moving away from the genre

[kaigou]

Finished reading Night of the Jaguar, by Michael Gruber, and it was as fantastic as his first book. Now reading Hard Rain, by Barry Eisler, about John Rain, a Japanese-American working as an assassin in Tokyo. Wow, on both counts. Gruber has a doctorate in marine biology, and peppers his stories with intense academia that make me wonder if there should be a bibliography at the end -- the first, anthropology about Yoruba, the second, ecology and the rain forest -- and Eisler's former CIA, a martial artist, and lived in Japan for a number of years. Each has a definite solidity to the writing, not just in good plots but imperfect characters who are very, very good at what they do but human despite that.

Thing is, I also went looking for urban fantasy to read, and did pick up the second book in the Dresden Files -- Fool Moon, by Jim Butcher. But the majority of the urban fantasy out there really disappoints me, and the revival of the whole werewolf/vampire schtick, thanks to L K Hamilton, bores me to death. I want stories that are somewhere between the grit of Eisler's world, and the fantastic elements in a solid fantasy, but without the gloss of glamour in DeLint's book where even the dirt is pretty, and could we please stop with the unspoken rule that at least two characters in any urban fantasy book must, by default, play part-time in a frickin' Celtic band? At least once, give me a heavy metal guitarist or a bluegrass banjo player or maybe someone who just fiddles around with the koto on odd days and doesn't play it very well. But enough already with the damn "they're in a Celtic band together" crap.

Gruber is probably the first -- if not only -- solid thriller that's somewhere between magical realism, Grisham-style thriller, and fantasy. No surprise he's in the mainstream literature/fiction section: how else could you possibly categorize a series in which the lead character is both cop/detective...and the son of a woman dedicated to Yemaya, in which knowing voudoun helps solve a mystery that's only partly possible and a good bit of impossible without the help of magic, gods, or both? It's almost as if, to some degree, this impossibility is so perfectly possible in Jimmy Paz' world that I don't even see it as 'fantasy' so much as an expansion of the thriller-suspense genre.

And my inclination to enjoy that more makes me really wonder about the tone I take in my own writing, the lure I feel for something grittier, more realistic, rougher, harsher, than the usual urban fantasy lines. Is the lack of urban fantasy, over all, an indication that it's not as popular as, say, Martin's alterno-world, or Bujold's, or any of a number of other well-known and popular writers? Does it mean we only like fantasy to trip over our real world if it's vampires and werewolves and things that are -- in a word -- created, rather than born? Do we prefer fantastical creatures riding the Metro only if the story contains a hint that in the right place and time and after charming the right person/thing, we might be that fantastical creature, ourselves? Is it easier to suspend disbelief if the fantasy happens in a world where these things are taken for granted, that the author builds it from the ocean floor up, and thus if there's magic/fantasy, this is simply the world's way -- but that we can't stop knowing our world isn't like that, long enough to accept a new interpretation of it?

So I wonder a lot about Gruber. I think if I were to write something and people were to compare me to him -- as opposed to the names in the SFF genre -- that I would be phenomenally complimented and ecstatic, really. He brings together such a concrete awareness of place (always of huge importance to me, and the reason I'm already caught up in Eisler's descriptions of the Tokyo neighborhoods), along with an undercurrent that the world may seem placid and consistent on the surface but that magic roils underneath. I can't get enough of that, honestly.

But would too much of the fantasy element irritate a reader who prefers thrillers/suspense, or would too much of the thriller/suspense and high action irritate someone who enjoys fantasy?

Comments

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

I saw this post on, hrm, last night? and thought a lot about it on the flight home today. Mostly I thought about the sociology of how we see immigrants -- or how we don't, for that matter -- and the old joke about "all you ___ look alike", which is a cruel joke on some levels but on others it's true; if you're not raised with a set of facial features, it's hard to place it as something other than "not familiar". To my Asian friends, identifying European features as German, Swedish, French, Spanish, Irish is nearly impossible, but many of my Anglo friends see an Asian face and can't tell if those are Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese features.

In the world I'm writing (based in the US), all people are a mix of human and non, just as all Americans are a mix of longer-stay (all the way back to indigenous) and relatively recent arrivals. Those who have learned (or not learned?) to see immigrants wouldn't see nonhuman elements, either.

I really dislike worlds in which the fantasy/fairy element is so divided as to be its own entity; it seems more likely that any such world would exist parallel and interdependent to ours just as the Asian immigrant community down the street from me shops at the same grocery stores, is right there geographically, but somehow distinct/distanced if purely by custom and language. Such worlds are there, but we don't see/find them not because they're behind a huge gate but because we never really have the need/want to go looking, and even if we did, the cultural boundaries are greater than any wall ever built.

I'm trying to remember who wrote the Borderlands anthologies -- was that the author who ranted for three pages online about the horrors of fanfic? I seem to recall she co-wrote Gypsy with, hrm, Brust (?) and I was so seriously not impressed, which was a bit of a disappointment.

[branchandroot]

*thinks* Windling's never ranted that I know of; she did post a letter including basic fic guidelines, but it actually gives permission to use her characters in fic. (http://www.player.org/pub/u/nathan/border/letter.html) Lessee. Windling is the editor. Some major contributors were Emma Bull and Will Shetterly, Midori Snyder, Ellen Kushner and Bellamy Bach the corporate nom de plume. A bunch of others did one-off stories for the books.

But yes. It seems like a lot of fantasy writers do treat their fantastic elements like recent-immigrant-populations, but naively--taking that cultural barrier as some kind of Natural Law and not permeable under any circumstances. I think the kind of variable permeability you're describing makes a lot more sense.