So, a ramble. Because why not. It’s late-ish, I’m tired, and I have a bee in my bonnet. Consider this blog a response to people who made me feel daft for loving fantasy back when I was young and impressionable.
I love fantasy. I always have. I want my stories to have magic in them. I’ve always been interested in witches, mermaids, dragons (I love dragons), selkies, magic carpets… I want stories to transport me. I want stories to take me somewhere else, somewhere I’ve never been. I want stories that travel to impossible places, where saving a single ant in a path may change the whole course of what happens. I want stories in which the protagonist might sometimes be a swan. I have always enjoyed magic.
And when I was a child, this was never an issue. People expect children to enjoy magic. Lot’s of children’s books have dragons, princesses, knights, improbable transformations, falling down rabbit holes into different realities. And this was normal and good and I enjoyed them (although not Alice in Wonderland, and that is a different discussion). In fact, I loved them. I was a child who lived in books, just as soon as I figured out this reading thing. And then I discovered Tamora Pierce and that was it. I was gone. Here was the fantasy I had been waiting for, with women front and centre, knights, magic, swords, dashing villains, goddesses. Also in it were well informed depictions of puberty, menstruation, difficult friendships, and well researched animals THAT BEHAVED LIKE ANIMALS and training – the characters have to work for things, they aren’t just suddenly good at a skill. The knights have to go through lots of training, and some of them fail. I was entranced. I am still entranced.
And again, this was fine. Until the strange, undefined moment when it wasn’t. When I hit some age barrier I had not known existed, and people started expecting me to read ‘real’ books. As far as I can tell, when certain people say ‘real’ books, they mean fiction in which everyone is miserable, or some teenagers find a body and somehow it’s a metaphor for growing up, or Classics in which everyone is miserable while wearing period costumes and suffering from period typical sexism and racism. Personally, I do not understand the appeal. I did not then, and I do not now. But, having some form of politeness and consideration, I would not tell someone that the book they are reading and clearly enjoying is not a ‘real’ book. It’s there, it’s a book, it has words on the page (or kindle screen), so it is a book. Strangely, this did not always seem to come into other people’s consideration of my reading choices. Fantasy, apparently, is not a real genre. Unless it’s written by white men, in which case we make really expensive films full of sweeping shots of landscapes and rugged men running around in the landscapes.
I have tried reading the books that have been thrust at me. I fought my way through Of Mice and Men at school. I read numerous of those books aimed at teenagers about having a Difficult Friend Who Shoplifts, or having a Difficult Friend Who Is a Bully, or being suddenly homeless with a serial killer stalking you, or having to run away from your abusive dad, or going through puberty and finding out that your aunt is actually your mum, or being a teenage spy. And it’s not that I didn’t enjoy these books; I just didn’t enjoy them as much. None of them have survived when I’ve had to make book culls. And I want to stress that there is nothing inherently wrong with these books – I just don’t like them. I liked fantasy. I love fantasy. And that was treated as a childish thing, which I deeply resent because I am not convinced I would have made it through my adolescence (which was rough for various reasons) in anything near as good shape as I did without fantasy books.
Fantasy books, in many ways, saved me. Because they were an escape. Because they let me go somewhere else, at least in my head, and I desperately needed to. Because they taught me that I might struggle, but I could fight through and come out the other side stronger. Because they took me to other worlds, in which there was magic and beauty and you could fight evil. Because they taught me that standing up against something bad is never wasted, however small your action. Because they taught me that women are strong and important and deserve respect (I was damn picky about the fantasy I read, okay? I had the good luck of picking up woman-positive fantasy before I came across the other stuff, so I expected everything to live up to at least those standards). Because the first time I learned about meditation, a practise that has helped me through many difficult times in my life, was in a fantasy book. Because I figured out my sexuality through fantasy books. Because fantasy could talk about things I didn’t have the strength to confront directly at the time. Because fantasy taught me that a person can survive staring into the darkness day after day. Because fantasy made me laugh when I did not have lots to laugh about. Because fantasy taught me that you respect Nature, because it is so much huger than you and there are forces you shouldn’t mess with. Because fantasy speaks to my soul in a way that fiction does not; it speaks about the knife-edge doorways between here and there, and about the magic inherent in living. Because fantasy is fun, and why on earth would you read a story that’s not fun (unless you’re rage-reading so you can go argue with people in a more informed way, which I totally understand)?
I am 27 now. I read stuff that’s not fantasy; sci-fi, dictionaries, books about etymology, poetry, quirky science books, comics, and history books. But fantasy is still my favourite. It will always be my favourite because I love magic, and dragons, and adventure. Because very little makes me happier than slipping into a book that’s been written well enough to convince me that the imagined world here is real. Because werewolves are cool. Because fantasy at its best is a genre in which your imagination is the limit, and that’s fun. Because reading things that are fun is brilliant and wonderful and I do not understand why people look down on this.
I’m not naive enough to think that fantasy is perfect: there are problems, and big ones. People who aren’t men and white have a hard time, both as characters and as authors. There is a subset of fantasy fans who are happy to learn an entire made-up language but will flip out if you put, say, a couple of words of Yiddish in there. This is probably the same subset of fans who think that having women in fantasy doing things other than being murdered or sexually assaulted or looking pretty is unrealistic because “insert vague excuse about the fantasy book being based on medieval Europe here” (I think these fans don’t know a lot about medieval Europe)(also if you can imagine orcs and elves and a villain who is a FIERY EYEBALL ON A TOWER then you can imagine women and people of colour. And if you can’t, you can walk out the door and see some and then you don’t even have to work at imagining them because, unlike orcs and elves and dragons, women and queers and nonbinary people and people of colour actually exist although if you have to do this you need to ask yourself some really soulsearching questions). And this is a whole big conversation that I cannot cover in this blog post, or indeed in one blog post alone, but it’s important to say I know. I know there are problems. My love of the genre does not mean I am blind to its flaws.
Fantasy, for me, has been a place of escape, safety, fun, and growth. It is rooted deeply in me, and I get really angry when people just dismiss the whole genre. No-one is forcing you to read this. You don’t have to come here. But if you have never read any, you should not just be dismissing the whole genre and saying it’s childish. If you don’t like it, that’s fine. You don’t have to like it. No-one is saying that. But there is a tendency to assume that, somehow, fantasy is less; it’s less grown-up, it’s less serious, it’s less skilled, it’s less ‘real’. To which I say, well of course it’s not real. It’s fantasy. That’s rather the point. Fiction isn’t real either, if you want to get into it. Fantasy is still important. Because fantasy is about exploring the limits of the imagination and storytelling, and those are things that shape the world. And because there are a lot of people who need to escape who cannot actually escape, but hopefully they can read. And if a fantasy book can keep them alive long enough to give them hope and get them into a better situation, that’s worthwhile. Even if it is a book about magic talking dragons, that you personally don’t like…
Enjoy the ramble-rant? You can buy me a coffee via the internet! (the money will actually be spent on hot chocolate, because I hate the taste of coffee).
The Big Discworld Readalong: The Light Fantastic
31 Jan 2019 2 Comments
by Meredith in Book Review Tags: baby star turtles, commentary, discworld, fantasy, meredith debonnaire, Review, terry pratchett, The Big Discworld Readalong, The big dscworld readalong: the light fantastic, The Light Fantastic
This is a readalong commentary rather than a review, so won’t necessarily make sense if you haven’t read the book!
I will be aiming to get normal reviews up as well in the near future.
The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn’t sure it was worth all the effort.
No chapters, thankfully. Phew, I can properly relax into this Discworld book with its traditional line break layout.
The quality of storytelling has shot up. Like, it’s very impressive. TP clearly learned a lot from TCOM. I’m starting to see more of the asides and detail that make the Discworld so wonderful, as well as the humour. Not that those things are absent from TCOM, just that they are not so well balanced.
Galder Weatherwax! I always forget him, because he is only in this book, but he’s an absolute delight! Obviously related to Granny… Speaking of, the structure of the Unseen University is so different here. Everyone is the head of a separate order, and they all have entertaining and complicated names. Luckily, they all turn to stone at the end of the book so TP can then do something entirely different.
Rincewind crossing the terror threshold never ceases to amuse me. Just, the point at which he is too scared to be scared of anything else is always such a wonderful bit of writing.
Cohen the barbarian! I love him! I love that we only meet this legend when he’s in his eighties and bitter.
Also, I forgot that we met Ysabel (Death’s daughter) in this book. It’s interesting, because what it means is that right from the beginning of the Discworld, Death is a being who has a more complicated relationship with humans than it seems on the surface. In this book, one gets the feeling that he is really just trying to do his job well and with care.
The old magic necromancer woman, unnamed and only having a brief appearance, is great. We’re starting to see TP seem to go “oh shit, need to have women in here” and it’s nice. I’m always really happy seeing an author trying to improve, and TP does an alright job here. All the women are still background characters at this point, but they’re interesting background characters. We get Bethan, who was going to be sacrificed by druids but marries Cohen instead and goes on to yell at useless wizards, Ysabel, who threatens Rincewind with Death’s scythe, aforementioned necromancer lady, and Herrenna the Henna Haired Harridan, who gets one of my favourite descriptions, included here for you to laugh at: …this particular hero is a heroine. A red-headed one.
Now, there is a tendency at a point like this to look over one’s shoulder at the cover artist and start going on at length about leather, thighboots and naked blades.
Words like “full”, “round” and even “pert” creep into the narrative, until the writer has to go and have a cold shower and a lie down.
Which is all rather silly, because any woman setting out to make a living by the sword isn’t about to go around looking like something off the cover of the more advanced kind of lingerie catalogue for the specialised buyer.
The description goes on to say that she’s wearing pretty sensible clothes, actually, and followed by a group of men she’s hired, who aren’t going to be described because they’ll be dead soon. The reader is invited to imagine them in leather if this makes us happy. I nearly spat food on my book laughing.
Twoflowers is a lot less annoying in this book. I think he’s grown on me. Like a fungus. In some ways he’s a bit like Carrot, now that I think about it.
The Luggage continues to be wonderful.
It’s funny meeting trolls, because the trolls later on are so different. I like the trolls in TLF though, especially about them moving backwards in time somehow. And the way that the Spell is just messing about with Rincewind’s life.
Aha! An answer to something that has bothered me! We never meet the Librarian before he is an Orangutan. He is turned into one in this book, before we meet him.
The star cult is an accurate representation of people reacting to stuff to be honest.
Love the magic shop. And the idea that there’s just a very grumpy sorceror to blame for all of them.
And then baby star turtles! This is why I never remember what else has happened in this book – we get to the baby star turtles and I stop caring about everything else! And this has happened again; I know there was a lot of detail, and things I was enjoying (Ymper Trymon is a fab baddie), but BABY STAR TURTLES!
Anyway, I am heading excitedly on to the next book now. TLF still doesn’t quite feel Discworld, which is odd seeing as it’s one of the first. It still feels a bit underbaked. I think the main difference is that at this point TP is really just poking fun at the fantasy genre, and that is great and a lot of fun, but the later Discworld books all have quite a lot to say in terms of thoughts about the world and humanity, and I feel that lacking here.