Torque Control

As Others See Michael Chabon

And here I thought everyone was looking forward to The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. From comments at TEV:

No super-heroes in this one, right? ‘Cause if there are, you know, I’m out.

Seriously, I have been a fan — fairly, fan; not connoisseur or scholar or anything so sophisticated — of Chabon’s since I by chance picked up the first paperback edition of “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” back in 1902, or whenever it was. It is heartening to read that he retains his gift for near-corporeal simile and metaphor; it is frightening to read that he is now putting them all in one paragraph.

I’m going to go out on a limb: I say, in advance of reading no more than just this one paragraph, he’s yellow-dogged this one. Mind you, I don’t want him to, I’m not after any hero-takes-a-fall sensationalism. I merely, as they say, got a feeling. Tell me I’m wrong, I’ll be happy.

[…]

I think he’s of late become sort of a caricature of himself. Occupational hazard maybe, for a successful, prize-winning novelist who sort of got genre-slammed. I mean, his work started as quite a bit more stable, less big-idea-centric and has sort of swiftly bogged down in the consistently fantastical. I don’t think it’s irredeemable, but it’s notable. I mean his screenwriting career alone is starting to sound like the pitch for a Charlie Kaufman script. That said, he’s a supremely talented writer. One of the best American writers currently publishing.

And There’s Five More Where That One Came From

Nic and Victoria at Eve’s Alexandria are going to review the Clarke Award shortlist, book by book. First up: Streaking by Brian Stableford. It would be fair to say they are underwhelmed.

I’m glad that Nic quoted the short passage about Canny Kilcannon’s large ham and mushroom pizza: it was the first (of many) points at which I closed Streaking by Brian Stableford, blinked, and sighed. In disbelief. My dear Clarke judges, what were you thinking about? Heavy-handed prose, stilted dialogue, two-dimensional characters, forced thematics and a blatant thread of misogyny – it’s all here.

Enjoy.

From the Archives: Meetings With Remarkable Men

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned reading the transcript of a 1979 guest of honour speech by Christopher Priest, in an old issue of Vector. Chris has generously allowed me to put the text of the speech, “Meetings With Remarkable Men”, up on the Vector website. As noted last time around, it touches on the state of sf and the state of sf criticism; as Jed Hartman recently noted, in some senses there’s nothing new under the sun in these debates, but it’s still well worth reading the full speech. Here’s another quote to tempt you:

You have probably heard Heinlein’s remark that writers are competing for the readers’ beer-money. […] [This attitude] crops up all over the place, in articles in fanzines, in interviews with writers, in criticism. Boiled down to its essence, it says: “We are but entertainers, and entertainment is a humble trade. Therefore our sights are set low.” I believe that entertainment is a high art, and should be treated as such. Everyone at the convention today is here because we believe that science fiction is a stimulating, radical and entertaining form of literature, yet by their very words the Poul Andersons and Robert A Heinleins are asking you to settle for less.

The parts of the essay that discuss criticism also chime with recent debates over at urban drift.

Links and Bombs

The Steep Approach to Linkadale

Standalone vs. Serial

So it seems that Heroes is killing Lou Anders’ love of episodic television:

What [Heroes is] doing that is making it for me is that it seems to be leaving the episodic nature of television behind completely. Sometimes they’ll run a “To be continued” and this just blows my mind, because in a show where everything seems to be carried forward and thru, I can’t figure out when they decide something is “to be continued” and something isn’t. I think it’s just to give us a break from the horrid voice overs, since the TBC episodes don’t have one at the end and start. What Heroes is doing to me and my wife is showing us the absurdity of dramas that start out at the beginning of the hour with a problem and resolve it by the end.

I am actually very disturbed by this.

Because that’s how most television has been written since the medium’s inception.

I always prided myself on not being one of those people who can’t watch black and white film or refuse to watch things because they are old or the special effects aren’t up to today’s standards. My excuse was always that it’s the story that matters, not the set dressings. But Heroes is doing fundamentally different things with story. I know this began with St Elsewhere and Babylon 5 and a dozen other shows over the last decade, but the level of inter-connectivity, non-episodic format is to an entirely new degree. Rome does this too — they are really neck and neck for my affection and it’s probably just that I’m more into comics than history that puts Heroes ahead — but Rome feels just a touch more episodic.

What I’m realizing is that changes in the sophistication of narrative may forever remove me from the garden and I’m not sure I can go back.

To put it mildly, I have some problems with the value judgements being made in this argument. Before I get to them, though, a quick defining of terms: by “episodic”, I am assuming Lou is talking about series in which installments can be treated independently, even if they are embedded in a larger continuity. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example, was an episodic show, although it became less so as it went on (to its detriment). I’m going to call the non-episodic format “serial”, by which I mean series like 24. You can watch, say, “Band Candy” with minimal knowledge of previous Buffy, and it’ll work fine. You can’t do the same with episode 13 of the fifth season of 24. The term “arc”, I would argue, is somewhat meaningless when applied to a serial show, because in a serial show there is only arc — there’s no “non-arc” for contrast.

Next up, areas of agreement. Television drama — or at least US television drama; British tv has certainly had short self-contained serials for as long as I can remember — evolved primarily as an episodic medium. More recently — again, particularly in the US — there has been a shift away from episodic storytelling and towards serial storytelling, although I don’t agree that Heroes represents anything more than, at most, an incremental advance in this trend. (And believe me, I like Heroes a lot.) I don’t know how long the current absurd practice of an October-to-May “season” punctuated by sweeps months and periods of hiatus has been operating, but you only have to look at the way shows like Buffy would “save up” showpiece episodes and/or big plot developments for November, February and May to see how it’s affected the structure of US shows, to the point where the decision a few years ago to start the season of 24 in January and run straight through — without breaks! — to May felt genuinely radical.

This, not unnaturally, leads to the assumption that a given number of episodes in a season are filler, just there to make up the numbers. I think this is a deeply suspect assumption, but I also get the impression it may be one of the factors that leads to Lou talking about Heroes as an example of narrative sophistication: a series where every episode is essential is obviously superior, right? But that’s not the part that really gets me: what I object to most are the assumptions in the idea that Heroes is an argument against “the absurdity of dramas that start out at the beginning of the hour with a problem and resolve it by the end.”

On any given day, my list of favourite Buffy episodes — which of course I’d argue is representative of the best episodes — would include “Lie to Me” or “Earshot”, possibly both; my list of favourite Angel episodes would include “Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been”; my list of favourite Farscape episodes would include “…Different Destinations”. My list of favourite West Wing episodes would probably be comprised almost entirely of standalones, because with a couple of exceptions (end of season two) that show didn’t do much serial storytelling. All of the episodes I’ve named start out at the beginning of the hour with a problem and resolve it by the end. But “Lie to Me” is the finest articulation of Buffy‘s core morality the show ever produced, “Earshot” possibly the finest articulation of the high-school-is-hell theme; “Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been” is a devastatingly powerful story about, among other things, race in 1950s America; “…Different Destinations” is arguably the best televisual time travel story of the past decade; and The West Wing never failed to deal with whatever issue it chose in a thoughtful and engaging way. Put bluntly, the point is this: an hour (or rather, 45 minutes) is plenty of time to tell an interesting, powerful, self-contained story.

Nor is the difference between the individual episode and the serial one of sophistication, any more than the difference between a short story and a novel is one of sophistication. That’s an imperfect comparison, but the basic point is easily demonstrated: probably my favourite Firefly episode is “Out of Gas”, which has a narrative that weaves between three time-frames with an almost breathtaking economy and grace. It is, by any measure, a sophisticated narrative. Heroes hasn’t produced an episode to match it yet — even “Company Man”. I would go so far as to say that Heroes taken as a whole doesn’t match it yet. Certainly serial storytelling has qualities that episodic storytelling can’t replicate: an accumulation of detail, a more sustained period of engagement with the tale. But consider Battlestar Galactica, which has been alternating unevenly between periods of serial storytelling and periods of episodic storytelling since its inception. The serial episodes are, almost without exception, the better episodes of the show (the creative peak is probably the start of season two), but — though I’ve seen the suggestion made several times — the disparity has nothing to do with the inherent qualities of the two types of storytelling. Serial is no easier or harder to get right than episodic; they’re different skill sets. So the problem with Galactica is not that it’s turning out standalone episodes, it’s that it’s turning out bad standalone episodes — ones that do offer too-easy answers, that rely heavily on melodrama, convenience and cliche. Serial storytelling is just as easy to do badly: look at Lost. If I wanted to, in fact, I’m pretty sure I could construct an argument that the pleasures of serials are often ultimately simplistic, familiar, consolatory pleasures — but I don’t want to, because that would be just as much a misrepresentation as the idea that a serial is more “sophisticated” than a standalone.

I feel a little weary typing all this, because I’ve been coming across variations of Lou’s argument more or less since I came online. One of the most succinct rebuttals I’ve seen in that time is, perhaps not surprisingly, by David Hines, from his review of the Angel episode “Through the Looking Glass” (the penultimate episode of the second season, while they’re in Pylea). As it happens, I think “Through the Looking Glass” is an odd choice to use as a defence of the principle, since it’s part of a mini-serial, just a mini-serial that appeared less related to the show’s larger continuity than many people would have liked. But on that principle, I think Hines is dead right.

Did I enjoy the Darla/Dru arc? You betcha. Have the writers stepped away from that a bit for more standalone-ish episodes? Yeah. Is there anything wrong with that? Nope. I enjoy story arcs as much as the next guy. But there’s something more important than story arcs — and that’s telling *good stories.* I don’t care what ANGEL tells stories about, as long as the show tells good stories. If the writers felt inclined to make season three an all-standalone year, that would be fine by me; many of ANGEL’s very best episodes (even this season) have been standalones, and I’ll take a story like “Untouched” over one like “Redefinition” any day of the week. Other shows, including one from Mutant Enemy, have gone story-arc crazy and suffered. Give me a good tale well-told any day.

An Interstitial Sceptic

Via Christopher Barzak, there’s a blog for Small Beer’s forthcoming Interfictions anthology, including (so far) the table of contents and excerpts from an interview with the editors, Theodora Goss and Delia Sherman.

I commmented over on Chris’ blog that reading the interview made me start to understand the allergic reactions some people have to the term “slipstream“, because I found it an increasingly frustrating experience. Given that I’m an advocate of the usefulness of slipstream as a descriptor, and given that most people seem to lump the two terms together anyway, this may seem surprising. The difference is that I know what people mean when they say a story is slipstream, or I can find out. To put it crudely, if they’re Bruce Sterling, they mean a story that generates a certain effect; if they’re Rich Horton, they mean a story that disturbs a familiar context with fantastic intrusions; if they’re James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, they mean a story that uses certain techniques and narrative strategies. We can argue all day long about which of these definitions is most useful, which identifies the most interesting set of stories, but they are all, to an extent, testable.

It’s hard to judge Goss and Sherman’s descriptions of the Interfictions stories without actually having read said stories — though I expect that, like Feeling Very Strange, Interfictions will be a strong collection, independent of whether you agree with the frame it’s presented in. But “Interstitial”, at least as Goss and Sherman are using it, doesn’t seem to work the way that slipstream works. The descriptions of slipstream above are bottom-up: if a story has these characteristics, maybe it’s slipstream. The descriptions of interstitial that Goss and Sherman give are dreadfully vague, and tend to be top-down: this story is interstitial, but why?

Q: Did you have a particular definition of interstitiality in mind before you began reading the stories?

DORA: […] interstitiality has been defined in so many ways, at various forums where Delia and I have discussed the concept, that I wanted to forget my own definition, to say to the writers, I’ve asked you for an interstitial story. Now show me what you think is interstitial. […]

DELIA: What I began with was less a definition of interstitial fiction than a short list of things I felt I knew about it. An interstitial story does not hew closely to any one set of recognizable genre conventions. An interstitial story does interesting things with narrative and style. An interstitial story takes artistic chances. These things are true, as far as they go. But the other thing I know is that every interstitial story defines itself as unlike any other.

Perhaps a better way of approaching the subject is to look at the overall aim of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, which is to promote “art that doesn’t fit neatly within recognised categories of genre or marketing”. This, it seems to me, is only a useful aim if you’re more concerned with the commercial restrictions placed on a given mode than with the mode itself; or to put it another way, it’s an aim that seems more useful for writers than for readers. If I were a writer, I might be reluctant to be labelled, because a label is reductive, and I know my work has many aspects. As a reader, I have a preference for stories of the fantastic, but I don’t care whether they’re labelled as such or not; I’ll pick up Against the Day and Nova Swing, both of which chafe against their assigned labels, in the same shopping trip. So as a reader, the “interstitial” label is barely useful — it’s tempting to say, “ok, name three books that do fit neatly within the categories of genre and marketing”. And as a reviewer, I’d never consider using it; part of a reviewer’s job is description, and “interstitial” is a smokescreen. By definition, even more than other labels, it avoids the specifics of what a story is doing, the details that make it interesting.

Links Are Not A Violent Subject