Thoughts on what I like to read

[jeregenest]

Recently I’ve been thinking about what I like to read. That leads me to a thread of books that are all similar in some ways, but not all involving the fantastic, that I send most of my fiction time reading (and a good chunk of my non-fiction reading bleeds into). This process makes me realize I throw a lot of terms around so this post is designed to figure out what I mean by those categories.


Romance of the Archive: A book which depicts an acquaintance with moldering books, indices, monographs, bibliographies, slips of paper, and footnotes through a romantic lens depicting a scholar-adventurer whose quests for Truth take place mostly through archives and dealing with written matter. A pivotal work is A.S. Byatt’s Possession.

Fantasy of History: A story that uncovers a Secret History of the World through the aid of fantasy devices. Set in the mundane world, either now or at some point in the past, no matter how fundamentally our understanding of the mundane world may be rewriten through the revelations of the tale. These are also widely called Secret Histories.

Alternate History: Simply stated, an alternate history is the description and/or discussion of an historical "what if" with some speculation about the consequences of a different result.

Occult Fantasy: The study of the occult is the pursuit of hidden or secret doctrine. Occult Fantasies are stories which explore these mysteries in the hope of a revelation. Some crucial examples are Joris-Karl Huysmans, La-Bas (1891), Talbot Mundy, Om: The Secret of Abhor Valley (1924) , and John Fowles, The Magus (1984)

Occult Detective: Occult detective stories are a sub-genre of the detective story. The main difference is that the occult detective is involved in cases involving ghosts, curses, and other supernatural elements. These days most occult detectives are really occult fantasies as their roots are more in the fantasy side then the detective side but there are exceptions. Theres also an interesting switch from occult detectives who abhorred the occult to ones who are active and enthusiastic practitioners (compare and contrast Dr Silence to Harry Dresden)

Occult Espionage: A rare breed, the espionage story turned to matters of the occult.

Crypto-thriller: Thrillers are characterized by fast pacing, frequent action, and resourceful heroes who must thwart the plans of more-powerful and better-equipped villains. Literary devices such as suspense, red herrings, and cliffhangers are used extensively. A crypto-thriller involves hidden history, secret societies, strange codes and puzzles. Think Da Vinci Code and all the rest.

Comments

[kniedzw.livejournal.com]

What about books like Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, J. Gregory Keyes's Age of Unreason or Richard Garfinkle's Celestial Matters, where there are elements of overt fantastic pressed onto a setting which is otherwise familiar to us? I've generally referred to them as "historical fantasy," though they are quite distinct from your "fantasy of history" category, above.

I only bring it up because you mentioned "alternate history" as an explicit category, and that seems a much more common tag for speculative fiction works than "historical fantasy."

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

Garfinkle is an outright alternate history. Temeraire I dislike and thus don't care about but if I did its an alternate history as well and Keyes was an alternate history/occult fantasy.

[kniedzw.livejournal.com]

Interesting. So you'd lump them together under "historical 'what if'" books. Makes sense, I suppose, though I tend toward thinking of them through the lens of "fantasy," simply because they are all worlds in which what would be impossible in our world is explicit reality. When I think "alternate history," I don't think of works where Aristotelian mechanics supplant Newtonian or dragons fly around; I think of historical scenarios where events transpired differently than they did in this world, but within a more mundane historical context. I suppose it's just a difference in how we each divide up the world.

As to the Temeraire books, I'm curious why you disliked them. I just finished them and found them to be enjoyable, if not particularly meaty, historical fantasy. Very much Patrick O'Brian meets Anne McCaffrey, which isn't generally my cup of tea, but which I found diverting and amusing.

(I should also note that I recently finished Charlie Wilson's War, which I found very interesting and enjoyable in a very modern-day Peter Hopkirk-esque slightly larger-than-life yarn kind of way. I'm glad I read it before the movie comes out this December. Of course, with the talent they have on that movie, it's unlikely to completely suck, so....)

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

A What-if is a what-if to me. If the book is about exploring a historical departure (Alexander lived to old age, celestial mechanics are different, dragons exist) its pretty much the same to me. Alternate history then does have different lenses based on the nature of the what-if and thetype of story told (is it a detedtive story, a thriller, a techno-gadget...) but for me the major question is it good or not?

[kniedzw.livejournal.com]

...but for me the major question is it good or not?

Which is, I suppose, your problem with Temeraire. I could see the argument, though I'm sad to hear you're not fond of it.

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

I found that the Temeraire books requires a rather interesting suspension of disbelief that didn't work for me. And no, its not the dragons, them I have no problem with. A good alternate history takes a point of departure in history from our current timeline then logically requires every event that takes place in the temporally downstream to be affected by said change. So to conjecture a world with dragons is reasonable but not one where history is utterly the same, there needs to be reasonable changes. Napoleon wouldn't be Napoleon with dragons around.

Which is why Garfinkle handles this so much better in his Celestial Matters, which is pretty much the same idea, a radically crazy point of deperature. But Garfinkle successfully handles the downstreamin a way that is enjoyable and makes sense.

[kniedzw.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. I didn't find the suspension of disbelief to be horrendously difficult in the Temeraire books, but, in part, that's because my knowledge of the Napoleonic era is somewhat lacking. I guess I didn't have the same problem with that as you did.

Then again, I was just looking for a way to kill a couple hours, rather than anything particularly stimulating. If I'd been expecting or looking for extensive world-building, I would have been disappointed.

swan_tower had an interesting thought that the core idea behind Temeraire was inspired by the famous quote attributed to Admiral Jervis, Earl of St Vincent: "I do not say they [the French] cannot come; I only say they cannot come by sea." ...and if you don't have a relatively static history in a world where such a book is set, the coolness of the idea of "Napoleonic Wars, only with dragons!" sort of goes away.

[bluegargantua]

Hi,

I'm not even all the way through it yet and I'm pretty sure you'll love "The Course of the Heart" by M. John Harrison. Gnostic rituals gone awry, secret histories, and lots more. I'll have a full review soon, but you may want to snag this on interlibrary loan after I'm done with it. Probably falls under Occult Fantasy.

later
Tom

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

I didn't know he had a new book out.

[bluegargantua]

Hrm...this doesn't appear to be a "new this year book". It looks like Nightshade Books is just republishing it. First copyright is 1992 and this edition is 2004.

But it's new to me anyway.

later
Tom

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

Hrm, still don't think I've read it. I'll definitely have to order it through the library.