Thank you to all the folks that worked behind the scenes including authors, columnists, technical folks and everyone else. You did a great job! We appreciate it!
And thank you to all the authors who submitted, even if we didn't get a chance to publish you this time.
One tool in the spec fic author's toolbox can be humor. Terry Pratchett has mastered humorous writing. Let's examine how he does it by looking at one of his books, Monstrous Regiment (MR), as an example.
Humor is based on the unexpected. As it says in How to Write Funny (HtWF) "…people laugh at two things: surprise and misfortune. We laugh in surprise at the union of two things that don't fit together…"(HtWF p36) Pratchett clearly realized this when he concluded the Borogravian National Anthem with "The new day is a great big fish!" (MR p11)
General comic elements include repetition, switches, exaggeration, extremes, indecision, convention suspension and wordplay. Pratchett makes use of many of these elements. For example, "A woman always has half an onion left over, no matter what the size of the onion, the dish, or the woman." (MR p132) is an example of convention suspension.
Let's focus further on literary humor. Award-winning speculative fiction author Connie Willis says the two most important techniques of humorous writing are exaggeration and understatement. (HtWF pp61-63) Pratchett makes excellent use of these tools. Specifically,
"The pigeon thought: 000000000. But had it been more capable of coherent thought, and knew something about how birds of prey catch pigeons,*And allowing for the fact that all pigeons who know how birds of prey catch pigeons are dead, and therefore capable of slightly less thought than a living pigeon." (MR pp115-116) is a wonderful example of understatement.
In fact, Pratchett is master at understatement: "'…we appear to have zombies in the lower crypts. Dreadful things…' 'Really? What are they doing now?' Clarence raised his eyebrows. 'Lurching, sir, I think. Groaning. Zombie things. Something seems to have stirred them up.' " (MR p13)
Pratchett often combines exaggeration and understatement together as with The Book of Nuggan:
"It's what they call a Living Testament…"
"This is a holy book with an appendix?"
"Exactly, sir."
"In a ring binder?"
"Quite so, sir. People put blank pages in and the Abominations …turn up." (MR pp15-16)
These abominations include: chocolate, garlic, cats, dwarfs, the color blue, oysters, babies, barking dogs, shirts with six buttons, and cheese.And a little later, Pratchett writes:"'Nuggan, sir…um…is rather…tetchy,' he managed. 'Tetchy?' said Vimes. 'A tetchy god? What, he complains about the noise their kids make? Objects to loud music after nine P.M.?' (MR p16)
According to David Bouchier "A Funny Character is a Caricature.
Funny characters are unusual, strange, odd, perhaps obnoxious and always extreme." (HtWF p23) Montrous Regiment is chock full of humorous characters, from plucky Polly Perk, determined to find her brother, to gruff macho Sergeant Jackrum to their effeminate fear-ful leader Lieutenant Blouse.
In fact, literary humor begins with an author's voice as Jennifer Crusie writes, "Humor in fiction is based in voice, which is why humor is so different from writer to writer and why a strong voice is essential in writing comic fiction." (HtWF p46). Pratchett definitely has a unique and humorous voice. For example, Pratchett writes, "Forget you were ever Polly. Think young male, that was the thing. Fart loudly and with self-satisfaction at a job well done, walk like a puppet that'd had a couple of random strings cut, never hug anyone, and, if you meet a friend, punch them." (MR p3)
Prattchet also utilizes exaggerated or unlikely comparisons in metaphors and similes, e.g. "…but Igor had to be a boy, with those stitches around the head, and that face that could only be called homely. …And even then it was the kind of home that has a burned-out vehicle on the lawn." (MR p138)
Humor in speculative fiction obeys these same rules and has a few extra tools at its disposal. In "Take My Wizard...Please!" Esther M. Friesner advises humorous speculative fiction authors to "Upset the Reader's Expectations". She claims speculative fiction includes "…easily recognizable types…the wizard, the witch, the dragon… When the reader encounters one of these types, certain expectations click into place…The writer of funny Spec Fic often operates by taking these reader expectations and setting them on ear."(HtWF p76) Pratchett makes good use of this idea, namely, the so-called soldiers in Blouse's regiment do not behave as typical soldiers (with good reason).
In conclusion, in Monstrous Regiment, Terry Pratchett has created a humorous, imaginative and unconventional world by utilizing a variety of comedic tools. Kudos, Terry.
References:
Pratchett, Terry, Monstrous Regiment, HarperCollins Publishers, 2003.
Kachuba, John B., Ed., How to Write Funny, Writer's Digest Books, 2001.
Link's voice is personal and intimate; it's as if the author is sitting next to you on the couch, leaning forward telling you, and you alone, a story. She doesn't explain; she assumes you, her friend, know exactly what she's talking about. She doesn't introduce characters such as Henry, Catherine, Carleton, and Tilly in “Stone Animals”; it's as if she's resuming an earlier conversation with the reader about them. For example, in “Stone Animals” the son, Carleton, is introduced via, "Carleton was running up and down the staircase, slapping his heels down hard, keeping his head down and his hands folded around the banister." (p71) In “Catskin”, the witch is introduces via "Cats went in and out of the witch's house all day long." (p125) The protagonist of “Some Zombie Contingency Plans” is introduced via "This guy Sap is at a party out in the suburbs." (p159)
Link writes of the fantastic and the surreal in a matter-of-fact manner. For example, in “The Faery Handbag”, "The faery handbag: It's huge and black and kind of hairy. ...Fairies live inside it. I know what that sounds like, but it's true." (pp 2-3) We also see this in “The Hortlak”, "The zombies came in, and he was polite to them, and failed to understand what they wanted, and sometimes real people came in and bought candy or cigarettes or beer." (p 28) In “Stone Animals” Link writes, "He sits on his rabbit, legs pressed against the warm, silky, shining flanks .... He has something in his other hand ...a spear. All around him, the others are sitting on their rabbits, waiting patiently, quietly." (p121
In places Link's voice approaches stream-of-consciousness. For example, in “The Faery Handbag”: "It's kind of like if you went through the wardrobe in the Narnia books, only instead of finding Aslan and the White Witch and horrible Eustace, you found this magic clothing world--instead of talking animals, there were feather boas and wedding dresses and bowling shoes, and paisley shirts and Doc Martens and everything hung up on racks so that first you have black dresses, all together, like the world's largest indoor funeral, and then blue dresses--all the blues you can imagine--and then red dresses and so on." (p1) This stream-of-consciousness is very informal; it's as if the reader has a line directly into the author's mind. And when that author is Link that's a real treat.
In other news, all the Electric Spec editors will be appearing on panels at Mile Hi Con October 23-25 in Denver. Some tentative panels include:
Stay tuned for more info about the new issue.
In Rhetorics of Fantasy (RoF) Farah Mendlesohn outlines a classification system which is about "the way in which a text becomes fantasy, or alternatively, the way the fantastic enters the text and the reader's relationship to this." (RoF p xiv).
Here, I consider four different types of fantasies: the portal-quest, the immersive, the intrusive and the liminal. These differ in how the reader perceives the fantastic elements. Mendlesohn says "In the portal-quest we are invited through into the fantastic" while "...in the immersive fantasy we are allowed no escape." (RoF p xiv). Mendlesohn furthermore says, in intrusion fantasies, "Fantasy and 'reality' are often kept strictly demarcated…" (RoF p xxii) while in liminal fantasies, "…the fantastic leaks back through the portal." (RoF p xxiii)
Many fantasies also have some formulaic elements; let's look at each of the four types of fantasy in turn.
In both portal and quest fantasies the fantasy world is an unknown place, i.e. the reader is a stranger to the world, namely,
"a character leaves her familiar surroundings and passes through a portal into an unknown place." (RoF p1)
Portal-Quest fantasies furthermore are structured around "...reward and the straight and narrow path." (RoF p5)
In fact, "...it is the unquestionable purity of the tale that holds together the shape of the portal-quest narrative." (RoF p7) One could say "...the insistence of the fixedness of history and of learning, divides quest fantasy from immersive fantasy." (RoF p16)
The role of the reader is quite different in immersive fantasies, namely, they invite "...us to share not merely a world, but a set of assumptions." (RoF p xx)
The reader does "not enter into the immersive fantasy, we are assumed to be of it..." (RoF p xx) In other words, the reader and "...the point of view characters of an immersive fantasy must take for granted the fantastic elements with which they are surrounded..." (RoF p xxi) and the fantasy world must "...function on all levels as a complete world." (RoF p59)
A unique quality of immersive fantasies is often “the creation of a vocabulary that claims meaning but reveals itself, if at all, only through context, which builds the sense of story and world behind what we actually see." (RoF p83) Science fiction could be labeled immersive fantasy in this classification system.
According to Mendlesohn, intrusion fantasies are quite formulaic, and in fact, "Among the intrusion fantasies, the regularity of the formula is almost overwhelming." (RoF p153) "The entire trajectory of the intrusion fantasy; the sense of threat, of waiting, and of repulsion of the horror. [is]…an episodic structure in which the whole is made up of many identical parts." (RoF p130) It should be noted that "…much of modern horror fits in the very center of the intrusion fantasy subset…" (RoF p142)
Something that is relatively unique to intrusion fantasies is " …the protagonist and the reader are never expected to become accustomed to the fantastic." (RoF p xxii) This means "…intrusion fantasy…relies heavily on the escalation of effect. Intrusions begin small and often quite distant. They increase in magnitude, in scope, or in the number of victims." (RoF p116)
Another quintessential quality of the intrusion fantasy, according to Mendlesohn is "… each is 'concluded'." (RoF p116) Moreover, "However mysterious the ending, there is the sense that there can be no next. We are left suspended on the edge of the void. Any next would be an anticlimax." (RoF p117)
Mendlesohn says, "Liminal fantasy is rare." (RoF p xxiii) Other possible terms for liminal fantasy are "hesitation or uncertainty…" fantasy. (RoF p xxiii) Instead of liminal fantasy, Mendlesohn considered the term "…'possible fantasy,' … Liminal fantasy creates possible readings." (RoF p 183) Whatever you call it, in such fantasies, a "…seemingly ordinary story feels like fantasy. We somehow know that it is the fantastic." (RoF p xxiii) She says further, "Liminal fantasy … was that form of fantasy which estranges the reader from the fantastic as seen and described by the protagonist …" (RoF p182)
This concept can be a bit difficult to understand. Mendlesohn states, "The anxiety and the continued maintenance and irresolution of the fantastic becomes the locus of the 'fantasy'. The liminal moment that maintains the anxiety around this material temptation assists the creation of the tone and mode that we associate with the fantastic: its presence is represented as unnerving, and it is this sense of the unnerving that is at the heart of the category I have termed liminal." (RoF p xxiii)
Mendlesohn concludes "…liminal fantasy, of all the forms of the fantastic, may be that which most requires that its readers be steeped in the conventions of fantasy, may indeed prove to be the purest form of the fantastic…."(RoF p245)
Phew! Complicated stuff! So, what's your fantasy? Portal? Quest? Immersive? Intrusive? Liminal? Whatever it is, feel free to send it along to ElectricSpec. :)
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