primeideal (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
primeideal) wrote2022-05-27 04:32 pm
primeideal) wrote2022-05-27 04:32 pm
Entry tags:
Frame stories, didacticism, body horror, sour grapes...
Between work friends, Reddit, and the Escape Pod flash (more on that to come), I'm having a lot more discussions about speculative fic so I want to write up some of them in a more permanent format. Dreamwidth is good for pretentious-looking babbling, but beware that I am actually way too shallow and uncool for the cool kids. TL;DR.
"If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love" is a flash-fiction piece from 2013 that won a Nebula Award (and got nominated for a Hugo) in the short fiction format. Even though it's short, I would argue it sort of qualifies as a "story within a story" format, because there's a frame story and then the doubly-fictional world imagined by the narrator as a what-if. In the internal story, the narrator imagines her lover as a T-Rex, who eats goats and performs love songs on Broadway. When the T-Rex eventually marries another (cloned) dinosaur, the narrator is so overcome by emotion that she turns into a flower. Because dinosaurs who perform on Broadway and humans who transform into flowers are not things that happen in our world, such events certainly fall under the umbrella of "speculative fiction."
The frame story, however, is a lot more somber. The narrator is, "in fact," speaking to a comatose lover who's been the victim of a violent crime; the perpetrators use hurtful epithets while attacking him, for instance, anti-LGBT slurs, even though the victim isn't necessarily LGBT himself. She's both mourning him and decrying the violence of a world where these things happen.
This story's success at the Hugos and Nebulas was one of the factors in the escalation of the "Sad/Rabid Puppies" campaign for slate nominations at the Hugos (though some of that had preceded this story); this kind of brigading eventually led to rule changes to, hopefully, decrease the ability of collaborating voters to nominate slates. There are a couple of criticisms one can make about the story. One: it's didactic. I agree, it is didactic. Now, "you shouldn't beat up people until they're comatose and shouldn't use bigoted epithets towards them either" is--hopefully--a message that everyone can get behind; I don't think anyone, even the Puppies, were critical of "Dinosaur" because it was harsh on the villains.
There are other stories that make less trivial claims. When person A writes a story that asserts, or even takes for granted, "every right-thinking person should believe X, only an utter troglodyte would believe Y," and person B (who believes Y) reads this, their reaction might be "this is insulting to me, because I don't agree with it," or "because of the didacticism about X, this is difficult to enjoy overall." And I've definitely been in that position.
In cases when the position being presented is something that everyone believes already, more likely reactions are "the story's conflict is kind of boring because everything is very clear-cut," or "the author seems to expect us to be impressed by the bold stance on X, but X isn't actually bold, they're arguing against a strawman/woman/entity." It's not impossible to write a good story that happens to be didactic, but in general, I think it does add an extra layer of difficulty (whether or not the moral is something everyone agrees on, there are easy parts and difficult parts to both approaches). And, of course, none of this justifies abusing or harassing authors who choose to do so, this should go without saying.
But a more relevant criticism of "Dinosaur," and of the fandom sentiment that led it to win a major award for speculative fiction, is that...it's arguably not speculative fiction. Now, I just said that the story-within-a-story clearly is science fiction. But the frame story is not. And, in my opinion, a story set in the mundane world doesn't become speculative merely by having subjunctive what-ifs. You could write a picture book about a kid who takes the bus to school and daydreams, "if I had a dinosaur, I would ride it to school;" I don't think that makes it a science fiction story. But nothing about the world in which the narrator and her love interest "actually" live suggest that that's a world where dinosaurs regularly perform on Broadway or humans transform into flowers, and in that sense, I would not call it SF. And so the fact that it won a Nebula suggests that the voters were much more impressed by the didacticism, which I find disappointing.
So with that, overly wordly, background, I want to talk about another short story Hugo/Nebula nominee from this year, one that several of my friends really liked: "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather." (Major spoilers below.)
"Oaken Hearts" is a story told through the format of a song-lyrics explainer website, where a variety of users chime in to annotate a (fictional) English ballad, of the same name. I'm the kind of person who enjoys unconventional formats/in-universe documentation, so I was intrigued by this.
If you just look at the ballad verses on their own, without the rest of the story, the song is about "Fair Ellen," who pursues "William," and all the stanzas end with "where oaken hearts do gather." And even I, who am sometimes slow on the uptake/bad at reading between the lines, was able to get an evocative mental image from this: Ellen carves William's heart out of his chest and turns him into a tree, she can't help it, that's just her way of showing affection.
Nice. I really like the premise of hanahaki disease, a fandom trope where unrequited love causes people to cough up flowers until they waste away, but a lot of the fic implementations don't work for me (mostly "I'd rather die than lose all my memories of this one perfect person"--come on, there are a lot of fish in the sea, or leaves in the forest, if that's your preferred metaphor). This is a weird, twisted narrative that is delightfully creepy in the way RL ballads are, and the implications that William might be into it and the villagers just don't understand are...kinda hot. So far, so good.
Now, based on that summary alone, is the short story "Oaken Hearts" fantasy? My take is, no, for the same reasoning as above. The story-within-a-story, the ballad, clearly follows ballad logic where humans just turn into trees sometimes. But the outer story, which consists of people analyzing the differences between different recordings of the ballad, is not (yet) fantasy. In the same way, a modern-day story that featured someone singing a folk song about talking animals wouldn't be.
Okay, but--maybe it's one of those where, if you read closely, you find connections between the outer story and the inner one. In the 2000's, user HenryMartyn posts about his plans to record a documentary about Dr. Mark Rydell's disappearance. HolyGreil, BarrowBoy, and others, follow along with their questions/notes/speculation about the song and its meaning. Some of the longer conversations have indentations to mark who's replying to who, but there are no timestamps, so some "later" footnotes (in the song) are chronologically earlier than the ones before. The "last word" goes to HenryMartyn, as he works on his documentary:
it’s a love story with a message that love involves give and take, and some ask for more than others. That’s not always such a bad thing, if you’re willing to give...I’m still looking for the right ending for my film, but I think I’m close. It feels funny to be searching for traces of Rydell where he was searching for traces of truth in this ballad, like we’re all chasing each other. Anyway, thanks for your continued help on this, friends. If nothing else, maybe we’re part of the cycle, bringing an old song to new listeners.
That feels like a happy-ish ending to me; ballads are always evolving over time, and even if we don't know what "really" happened that the historical events were based on, every generation is going to adapt and reinvent the song in their own way, and that's the beauty of art and life. Yay. But again--not fantasy.
And that's where I threw up my hands and decided "either I'm too stupid to find the speculative elements in the frame story, or I'm too stupid to appreciate this as a gem despite their absence, either way I'm not going to admit my incompetence in front of my smart work friends." Untilcahn posted a similar reaction and I figured I could ask my stupid questions online instead.
So it turns out that, if you read "upthread," the responders replying to HenryMartyn note that he hasn't replied in years, and that he disappeared (like Rydell) before the end-of-year presentations. Implication being: the tour guide turned him (and Rydell) into trees as well.
In that sense, the choice to end on HenryMartyn's lines is a bold one, because it makes the ending more hopeful than it would have been otherwise--I got the sense that he was maybe fine with the concept--but also makes it more of a chore to find the twist. (I know some people like that. For me, with my brain, feeling like "I am too dumb to catch the Implications, woe is me, guess I'll go back to the kids' section" is something I have a negative reaction to, but that's not anyone else's problem.)
In skimming it this time, this line near the end stood out: "neither lover betrays the other’s expectations, and it’s only because of the villagers that their story turns tragic." At first this seems like "stupid townspeople want to get back at Ellen because they just don't understand true love," but now I'm wondering if the "villagers" are the other bloggers/us readers, wondering about the unresolution left by Martyn's disappearance. Ellen and William are happy, it's only the ambiguity left behind that hurts the rest of us. Hmm.
Mostly tangential: the "fake documentation" format lends itself to a lot of fake links, for instance, this is a thing:
I'm teasing, but I also feel like some of my reaction is (uncalled for) sour grapes. Like, submission guidelines will say, "make sure it's polished, don't be too verbose, send only your best work!" And I feel like, if I tried to write a document with lots of tangential annotations, or put effort into rhyming an universe poem ("Oaken Hearts" doesn't rhyme, but it's a ballad, a lot of them don't anyway, so that's not a criticism), it would just be like "lol nope." Which, obviously, Sarah Pinsker is a pro and I am not a pro! I do not want to get an overinflated view of my mediocre efforts! But (and this is more relevant for something like the Escape Pod flash) when I see people who do similar things to me, mine fails, and theirs gets a pat on the back, I get frustrated because I wish I could be more specific about identifying what they have that I don't have. (And it's entirely possible, in some cases, that what they have is "ideological smugness" and I don't even want it, it would just be good to know!)
(This post is twice as long as "Dinosaur." I can either communicate in one-liner snarky aside mode or WALL OF TEXT mode, there is no middle option.)
"If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love" is a flash-fiction piece from 2013 that won a Nebula Award (and got nominated for a Hugo) in the short fiction format. Even though it's short, I would argue it sort of qualifies as a "story within a story" format, because there's a frame story and then the doubly-fictional world imagined by the narrator as a what-if. In the internal story, the narrator imagines her lover as a T-Rex, who eats goats and performs love songs on Broadway. When the T-Rex eventually marries another (cloned) dinosaur, the narrator is so overcome by emotion that she turns into a flower. Because dinosaurs who perform on Broadway and humans who transform into flowers are not things that happen in our world, such events certainly fall under the umbrella of "speculative fiction."
The frame story, however, is a lot more somber. The narrator is, "in fact," speaking to a comatose lover who's been the victim of a violent crime; the perpetrators use hurtful epithets while attacking him, for instance, anti-LGBT slurs, even though the victim isn't necessarily LGBT himself. She's both mourning him and decrying the violence of a world where these things happen.
This story's success at the Hugos and Nebulas was one of the factors in the escalation of the "Sad/Rabid Puppies" campaign for slate nominations at the Hugos (though some of that had preceded this story); this kind of brigading eventually led to rule changes to, hopefully, decrease the ability of collaborating voters to nominate slates. There are a couple of criticisms one can make about the story. One: it's didactic. I agree, it is didactic. Now, "you shouldn't beat up people until they're comatose and shouldn't use bigoted epithets towards them either" is--hopefully--a message that everyone can get behind; I don't think anyone, even the Puppies, were critical of "Dinosaur" because it was harsh on the villains.
There are other stories that make less trivial claims. When person A writes a story that asserts, or even takes for granted, "every right-thinking person should believe X, only an utter troglodyte would believe Y," and person B (who believes Y) reads this, their reaction might be "this is insulting to me, because I don't agree with it," or "because of the didacticism about X, this is difficult to enjoy overall." And I've definitely been in that position.
In cases when the position being presented is something that everyone believes already, more likely reactions are "the story's conflict is kind of boring because everything is very clear-cut," or "the author seems to expect us to be impressed by the bold stance on X, but X isn't actually bold, they're arguing against a strawman/woman/entity." It's not impossible to write a good story that happens to be didactic, but in general, I think it does add an extra layer of difficulty (whether or not the moral is something everyone agrees on, there are easy parts and difficult parts to both approaches). And, of course, none of this justifies abusing or harassing authors who choose to do so, this should go without saying.
But a more relevant criticism of "Dinosaur," and of the fandom sentiment that led it to win a major award for speculative fiction, is that...it's arguably not speculative fiction. Now, I just said that the story-within-a-story clearly is science fiction. But the frame story is not. And, in my opinion, a story set in the mundane world doesn't become speculative merely by having subjunctive what-ifs. You could write a picture book about a kid who takes the bus to school and daydreams, "if I had a dinosaur, I would ride it to school;" I don't think that makes it a science fiction story. But nothing about the world in which the narrator and her love interest "actually" live suggest that that's a world where dinosaurs regularly perform on Broadway or humans transform into flowers, and in that sense, I would not call it SF. And so the fact that it won a Nebula suggests that the voters were much more impressed by the didacticism, which I find disappointing.
So with that, overly wordly, background, I want to talk about another short story Hugo/Nebula nominee from this year, one that several of my friends really liked: "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather." (Major spoilers below.)
"Oaken Hearts" is a story told through the format of a song-lyrics explainer website, where a variety of users chime in to annotate a (fictional) English ballad, of the same name. I'm the kind of person who enjoys unconventional formats/in-universe documentation, so I was intrigued by this.
If you just look at the ballad verses on their own, without the rest of the story, the song is about "Fair Ellen," who pursues "William," and all the stanzas end with "where oaken hearts do gather." And even I, who am sometimes slow on the uptake/bad at reading between the lines, was able to get an evocative mental image from this: Ellen carves William's heart out of his chest and turns him into a tree, she can't help it, that's just her way of showing affection.
Nice. I really like the premise of hanahaki disease, a fandom trope where unrequited love causes people to cough up flowers until they waste away, but a lot of the fic implementations don't work for me (mostly "I'd rather die than lose all my memories of this one perfect person"--come on, there are a lot of fish in the sea, or leaves in the forest, if that's your preferred metaphor). This is a weird, twisted narrative that is delightfully creepy in the way RL ballads are, and the implications that William might be into it and the villagers just don't understand are...kinda hot. So far, so good.
Now, based on that summary alone, is the short story "Oaken Hearts" fantasy? My take is, no, for the same reasoning as above. The story-within-a-story, the ballad, clearly follows ballad logic where humans just turn into trees sometimes. But the outer story, which consists of people analyzing the differences between different recordings of the ballad, is not (yet) fantasy. In the same way, a modern-day story that featured someone singing a folk song about talking animals wouldn't be.
Okay, but--maybe it's one of those where, if you read closely, you find connections between the outer story and the inner one. In the 2000's, user HenryMartyn posts about his plans to record a documentary about Dr. Mark Rydell's disappearance. HolyGreil, BarrowBoy, and others, follow along with their questions/notes/speculation about the song and its meaning. Some of the longer conversations have indentations to mark who's replying to who, but there are no timestamps, so some "later" footnotes (in the song) are chronologically earlier than the ones before. The "last word" goes to HenryMartyn, as he works on his documentary:
it’s a love story with a message that love involves give and take, and some ask for more than others. That’s not always such a bad thing, if you’re willing to give...I’m still looking for the right ending for my film, but I think I’m close. It feels funny to be searching for traces of Rydell where he was searching for traces of truth in this ballad, like we’re all chasing each other. Anyway, thanks for your continued help on this, friends. If nothing else, maybe we’re part of the cycle, bringing an old song to new listeners.
That feels like a happy-ish ending to me; ballads are always evolving over time, and even if we don't know what "really" happened that the historical events were based on, every generation is going to adapt and reinvent the song in their own way, and that's the beauty of art and life. Yay. But again--not fantasy.
And that's where I threw up my hands and decided "either I'm too stupid to find the speculative elements in the frame story, or I'm too stupid to appreciate this as a gem despite their absence, either way I'm not going to admit my incompetence in front of my smart work friends." Until
cahn posted a similar reaction and I figured I could ask my stupid questions online instead.So it turns out that, if you read "upthread," the responders replying to HenryMartyn note that he hasn't replied in years, and that he disappeared (like Rydell) before the end-of-year presentations. Implication being: the tour guide turned him (and Rydell) into trees as well.
In that sense, the choice to end on HenryMartyn's lines is a bold one, because it makes the ending more hopeful than it would have been otherwise--I got the sense that he was maybe fine with the concept--but also makes it more of a chore to find the twist. (I know some people like that. For me, with my brain, feeling like "I am too dumb to catch the Implications, woe is me, guess I'll go back to the kids' section" is something I have a negative reaction to, but that's not anyone else's problem.)
In skimming it this time, this line near the end stood out: "neither lover betrays the other’s expectations, and it’s only because of the villagers that their story turns tragic." At first this seems like "stupid townspeople want to get back at Ellen because they just don't understand true love," but now I'm wondering if the "villagers" are the other bloggers/us readers, wondering about the unresolution left by Martyn's disappearance. Ellen and William are happy, it's only the ambiguity left behind that hurts the rest of us. Hmm.
Mostly tangential: the "fake documentation" format lends itself to a lot of fake links, for instance, this is a thing:
Listen to the Kingston Trio: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”
Listen to Joan Baez: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”
Listen to Windhollow Faire: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”
Listen to Steeleye Span: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”
Listen to the Grateful Dead: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”
Listen to Metallica: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”
Listen to Moby K. Dick: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”
Listen to Jack White: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”
Listen to the Decemberists: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”
Listen to Cyrus Matheson: “Where Broken Hearts Do Gather” [FLAGGED by BonnieLass67][UNFLAGGED by LyricSplainer ModeratorBot]
Full Lyrics for “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” (traditional) (7 contributors, 95 notes, 68 comments, 19 reactions)
(see disambiguation for other versions)
(see related songs)
At 8 cents a word (the former cutoff for SFWA's "pro" threshold, I'm not sure what Uncanny's rate was at the time this was published, it's 10 cents now), that would earn you $9.84. :D
I'm teasing, but I also feel like some of my reaction is (uncalled for) sour grapes. Like, submission guidelines will say, "make sure it's polished, don't be too verbose, send only your best work!" And I feel like, if I tried to write a document with lots of tangential annotations, or put effort into rhyming an universe poem ("Oaken Hearts" doesn't rhyme, but it's a ballad, a lot of them don't anyway, so that's not a criticism), it would just be like "lol nope." Which, obviously, Sarah Pinsker is a pro and I am not a pro! I do not want to get an overinflated view of my mediocre efforts! But (and this is more relevant for something like the Escape Pod flash) when I see people who do similar things to me, mine fails, and theirs gets a pat on the back, I get frustrated because I wish I could be more specific about identifying what they have that I don't have. (And it's entirely possible, in some cases, that what they have is "ideological smugness" and I don't even want it, it would just be good to know!)
(This post is twice as long as "Dinosaur." I can either communicate in one-liner snarky aside mode or WALL OF TEXT mode, there is no middle option.)
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