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Fantasy vs Science Fiction: The Second Bout

I have another rejection letter - well in this case it is an email. I will save it and print it out to add it to the growing collection that adorns the walls of 'my room'. It is a good thing, though. If a writer is to survive rejection it becomes something that is in the general course of life's events. I must say that I have a feeling that someone actually read the story and personally liked it enough to regret having to reject it. For whatever reason, it does not meet with the editorial style of the magazine.

My publisher does not reject what I submit; he suggests corrections. Realistically there may be a subtle difference but at least he published a couple of books for me.

Sometime before Christmas, with the whole hearted support of Ash Creek Publishing, I submitted an early version of "In the Way of Humanity" to The New Yorker Magazine. At the time I felt very comfortable with the version and it was not nearly as long as the version that appears in this blog - during the week of 1/09/05. I have a number of shorter works but I have never done anything with them over the years. They occupy space on my hard drive and every once in a while I find a reason to morph them into something that contributes to the plot of a novel. "In the Way of Humanity" is one of those things except that I drew it into Book 7 as it helped fill in a gap in a character's past. That is why it pertains to Brent and is not first person as it was in its earliest format - a journal entry originally composed in 1994 at 2 AM. Yes, I remember writing the original work; no, I won't post the original but it was five pages and it was a prime example of how immature and inexperienced I was as a writer in 1994.

I am not a short story writer. My publisher will attest to the fact that hardly anything I compose is short. Whenever I create, even if it is short at first it evolves into something longer and if allowed to ferment the creative zones of my cerebral cortex for a week or so it turns into a storyline for a novel.

All of my shorter things, the works that are less than novel length that I never did anything else with, I have bound into a single MS Word document. I figure I can still add onto the mass at will. At the moment it is around 250 pages. Some of the material that I have been posting on this blog comes from that collection, by the way but there has been a lot of original and timely posts. Some of them may be added to that collection. So it is a two-way thing.

Most of that material is very, very different than the sci-fi things I wrote earlier on in my evolution from writer to author. I have been posting it as a way to demonstrate that I am not tied to a single genre and am not one dimensional at all.

I love well-written science fiction. There really is nothing like it. The canvas for creating a world really is blank. Anything is possible as long as the writer than make it believable. I only hope that what I have produced can be categorized as well-written.

I also love fantasy storylines. I understand that fantasy is usually considered a subset of science fiction or vice-versa but in my mind they have been pretty much distinct genres. For some reason horror and gore have also been lumped into the overall category which I give the label of bizarre fiction.

Anyone that had read this blog probably knows intuitively how I feel about labels. I am an individual and apart for accepting the categorization as human, I will challenge any further classification as largely irrelevant. So it is also with writing. I get it. There is a need for the labels 'fiction' verses 'non-fiction'. I am fine with that. The other, more specific delineations tend to benefit bookstores more than authors or readers. What I hate about it is that it fosters comparisons between a number of writers and their many works. I am not really about that at all. If it is a good book what difference does it make whether it is like something that someone else wrote or even that it is written in a style that is close to that of some other author?

I write fiction. I write some things that are fictionalized accounts of real events. I write because I need to write and sometimes what I write ends up being read. It is a process.

I write science fiction, sometimes; I write fantasy, sometimes. Other times I write neo-realism. I will not claim to be the first to merge the three genres into a single, overall plotline. Others have done it successfully. I believe the honor of first may well belong to one of my favorite authors, Samuel R. Delaney.

Perhaps only his most devoted readers had the mental strength and physical stamina to read "Dahlgren" but I consider it his masterpiece. You have to dig a bit to find the fantasy elements as they are masked behind the image projectors that are science fiction gadgets at their best. Some of the characters use the projectors to create the illusion that they are dragons or other mythological creatures whenever they engage in gang warfare. The characters are into piercing, tattoos and implants. Some of the implants are bizarre, like talons attached to the wrists or ankles. Some of the characters that Delaney describes may not have the outward appearance of a human at all even without the image generators.

Apart from the fantasy elements in the work, the sci-fi elements are more obvious. It is a post modern urban setting where the socio-economic fabric and political structures of a large city have utterly collapsed, leaving the city in a chaotic quandary in this the gangs emerged as the only force of origination or authority and they 'manage' as they see fit.

Dahlgren is a beefy work, pressing hard against the 1000 page barrier. It is a challenging read as the transitions between plot and characterization are sometimes abrupt. In my estimation the reason anyone should read Dahlgren is that Delaney's abilities with the English language rival any writer that has ever lived. He also is unabashed in his exploration of the human condition even at its fringe.

I do not know how to express this any other way but I do not want for it to be misconstrued as I respect the art and craft of Samuel R. Delaney. I also think that the classification that I have seen associated with him is irrelevant. He is a gifted writer, regardless. Celebrate in that and enjoy his many achievements in fiction.

I have to interject this as it is somewhat pertinent. A teacher turned me on to Samuel R. Delaney's writing. I blessed her every time I read and enjoyed one of his books. In passing, while I was matriculating at Purdue I mentioned to s couple of my friends that were English literature majors that I was reading Dahlgren. I was very impressed with the book and felt that they as lit majors should know that it was a work of significance.

"Oh, I have never heard of that book, is it new?"

"It is a sci-fi thing," the other friend said. "Samuel R. Delaney wrote it."

"Oh, that Black author."

So there is at least one Black man in the world that writes science fiction. Not only can Samuel R. Delaney write but he writes at a level of sophistication that I doubt many others in the genre could ever attain.

I admit that I read everything that Samuel R. Delaney ever wrote before I read Dahlgren. As a testament to the fact that he is a writer for every one of us: I never knew or had I known would I have cared to know the irrelevant fact that he is Black.

E

posted by Unknown @ 9:06 PM