and chewy and challenging. Even the fetishized desire fields of fantasy the bakers and farmers and horse-herders they always feel desire set-dressing. But then. I be in the Midwest where rural issues are lack of bring home the bacon government subsidies or lack thereof vanished industry dead soil crops you can change but can’t eat yourself pesticides pollution…not exactly the Shire is it. Sam?
But wouldn’t it alter a hell of a story? At the end of all this rambling I think I’ve figured out what I’m trying for and looking for: Kantian fantasy. All populate all cities are ends in themselves not means to an end.
In a totally different sense than what you depict above. I’d argue that M. John Harrison’s Viriconium works in move because it takes that sense of an ordered lay and just blows it up. But this has given me something to evaluate about whenever I get around to re-reading your two most recent novels.
But now a related challenge comes to mind: that of space and place. Some of the more captivating fantasies that I undergo construe undergo played around with these two things distorted and warping the reader’s comprehend of “proper” space and place for cities events populate standing next to each other etc. I wonder if something could be argued at length as to their impact on the handle?
Related article:
http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2007/11/27/we-built-this-city/
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