Swords and absinthe
Attended the online chat with Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman hosted by SCIFI.com and Asimov's/Gardner tonight. Always surprised that so few people show up to these things; there can't have been more than about a dozen people in attendance. (I think I saw Tempest pop in briefly, but otherwise nobody I knew among the audience, at least not by the names they were using.) I think they're kinda fun, even when the interviewee is someone I can talk with in email anytime.
Anyway, the best exchange of the evening was this:
Delia: What I'm doing is writing a straight (loosely speaking) historical about the Franco-Prussian War and courtesans and eating rats during the 1870 siege of Paris. Oh, and Absinthe. There's lots of absinthe in it.
Gardner: If you're going to eat rats, you NEED lots of absinthe!
But maybe you had to be there.
I still find it really interesting that Swordspoint is pretty much universally considered a fantasy despite having no overt magic or other fantastical elements. In some ways it's like a historical novel from a different world. What qualifies it as fantasy, it seems to me, are three things:
- The tone and language—it most definitely has fantastical sensibilities.
- The fact that it's set in a world not our own, even though this world is populated by ordinary humans who behave much like ordinary humans in our own world.
- The fact that it was published by a fantasy publisher, labeled as fantasy, and has a Thomas Canty cover.
Ellen referred to it as subversive fantasy, and of course as interstitial. (Btw, apparently the interstitial movement has largely swallowed up the Young Trollopes, and if that didn't make any sense I apologize but I'm not going to explain right now.) Which is fair enough. But I'm intrigued that people seem perfectly satisfied with calling it fantasy, whereas if she'd set it in, say, 17th-century France and otherwise written the same book (mutatis mutandis), nobody would've called it fantasy.
Swordspoint was also, I think, what first set off my thoughts about the geography of fantasy, and the question of when fantasy worlds shifted from being treated as faraway parts of the real world to being set in other worlds that aren't part of our universe. Some day I'd still like to write that article.
Anyway. If you'd like to see Ellen and Delia in person, and you live on the east coast, you may be in luck; they're giving several readings over the next month or so, in the Boston area, NYC, and Philadelphia.