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I've been greedy for some destination I can't get to
Anna Tambour has most generously chosen to reprint my story "On the Blindside" (Flytrap #4) at her website. It won't go up until October, but I figure that if I warn everyone now, you will have plenty of time to start running by the time the dead month blows into town. I am particularly pleased with this because "On the Blindside” is an uncollected story; and because it has received a certain amount of critical notice, which startled me like anything. Rich Horton recommended it in the August 2005 issue of Locus:
Taaffe also contributed "On the Blindside" to the May Flytrap. Sam is a woman about to get married, confronted with a lover who still has a hold on her. The intensely written story slowly reveals the nature of Sam's lover—a familiar trope—then surprises us with a slight reversal of expected power relationships.
. . . and Nick Gevers didn't seem to have hated it, either:
A gentler but no less effective examination of the cloying effects of the fantastic: Sonya Taaffe's "On the Blindside," about a married woman desperate to rub off the taint of her old association with Faerie; Taaffe captures perfectly the eroded charm of childhood fancies re-examined in adulthood.
All of which made me extraordinarily happy. (The story has also, to be fair, received an impressively negative review at LitHaven. Universal balance is maintained.) And come the first of October, you can wander on over to the Virtuous Medlar Circle and decide: effectively intense or unfinishably overwritten? Your call.
(Cut for my own thoughts on the story and others. Deconstruction and footnotes ahoy!)
"On the Blindside" is a story that I wrote partly because I needed somewhere to put the images that showed up in my head—Sam's broken-lime eyes, Chion with his walking stick and greatcoat like every good autumnal showman, the way a wall feels when you walk through it—and partly because I needed somewhere to put some of my thoughts on fantastic journeys. As Sam thinks at one point, "Children were meant to hurtle through the spaces between here and elsewhere, the fearless and innocent heroes of daydreams and nightmares, not married women . . ." If I were to write her earlier life, it would be very much the kind of young-adult fantasy novel where the protagonists have strange and wild adventures in other worlds, which are always better than their everyday and often difficult lives. But what happens when you get older? Adults don’t enter Elizabeth Goudge's Valley of Song unless they can find some child to carry their years for them. Only a "child-like poetic spirit" enables the student protagonist of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Golden Pot” to enter the fantastic world. We're not even going to talk about Susan and the Chronicles of Narnia. For adult characters who journey, off the top of my head I can think only and disparately of Greer Gilman's Moonwise, Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist, and the recent work of Caitlín R. Kiernan, especially Murder of Angels.* (Feel free to suggest others.**) So what happens when you want to shift from a life riddled with the fantastic into a more normal one? And when you cannot, for several interlinked reasons, simply walk away?
Because one of the story's key points is vision, seeing things as they are—in this case, less the protagonist's ability to see into the otherworld than her inability not to see—I also wanted to play with some of the assumptions of this kind of fantasy.*** Because the otherworld is . . . the otherworld, right? Tapestried with wonders and terrors, strange constellations seen even in the daytime and slot-eyed tricksters, alchemy that works "and prophecies that were neither believed nor discounted." Even as saviors,**** we are still mundane in the face of magic. But: we are all aliens to one another. When magic is familiar, it's the mundane that looks strange. Wrapped up in her beloved illusions, the traditional roles—that she is a refugee from the ordinary world and Chion is exactly as thousand-faced and tricky and powerful as he boasts—Sam has forgotten this. I think it's worth remembering.
And of course I've wound up with another otherworld. So far, I've created one for "Time May Be" (Aruis, Singing Innocence and Experience) and another for "The Sense of Spirals" (the patternless city, Fantasy Magazine #1; forthcoming), and neither of them is the same place.° I keep wanting to write further stories set in these worlds. Further stories have proved obstinately recalcitrant.°* At the moment, I am in deep envy of writers who can either create self-consistent universes and return to them time and time again, or whose otherworlds all turn out to link up in the end. Then again, my approach to worldbuilding tends to be: as a side effect of whatever it is I really want to write the story about . . .
*Of these, at least the first and third can be read—and, I suspect, were intended—as critiques of traditional journeying fantasy. (I would guess that Lud-in-the-Mist was written too early to function as such—i.e., before the tropes on which the other two novels play were either in existence or so firmly established—but my knowledge of fantasy in the 1920’s is not all that it should be.) If requested, I will expound.
**Although no one in Patricia McKillip's Song for the Basilisk ventures precisely beyond the fields we know, I still respect the novel for its middle-aged hero, who has an adolescent son and a settled life by the time he sets off on his quest for revenge. Heroic parents are rare. See also Sherwood Smith's marvelous "Mom and Dad at the Home Front"—the standard children's-adventures-in-the-otherworld as glimpsed from the parental point of view.
***I am far from the first to attempt this kind of exploration! In particular, see Diana Wynne Jones' Dark Lord of Derkholm. Set in a magical world that hosts D&D-like tourism from our world, the novel primarily chronicles the attempts of that year's chosen Dark Lord—rather like being picked for jury duty, only more unpleasant—to live up to his role and not get anyone killed in the process. It's a wicked deconstruction of Tolkienesque fantasy and all the quest-tropes that have followed in J.R.R.'s wake, and that includes outworld travelers' expectations for the realm which they have so blithely crashed.
****Or in the case of Moonwise, the temporary fix that blows everything up in the long run; in Murder of Angels, the foretold archetype that does not behave as prophesied; even Lud-in-the-Mist is hardly a straightforward descent and return. I think it's no accident that the novels whose adult protagonists travel between worlds behave very differently than their childish or adolescent counterparts. See also first footnote.
°As I said, I don't write other worlds for the sake of writing other worlds. They accrete around the characters; my knowledge of them generally extends as far as the characters' and no more. But they are always cities, for some reason. Clearly I need to create some fantastic countryside, just to see what happens.
°*"Time May Be" was one of half a dozen stories set in Aruis, and the only to see completion; I suspect it will remain so. "The Sense of Spirals" emerged out of nowhere in late August and doesn't seem to have brought any other stories along with it. “On the Blindside” was written last October and did spawn a sequel in February, but it (a) was set in this world (b) has since been consigned to the shelf of Rather Useful To Have Written For Figuring Out Stuff About The Characters, Not Very Publishable, Sorry, Try Back Next Time. I'm still hoping . . .
Taaffe also contributed "On the Blindside" to the May Flytrap. Sam is a woman about to get married, confronted with a lover who still has a hold on her. The intensely written story slowly reveals the nature of Sam's lover—a familiar trope—then surprises us with a slight reversal of expected power relationships.
. . . and Nick Gevers didn't seem to have hated it, either:
A gentler but no less effective examination of the cloying effects of the fantastic: Sonya Taaffe's "On the Blindside," about a married woman desperate to rub off the taint of her old association with Faerie; Taaffe captures perfectly the eroded charm of childhood fancies re-examined in adulthood.
All of which made me extraordinarily happy. (The story has also, to be fair, received an impressively negative review at LitHaven. Universal balance is maintained.) And come the first of October, you can wander on over to the Virtuous Medlar Circle and decide: effectively intense or unfinishably overwritten? Your call.
(Cut for my own thoughts on the story and others. Deconstruction and footnotes ahoy!)
"On the Blindside" is a story that I wrote partly because I needed somewhere to put the images that showed up in my head—Sam's broken-lime eyes, Chion with his walking stick and greatcoat like every good autumnal showman, the way a wall feels when you walk through it—and partly because I needed somewhere to put some of my thoughts on fantastic journeys. As Sam thinks at one point, "Children were meant to hurtle through the spaces between here and elsewhere, the fearless and innocent heroes of daydreams and nightmares, not married women . . ." If I were to write her earlier life, it would be very much the kind of young-adult fantasy novel where the protagonists have strange and wild adventures in other worlds, which are always better than their everyday and often difficult lives. But what happens when you get older? Adults don’t enter Elizabeth Goudge's Valley of Song unless they can find some child to carry their years for them. Only a "child-like poetic spirit" enables the student protagonist of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Golden Pot” to enter the fantastic world. We're not even going to talk about Susan and the Chronicles of Narnia. For adult characters who journey, off the top of my head I can think only and disparately of Greer Gilman's Moonwise, Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist, and the recent work of Caitlín R. Kiernan, especially Murder of Angels.* (Feel free to suggest others.**) So what happens when you want to shift from a life riddled with the fantastic into a more normal one? And when you cannot, for several interlinked reasons, simply walk away?
Because one of the story's key points is vision, seeing things as they are—in this case, less the protagonist's ability to see into the otherworld than her inability not to see—I also wanted to play with some of the assumptions of this kind of fantasy.*** Because the otherworld is . . . the otherworld, right? Tapestried with wonders and terrors, strange constellations seen even in the daytime and slot-eyed tricksters, alchemy that works "and prophecies that were neither believed nor discounted." Even as saviors,**** we are still mundane in the face of magic. But: we are all aliens to one another. When magic is familiar, it's the mundane that looks strange. Wrapped up in her beloved illusions, the traditional roles—that she is a refugee from the ordinary world and Chion is exactly as thousand-faced and tricky and powerful as he boasts—Sam has forgotten this. I think it's worth remembering.
And of course I've wound up with another otherworld. So far, I've created one for "Time May Be" (Aruis, Singing Innocence and Experience) and another for "The Sense of Spirals" (the patternless city, Fantasy Magazine #1; forthcoming), and neither of them is the same place.° I keep wanting to write further stories set in these worlds. Further stories have proved obstinately recalcitrant.°* At the moment, I am in deep envy of writers who can either create self-consistent universes and return to them time and time again, or whose otherworlds all turn out to link up in the end. Then again, my approach to worldbuilding tends to be: as a side effect of whatever it is I really want to write the story about . . .
*Of these, at least the first and third can be read—and, I suspect, were intended—as critiques of traditional journeying fantasy. (I would guess that Lud-in-the-Mist was written too early to function as such—i.e., before the tropes on which the other two novels play were either in existence or so firmly established—but my knowledge of fantasy in the 1920’s is not all that it should be.) If requested, I will expound.
**Although no one in Patricia McKillip's Song for the Basilisk ventures precisely beyond the fields we know, I still respect the novel for its middle-aged hero, who has an adolescent son and a settled life by the time he sets off on his quest for revenge. Heroic parents are rare. See also Sherwood Smith's marvelous "Mom and Dad at the Home Front"—the standard children's-adventures-in-the-otherworld as glimpsed from the parental point of view.
***I am far from the first to attempt this kind of exploration! In particular, see Diana Wynne Jones' Dark Lord of Derkholm. Set in a magical world that hosts D&D-like tourism from our world, the novel primarily chronicles the attempts of that year's chosen Dark Lord—rather like being picked for jury duty, only more unpleasant—to live up to his role and not get anyone killed in the process. It's a wicked deconstruction of Tolkienesque fantasy and all the quest-tropes that have followed in J.R.R.'s wake, and that includes outworld travelers' expectations for the realm which they have so blithely crashed.
****Or in the case of Moonwise, the temporary fix that blows everything up in the long run; in Murder of Angels, the foretold archetype that does not behave as prophesied; even Lud-in-the-Mist is hardly a straightforward descent and return. I think it's no accident that the novels whose adult protagonists travel between worlds behave very differently than their childish or adolescent counterparts. See also first footnote.
°As I said, I don't write other worlds for the sake of writing other worlds. They accrete around the characters; my knowledge of them generally extends as far as the characters' and no more. But they are always cities, for some reason. Clearly I need to create some fantastic countryside, just to see what happens.
°*"Time May Be" was one of half a dozen stories set in Aruis, and the only to see completion; I suspect it will remain so. "The Sense of Spirals" emerged out of nowhere in late August and doesn't seem to have brought any other stories along with it. “On the Blindside” was written last October and did spawn a sequel in February, but it (a) was set in this world (b) has since been consigned to the shelf of Rather Useful To Have Written For Figuring Out Stuff About The Characters, Not Very Publishable, Sorry, Try Back Next Time. I'm still hoping . . .
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There are adults-in-otherworlds stories. Thomas Covanant, Kay's Fionavar books...
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See, I am not familiar with these books. (I started the first Thomas Covenant, I believe; and did not finish. I've read Guy Gavriel Kay's Sarantine Mosaic, but nothing else of his.) Recommend more? Clearly I need to be better-read.
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The Kay books are The Summer Tree and sequels The Wandering Fire and The Darkest Road. But they're students and young starting-profession level people, not children but far from middle-aged and settled.
Barbara Hambly's The Silent Tower and sequel The Silicon Mage?
Charlie Stross's The Family Trade?
There's not a whole lot of them out there, certainly compared to children-fall-into-otherworld but they do exist.
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Has anyone ever done a formal study of otherworld fantasies in which adults rather than children are the protagonists?
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I don't suppose Dorothy Heydt has ever collected all of the Sword and Sorceress Cynthia stories? I love those.
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There is a set of books, I'm forgetting the author and titles sadly (but they used to be on the bottom shelf of the paperback SF/F books at the Hamden Library) about a vetrinarian who is brought into a fantasy world for her medical skills just as she's contemplating suicide because she might well have huntington's chorea. Definitely an adult, although far from middle aged.
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If Mathemagic is what it sounds like, I didn't realize it was a novel—I just remember a set of short stories in various Chicks in Chainmail anthologies. Neat.
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The vet novels are _The Magic and the Healing_, _Under the Healing Sign_, and _The Healing of Crossroads_ by Nick O'Donohoe. IIRC, so are his _The Gnomewrench in the Dwarfworks_ and _The Gnomewrench in the Peopleworks_.
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I haven't read your story yet, so I've averted my eyes to the discourse surrounding it until I have.
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At this point, most of the discourse is about fantasies in which adult (rather than child) characters travel to some otherworld; so feel free to join in.
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Those are all good examples, and many of them are also on Books Jason Has Never Read. I'm tired and just finished teaching a three-hour class, but I can add Graham Joyce's Dreamside.
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I for one thought that the Dark Tower books were much better before they were the Books That Included All Of Stephen King Ever.
So while it's nice sometimes that people do that (like for example Hobb's first and second trilogies and their connections were subtle and appreciated), it's certainly not always praiseworthy.
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I guess in my mind it's one think of the worlds link up on their own, that's great, but any time an author has to put any effort into making things match (especially if some of that effort is visible and wince-inducing), things can go south fast.
Oh and for what it's worth, I look forward to reading this story . . . remind us all around the first of October when it's up for sale? (Or you can email it to me now and I'll buy it later anyway :)
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Nine
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