This site is updated Thursday afternoon with a new article about an artistic pursuit generally considered to be beneath consideration. James Schellenberg probes science-fiction, Carol Borden draws out the best in comics, Chris Szego dallies with romance and Ian Driscoll stares deeply into the screen. Click here for their bios and individual takes on the gutter.
While the writers have considerable enthusiasm for their subjects, they don't let it numb their critical faculties. Tossing away the shield of journalistic objectivity and refusing the shovel of fannish boosterism, they write in the hopes of starting honest and intelligent discussions about these oft-enjoyed but rarely examined artforms.
Recent Features
ROUND THE DECAY OF THAT COLOSSAL WRECK
In the run-up to, and wake of, the release of Watchmen, it has become common currency to say that adapting Zach Snyder, et al undertook a massive challenge in adapting Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ complex, sprawling medium- and genre-defining work for the screen.
But I’m going to suggest that they actually undertook an even more massive challenge: adapting Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ complex, sprawling medium- and genre-defining work for the screen - and completely missing its point.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By gillmen wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
--sorta T.S. Eliot
Do you hear that? Off in the distance? A song too beautiful to be real but somehow... familiar? The song twines over the water, through the cattails and the woods, into the window, eighth notes swirling all around. The creature in the lagoon is singing. He's not dead after all and who are we to resist him and the “centuries of passion pent up in his savage heart?"
Zahn's Star Wars; Or, Will This Death be Permanent?
A scrappy rebellion, a victory against an evil overlord, leftover spaceships in the dark outer reaches of the galaxy, warriors with extraordinary powers (nearly wiped out), now on the verge of a comeback. Laughs, thrills, moments of sadness, moments of sheer action. Exciting stuff! And oh yeah, it's a Star Wars tie-in novel.
Toronto's downtown has been abandoned by government and police. The rich have fled to the suburbs, and put up a barrier to keep all those nasty poor people from leaving the middle of the city. Nalo Hopkinson's first book, Brown Girl in the Ring, takes this simple and believable premise and shows us what life might be like in the Burn (as part of downtown Toronto is now called) for those either stuck there or too stubborn to leave.
At first, this crumbling, barricaded Toronto sounds too much like all those grim post-apocalyptic stories in science fiction. For example, the absence of law in the area lets a drug dealer named Rudy take over; he now rules from his headquarters in the CN Tower. Rudy has been hired by some corrupt officials of the provincial government (which is conveniently located outside of downtown Toronto at this point) to find a "volunteer" heart donor for the ailing leader of the province.
But Hopkinson takes the story in a much different direction than might be expected based on the description so far. Life in the city is dangerous but ordinary people still live there. And post-apocalyptic stories generally have women in a reduced role, but Brown Girl in the Ring is the opposite: the main character, Ti-Jeanne, is a young woman, and her grandmother Mami Gros-Jeanne also plays a major role in the story. In fact, Mami leads the flourishing of a vibrant culture of natural healing and oral traditions, a transplanted culture, the medical aspect of which would be strictly regulated or stamped out in the "advanced" health system on the outside. This is another twist.
Ti-Jeanne is the human face of the story. She's a new mother, and she's trying to avoid a handsome young man named Tony, the baby's father. Tony is an addict and also involved in a local posse of drug dealers; he has promised Ti-Jeanne many times that he would get out of the drug world, but she no longer believes him. Hopkinson writes with great sympathy for Ti-Jeanne who is still attracted to Tony despite knowing better.
Tony is a self-pitying bastard, full of rationalizations for his behaviour. He certainly doesn't tell Ti-Jeanne about his new task from Rudy: Rudy has delegated the job of finding the heart donor to Tony. Tony is simultaneously trying to get out of the inner city and secretly sizing up Mami to see if she has the right requirements to "donate" a heart. Rudy is a predictable villain; resentful, powerful, and ruthless. It's Tony who could go either way. Ti-Jeanne and her grandmother would like to redeem Tony, but Hopkinson shows us how their exasperation with him often gets in the way of actually helping him.
In addition to the great story and characters, Hopkinson does interesting things with language in the book. The narrative voice is a standard third-person omniscient in conventional English, but the majority of the characters speak in their own version of English amongst themselves. This has variations, however; Mami's role as the local healer plays into this: "'Come. Bring her inside," Mami said, switching to the more standard English she used when speaking to non-Caribbean people" (63). Ti-Jeanne and Mami know "standard" English, but choose to use their own flavour. As Hopkinson puts it in her bio at the back of the book: "I saw it as subverting the genre, which speaks so much about the experience of being alienated, but contains so little written by alienated people themselves."
Brown Girl in the Ring was the winner of Warner Aspect's First Novel Contest in 1998, beating out nearly a thousand other entries to get published. If this contest was an investment in a career, Warner made a wise choice. Hopkinson has since published two other ambitious novels, Midnight Robber (a nanotechnology novel recast in Caribbean cultural terms) and The Salt Roads (a speculative/historical novel spanning many centuries and Haiti, France, and the Middle East). She has also edited a number of interesting anthologies, most recently Mojo: Conjure Stories, and contributed short fiction to other anthologies, such as the upcoming Girls Who Bite Back. Not many writers have a career retrospective worth mentioning after six years, and I'll be curious to see where Hopkinson is at in another few years.
As a side note, I re-read Brown Girl in the Ring due to one of those weird pop culture moments. Touching the Void is a recent documentary about a mountain-climbing accident. An injured climber, near death and hallucinating badly, can't get a song out of his head. He's horrified that he might die with Boney M's "Brown Girl in the Ring" stuck in his head. After watching the movie, I had the song stuck in my head too! Re-reading Hopkinson's book was the perfect way to get my brain thinking about something else.
hey,
i just wanted to comment that "Brown Girl in the Ring" sounds _extremely_ similar to Octavia Butler's sci-fi classic "Parable of the Sower" (1993).. is this intentional?
raigan
—raigan
Hey Raigan,
Good point. The two books have a similar set-up, but Brown Girl in the Ring focuses more on the grandmother's Caribbean belief system and the dilemmas of passing along cultural/traditional ideas in a transplanted community. If I recall Butler's book correctly, Parable of the Sower was about how the main character developed her own set of semi-religious principles.
James
—James Schellenberg
hey,
fair enough -- having not read BGitR, it was really the post-apocalyptic-urban-microcosm-lone-female-heroine aspect that made me wonder ;)
raigan
—raigan
raigan -- yup, you're probably right to wonder (and your post made me think about the parallels a bit more). I guess I'm resisting your point a bit because a book like this isn't easy to pull off, even if it's (mostly/somewhat) been done before.
btw, Brown Girl in the Ring has a blurb from Butler on the front cover, so there definitely is a line of influence.
james
—James Schellenberg
I read the question about BGITR and Parable of the Sower. No one's asked it before, though I've heard from many people who've read both books. Certainly, Octavia Butler is an influence on my writing, and yes, I'd read _The Parable of the Sower._ But no, I wouldn't intentionally write a novel aping one by perhaps the only other black science fiction woman novelist on this continent, even if only because people inevitably compare us to each other, as though our sharing a gender and a race means that Octavia and I must be the same in other ways as well. Along with _Parable of the Sower,_ I'd also read Gibson's Neuromancer books, and Emma Bull's _Bone Dance_ and Pat Murphy's _The City, Not Long After,_ and Samuel R. Delany's _Dhalgren,_ and Alfred Bester's _Golem 100,_ and probably other "post apocalyptic city" novels that aren't coming to mind right now (and films! "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome" comes to mind). I'm sure that they all played into the writing. The story that I was most aware of using as a pattern was Derek Walcott's play "Ti-Jean and His Brothers." I ended up phoning him to request his permission to quote from his play, which he graciously gave me. I was also aware--as James has pointed out--of working in the well-trodden territory of the post-apocalyptic city novel. It was my first novel, and it helped me to have some familiar ground to tread. And I love the practice of remembering to write women's stories too, so I was deliberately doing that. (Some influences there would include Ursula Le Guin, Suzy McKee Charnas, Candas Jane Dorsey, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Joan Vinge, Judith Merril, Keri Hulme...) Other influences included Caribbean writers and calypsonians working in the vernacular (creole, patwa or dialect, if you will), such as Kamau Brathwaite, Lord Sparrow, Merle Hodge, Chalkdust, Derek Walcott, Roaring Lion, Dennis Scott, Eintou Springer, Pamela Mordecai, Ramabai Espinet, Olive Senior, Miss Lou. If you do ever read Brown Girl in the Ring, I suspect (I hope) that you'll find that it's a very different novel in terms of both theme (I wasn't doing the kind of cautionary tale that Octavia took on with the Parable books) and plot (my protagonist is not starting a religion). Its similarities include that it's a science fiction novel set in a deteriorating near future, with a female protagonist who happens to be black.
I read the question about BGITR and Parable of the Sower. No one's asked it before, though I've heard from many people who've read both books. Certainly, Octavia Butler is an influence on my writing, and yes, I'd read _The Parable of the Sower._ But no, I wouldn't intentionally write a novel aping one by perhaps the only other black science fiction woman novelist on this continent, even if only because people inevitably compare us to each other, as though our sharing a gender and a race means that Octavia and I must be the same in other ways as well. Along with _Parable of the Sower,_ I'd also read Gibson's Neuromancer books, and Emma Bull's _Bone Dance_ and Pat Murphy's _The City, Not Long After,_ and Samuel R. Delany's _Dhalgren,_ and Alfred Bester's _Golem 100,_ and probably other "post apocalyptic city" novels that aren't coming to mind right now (and films! "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome" comes to mind). I'm sure that they all played into the writing. The story that I was most aware of using as a pattern was Derek Walcott's play "Ti-Jean and His Brothers." I ended up phoning him to request his permission to quote from his play, which he graciously gave me. I was also aware--as James has pointed out--of working in the well-trodden territory of the post-apocalyptic city novel. It was my first novel, and it helped me to have some familiar ground to tread. And I love the practice of remembering to write women's stories too, so I was deliberately doing that. (Some influences there would include Ursula Le Guin, Suzy McKee Charnas, Candas Jane Dorsey, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Joan Vinge, Judith Merril, Keri Hulme...) Other influences included Caribbean writers and calypsonians working in the vernacular (creole, patwa or dialect, if you will), such as Kamau Brathwaite, Lord Sparrow, Merle Hodge, Chalkdust, Derek Walcott, Roaring Lion, Dennis Scott, Eintou Springer, Pamela Mordecai, Ramabai Espinet, Olive Senior, Miss Lou. If you do ever read Brown Girl in the Ring, I suspect (I hope) that you'll find that it's a very different novel in terms of both theme (I wasn't doing the kind of cautionary tale that Octavia took on with the Parable books) and plot (my protagonist is not starting a religion). Its similarities include that it's a science fiction novel set in a deteriorating near future, with a female protagonist who happens to be black.
A wrestler-fairy? A nerd-werewolf? A caveman-pirate? All these and more in Creebobby's second Archetype Times Table.
~
Wong Fei-Hung's been on my mind lately. Luckily, Kung Fu Cinema has a nice video (scroll down) of Wong Fei-Hung in the movies from Kwan Tak-Hing to Gordon Liu, Jet Li as well as Jackie Chan and actress Angie Tsang Tze-Man's portrayals of young Wong Fei-Hung. There's also a detailed companion article tracing the historical and fictional Wong Fei-Hung through newspaper pulps, radio, tv and film.
~
"It's common practice for one of those guys, in a single day, to
chainsaw his way out of the belly of a giant worm, take a detour
through a zombie shantytown, euthanise his long-lost wife, and spend
hours in a sewer trawling through blood and waste, with monsters
leaping up at his face and depositing their brain matter on his boots."
Hit Self-Destruct again, on what life's like for videogame heroes.
In the run-up to, and wake of, the release of Watchmen, it has become common currency to say that adapting Zach Snyder, et al undertook a massive challenge in adapting Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ complex, sprawling medium- and genre-defining work for the screen.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
A scrappy rebellion, a victory against an evil overlord, leftover spaceships in the dark outer reaches of the galaxy, warriors with extraordinary powers (nearly wiped out), now on the verge of a comeback. Laughs, thrills, moments of sadness, moments of sheer action. Exciting stuff! And oh yeah, it's a Star Wars tie-in novel.
Toronto's downtown has been abandoned by government and police. The rich have fled to the suburbs, and put up a barrier to keep all those nasty poor people from leaving the middle of the city. Nalo Hopkinson's first book, Brown Girl in the Ring, takes this simple and believable premise and shows us what life might be like in the Burn (as part of downtown Toronto is now called) for those either stuck there or too stubborn to leave.
In addition to the great story and characters, Hopkinson does interesting things with language in the book. The narrative voice is a standard third-person omniscient in conventional English, but the majority of the characters speak in their own version of English amongst themselves. This has variations, however; Mami's role as the local healer plays into this: "'Come. Bring her inside," Mami said, switching to the more standard English she used when speaking to non-Caribbean people" (63). Ti-Jeanne and Mami know "standard" English, but choose to use their own flavour. As Hopkinson puts it in her bio at the back of the book: "I saw it as subverting the genre, which speaks so much about the experience of being alienated, but contains so little written by alienated people themselves."