Magic for Beginners Review

This week's book is Magic for Beginners, short stories by Kelly Link.  This one comes from a magical realism recommendation list that I didn't bookmark and now have no way of finding ever again.

There are nine short stories here, so let me give you an overview of a couple of them.  In "The Faery Handbag," a young woman is charged with keeping track of her eccentric grandmother's handbag, which holds the refugees of the village where she was born, but the girl's best friend takes it to lose himself in the handbag when his life takes a turn for the worst. In "Stone Animals," a family trying to recover from the wife's infidelity and the husband's inability to prioritize his family over work, buys a house that is eerily haunted, possibly by rabbits.  In "The Great Divorce," a man and his wife are getting a divorce and take a last family trip to Disney Land, only the wife is a ghost who he met and must talk to through a medium, and their three kids "take after their mother" meaning they're also ghosts.  "The Cannon" is a transcript of an interview with someone...who is in love with a cannon?  It's stream of consciousness and the main character changes throughout the interview.

I liked that in several of the stories, it's possible that no magic is happening at all.  In "The Faery Handbag,"it's possible the grandmother is lying about being two-hundred-years-old from a village that no one's heard of, and her husband isn't aging slowly in her handbag but rather ran out on her or wasn't ever her husband, and that the best friend too the midnight bus out of town.  It's possible that the handbag idea was a lie the grandmother told to a child and that the young woman is now using the same lie.  It's possible in "The Great Divorce" there are no ghosts and it's a huge scam set up by mediums.  In these stories it's like you get two stories in one, one with weird magic and one with people who invent weird scenarios to make their lives easier.

But overall, these were not my favorites.  Often there are ideas, sometimes a lot of ideas piled on top of each other in a single story, that don't go anywhere, that don't add anything to the other ideas or the themes of the story.  There's a cool concept and I'm waiting to see where Link goes with it, and the answer is nowhere.  I feel like I need a book club to dissect these with me so we can figure out what the painting of the woman with the apple was about, or why Soap is obsessed with zombies or why he kidnapped a kid.  I don't get a lot of what's going on and it makes me feel stupid, and I don't like feeling stupid.

The strands don't come together.  It's not like all the things going on are different facets of the same problem (which when done well, is so beautiful it's one of my favorite things about literary short stories) or that they all come together in the end.  In a lot of stories there isn't really an end, not really a conclusion.  In "Lull" there's a story within a story within a story, all of which are cut off before the conclusion because they've run out of time.  Maybe there's a reason for this, but...these make me feel so stupid.  I shouldn't post this and air my stupidity in the breeze for you all to see.

I think this makes me so twitchy because these are issues I've struggled with in my own writing.  If I'm writing a story about a yeti, I have to ask, "why does this character have to be a yeti?  What does being a yeti bring to the table and what themes can I build or highlight with that?"  If I have a cool idea, a neat premise, I'll stress over "okay, but then what happens?"  It feels like Link didn't do this.  Maybe she's freed herself from the stress or the "have tos" and writes what she wants to write, and it doesn't matter if there's a point to everything or if there's a reason or a why.  But this is such a sensitive topic to me right now that I can't get past the feeling that she just didn't do the work.

***

Next week: Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean, a feminist anthology of short stories.

Because Magic! Because Science!

I've been thinking about the genre boundaries between fantasy and science fiction. 

There's a stellar interview (this is a long debate between the two, but this one is funny) between Ursula Le Guin and Margret Atwood, real life besties who disagree about genre boundaries.  Le Guin argues that The Handmaid's Tale and Year of the Flood are sci-fi and labeling them otherwise is a disservice to the works because you have to critique them differently.  (It's also a disservice to the sci-fi genre as a whole when people get elitist about a story because it's too literary to be lumped into sci-fi with all the pulpy, alien squid monsters.)  Atwood argues that her work is not sci-fi because she doesn't write sci-fi.  Atwood sets the boundaries like this: if it could happen today or with technology already in place in some form, it's speculative fiction; if it could happen in the future but not with technology that's been invented (faster than light travel, time travel), it's science fiction; and if there's no way it could happen, it's fantasy.

In the last few months I've read and reviewed two books (The Forgetting and Where Futures End) that "start as fantasy and end up as science fiction."  But what does that mean?

Using Atwood's definition, we could say that we assume at the beginning of these two stories that they present impossible situations, but then we're given more information and told, "no, no, it can happen.  With SCIENCE!"  If we roll with this, it means that readers are naturally skeptical and start these books assuming there's no way this could happen and have to be convinced.

Another way to define the genres is to look at the central conceit.  Stories in these genres typically have one big "what if" or one thing that is fantastical about which the reader is asked to suspend their disbelief.  The rest of the story, the world building and character reactions and plot, are affected by this.  In 1984, we're asked to imagine a government that watches people's every move.  In Harry Potter we're asked to imagine that wizards exist and are educated at a boarding school.  Aliens send us a message.  Dragons exist.  Water molecules stacked a certain way freeze anything they touch.  If we think about it like this, in science fiction the central conceit is explained by or derived from technology.  In fantasy, the central conceit is magical.

This definition gets a little screwy if you start looking at it too hard.  We generally assume that everything set in space is sci-fi (and it's marketed as such) because advanced technology is required to get them there.  But The Little Prince, where he travels around in space and visits different planets, is fantasy because he travels with magic rather than technology.  The movie Apollo 13, which is (mostly) true and doesn't require us to suspend our disbelief, does not count as science-fiction because it's not fiction.  The movie Gravity is fiction, but I'm not sure it counts as science fiction either.  All the technology used is already up there and the conceit is "there's an explosion that messes stuff up" which doesn't have anything to do with technology really.  We suspend disbelief that this happened rather than that this could happen.  What about Star Wars?  Our conceit is that there are people and aliens on a bunch of different planets with space ships and lasers that blow up planets and lasers that are like swords (all sci-fi), but also a conceit that there's a magical force that connects people to the universe and gives them magic powers (fantasy). 

So in these cases, I can see where Atwood is coming from.  Gravity is speculative, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (or Blade Runner, either way) are sci-fi. They both have tropes common to science fiction, but they're not the same.

And where does magical realism fit into all this?  By definition, the fantastical elements in magical realism are never explained.  The reader assumes thing happen "because magic" and leave it at that, but since it isn't explained (even to the level of "because magic"), it could very well be "because science."  Maybe it's radiation or nanites.  We don't know.

So this would imply that until we're given an explanation, we assume "magic" and the story is fantasy by default.  This would explain those two genre shifting books that start off as fantasy until you learn more and they become science fiction.  And isn't that a neat thing--that the human mind jumps straight to magic, that that's what we're most comfortable with?

Modern Monsters, Episode 6: The Roommate

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 1: Modern Monsters

Episode 6: The Roommate

On the Edge of Gone Review

This week's novel is On the Edge of Gone, apocalyptic YA by Corinne Duyvis.

A comet will shortly crash into the Earth, setting off an EMP, throwing debris into the air that will block the sun for at least a year, raining flaming debris, and setting off earthquakes and tsunamis. While some people are lucky enough to get spots on generational space ships bound for distant habitable planets, and others get into permanent shelters where they can survive underground, Denise—an autistic, biracial teenager—and her family have spots in a government constructed temporary shelter meant to last only through the initial impact. When Denise's sister doesn't come home on time and Denise and her mom are late leaving for their shelter, they end up giving a ride to a desperate couple, late for their generational ship. Now Denise has to bend over backwards to get spots on the ship for her and her family, find her sister, and hold it all together at the end of the world.

This book gets intense. They outrun the comet, the comet hits, they outrun a tsunami, the tsunami hits. That's all in the first third of the book.  And if that's not enough, this story is set outside Amsterdam, which is below sea level, so after the wave hits, half the country is underwater. But aside from the nail biting disaster moments, the book gets more and more stressful as you realize there is no perfect solution to Denise's problems. Even if she can get herself, her drug addict mother, and her protest-organizer sister into space...maybe she shouldn't. She'd be better off without her mom (IMHO) and sneaking her mom aboard would use up resources the ship can't afford and make everyone angry once they found out after lift off. Her sister would do better staying on Earth (IMHO) where she can help the survivors. And then there's no happy ending for the people who stay on Earth or for the people on the ship leaving family behind.

Along these lines, Denise's autism works to great effect in this story. I'm not saying there has to be a reason to have an autistic character, but here the situation through her eyes was so much more impactful and emotional and overwhelming as a result of her autism. In addition to representation, it works to emphasize the horror and stress of it all. People keep breaking the rules and asking too much of Denise, and the situation would be too much for anyone, much less someone who gets overstimulated by people bumping into her and loud noises.  It's taking what anyone would feel a the end of the world and turning it up to eleven.

The relationships are beautifully complex.  Denise's mother keeps messing up, jeopardizing Denise's plans and nearly getting them thrown off the ship.  She doesn't respect Denise's personal boundaries about touching or being coddled.  Her mom might get her killed, but at the same time, she's her mother.  There's also complicated (and spoilery) tensions between Denise and her friends on the ship and between her and her sister.  It's all layered in conflicting emotions, and again there's no perfect answer.

It's also a diverse story.  From the family that can't sit shiva because they have to work through the apocalypse, to the couple trying to scavenge halal food.  There are gay and bi characters.  There are trans characters (yes, plural).  Denise and her sister are biracial and encounter micro aggression racism throughout the book.  There are refugees from other countries who speak broken Dutch.  It's pretty neat, and it's sad that I have to point out that it's pretty neat.

***

Next week: Magic for Beginners, short stories by Kelly Link.
 

Place

Dorothy Allison wrote an essay called "Place" for The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House.  In it, she describes place not as a description of the setting, but as an experience for the character.

"Place requires context.  Is it responsive?  Does it notice me?  Or is it porcelain, pristine, and just ignoring my passage through?  Are there people on the street who flinch when I smile at them?  Is there a reason they do that?"

 "What I'm trying to say is that place is not just landscape--a list of flora and fauna and street names.  That's not place, that's not even decent research."

"I want a story that is happening in a real place, which means a place that has meaning and that evokes emotions in the person who's telling me the story.  Place is emotion."

 She compares the place of a hotel room, which is exactly like all other hotel rooms and has no emotional resonance with the character or the reader with the place the character was when her boyfriend said he didn't want her and the place where the character's mother slipped a cookie into her luggage for her to find when she got to that hotel room far away and unpacked.

This relates to something my friend, Eric, has been talking about for quite a while.  He hates description and makes the point that great description tells us about the character, about their emotional state, their habits, or their background.  For example, if a character who just lost her mother describes her kitchen, everything will relate back to her mom and the description will slip into memories, and Eric likes memories.

If you have a non-omnipotent narrator, the things they mark as worth mentioning in a description, where they choose to point the camera, are the things they think are notable--things that remind them of memories or the things that are out of place or strange or wondrous.  They note things they haven't yet taken for granted.  So in a way, any description will tell you about character, about their experiences and their understanding of their environment.  But I think Dorothy Allison and Eric want it pushed further, they want you to lean into those emotional moments and make the connections more explicit.  "I remember my mother standing at our electric stove-top, cursing over inedible spaghetti."

Allison's advice is also related to Jay Asher's advice.  He says that there's no point in describing a 7-eleven or a grocery store, because everyone has experienced those places and knows what you're talking about.  You don't usually have emotional memories of 7-eleven, so going on about how the character feels about a fridge full of Dasani would be a stretch.  I'm not sure if Allison would argue not to set a scene in one of these settings, or if she would argue that they just aren't a place, that the character brings "place" with them.

Allison also mentions that a writer has no idea who their audience is, where they are, or what they've experienced.  So is it presumptive to assume that your reader knows what a 7-eleven looks like and considers them non-places?

Then there's something to be said about non-places.  Just as you can learn about a character through what they choose to describe*, you can learn from how they feel about being in a non-place.  Do they like it?  Are they used to it?  Is it uncomfortable?  Are they in a non-place physically because they're in a non-place emotionally?

"If you're lucky, Oprah is on at eleven-thirty at night.  And you can check out what she's done lately.  Try, try, try not to start channel-hopping and watching the ads.  You can't afford any of that stuff anyway.  It's the middle of the night, three o'clock in the morning, and you're in a room in which the art on the wall is a stylized painting of a flower or an unknown landscape.  And I do mean an unknown landscape.  Someone is doing these paintings and making money, but it's not an actual artist and that landscape is nowhere you recognize.  Also, the mattress is kind of soggy, and you've got one of those covers that you are too hot if you have it on and too cold if you pull it off.  You're awake at three o'clock in the morning and you are nowhere; this is not a place."

This section is her own most damning counter argument.  It is so much more engaging than the scene after a breakup that she describes.  Why is the "you" in this passage awake at 3 AM?  You're clearly having a miserable time.  Is it the fact that emotion slips into what she intends to be a boring setting, a non-place, that shows you bring place with you?  And the details she uses are so relatable.  Oprah on at a weird time!  The comforter that doesn't work!  Yes!  I've been in that hotel room!  That's exactly what it was like!  But Allison reads to learn new things, and I read for escapism and for those moments of resonance, those moments of things I've experienced put on paper where I know I'm not alone.

So maybe there's some middle ground in all this.  You don't need to describe the 7-eleven, but if you describe the lighting as "Mountain Dew colored" hitting a resonance point and a witty detail, and saying it aggravates your hangover (pulling the character's situation and emotional state into the setting, then that works for me.



*This is short hand.  I know a characters are fictional and have no agency to choose anything and it's all the writer making decisions.  [loud raspberry noise]

Modern Monsters, Episode 5: The Reaper

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 1: Modern Monsters

Episode 5: The Reaper

Content Warning: This episode deals with suicidal ideation.  Stay safe.

Ghost Talkers Review

This week's novel is Ghost Talkers by Mary Robinette Kowal.

Ginger is a medium working for the British Spirit Corps during WWI.  Ostensibly, the Spirit Corps is a group of women who entertain the troops and keep their moral up.  But actually, the British servicemen are conditioned to report to the Spirit Corps as ghosts after they die to describe the events of their deaths, like the locations of snipers and machine guns.  The women of the Spirit Corps speak to the ghosts and take their reports before releasing their spirits.  But now the Germans have figured out that the British are using ghosts and are trying to find details of the project's operation, and there's a spy in the British ranks giving the Germans information about the ghosts--a spy that killed Ginger's intelligence officer fiancé, Ben, when he got too close to discovering the leak.  Now Ginger and Ben's ghost have to go to the front, find the leak, find Ben's murderer, and save the Spirit Corps.

My favorite thing about this book was how Ben's ghost deteriorated over time.  His memory would slip, so he couldn't remember the specifics of what he had learned in his investigation.  This worked well for the story's plot in that he couldn't just tell Ginger who the spies were, so she had to go on an adventure to retrieve his notebook and then figure out how to decode it, because he couldn't remember the cipher he used.  But it also worked to raise tension, because it wasn't simply that he had amnesia, but that he also misremembered things.  He talked about memorizing poems in school that didn't come out until years later.  He confused the cipher he used on his notes about the spies with the cipher he used to talk to Ginger.  So in all this, Ginger not only has to find the truth herself, but she has to sort what he says as true or false.  This was on top of suspicions from early in the book that the war has changed Ben and that he might be the spy and might be misdirecting everyone even after death.

He becomes more and more driven by his base emotions, like protecting Ginger and taking revenge on his murderer.  He went into rages and poltergeisted at people who hurt Ginger on accident because she startled them.  Eventually there wasn't much left of him and what was left wasn't recognizable as Ben, or even as human.  My favorite image of the book is that ghost Ben would be both standing at attention and crumpled in a ball, holding his own head.

This is all putting the emphasis on Ben a bit more than I would like, so let me clarify: my favorite part was that Ben deteriorated and Ginger handled it.  She was professional as a trained medium who constantly experienced death.  She was afraid of Ben's rages and of his personality being lost.  She was broken up that he had died, yet glad he was still around, and ashamed that she wanted him to stay and worried that he would stay too long, and then pained again that he would leave eventually.  There was so much love in her, and she was so strong in the face of supernatural yet relatable hardship.

I did get confused sometimes as to why Ginger wasn't talking to certain people, when they would probably have valuable information. Sometimes it seemed a bit because the plot needed her to not know things and to be in certain places.  For instance, at one point Ginger and Ben's former assistant get separated on a train because the doctor in charge drags the injured assistant off to a car with people with similar injuries and sends Ginger to go nurse the not-so-wounded guys in the car for the not-so-wounded.  When she gets off the train, she can't find the assistant.  Instead of asking the doctor where the assistant went, she hides so she's not spotted.  I almost get that.  But not completely.  It would have saved a lot of time if she'd kept up her nurse-supervising-one-wounded-guy disguise to have one conversation with the doctor who was supposed to have taken responsibility for her charge. Oh well.

***

Next week: On the Edge of Gone, apocalyptic YA, by Corinne Duyvis.