“The Wild Robot” and the Problem with Metaphor

Fink the fox and Roz the robot in Dreamworks’ The Wild Robot

Chris Sanders (writer/director), The Wild Robot

When the service robot identified only as Roz washes ashore on a rugged Pacific Northwest island, it wants one thing: instructions. It races around the island, pestering wildlife with its preprogrammed spiel of helpfulness, cheer, and obedience. The animals won’t have it. Until circumstances make Roz responsible for an orphaned hatchling goose, which imprints on it as his mother. Suddenly Roz has purpose and a mission.

This film’s creators intended a message. Roz (Lupita Nyong’o) is a complete cypher, even to herself, until nurturing the gosling Brightbill defines her. A local fox, Fink (Pedro Pascal), initially sees Brightbill as an easy appetizer, but Rox manages to turn him into an ally. As the island’s wild inhabitants teach Roz to become a mother goose, they also learn together to overcome their natural enmities and live in trust.

For its intended audience of older children and their parents, this inclusive, communitarian message should ring true. I appreciate the intention behind it. The thesis, that nobody on the island is beholden to their natures, and can unify to protect their homeland against encroaching human technology, seems timely. As powerful forces in American society find creative ways to divide citizens and enflame culture-war animosities, the moral of overcoming division matters.

I enjoyed the underlying conceit. In less judicious hands, Roz could’ve become needlessly messianic, especially in later scenes, when her manufacturers try to reclaim her from a flying platform, literally on high. But Roz isn’t a messiah; like Paddington Bear, her guileless attempt to manufacture a place in life inspires those around her to evaluate their own choices. She makes everyone better, not through exhortation, but through simplicity and action.

However, there we encounter the problem with this storytelling approach. Linguist George Lakoff contends that human communication depends heavily on metaphor, the comparison of one form to another. Hope is the thing with feathers, Emily Dickinson wrote. (That’s a simile, yes; bear with me.) Dickinson doesn’t contend hope is a literal bird, but that it has sufficient bird-like qualities to bear the comparison, which she justifies in succeeding stanzas.

But any metaphor, pushed sufficiently hard, breaks down. Is hope migratory? Does it hunt or scavenge or live on carrion? Is hope a sweet songbird or an aggressive Canada goose? Metaphors are, by necessity, inexact, and don’t support extensive scrutiny. Many birds are dangerous to handle, bear diseases, and could kill humans. They also have a frustrating tendency to leave at predictable intervals, which undermines Dickinson’s metaphor.

This movie presents the differences between animal species as something Roz can overcome through honesty and innocence. The animals that disparage Roz for her attempts to teach Brightbill to fly come around to her position, slowly at first, simply because Roz’s need for purpose inspires them. Eventually, they learn to trust her enough that she inspires them to trust one another and huddle together during a violent winter storm.

Except, animals aren’t human communities, which could hypothetically pause their divisions to work together. The movie shows predators like foxes and grizzly bears consciously choosing not to eat prey animals—something they cannot do, because their digestive tracts can’t process vegetable matter. I’m reminded of Timothy Treadwell, the notorious Grizzly Man, who thought his big-heartedness defended him from grizzly bear attacks. Spoilers: the bears he loved killed him.

The broken metaphor leaves me struggling. We need the message of overcoming inherited divisions to resist the corporate invaders who would steal our resources. From Bacon’s Rebellion to today, wealthy oligarchs profit when they keep ordinary people divided and belligerent. This movie tells audiences that, supported by a shared purpose, we can overcome those divisions and unite to protect our island from the third-act invasion.

But it conveys that message in language that doesn’t withstand scrutiny. Grizzly bears aren’t disobedient puppies which need trained out of their aggression; they are muscular predators whose consumption serves an important role in forest ecosystems. Anthropomorphizing animals works well in movies like Disney’s Robin Hood, which shows animals outside their habitat, enacting human roles. The forested island ecosystem behind the story undermines this division and gives false ideas.

Please don’t misunderstand me. This movie has received accolades for its storytelling, visual design, and message, and I wouldn’t take anything away. But misplaced metaphors give honest, well-meaning people like Treadwell false ideals about how nature works. The idea that predators can stop being predators because they learned from an honest, naïve ingenue, teaches child audiences falsely optimistic lessons about how animals, and possibly human societies, work.

History, Horror Movies, and Literary Critique

Michael B. Jordan (center) and ensemble prepare to face the monsters, in Sinners

In late spring 2025, two movies dropped close enough together to be essentially simultaneous, and therefore comparable. Sinners, written and directed by Ryan Coogler (Black Panther), hit cinemas on April 18^th and became an immediate success. The fourth Fear Street movie, Prom Queen, shipped on Netflix on May 23^rd, and landed with a thud. These movies share significant overlap, so why did one succeed, and the other splat?

Both movies are historical reconstructions. Sinners recreates a pre-Hays Code gangster film, but with a primarily Black cast, adding the burdens of Jim Crow onto Prohibition-era themes. Around the halfway mark, it shifts from a musical gangster drama into a horror film, painted in shades of Quentin Tarantino. But throughout, it retains its core of Black Americans struggling to assert their identity in an era of overt, legalized bigotry.

Prom Queen, set in 1988, attempts to capture the experience of a 1980s “dead teenager” slasher flick. That’s all it does. Unlike Sinners, which unpacks multiple layers of Black experience and the economic dislocation of the post-WWI world, Prom Queen tries to return viewers to the era when audiences got giddy, giggly, and possibly horny while watching masked evildoers hack their way through hordes of pretty, sexually precocious youth.

Both movies are freestanding. Though Prom Queen joins an existing franchise, viewers needn’t watch prior Fear Street movies to understand most of this one. I had definite quibbles with the original trilogy, but overall liked it. But without the connection to the existing movies, this one feels adrift. The original trilogy existed in conversation with prior generations of horror film canon; without that, this one appears merely lurid.

Sinners shows two Black men who share one goal: to build a distinctly Black space in segregated Mississippi. Their Club Juke aspirations, where Black musicians sing Black songs to Black audiences, bespeak a desire to simply exist, without the need to propitiate White gatekeepers. But a trio of local Whites demands entry anyway. Yes, the trio are supernatural monsters, but that’s ancillary. At root, Whiteness defines them, and their demands.

White Americans have a history of expecting admittance to Black spaces: blues clubs, Juneteenth parades, the entire disco subculture. But when White people arrive, they begin making exorbitant demands, expecting the existing Black infrastructure to assuage their White fears. I say this as a White man who frequently attends Black church; I know Whiteness makes aggressive, high-handed demands on Black identity. We eventually drive Black people from their own spaces.

Set aside everything else that happens in Sinners. Pause the time-shifting griot magic on the dance floor, the Smokestack Twins’ need for cash in a cash-strapped community, or the bloodthirsty monsters that eventually besiege the club. Those are trappings, but the movie is really about Black people building Black spaces, and White people demanding admittance. Viewers needn’t ruminate upon these themes, but these themes drive the movie.

The killer prepares to dispatch another interchangeable teenager in Fear Street: Prom Queen

Similarly, the original Fear Street trilogy uses the trappings of past cinema: 1990s horror comedies, 1970s slasher flicks, and 2010s psychological horrors. But again, these are set dressing. The movies are about inherited guilt and the degrees to which the living bear responsibility for their ancestors’ sins. The movies don’t foreground those themes or demand answers from the audience, but they exist behind the garish surfaces.

The best horror narratives have a definable spine that says something about us, the audience. The Call of Cthulhu asks what might happen if God were ultimately hostile to human needs. Cujo depicts a mother reduced to helplessness and the inability to keep her children safe. Night of the Living Dead, made during the Cold War, asks what happens when buried secrets rise up and demand admission.

Again, audiences don’t need to spend time mulling over these themes. But we also need them there, to give their narratives meaning. Jason Voorhiees and Fredde Kruger say something about class divisions and suburban anomie, and when studios remove these themes from sequels to focus on gross-outs and bloodbaths, the resulting movies just don’t work. Horror succeeds or fails based on what it says, or doesn’t say, about us.

By contrast, Prom Queen uses the original trilogy’s trappings, but forgets the driving themes. Like countless Freddy sequels, it dresses up pretty, and spills copious blood, but it doesn’t feel larger than that. Some themes exist, but only laterally, and without connection to the original trilogy’s message. Like too many sequels, it’s all style, no substance. But without substance, it’s easy to forget, and audiences probably will.

Justice, Doubt, and Modern Storytelling

Nicholas Hoult (center) in Juror #2, with Leslie Bibb (left) and Adrienne C. Moore (right)

Clint Eastwood (director), Juror #2

When Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is the only juror to vote “not guilty” on the first poll, we’re clearly meant to remember Reginald Rose’s 1954 classic Twelve Angry Men. Like in that classic, Kemp speaks brave words about the meaning of justice and the importance of deliberation. Unlike in Rose’s classic, we already know Kemp’s real reason: he has doubts about the trial’s underlying premise. He believes that he, not the accused, might be guilty.

Therein lies the difference which has arisen in the seventy years between these two movies. In 1954, as America still recovered from its post-WWII hangover, filmmakers at least pretended to believe that justice existed, and humans could reach it through dialectical means. Whether audiences shared that belief, or even pretended to share it, remains debatable. By 2024, doubt and ambiguity were the presumed background of storytelling. The idea that rationality could uncover truth was passé.

Unlike Rose’s classic, which confines virtually all action to a single room, director Clint Eastwood swings the action widely throughout the Savannah, Georgia, environs. Kemp and another juror (J.K. Simmons) perform unauthorized investigations at the scene of young Kendall Carter’s purported murder. Another juror prolongs proceedings with technical maneuvers she learned from true crime podcasts. Kemp and his pregnant wife agonize over the proceedings together. He knows these approaches are all strictly against jury protocol.

Meanwhile, Kemp struggles with one secret: a recovering alcoholic, he was at the bar where Kendall was last seen alive with her boyfriend, defendant James Sythe (Gabriel Basso, The Night Agent). Kemp didn’t drink, but he wanted to. If his wife, employer, and others discover he came within inches of violating his sobriety, he’ll lose everything. But protecting his secret means concealing what came after: he definitely hit something near the spot where Kendall died.

As Kemp uses jury procedure to delay a verdict, and allows others to do likewise, his internal conflict becomes more all-consuming. He cannot confide in lawyers, jurors, or his wife. The one person he shares with, his sponsor Larry (Kiefer Sutherland), doubles as an attorney, and warns him that coming clean will create seismic legal repercussions. So Kemp suffers in silence, knowing that only bad options remain for him. The jury room becomes a battlefield.

The longer we watch Kemp struggle with his secret, the more we realize: for this movie, ambiguity is the point. We don’t watch Kemps struggle because we’re seeing the character overcome obstacles on his way to the resolution. We certainly don’t watch because today’s society acknowledges moral complexity and doubt as the normal course of events. No, rather than seeing ambiguity as something characters pass through while approaching resolution, ambiguity has become its own point.

Admittedly, Hollywood moral ambiguity isn’t novel. Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum played grim antiheroes generations before movies like Training Day and Gone Girl left audiences with no clear heroes to support. But this movie goes further. We don’t have to sort the respective characters’ loathsomeness while deciding which one is right. We simply have no foundation from which to interpret events. The script takes extraordinary steps to avoid presenting steps to a clear narrative resolution.

Kemp even manages to convince himself he’s innocent, before surrendering to doubts and re-convincing himself of his guilt. Prosecutor Faith Killibrew (Toni Collette) begins the trial absolutely convinced of defendant Sythe’s guilt, but becomes increasingly doubtful as the jurors descend into infighting. Yeah, her continued prosecution while she doubts her own case is an ethical violation. But it’s nickel-and-dime stuff compared to the wild violations of procedure that Kemp encourages to assuage his guilty conscience.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t yearn for the moral certainty of John Wayne movies, which clearly delineate heroes and villains. The only story tension comes from whether the heroes will win, which is no tension whatsoever, since outcomes are as inevitable as a medieval morality play. Ambiguity is more than just realistic, it’s a narrative motivator, as audiences seek to untangle the truth concealed behind the rationalizations which characters write and rewrite for themselves.

But this isn’t that. Though the movie implies that truth exists, it subverts every tool to discover it, leading to an irresolute “lady or the tiger” conclusion. In Gone Girl, everyone’s manifold sins are unveiled, and everyone faces consequences. Here, we just flip-flop along for most of two hours, before the final shot, a literal stare-down. Ambiguity has become its own justification. Doubt no longer motivates the story, because it apparently now is the story.

The Persistence of Epic Novels

Plato and Aristotle, depicted by Raphael

Aristotle, in the Poetics, records a sentiment probably shared by 3,000 years of classical studies students: the epics of Homer are too damn long. The Iliad and the Odyssey each comprise twenty-four “books,” each book running hundreds of lines. In the ancient Athenian recitation competitions, one speaker would memorize one book, and one or two would speak per day, meaning recitations lasted anywhere from nearly two weeks, to nearly a month.

To Aristotle, this was excessive, and he asked for “epics” which a single performer could recite in one or two nights. But Aristotle, writing half a millennium after Homer, might’ve missed something important. Classicist Barry B. Powell suggests, in the introduction to his translation of the Odyssey, that Homer’s performances probably did last only one night. Today, when Homer is “required reading,” we forget he was pop entertainment in his day.

Powell postulates that Homer was probably illiterate, and didn’t have his massive epics memorized. Instead, Powell suggests that Homer improvised his poetry on well-known themes, and each performance was unique. They probably lasted for one- or two-night engagements, But when somebody finally pledged to transcribe Homer’s poetry, Powell believes, Homer composed in long-form, unpacking details usually elided, to create a sweeping saga intended for the page.

This difference matters. Even three millennia ago, Homer realized that people reading a book committed themselves to something vaster, with a willingness to persevere across the span of days. Works intended for public recitation generally run much shorter—it takes approximately two hours to read the entire Gospel of Mark aloud. But books are a different order of beast, and Homer, transcribing early in the medium’s history, already knew that.

Now, as then, we have conflicting desires for short-form and longer entertainments. There’s nothing new under the sun. We want stories we can devour in one sitting, often already prepared for the next one, and we want stories that take days to consume, which we must pursue doggedly. But the changing media market has split our interests. First television, and more recently the internet, swallowed up the market for short-form, one-evening entertainments.

An undated traditional depiction of Homer

Authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote short stories for commercial purposes. The magazines in which they published, like The Atlantic, the Saturday Evening Post, and The New Yorker, had large audiences and paid handsomely. At his peak, Fitzgerald notoriously tore off short stories for magazine markets to get paid, and wrote the novels for which he’s now more famous to indulge a literary inclination that wouldn’t have paid particularly well.

Since Fitzgerald’s time, the magazine market has become considerably less lucrative. The Atlantic no longer publishes fiction and The New Yorker mostly only publishes well-known names or controversial content that drives engagement. A handful of genre magazines pay moderate rates, and art purists still regularly launch small-circulation “zines,” but the short-form entertainment market has moved mainly onto electronic media.

Conversely, contra Aristotle, the book continues to harbor the epic format he thought Homer overstretched. From Dante and Milton to J.R.R. Tolkien and Tom Clancy, authors preserve Homer’s physical length and dramatic sweep, because people really want that scale and that depth of immersion. People want an “entertainment” that will take them out of themselves and their own lives for literally days, even weeks, at a stretch.

And electronic media largely can’t provide that. Compare the prose and streaming versions of one of our time’s greatest epic authors. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series certainly has its detractors, but Jordan’s audience remained loyal, even when many felt his middle novels lagged. Not only were the books physically and thematically massive, but his story unfolded across multiple books, and readers remained immersed in his milieu for years.

But the streaming media adaptation of Jordan’s books largely fell flat. Not only did it take two years to produce a second season, even with the storyline already written, but when the product finally emerged, it suffered from cost overruns and content bloat. The audience from Jordan’s novels disliked the compromises which the transition between media forced, and the series has struggled to find a non-book audience.

Simply put, Aristotle was wrong. Audiences don’t find the length, density, and complexity of Homer’s epics off-putting. Indeed, as TV and Netflix continue consuming our short-form entertainments, audiences not only still buy books, but they support longer books and convoluted book series. Aristotle thought the hoi polloi weren’t lettered enough to follow stories that took days to develop, but given the choice, that’s apparently what audiences want.

How Americans Make (and Remake) History

Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America

At the height of the controversy over American historical monuments, Harvard poet and Atlantic staff writer Clint Smith visited some of them. He wanted to see firsthand the places where America memorializes people, places, and events associated with slavery. For those who love terminology, Smith was primarily interested in historiography, not history; that is, he cared more about how we tell our stories than necessarily what stories we tell.

Smith presents a detailed travelogue of seven historical sites: six in America, and one African slave port. Smith records the visiting experience, talking with the guides and conservators responsible for transmitting the historical narrative onto listening audiences. He records how the stories told to audiences, including tourists, corresponds with the documentary record—and how it doesn’t. The differences can be astounding for dedicated history readers.

Some locations have unsurprising responses. Smith visits the Whitney Plantation, a tourist destination dedicated specifically to slavery. There he finds a painstakingly restored image of the sufferings enslaved Black Americans endured, even at putatively benevolent masters’ hands. He also visits Blandford Cemetery, the largest surviving Confederate graveyard. Visitors flock to revel in Lost Cause mythology, while pained curators try to correct the record for audiences who don’t want to hear.

Other locations prove more unexpected. Monticello, for instance. The historical trust that owns Thomas Jefferson’s plantation once notoriously whitewashed his reputation, and aggressively denied his relationship with Sally Hemings, but has reversed itself, becoming a haven for serious historians and truth-seekers. Gorèe Island, off the Senegal coast, has moved millions to tears with its brutal narrative of the Transatlantic Slave Trade—a narrative Smith admits is probably mythologized.

Between the locations, Smith finds an America caught in an awkward transition. Americans overall, including White Americans, have become more willing to face our slaveholding history, and the long-term consequences which slavery continues to wreak on the present. But faced with this rapidly changing shared history, some Americans simply refuse to face the evidence. Others, even worse, cling to myths that contradict the copious documents and works of serious historians.

Clint Smith, Ph.D.

History isn’t just a matter of scholarship and research. It also involves storytelling, in oral and written form. For instance, Smith visits Galveston Island, the site of the Juneteenth event, where Union soldiers proclaimed freedom to Texas’ enslaved population. Texas became the first state to proclaim Juneteenth as a state holiday, and historical reenactors perform the Juneteenth liberation every year, an event Smith describes as emotionally fraught and almost religious.

Yet Smith also notes that one in ten American public-school students attend school in Texas, where the state’s board of education continues to promulgate textbook standards which whitewash slavery’s impact. Lost Cause mythology permeates Texas’ official state history teaching standards. Sure, enacting Juneteenth is important for Texans to experience history. But that only reaches those who voluntarily make the pilgrimage, and I question how many White Texans do so.

One of Smith’s most telling narratives happens in Manhattan, a site not normally associated with slavery. But New York State didn’t abolish slavery until 1827, so binary narratives of “slave” and “free” states don’t hold water. With a professional tour guide’s assistance, Smith finds a plaque memorializing a slave market which existed for fifty years on Wall Street, within spitting distance of the Stock Exchange that now embodies American capitalism.

This plaque exists because of citizen activism. Manhattan’s Black population remembered the slave market in oral tradition, but no official body remembered anything. Then, during the Occupy Wall Street protests, one activist took it upon himself to comb the historical records. The activist, whom Smith doesn’t name, pulled maps, records, and images demonstrating the exact location of Wall Street’s market, forcing city fathers to create the first-ever official memorial.

Examples like this flood Smith’s narrative with exciting life. History, in Smith’s telling, isn’t only events which happened; it’s also the living, breathing humans who transmit those events to coming generations. Some historians make scrupulous efforts to preserve facts accurately, even when they reflect poorly on our ancestors; others market a feel-good panacea, sometimes because their hidebound audience will accept nothing else.

One wonders how Smith’s book will read for future generations. We exist in times of turmoil, as Americans increasingly favor honesty over mythology. Our official history, what Smith calls our “public memory,” is changing rapidly, and nobody knows what final form it will take. Smith provides a snapshot of that transition, taking place in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Smith shows us history as process, not product.

On a similar topic: Leaving the Church of St. Robert E. Lee

Cowboys and the Power of Storytelling

From left: Jaimz Woolvett, Morgan Freeman, and Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven

I saw Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven in the cinema when it was first released in 1992, and loved it. Then I didn’t watch it again for thirty years, until this week. Given my family’s conservatism, I grew up surrounded by Westerns, especially John Wayne and James Arness, but my parents specifically exempted Clint Eastwood. My mother disparaged Unforgiven as, in her view, a return to his youthful form of violence for its own sake.

Then as now, I felt Mom misunderstood what happened. When it came to dispensing actual violence, Morgan Freeman’s character, Ned Logan, can’t actually stomach it; he’s grown a conscience in his old age. Eastwood’s William Munny feels every human emotion while sober, and can only become the killer he once was after numbing himself with alcohol. Their ally, the self-proclaimed Schofield Kid, likewise feels every inch of pain.

Rewatching Unforgiven in adulthood, however, I noticed another theme which teenaged Kevin missed. The characters spend remarkable swathes of time telling one another stories. From the moment the Schofield Kid enters Munny’s homestead, he demands to know which among the many legends of Munny’s violent exploits are true—legends which the Kid repeats giddily. The Kid enjoys stories he’s heard, and wants to become a story himself.

Almost simultaneously, the contract enforcer “English Bob” enters Big Whiskey, Wyoming, accompanied by his official biographer. This author, Beauchamp, almost matters more than English Bob himself. Beauchamp has dedicated himself to setting English Bob’s exploits in print, preserving Western storytelling for an Eastern audience thirsty for lurid adventures. When Beauchamp discovers English Bob’s stories are fabricated, he drops his ally and attaches himself to another storyteller.

Beauchamp is himself a fabulist, who uncritically repeats stories of White men dispensing karmic justice, protecting innocent (White) women, and taming a land wrested from savage Indians. He describes a world where judicious applications of White male violence bring order to a putatively disorganized land. His character’s entire point, of course, is that he abandons his preferred story when Sheriff Daggett humiliates English Bob and offers an alternative story.

Much of what we believe we know about the American West comes from fabulists like Beauchamp. People who survived the West told their stories to an uncritical penny press, which devoured their frequently ridiculous memoirs. We remember Wyatt Earp, and forget his arguably more accomplished brothers, because Wyatt survived and had a press agent. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show sold an almost entirely fake account of western settlement.

These characters and their hyperbolic stories made good fodder for the nascent film industry. Early stars like Tom Mix, who pioneered the white-hat cowboy mythology, presented a world of moral absolutes, swift civilian justice, and libertarian freedom. Mix bequeathed the reins to similar morally unambiguous performers like the “singing cowboys,” Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, then to the cowboys my parents loved, Marshall Dillon and Wayne’s Rooster Cogburn.

We mustn’t forget, however, that these performances served a social role. Tom Mix corresponded with the rising social tensions which preceded World War I. Rogers and Autry sang their sermons during the Great Depression, while John Wayne and James Arness flourished during the Cold War. John Wayne arguably kept trying to re-fight the early Cold War well into his seventies, limping along, mortally wounded by exposure to nuclear test fallout.

Owen Wister’s genre-defining Western, The Virginian, begins not with character or action, but with a preface lamenting the disappearance of cowboys. The cowboy, to Wister, represents an absent ethic in American life, a moral purity unadulterated by civilization’s decadence. Just as Homer believed true Greek greatness ended with the Mycenaeans, and Arthurian romance locates chivalry among knights of yore, Westerns imply American greatness happened “back then.”

The spaghetti Westerns which made Eastwood’s career, with their moral ambiguity and their casual brutality, arose as the Cold War dragged on interminably. The Italians who made these movies, including Eastwood’s mentor Sergio Leone, witnessed firsthand how flag-waving stories of bygone national glory looked pale against events actually occurring in Europe. They presented a counter-narrative of the cowboy West as brutal, amoral, and already dead.

By 1993, however, even that counter-narrative had become disappointing. Eastwood presents the differing stories of America’s West—the Kid’s romantic savagery, Beauchamp’s redemptive violence, Daggett’s tales of law and order—as equally disappointing. All characters, in this West, wind up equally lonely, aiming for the same cold clay. “The Wild West,” this movie acknowledges, never existed; it was a story we told ourselves. Like all stories, it has to end.

Horror Movies, Community, and the Power of Stories

Sisters Cindy and Ziggy face off, in Act One of Fear Street Part 2

Near the beginning of the second installment in Netflix’s Fear Street teenage horror trilogy, principal characters Ziggy Berman (Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink) and her goody two-shoes sister Cindy (relative unknown Emily Rudd) have a quarrel. Cindy, who has worked hard, gained some level of respectability, and hopes to someday attend college, sees Ziggy as a malcontent and heel-dragger. Ziggy sees Cindy as a sell-out. We’re all trapped, Ziggy reminds her sister, by the witch’s curse.

Watching this exchange the first time, I had no problem. The entire Fear Street trilogy deals with the ways community patterns, whether healthy or dysfunctional, repeat themselves across generations, and the question of whether individuals can break the cycles of inheritance. It’s a sort of funhouse mirror version of the Small Town America myth, pitting the bucolic town of Sunnyvale against the rusticating despair of Shadyside. The “witch’s curse” myth simply symbolizes that dismal inheritance.

Then, the personality behind the widely watched YouTube channel “Scaredy Cats” weighed in. Like me, series host Matt (who also goes by Mildred) views art and literature through a political and economic lens. Mildred sees Ziggy and Cindy’s argument as a nihilistic surrender to capitalist forces that want to keep the working class beholden; Ziggy’s claim that some centuries-old disembodied witch tale holds Shadyside back, is emblematic of the ways workers internalize a poverty narrative.

I initially balked at Matt’s characterization. How dare this big-city interloper, an urbane media creator from Toronto, Ontario (of all places), tell me how to interpret small-town American malaise! Ziggy and Cindy’s Manichaean dichotomy perfectly describes my experience with small and small-ish American towns, where some people try to escape by working hard, “improving” themselves, and following the rules; while others try to drag the ambitious down with mockery, derision, and accusations of rank disloyalty.

On further consideration, though, I realized Mildred may be partly correct. Ziggy has internalized a colonial campfire boogeyman narrative of pessimistic resignation, while Cindy has internalized a modernist, cheerful narrative of success through conformity. In this movie, narratives don’t just explain events, they create identity. Which, thinking about it, is essentially what much American rah-rah boosterism does: it aligns individuals with whichever story makes them most comfortable with the circumstances capitalism makes available to them.

About the time Cindy and Ziggy quarrel about individual identities, their doomed summer camp prepares for an annual tradition, the Color War. Campers from Sunnyvale battle campers from Shadyside in an elaborate capture-the-flag which, apparently, Sunnyvale has won for forty consecutive years. Calling it the “Color War” makes it sound racial, which it isn’t (both communities are essentially integrated), except yes it is. Both camps muster enthusiasm with songs and speeches “othering” the opposing camp.

Watching these adolescent war conclaves, I couldn’t help remembering the stories used in small Nebraska towns where I’ve lived for thirty years. Towns, schools, and workplaces constantly encourage local loyalty through tales of cowboys, sodbusters, and the Oregon Trail, stories of supposed ancestral persistence, often stripped of real history. By contrast, capitalism, higher ed, and mass media tempt youth with narratives of shiny modernist counter-conformity, narratives that often involve walking away from your hometown forever.

Stories unify groups, while also making opportunities available to individuals—and, importantly, also closing other opportunities. People who want to escape small-town life have to choose how they’ll achieve that, which forecloses the chance to find the niche where they’ll successfully serve their community. Likewise, those who have loyalty to their community, choose careers and family paths that make moving out insuperably difficult, ensuring they’ll stay put forever. Just remember, you can’t serve two masters.

In the movie’s culmination, Ziggy and Cindy, having overtaken an axe-wielding maniac to find each other, both reject their internalized narratives. Cindy realizes her devotion to “escaping” Shadyside blinds her to local responsibilities, while Ziggy realizes she’s valued her community over the people in it. Both of them have, temporarily, transcended the narratives they once accepted unquestioningly. Then the slasher returns and, without a guiding narrative for their actions, they both wind up dead. (-ish.)

So yeah, Matt’s actually correct, these narratives—Ziggy’s inherited narrative, and Cindy’s imposed one—are artificial and constricting. But, like money or race, the fact they’re artificial doesn’t make them any less real. American small towns tend to stay rich or poor, conservative or progressive, healthy or dysfunctional, across several generations. And they stay this way because of the stories their people tell each other. This, I believe, is the central message of Fear Street.

See Also:
Fear Street and the Illusions of Community

Severus Snape and the Backstory of Doom

Professor Snape (Alan Rickman) showing his usual patient, nurturing classroom technique

Who is Severus Snape, and why do Harry Potter fans have such high feelings about him? From his first appearance in the Harry Potter novels, Professor Snape comes across as a bully, a man-child with unresolved oedipal issues who turns his self-hatred on students. Surely I wasn’t the only reader who shrugged, remembering teachers I had like that. Some people become teachers because they aren’t done learning yet.

This weekend, I posted an internet meme to a popular discussion board, suggesting filmmakers could profitably make a film series about Professor Snape’s transition from one of Lord Voldemort’s shock troopers, to Dumbledore’s inside man. Because I don’t follow fan culture closely, I failed to anticipate the high feelings which this would generate. Besides predictable rants against J.K. Rowling personally, many fans took umbrage at anything foregrounding Snape favorably.

In fairness, I understand that anger. I remember watching trailers for Todd Phillips’ 2019 movie Joker, and reflexively rejecting the characterization. I wrote back then that giving Joker traditional motivations “devalues the character.” Besides the fact that Joker is like a hurricane, and simply destroys because it’s his nature, it also recycles a weatherbeaten writing trope. I’m tired of “nice guys” snapping because they’ve been crushed down so long.

That character arc, the broken “nice guy,” superficially applies to Snape. When Harry sees into Snape’s memories through the Pensieve in Order of the Phoenix, we witness “nice” teenage Severus trying vainly to romance the future Lily Potter, only to get bullied by tall, dashing, broad-shouldered James. Clearly, in Snape’s mind, he had the potential to become a charming teenage lover, but James and the “cool kids” denied him the opportunity.

If filmmakers wrote this story, I’d be disappointed. Not only because we’ve seen this weak story so frequently, but also because it makes Snape a reliable narrator. Please. We know Snape lies as easily as breathing. Not only does he lie to others regularly, but we learn in later books, he lies to himself. The memory Harry sees through the Pensieve has probably been edited numerous times, to offer Snape the justification he eagerly seeks.

J.K. Rowling

Rowling’s narrative emerges from her Scottish Presbyterian religious background. This requires a little theological understanding. Presbyterianism, with its Calvinist background, holds all humans are essentially sinful, or in Calvin’s words, Totally Depraved. We’re all liars, egoists, gluttons, and bigots, awaiting salvation from a merciful God whose entire being consists of everything good and beneficial in this universe. Only God can save us from ourselves.

The catechistic nature of wizard school mirrors the Calvinist journey out of sin. Three school houses encourage different virtues; the fourth teaches students to embrace their Total Human Depravity and remain sinful. Not for nothing is Dumbledore’s domicile at the peak of the tallest tower, while the Slytherin dormitories are in the dungeon. They provide two opposite aspirations… and Snape chooses the aspiration closest to the earth.

Of Snape’s many failings, foremost is his lack of self-reflection. Even after his loyalties cost Lily Potter her life, he continues whining about the unfairness to him, not to everyone Lily loved. He shows no capacity for even rudimentary repentance, because he doesn’t understand himself well enough for that. People like Snape—arrogant, convinced of their own rightness, and plush with privilege—are prime pickings for malevolent manipulators like Voldemort.

(I promise, I’m not talking about current politics.)

That’s the Snape whose backstory I’m interested in seeing dramatised. Not the “nice guy” pushed to breaking, but the deluded sinner, the self-righteous egoist who hasn’t learned to examine himself coolly and revise his faults. I want the Snape who pushes forward with the grace and discretion of a cattle stampede, failing to realize he’s the villain in other people’s stories, until he’s abruptly forced to reckon with the consequences.

I acknowledge, this justification omits many people’s most adamant objection to new Potterverse material: the person of J.K. Rowling. Her insistence on voicing opinions which her young, mostly left-leaning audience finds objectionable, isn’t insignificant. But, as I’ve written recently, it’s a mistake to expect Great Artists to be Good People. Stories like Harry Potter don’t emerge from healthy, well-adjusted minds.

Poor writing could torpedo any Snape story beforehand. Especially if the writer succumbs to sentimentality, or reaches for low-hanging fruit, Snape’s backstory could be irretrievably ruined. But if a writer accepts, in advance, that Snape’s “nice guy” self-image is a delusion, and that he’s incapable of understanding his own Total Depravity, the story produced could be engaging and worthwhile.

 

On related topics:

• Harry Potter and the House Elf Manifesto
• What J.K. Rowling Says About You and Me
• Harry Potter and the Butt-Plant of Destiny

The Other Ever After

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 71
Amber Sparks, May We Shed These Human Bodies: Stories

A desperately solitary suffragette finds love in a bitter winter, and hates it, cursing her heirs for the burden. A banal schoolteacher, riven with heartbreak, finds himself the only survivor of a family plagued by heart disease. A school devises a curriculum for future teenage superheroes, but finds itself accidentally cradling a nascent supervillain. A young girl escapes her family ghosts, only to find the ghosts are her actual family.

Amber Sparks’ debut collection channels fairy stories and folktales, but in a contemporary setting, a permeable world where dream logic infiltrates our banal technological lives. It’s tempting to compare her work to Magic Realist authors like Borges and Kafka. But these very short stories, some under one page, represent a distinct Amber Sparks style that accepts influences, without remaining slavishly dependent upon them.

Early stories in this collection more obviously imitate Sparks’ fairy tale influences. The opening story, “Death and the People,” features a literally embodied Death simultaneously vacating the entire Earth. But massed humanity, initially embracing the opportunity for a clean break, discovers something unexpected in the Afterlife: eternal, transcendent boredom. This story, and some closely following it, blatantly resemble the narrative voice of the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault.

Like the classic fairy stories, Sparks’ narratives are a collision between tone and content. Her voice of naïve innocence suggests a storyteller unaffected by life’s petty discontents. But like Red Riding Hood, her characters’ attempts to display basic independence explode in their faces. Hers is a world where people find themselves blown back into dependent, pre-written roles, though less from moral veracity than because it’s tough to fight indoctrination.

As the collection progresses, however, Sparks breaks from the storybook voice. Her tone becomes darker, more aggressive, deeply unsentimental. Stories like “Cocoon,” about a visit to an old-folks’ home gone terribly wrong, or “Vesuvius,” wherein a public figure’s wife reclaims control of her life by destroying what her husband loves, maintain the ethereal tone while refusing to be cute. These stories brim with the violence implicit in our postmodern situation.

Amber Sparks

Individual stories vary in tone from whimsy, to seductive bedtime story, to outright horror. Collectively, however, a through-line develops of a world still suffused with the wonder children take for granted. Though only a few tales involve recourse to the supernatural to explain this wonder-working influence, Sparks nevertheless evokes the speculation that, behind the world we all equitably see, resides another world visible to the blessed, or cursed, few.

Reading Sparks, I cannot help remembering Maria Tatar, who writes that children enjoy stories for different reasons than adults. Reading, for children, involves immersion into a deeply sensory world to which they haven’t become inured, like the adults around them. Children want experiences that, with their underdeveloped bodies, they cannot directly have. Stories then become ways, not to escape real life, but to immerse themselves more fully in reality.

Something similar happens reading Amber Sparks. We, as adults, have the bodily capacity to participate in real life’s wonder. But a life comprised of compromise, belittlement, and need, inevitably stunts our spirits: adults are capable of doing profound things, we just don’t do them. Sparks attempts, mostly successfully, to recapture the grand spirit children share, reconstituting that magnificence in full-grown bodies. She encourages the audacity we craved as kids.

“Urban fantasy” has become a mainstream genre in today’s publishing world. Generally, this means fantasy stories with contemporary settings, heroic quest epics that superficially resemble noir thrillers or bodice-ripper romances. But arguably, Amber Sparks deserves the “urban fantasy” moniker better, because her narrative uses the ambling, transcendent fantasy of childhood bedtime stories, transplanted into a close-set, claustrophobic adult world of city streets and sooty jobs.

Even the book’s physical design emulates this childlike clarity. Running under 150 pages (plus back matter), this book’s mass resembles children’s storybooks. Many pages are tinted to look faded and old, like yellowed heirloom pages: Mommy and Daddy are sharing the stories we loved when we were your age, Sweety. In that moment, we’re all immersed in childhood storytelling passion together, untethered by jobs or boring old physical age.

As a storyteller, Sparks captures the collision between childhood wonder and adulthood capability, often overlooked by other writers, because audiences overlook it in themselves. She encourages us to believe, unencumbered by demands of money or responsibility. Even if we can’t stop being boring grown-ups every day, Sparks gives readers permission to dream big for an afternoon, an hour. And we finish reading, feeling like we’ve been given a gift.

The Brothers Grimm Visit Deepest America

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 62
Diane Wolkstein, The Magic Orange Tree and Other Haitian Folktales

Modern Euro-American scholars like Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan unabashedly regard written and visual communications as normal in modern society, and oral communications as “vestigial,” in Ong’s terminology. Storytelling, once the chief means of conveying history and public morals (see Maria Tatar), is regarded as a lingering remnant, like your tailbone or your appendix. But what about societies where literacy remains rare? Do such societies not count?

Acclaimed folklorist, storyteller, and one-woman Broadway performer Diane Wolkstein took her tape recorder to rural Haiti in the late 1970s, hoping to catch the sounds of the countryside’s legendary storytellers. Even back then these modern bards were endangered, squeezed by American television and radio. But while electricity remained (and remains) a scarce resource in upland Haiti, these oral storytellers remain an integral part of Haitian community life.

Wolkstein recounts, not just the stories themselves, but how she came to collect them. Being usually the only white face among the ebon-hued Haitian crowd, she witnessed not only the energetic, theatrical raconteurs themselves, but the ecstatic audience that surrounded them. Brought together by markets, pot-luck dinners, and street dances, the crowds shared a true communal experience. Here the old pre-Gutenberg community ethic doesn’t just survive, it thrives.

Some stories she collected, Wolkstein writes, have clear precedents in printed literature. She notes how some stories are clearly retold from the Brothers Grimm, African folktales, and elsewhere. However, other stories are clearly original to Haiti’s impoverished, war-torn, pre-literate social structure. Our society has grown accustomed to fairy tales as either ancient artifacts, or products of single authors; Wolkstein presents new-to-us stories written by an entire culture.

The twenty-seven stories Wolkstein collects here reflect a uniquely Haitian perspective. “Papa God and General Death” describes a peasant meeting the two most important forces in Haitian life, religion and mortality. (Wolkstein visited during Baby-Doc Duvalier’s reign.) “I’m Tipingee” features a young heroine proving her resilience in a culture where children, until they’re old enough to work, are mere baggage. An American wouldn’t write such harsh but insightful stories.

Diane Wolkstein

And Americans probably couldn’t write stories as transcendent as “Bye-Bye.” An allegory of emigration, it reflects a society whose highest aspiration is to leave everything behind and start over. Yet in many ways, this story feels remarkably familiar to modern Americans. Like apocalyptic End Times superstitions, it contrasts the virtuous few able to leave Earth and fly to Heaven (depicted here as New York), with the struggling many Left Behind.

These stories have definite religious components. “Papa God” is a recurrent, and humanly fallible, character. Spirits, ancestors, and magic permeate these tales. But beyond personal faith, the religion arises from the stories themselves. By bringing people together in mass gatherings, speaking aloud their moral values, and bonding them together against oppressive regimes, these stories embody the bond-building goals Émile Durkheim identified as rudimentary to the human religious experience.

By the author's own admission, these stories weren't necessarily the best-told she encountered while researching folk tales in Haiti. Haitian storytelling relies on voice, gesture, stage presence. The flat page lacks the beauty of the oral tale, and some of these stories may have been a little weak in the telling; but on the page they reveal a great deal about Haiti, and are a fascinating read besides.

Folk tales reveal a great deal about a culture-what it values, how members of the society relate, what their beliefs are. These tales do exactly that. While they aren't as clear-cut, with a defined beginning, middle, and end, as American readers have become accustomed to, they do give away a great detail about Haiti. Life is unfinished; hardship is to be embraced and studied; the spirit world is right here at hand, not a million miles away above the clouds.

I had the privilege of corresponding briefly with Diane Wolkstein briefly, before her sudden passing in 2013. Though an inveterate world traveler and seasoned folklorist, Wolkstein admitted Haiti and its stories had remarkable staying power with her. Stories like “The Magic Orange Tree” and “Mother of the Waters” remained staples of her live performance for thirty years. This book remains her best-selling work, for reasons eminently clear in her text.

Even on their own, these stories stand as a monument to the creative act and the power of the human intellect. These stories will infect your head like a virus, spreading and replicating, until you have to pass them on. Read them casually, and you will be enlightened. Study them seriously, and you may be transformed.

Has Jim Butcher Changed—Or Have I?

I just can’t bring myself to finish Jim Butcher’s newest Harry Dresden novel, Ghost Story. This frustrates and confuses me, because I’ve enjoyed every book in the series up to this point. This one continues the same dynamic character tensions and intricate situations, and takes the series’ backstory to new levels. So I certainly can’t say the book is any less good than its predecessors—just the opposite, if anything.

Yet I stalled out around page 225, and I can’t bring myself to pick it up again. Why the sudden change?

It’s not just Harry Dresden I’ve strayed from. A friend put me onto the first Dresden novel back in the spring of 2008, and I read all the series in print as fast as I could. The concept impressed me so much that I started snapping up every author I could: Kat Richardson, Seanan McGuire, Thomas E. Sniegoski, Caitlin Kittredge, Jes Battis. As with any genre, some authors really stunk up the joint. But others were quite smart, inventive, and engaging.

I read my last urban fantasy novel in mid-December 2010. I’d read them at a rate of about four per month for over two-and-a-half years, squeezing them in amid grad school requirements, more sober novels, and other “serious” reading. When I put the last one down, I had over half a dozen waiting for my time. A couple were half-finished, the rest waiting for me to start. And I made a good-faith effort to start. Believe me, I tried.

Maybe I burned myself out. If I overloaded on urban fantasy, I have no one but myself to blame. But considering what a glut these hard-boiled fantasies have been on the market recently, why hasn’t the entire genre burned out? Is there no critical mass beyond which readers cannot handle the saturation? Evidently not.

The problem must be me.

Publishers crank these books out so rapidly that the authors have little time to finish one before they must start the next. These companies, many of which began as labors of love by small entrepreneurs who expected only minimal returns, are now owned by multinational conglomerates. And their corporate overlords demand such extravagant returns that international drug lords would blush.

But we can’t blame publishers alone. Sure, they demand ceaseless reiterations of what they already know the market will bear, but that market consists of real humans who buy books. If authors have become factory hands, assembling uniformly predictable product, surely they do so because they know readers will buy it. Inoffensive blandness may curl my hair, but it also ensures a bottomless revenue stream.

Yet people like urban fantasy because it contains at least the germs of an older fantastic form—which is far from safe. As Richard Mathews asserts in Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination, fantasy’s founding myth-makers knew their greatest popularity when their work was at its most unsettling. Consider the conflict between the secularist William Morris and the Christian George MacDonald.

Even better, consider the writers who brought the genre to maturity in the 20th Century. Writers like Robert E. Howard, whose classic Conan lashes out against metaphorical agents of the Gilded Age. Writers like JRR Tolkien, whose best works reflect trench soldiers’ fears in World War I. Writers like Lloyd Alexander, who discovered the timelessness of Welsh myth while facing life’s transience during World War II.

The best fantasy is often mischaracterized as bucolic, when at root, it’s profoundly unsettling. It deals head-on with life’s finitude in ways that “realistic” fiction cannot. Like all good literature, good fantasy is slightly threatening. But too many readers want to be soothed like kittens. And paperback publishers, like candy makers, sell anything their customers buy, even if it’s bad for them.

Perhaps I’m the outsider, because I like challenges. As I've said before, I want reading fantasy to be like visiting a foreign country, getting lost on unfamiliar streets, and trying to order coffee in a strange language. Plenty of fantasy still provides that. And while Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden may lack the epic magnitude of Howard’s Conan or Tolkien’s Aragorn, he at least challenges me from time to time.

But those challenges now come too infrequently. I want authors to push themselves harder, so they can push me harder. I want them to take me farther. I want to continue growing. The current crop of paperback writers, including Jim Butcher, just don’t offer that. And Butcher’s newest sits on my bedside table, months later, still unfinished.

The Many Faces of Merlin

I love a good fantasy. Swords, sorcerers, and savagery get my blood pumping. And, in the tradition that the old ways are the best ways, I’ll rush out for a well-made take on the Matter of Britain. But the high quality of two recent, but very different, Kings Arthur makes me wonder: why do writers look backward when they want to retell a good story?

The BBC’s Merlin and Starz’ Camelot share a young, fair-haired, and very pretty Arthur who proves his manhood against seemingly insurmountable odds, and there the similarity ends. They tell very different stories, for very different audiences, with wildly divergent morals, and incompatible tones. Comparing these two stories says a great deal about the needs modern audiences bring to myth and legend.

Start with the heroes of each story. Merlin, as the title suggests, foregrounds the wizard whose exploits parallels Arthur’s. The first episode features a fresh-faced Merlin entering Camelot to find his adult role. He quickly discovers that his innate magical talents make him a fugitive, even as he finds his way into the king’s court, and discovers a prophecy that entwines his future with that of arrogant, untested Prince Arthur.

Arthur (Bradley James) and Merlin
(Colin Morgan) in the BBC's Merlin

Camelot, by contrast, centers Arthur against a Merlin who reveals little of himself, but carries a crushing pain that becomes incrementally visible.  This Arthur has more in common with the prince of Le Morte d’Arthur or The Once and Future King, entering untested into an inheritance he never anticipated. This amplifies the scope and consequence of even minor failures, since he has no chance to learn from errors in security.

The world depicted in Camelot is much grittier than the one in Merlin. Camelot comprises many more drystone walls, thatched cottages, and dirt-smeared peasants. Merlin looks more like the Fantasy Village at Disneyland. Where the title fortress in Camelot is a Roman ruin whose gradual reconstruction mirrors the growth of the kingdom, the fortress in Merlin is an elaborate French fairy-tale confection, layered like a wedding cake.

I mean that as no insult against Merlin. Rather, it self-consciously tells a story of boyish bravado in which young men test their legs in relative safety. It makes no pretense of recounting a history that might have happened to real people in a real place. Camelot, despite the narrative use of magic, essentially presents Britain as it may well have looked in the Fifth Century CE. Merlin increases romance; Camelot expunges it.

Moreover, Merlin offers a story with not one but two father figures. Merlin shelters with royal physician Gaius (a role created for the series), while Arthur learns kingship from his father, King Uther. These two paternal figures guide their wards into adulthood gradually, imparting lessons of self-restraint and discretion from which the show’s intended young audience can also learn.

Camelot, by contrast, has no paternal figures whatsoever. Patriarchal, yes: King Uther is a domineering barbarian who threatens his children and bullies dissenters. While Merlin bears more interest in justice and the common good, he relies on realpolitik and expediency. This Merlin, whose external scars reflect his cynical soul, resembles Otto von Bismarck more than Obi-Wan Kenobi.

These contrasting visions of Arthuriana woo different audiences. The BBC produces Merlin for children and youth. Starz, a pay cable network, uses its freedom from censorship to tell a grown-up story. Merlin’s Arthur enjoys a chaste romance with Guinevere, a servant with a heart of gold. Camelot’s Arthur has an adulterous, and boldly sexual, relationship with Guinevere, wife of his greatest champion.

Not that Camelot shows the exhibitionistic streak underlying other pay cable shows like True Blood. Despite nudity, sex, and language, it never feels like the creative team is being merely dirty. It just pitches for an audience older, and more sexually aware, than Merlin courts.

So the question becomes: why do creative types feel the need to look backward to create new content?

Arthur (Jamie Campbell Bower) and Merlin
(Joseph Fiennes) in Starz' Camelot

As I've written before, our society’s new “mythology” is proprietary. No one but the creators or their authorized agents can add anything to the canon. Sure, we have two versions of Battlestar Galactica, but note that they were created a quarter century apart, and only under license. Can you imagine Homer trying to trademark Odysseus and charge Sophocles a licensing fee to write Philoctetes?

No, you can’t. Because we don’t spin myths anymore; we manufacture commodities. So as much as I enjoy these Kings Arthur, they display the loss of folk traditions that permitted Western society’s greatest classic artworks. What a shame.

When Fantasy Fails—The Secondary World Hypothesis

Science fiction and fantasy writers have a unique obligation to say something nobody else could ever say. This seems obvious, but bears repeating, because so much genre fiction goes through the motions. Alternate reality fiction may bear hallmarks of familiarity, but if readers feel we’ve seen all this before, we tend to feel robbed.

On the one hand, parts of Val Gunn’s In the Shadow of Swords seem familiar, with its Arabic-based culture and power politics, but not so familiar that we feel we’ve been here before.  Gunn presents a world of secrets and invites us to join him in discovering them.  He gives us an opportunity to explore, like a kid in a toy store, hoping to find something profound and dazzling around the next corner.

On the other hand, Peter Orullian wastes our time with abject silliness like The Unremembered.  Running nearly 700 pages, experienced fantasy readers will never feel they’ve encountered anything new.  Orullian’s world is laid out perfectly beforehand, and you can accurately predict each new development well in advance.  Val Gunn leads us on a journey to a mythic otherworld; Orullian gives us a guided tour of Disneyland’s Fantasy Village.

What makes Gunn more effective than Orullian?  Gunn creates what Tolkein called a secondary world: one separate from our “primary world” yet subject to standards equally consistent.  It’s like visiting a distant land: we go so we can get lost in winding streets, meet interesting people, and order coffee in a strange language.  If English-speaking  tour guides show us vistas pre-screened and guaranteed safe, what do we gain?

Gunn tells us of Ciris Sarn, an amoral assassin djinn-bound to a Sultan who has fallen under his deputies’ sway.  When one such deputy orders him to make a kill he doesn’t want, he has no choice but to obey.  But the victim’s widow seeks vengeance, while Sarn wants only his freedom.  As two steely adversaries play out their dance, grim conspiracies threaten to destroy generations of stability in the desert kingdom of Qatana.

By contrast, Orullian tells us of Tahn Junell, starry-eyed youth who gets hit with cold reality when ancient monsters banished to a distant realm suddenly show up in his village.  A mysterious wizard, a Sheason, informs Tahn that he and his friends are the fulfillment of ancient prophecy and must now fight to save all reality.  If this sounds familiar, it is: this entire book nakedly plagiarizes Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series.

The Unremembered comes from a major label publisher, and has one of the biggest promotional budgets accorded to a debut author in years.  In the Shadow of Swords was published by an indie house, has a shoestring budget, and is unlikely to see the sales it deserves.  Which tells us everything we need to know about publishing in our time.

Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief exemplifies what I like in secondary worlds.  Sure, it’s science fiction rather than fantasy, but remember what Clarke said about sufficiently advanced technology.  The science is purely rococo; Rajaniemi creates a shifting dreamscape blending Hebrew myth, French and Russian literature, technological paranoia, and online RPGs into a stew that we don’t so much comprehend as osmose.

Jean le Flambeur, the solar system’s most ostentatious larcener, gets sprung from prison by posthuman acolyte Mieli, who now keeps him on a short leash and needs him to do a job.  But Jean has his own goals, which include recovering memories of his enigmatic past.  When Jean’s name falls into detective Isidore Beautrelet’s hands, the two find themselves on a converging path toward secrets neither realize they’ve been keeping.

But the story almost takes second place to the structure.  And I don’t just mean the story structure: the caper takes place in the Oubliette, a walking Martian city that rearranges its own street layout at seemingly random intervals.  That symbolizes the whole book, as alliances, identities, and history rearrange themselves constantly.  We’re constantly disoriented, caught on the back foot, just like getting lost in the distant land I mentioned earlier.

This constant shift makes the book resistant to summary, much less analysis.  But it means we never have an opportunity to get bored.  Sure, Rajaniemi appropriates classic literature and myth to tell his story, but it never feels familiar.  Every page, every scene creates something new.  And because of that, this book seizes your imagination long after you close the cover on the last page.

I believe that is the true difference between triumphant and exhausted genre fiction.