Tuesday 16 February 2016

I Prefer to Think of it as the Vanguard

People who like novels and reading are going through a bit of a crisis of confidence lately. There's a sense that books are dumbing down and the only reason anyone writes them is to get a movie out of them. It's as if a novel is just an aspiring script which, if it behaves itself and eats its greens, might end up being a film or TV series some day. Meanwhile, there's very depressing stuff like this to read in the far flung corners of the internet: in order to even get into an agent's slush pile, you need a blog with 5,000 readers and the mentality of a prostitute with extremely low standards. "The only way to gain approval is by exploiting the very thing that cheapens [you]," as a man once said. On the other hand, if you happen to be a comedienne who has name recognition and is the kind of person the BBC refers to as a "national treasure", an amiable radio DJ with a popular podcast and lots of twitter followers, who is mates with Adam Horowitz, or the relative of a famous basketball player, publishers queue up to give you a fat book contract whatever dreary tripe you're serving up.

All very bleak and doomsdayish. It's easy to agree with Frank Furedi that, while reports of the death of the novel are very much overstated (I shared the view of Nassim Taleb that it's more likely that ebooks and even the internet will die out before paper novels), the long story is going through a grim and unimpressive period, with novels failing to live up to their USP of offering a deep, creative and self-exploratory experience. In particular, the really imaginative and thoughtful stuff in the field of fantasy and SF seems to be getting rarer - apart from a few stalwarts it's a very bland and repetitive place indeed. If you are looking for your mind to be blown, to ruminate carefully over hidden themes, or to experience a greater and more profound sense of self, you would be hard pressed to find that in a fantasy novel picked at random from a bookshelf in a modern day book shop.

This is where the DIY RPG brain trust steps in. Think of The Driftwood VersesStraits of AnianLanthanum Chromate. The stuff Arnold K puts outThe Swordfish Islands. &c. But also, think of the games you are running, planning, reading about, thinking about. Think of your special snowflake campaign setting, or the one your DM has dreamed up. Isn't it more imaginative and vibrant than anything going on in 95% of the fantasy literature out there? Isn't it interesting, creative, thoughtful, and surprising?

One way to think of this is that people who play D&D are fighting a rearguard action against the Philistine hordes of late modernity - we're the last of a dying breed, keeping our fires burning as long as we can before the icy wind of the lowest common denominator snuffs them out. But I prefer to think of the whole DIY RPG thing as part of the vanguard of something, instead. There are signs that both high street book shops and public libraries are making comebacks - which would be entirely in keeping with the search for 'authenticity' that anybody with their eyes open can see spreading throughout the Western world. In 2016, the zeitgeist is very much analog, local, anti-corporate and artisanal. This can be very easily co-opted, of course, but its also suggests that there is still a place for humanism amongst all the bogus transhumanist/post-humanist-feeling superficiality of our popular culture, with its flashy aesthetics, auto-tuners, and slickly 'ironic' advertising. And that place may well be growing. I think creating materials for RPGs, whether for your friends, the market, or just for you, is part of that growth, the revival of humanism in a digital age, and indeed is one of the chief engines of it for those who are in the know. We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams - in the green shoots of something rather than the dying embers.

19 comments:

  1. Man something about these "lifestyle design" types makes my skin crawl - it's all too smooth, too perfect, too sterile. Reminds me of this: https://youtu.be/xK0njkATf84

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    1. Me too. That's part of what I mean about transhumanism/posthumanism. Some people seem to want to move beyond what's actually *real*. They're not interested in exploring their humanity, but "designing" it away.

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    2. _not interested in exploring their humanity, but "designing" it away._

      Would read this novel.

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    3. There must be loads of novels about that but none quite spring to mind right now.

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    4. Try M John Harrison's Light or Nova Swing. (Probably Empty Space as well, but I have not read it.) Among other things, they banalify the high-tech cyberpunk future.

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  2. I disagree with the sentiment of the declining novel. 2014 saw the release of The Wake, a postapocalyptic novel set in 1066 England, written in an imaginary Old English. In 2015, we got Animal Money, a huge tome documenting the advent of living currency that unravels the world.

    And we have a new Louise Erdrich book coming out next year, and I think she's the best living novelist. And we have books like Solar Storms by Linda Hogan, The Passion by Jeanette Winterson, Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon, How to Be Both by Ali Smith, and so on; lots of living authors who write in modes of magic and swashbuckling and questing, but they're marketed as literary or magical realism.

    I work at an all-volunteer radical bookstore, and we have a lively market of fiction zines/chapbooks/whatever; pulp stuff, weird sci-fi comics, reimagined fairy tales and so on. Just like with RPGs, you have to engage in the community and do some research to find the real good stuff.

    So I agree that there's a renaissance of creative work in RPGs. It's very invigorating. Since my bookstore shares a home city with Dave Arneson and Fantasy Flight Games, I'm hoping to find a local RPG zine community and hold some events at the store this year.

    If you're in the Midwest and interested in something like this, whether it's consigning some zines or holding a game night, reply here or send me an email: aaron@boneshakerbooks.com.

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    1. Well, I don't want to suggest there are no good books being written any more. That would be absurd. Also, I think what you're talking about is part of what I describe as being the "green shoots" of something amidst all the malaise. I will definitely check out "Animal Money", which sounds terrific, although I have an allergy to books which are really fantasy but marketed as being literary or magic realism - unless they're written by a Latin American. ;)

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    2. PS, I live in the UK - so a little but too far!

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    3. Re: the allergy, it's definitely frustrating when authors do it, but it's what allows an okay sf author like Atwood to be considered literature and talked about by serious people. So it's locally beneficial for authors but globally suboptimal for the genre.

      Also, the Wake was excellent.

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    4. Margaret Atwood is definitely the worst offender. There's also Ishiguro. I wouldn't mind particularly, but both of them write stuff that wouldn't really pass muster as SF or fantasy - it would be seen as trite and old hat. The Handmaid's Tale, for instance, is okay, but nothing more than that, and nothing that hadn't been done a billion times before.

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  3. Given the literary interest you have shown recently I think you would like --The Face In The Frost--. I am not sure what to make of The Neverending Story yet.

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    1. Thanks. I'll put it on my Amazon list. I was skeptical of The Neverending Story for the first couple of chapters. It gets better and better.

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  4. Not sure what to think about this post. On the one hand, your ode to the creativity and energy of world-building gamers and DMs is downright inspiring. I think you've said stuff like this before, and I could hardly agree more that RPG bloggers and DIY publishers are great for the (sub)culture.

    The first part, though, sounds like someone who's still on their way to realizing Sturgeon's Law. I mean, if there was a "crisis of confidence" going on for novel-readers, I hadn't heard of it.

    Yes, the world is full of over-hyped trash and products designed to ride some momentary wave of popularity rather than stand the test of time. It always has been, though... we just don't know about most of the trash of yesteryear because it didn't stand the test of time! Do a little digging and you're sure to discover pulp novels that aren't worth the cheap stock they're printed on; penny dreadfuls that are truly dreadful; Dickens-style serialized novels that were left behind while Dickens carried on.

    It's not like good fantasy hasn't been written since Tolkien or Earthsea. Peter S. Beagle is still with us, and still a poet. Steven Brust probably isn't one of the all-time greats, but his main fantasy world is deep and creative, and The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars moved me on multiple levels. If you allow graphic novels to count, you'll find some really good work. Try Joe Hill's Locke & Key series, for example.

    For that matter, I do most of my novel reading in Japanese these days, and there are some authors I'd all but commit murder to get the chance to translate for. You've no doubt heard of the cheap, profitable schlock that takes up most of the J-to-E bandwidth, but if you want a deep, rich, compelling fantasy world that supports an exploration of the human condition, try the works of Uehashi Nahoko. (I'd say "...or Tsunekawa Kotaro," but he's as yet untranslated, and doesn't even have an English-language Wikipedia entry.)

    So, you know, go on having hope, and go on lauding the amateur or self-publishing creative types you know, but there's no need to do it against a backdrop of imagined doom. Just keep an eye out for the actual good stuff, and be part of the human-historical process of separating it from the dross.

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    1. I understand Sturgeon's Law, and there is a big element of truth in it, but it doesn't seem very satisfactory to just say "Most stuff is rubbish and was ever thus." The pressure novelists seem to be under to produce fiction that will someday be filmable seems, in particular, to be a new phenomenon.

      If you are interested in translating Japanese fiction to English, it may be worth simply contacting the publisher and asking. That is often the way fiction ends up being translated. I know of a few people who have done that - there was also an article in, I think, Metropolis about it a number of years ago (if Metropolis still exists?).

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  5. Yes to all of this post! Creativity is struggle. Keep fighting.

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  6. Ugh. What a depressing assessment of the state of things. I know I sound like a neoLuddite or something, but I sure hate smart phones...

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    1. Same here. I keep mine because I like listening to podcasts on it on the way to and from work, but every day I think about ditching it and going back to my old Nokia.

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  7. I have been unwillingly converted to Kindle. I got one for christmas a few years ago and I like that I can carry a whole library around with me. It does have it's drawbacks, but for every day use, the Kindle is the way to go.

    I miss the days when paperbacks were under $5, if you didn't like a book you just threw it away and got another one. The publishers now make paperbacks that cost more than Hardbound books ever did, and tell us lies about inflation and publishing costs, it is almost like they want us to kill their industry.

    As a writer, authors really aren't making the kind of money that they should. It is preferred to buy a book directly from the author, as this is the only way that he can really get paid for his work. Book sellers take a much bigger chunk than they used to, and from what I've heard, there is no money to be made from digital books.

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  8. Book sellers take a much bigger chunk than they used to

    As a former bookseller, I'd take issue with this - the margin on books in your typical bookstore is razor thin given the "20% OFF!" that people seem to demand these days. 20% list price means you're getting maybe 10% profit on a book, if people don't just flip through it and then go home to order it off Amazon (which was part of the reason my bookstore failed).

    As far as the post goes - I've always thought RPGs were a weird genre - you've got books that demand your writing "the rest of the story", a type of pseudo-fiction that survives on audience participation in a unique way (other than maybe improv comedy).

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