I’ve been indexing the manuscript, and as with everything associated with this book, it’s more involved than I thought it would be. Fortunately, rather than lunging in to use Word’s indexing functions, I decided to read Nancy Mulvany’s very good Indexing Books, Second Edition (link to BigMuddy), so I learned that everything I was ready to do was, shall we say, suboptimal? Yes, this is a textbook for people who create indices, and I do advise reading it before you launch into indexing.
It’s not that indexing is technically difficult, it’s that an index is a “paratext” (a parasitic separate text?) that reorganizes the book to enable someone looking for a particular bit of text to rapidly find it. Creating one can’t be done by machine, because the essential trick is getting inside the readers’ minds and anticipating how they will search for information and what they will search for. Yes, I could hire someone to do it for me, but that would cost hard money, and this is definitely a soft money project. So I’m lumping it myself, and hoping that I can figure out how you’re going to go looking through the index.
One grumble about Mulvany’s book is that I decided to get the Kindle edition. It has a beautiful index, of course, but all the Kindle converters did was to copy the index as if it was a table, so on my little Paperwhite, I can’t enlarge it. All I have is page after page of two column index in flyspeck 3 font, too small to read without a magnifying glass, no links, page numbers noted and irrelevant in a Kindle edition. In other words, in a textbook on indexing, the index on my version is totally useless.
Very few ebooks have functional, hyperlinked indices, but if I’m not being overly ambitious, I’m going to try to make a working index for the electronic version of my book. Right now it looks like creating the electronic index involves radically reformatting the manuscript, feeding it into Caliber, and likely as not making various and unspeakable sacrifices to nameless deities. Whether Amazon will carry the resulting file is another one of those interesting questions that hopefully I can answer in the next month or two.
While I could easily rant on about how ebooks are worse than paper books, I think this makes the case. It’s beyond silly to have an electronic document with no hyperlinks and no way to resize images, but that’s what I’m supposed to create, unless I put in some extra effort. Oh well. Good thing I’m stubborn.
The only take-home from this is that if you care about your readers having an index handy, put the requisite effort into it. If you’re into DIY indexing, Mulvaney’s book is required reading, and if you’re planning on selling your manuscript (especially if it’s non-fiction), get the Chicago Manual of Style (preferably the dead tree version), because apparently it has warped brains in the American publishing industry more than other style manuals, and they will expect you to follow it, except when they don’t.
Back to the coal face.
Filed under: fantasy, science fiction | Tags: cli fi, SFF literature, The Onion
I have no literary pretensions, so my favorite book review comes from The Onion’s online book review every Monday. Back on September 7, Kyle Fowle reviewed Salman Rushdie’s venture into fantasy, Two Years Eight Months And Twenty-Eight Nights (link to the review). Here’s how the review opens:
“Genre fiction has always been poking around the mainstream, but now more than ever it’s enjoying unprecedented success. Sci-fi and historical fiction, fantasy and bawdy romance, superheroes and dragons, are an integral part of the mainstream media diet, be it in literature, television, or film. Perhaps it’s no surprise that fantasy and sci-fi are enjoying widespread appeal. After all, most can relate to the way those genres explore class division, oppression, economic and moral collapse, and the constant fight between good and evil. Such themes feel particularly relevant and urgent in 2015, and the best fantasy and sci-fi writing isn’t an outlandish exploration of the future or some magical past, but a insightful examination of our current culture.” (emphasis added)
Of course I disagree with that last statement. I’m with Tolkien, in that I’m not terribly interested in writing allegories about the modern age, although I agree that good stories have taken this tack. Perhaps this is an example of someone attempting to turn personal taste into dogma? We can also debate whether LOTR, Harry Potter, ASOIF, Star Wars, or Dune are insightful examinations of the cultures of their times, or just worth consuming on their own terms.
Building on the last blog entry, “White Men in the Jungle, I’d say this perception of what makes quality fiction is another problem with cli-fi. My interest is in exploring what, to me, looks like a very outlandish future, to give people an idea of where we’re headed if we keep blowin’ GHGs and swiggin’ every resource in sight. Cli-fi that’s an “insightful examination of our current culture” is inevitably dystopian, sometimes narcissistically so, all about how we’re screwing up, something that all too often turns into a jeremiad. Indeed, it seems that people expect cli-fi to be about the jeremiad, to explore the ways in which the results of our sins will be visited on our descendants, if not to wallow in it.
But I love real creativity, and I think the most creative solutions happen within harsh limits. For instance, I love traditional Inuit kayaks and Micronesian flying proas, because they’re two examples of incredibly creative people taking almost nothing and making something spectacular out of it. In the case of kayaks, the Inuit took driftwood and seal carcasses and made these beautiful and incredibly maneuverable little boats. The proas are those beautiful outriggers with the asymmetric hulls that were the fastest sailboats in the world into the 19th Century. They were built with driftwood and the things you find on a coral atoll: coconuts (logs and fiber), breadfruit logs, pandanus for the sails, and clamshell adzes, because they didn’t even have stone to shape the wood. And proas sailed rings around European square-riggers when the latter first showed up. To me, these boats represent real creativity, far better than anything I could dream up if I was stranded on an Arctic shore or a Pacific island. In stories, I always love it when the author finds a way to get the protagonists through the impossible limits of a story with grace and creativity, when the book has good characters, good plot, and the literary equivalent of a kayak build as part of the climax.
So with cli-fi, we could make it a dystopian examination of our current culture, and that might be insightful, if a little tedious and self-absorbed. Or, just perhaps, we can look at it as an exploration of those strange worlds on the far side of hell that could just be our deep future.
Do you have any preferences?
Filed under: book, deep time, fantasy, fiction, futurism, science fiction, Worldbuilding, writing | Tags: cli fi, Deep Future, tropes
Perhaps I’m borrowing trouble here, but one thing I started thinking about is how much stereotypes and standard tropes underpin science fiction and especially fantasy. Even though educated people know about the Medieval Warm Period, so much fantasy contains the equivalent of Game of Thrones’ “Winter is coming.” Yes, this is great escapism in the middle of summer, but still, there are a huge number of tropes that show up when dealing with fantasy: medieval, Europe, wintry, or mysterious, oriental, and so forth and so on. You’ve seen them, you know them, and writers too often depend on you knowing them.
Yes, I can think of more than a few books that break tropes, but equally, I run into people whose take on writing is conditioned by the metaphors and tropes conjured by words, and this makes communication difficult. One example was when I talked to a writer (with a strong humanities background) online, about how I, as an ecologist probably wouldn’t name plants that were growing in a vacant lot in southern California as a way to describe the scene. Why not? came the question. Well, I replied, because I suspected that the names wouldn’t paint the scene for anyone who didn’t know the plants already. This was scoffed at. Okay, I wrote, the plants I’m thinking of are black mustard and ripgut brome. Oh, those are so evocative of doom, decay, and violence. Perfect for a vacant lot in Southern California. Well, I replied, that’s exactly my point. You just misled yourself, I replied, and you have no idea of what I was actually trying to describe…The conversation deteriorated from there. Yes, this conversation has been changed somewhat, because I want to use it as an illustration, rather than to embarrass someone. The miscommunication is the point.
The idea I’m chewing on, the trouble I’m borrowing, is how to deal with climate change in fiction, “cli-fi” if you want a newish shorthand. If you’re writing about a climate changed world and thinking like an ecologist, it makes perfect sense to talk about a tribe of white-skinned people living in a jungle, because tropical forests are predicted to grow north into modern Oregon if we go in for severe climate change. If you’re not thinking metaphorically (would that be trope-ically?), it’s perfectly reasonable to talk about the descendants of today’s Portland hipsters living a barbarian lifestyle in the coast ranges, in a dense forest of bamboo, briars, kudzu, and naturalized street trees, hunting feral pigs and settling all too often for grasshoppers instead.
The problem is, if someone who reads metaphorically sees this, all sorts of problems jump out. Is it cultural appropriation or imperialism to put white men in jungles? Or to have them happily eat the foods of other cultures, like grasshoppers, which are edgy and taboo in today’s America? Or to work with bamboo? I don’t know. But jungles bring all sorts of cultural baggage and expected tropes along with them. Any place does. That’s why fantasy castles are set so often in fantasy Europe, rather than in the fantasy Amazon, fantasy Congo, or fantasy Zomia. Especially if the characters are white.
Climate change violates these tropes, moving climates, and eventually the plants and animals they support, to different places than they occur in now. That’s why I’m interested in cli-fi, really, because a climate-changed future gives you a huge new palette of possible realities to explore. The jungles of Cascadia may be a real place in 300 years.
The shortcoming of this new palette is that it violates expectations, and I suspect this is one reason why people tend to think of post-apocalyptic stories as set in a ruined version of today’s world, rather than in something much stranger. It’s easier to think of such stereotypes, rather than to confront how strange the world could get.
And it does get more complicated. If you want to write a story set, say, 10,000 years in the future, humans probably won’t have the races or ethnicities we have now. And there’s a whole other set of expectations, stereotypes, and tropes associated with race, especially in America and most especially now. If you want to write a story set in the truly deep future, you can legitimately jettison today’s races and start over. However, how do you write the resulting story without it being seen as a commentary on today’s racial politics? I have no idea. Maybe you don’t. Thing is, it’s unrealistic to assume that today’s racial, ethnic, even gender identities have any sort of permanency. Is talking about this a reflection on today’s racial politics, or just some naive white dude (that would be me), trying to think about what the future might hold? It can be read both ways.
And so it goes. I don’t have any answers, only questions. Authors don’t get complete control over what people read into their work, and readers bring a wide variety of preconceptions with them to any work. Still, if you’re going to play outside established tropes, I don’t think it’s overly paranoid to at least think about how things can be misinterpreted, and possibly to take some steps to head off the worst problems.
Or perhaps I’m just borrowing trouble where none exists. What do you think?
Putting the life back in science fiction 