New Attitudes for Old
“Reviews” by Jonathan Strahan, appearing in the March, 2004 issue of Locus focuses on authors who are, each in their own way, reshaping fantasy: Gwyneth Jones and Patricia McKillip.
His review of Patricia Mc Killip’s new Alphabet of Thorn left me wanting to hunt down not only Alphabet but Ombria in Shadow and In the Forests of Serre as well.
What left me sputtering in my coffee was his comment on “mastery” in the field of fantasy: how rare it is to see a writer advancing their craft throughout their career.
It may seem odd to suggest that an author with as long and prestigious a career as McKilip’s could still be said to be growing and evolving, but that’s very much what Alphabet of Thorn reveals: a writer at the top of her form testing her boundaries, stretching and growing.
I haven’t keept as current with Patricia McKillip as I would like–the last book of hers I read was Song for the Basilisk–but her constant evolution as an author is one of the things that attracts me to her work. So I’m simpatico with Jonathan’s assessment of both the writer and her work.
But I was trying to think of other writers who have continued to progress in their art throughout their career. Ursula Le Guin and Chip Delaney come readily to mind. After that, I stall. Maybe you readers can come up with some more writers, but I bet overall it’s a small percentage of the writers out there. I think Jonathan is right. I think many writers of fantasy reach a plateau and stop.
I’ve spent enough years in the martial arts to be uncomfortable with the idea that mastery is a position you can arrive at. Mastery is a process, not a destination. There are some qualified Senseis out there who have “arrived,” who figured everything out a decade back and are still doing it the same way. But I tell you, they aren’t as good as the ones who are still refining, still experimenting with form and technique. To run into an old buddy and see them performing technique the same way they were five or ten years ago leaves me sad.
In the same way, to see venerable writers in the field still writing nearly the same thing nearly the same way twenty and thirty years after they’ve made their mark leaves me sad.
It is also another one of those little differences between the genre ghetto and the expectations of mainstream literature, where I feel we fall out on the inadequate side of the equation.
Best regards,
Alan Lattimore
March 20th, 2004 at 10:08 pm
I don’t think this is really anything to do with fantasy but with writers in general, in the literary mainstream, too. Inasmuch as some fantasy writers go after trilogies when they shouldn’t even be writing sequels, the argument has some merit.
But every writer enters a kind of decaying orbit at some point. There’s always a point where the writer cannot withstand the inertia of complacency. It varies for every writer, but it happens to almost everyone.
It’s just the way it is. And some writers, like Jonathan Carroll for awhile there, feel like they haven’t quite gotten it right, and so the repeating is an attempt to render in more perfect form what they feel was imperfectly rendered the first or second or even third time.
Jeff VanderMeer
March 21st, 2004 at 10:20 pm
My exposure to mainstream fiction is quite sketchy; my exposure to literary fiction is only slightly better.
I don’t know that anyone expects Judith Krantz or Danielle Steele to improve much over their professional lifetime. I don’t remember hearing anyone note that any particular Nero Wolfe was an improvement (or not) over a predecessor.
My impression of literary fiction includes more of an expectation of artistic growth and development. Milan Kundera gets knocked for rewriting the same story over and over again. The latest Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Eco, Updike or Barth will be scrutinized to see if it is better than the last, to see if the master has at least retained his or her ability to understand the human condition and render it to the reader.
Part of that might be the emphasis on novelty in the artsy crowd. Personally, I think the search for the shock value of "new" can easily become distracting and misleading.
Perhaps this is selective attention on my part, the result of wishful thinking. What is clear to me is the dissapointment I experience when I read some novel excerpt by a great master in "Asimov’s" and the quality is not only not their best but barely up to the standards of a first appearance in a second tier magazine.
I don’t think anyone is doing anyone else a favor by cutting the greats so much slack.
Best regards,
Alan Lattimore
March 23rd, 2004 at 1:05 pm
I don’t know if invoking the dead is appropriate to this topic, but throughout his career, I believe that Roger Zelazny demonstrated clearly a constant evolution of style, including his clear stylistic re-evaluation in the middle of his career.
March 24th, 2004 at 9:36 am
Er, followed by the definitely decaying orbit of writing so many Amber novels that he managed to franchise himself…in a real cookie-cutter way.
JeffV
March 25th, 2004 at 2:43 pm
"Maybe you readers can come up with some more writers"
After reading her reply above, I imagine Nalo Hopkinson would second this nomination: Gene Wolfe.