livelier than the average dragon
by uzwi
A few fatal omissions from the fantasy & sf lists. Doubtless there’ll be more.
The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, 1815, Jan Potocki
The Circus of Dr Lao, 1935, Charles G Finney
The Street of Crocodiles & The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, 1934, 1937, Bruno Schulz
A Matter of Life & Death, 1946, Powell & Pressburger
The World of Null-A, 1948, AE Van Vogt
The City & the Stars, 1956, AC Clarke
On the Beach, 1957, Nevil Shute
The Saragossa Manuscript, 1965, dir Has
Crow, 1970, Ted Hughes
The Year of the Quiet Sun, 1970, Wilson Tucker
Roadrunner, 1976, Jonathan Richman (produced by John Cale)
The Affirmation, 1981, Christopher Priest
Burning Chrome, 1986, William Gibson
Violent Cases, 1987, Gaiman & McKean
Heathern, 1990, Jack Womack
Norstrilia & The Rediscovery of Man, 1993, 1994, Cordwainer Smith
Only Forward, 1994, Michael Marshall Smith
Northern Lights, 1995, Philip Pullman
Who Will Love Me Now ?, 1996 [?], PJ Harvey
The Wolves in the Walls, 2003, Gaiman & McKean
Varjak Paw, 2003, SF Said
Mortal Love, 2004, Liz Hand
Primer, 2004, dir Carruth
The Broken World, 2008, Tim Etchells
The City & the City, 2009, China Mieville
Oh, & Oaxacan woodcarvings, livelier than the average fantasy by ten thousand watts of power–
–not to say simpler, more direct, more fun, & a lot more appealing in terms of their aesthetic.
Photo: Cath Phillips
the m john harrison blog 
Can we include the 911 Commission Report in the fantasy list? Talk about world building chops…
Conspiracy theories and their counternarratives give me a tingle akin to the overlapping connections and contradictions between Viriconium stories (finally finished the whole set today!)
Nick Drake’s Pink Moon is also on my key fantasy list.
Conspiracy theories and their counternarratives strike me as quintessentially mundane: bored not so much with what we see around ourselves, but with what we see others seeing around them, we try to justify our neuroses to others with facts we feel they are invested in.
In other words, politics. (let me interpret your world for you, because mine isn’t satisfying enough)
Conspiracy theories can fabricate, but never create. Good SF&F, like all art, does the opposite.
(tossing the filth of partisan politics atop MJH’s attempt to be constructive is a misapprehension at best; an insult otherwise. why are you even here if your reaction to all stimulus is so predictable?)
I am here because I enjoy MJH’s fiction and perceptions. As for my enjoyment of the clash of conspiracy theories and their countertheories… the gaps and overlaps between what can be known, what can be imagined, what can be surmised, what can be proven, what can be asserted, are for me a key breeding ground for fantasy. My interest lies not in taking sides but in following the competition between narratives… a bit like enjoying a sporting event in which one has no rooting interest, and doesn’t even know the rules.
Yes, forgive my tone…my ire was more raised by Dave than yourself. I just can’t think of much of anywhere less appropriate for wink-wink nudge-nudge dead-end political self-pandering than a serious discussion of great fiction. To go from a fascinating reading list and a prismatic dragon and then to “Bush lied!” galls me. I wouldn’t care if I didn’t have higher expectations for this crowd than most other authors’.
My earlier post was a joke. That probably would have been more apparent had I posted it with the last blog entry like I’d intended. It was meant as a possible addition to the non art/entertainment fantasies like the car and cosmetic ads and texts that are more successful than fantasy novels.
If the world is constructed, then Philip D. Zelikow certainly deserves the Allen Dulles award for fantasy creation.
Sorry for the confusion. Didn’t mean for poor old euphrosyne to get so bent out of shape.
MJH, if you like, you can move my post above to your previous entry or just delete it. For the record, I’m quite appreciative of your recent lists and this blog in general, so no insult was intended.
I think following on from the previous post by MJH on the general topic, the thrust of the argument about politics is not to let it descend into a paranoiac-critical method of seeing how social status and powerful factions interrelate (which could still produce some interesting phantoms with some poetical truth to them) but actually to be effective politically. MJH nailed it with the phrase ‘decent dreams of people’ – but what are they and how can they be realised? Muddle only arises if we add syntactical rearrangement and come up with ‘decent people’s dreams’, instead. What is decency? Edward Carpenter believed real decency meant the abolition of the top-hat, the civilizational gloss of his times. But I struggle with this. I could never quite swallow Orwell’s apparent faith in the proles but at the same time if I hear the words ‘chav’ or ‘pikey’ I get indignant down to my ingrowing toenails. For a brief moment, the East Germans waved the correct banner of ‘Wir sind das Volk’ – we are autonomous, we have volition, we have identity, and no-one had better think or *pretend* otherwise.
Whatever we write or devise, it has to come out of the Volksmund, like this prismatic dragon – everything else is just hot air.
Hi Dave. I can do that if you like.
Euphrosyne, Dave’s irony tends to be quite dry & unsignalled. Would you be happy if I shifted his post to the previous entry as he suggests ? I’d have to erase these comments then, to stop them from hanging in nowhere.
Aaron, what do you think ?
Varjak Paw is an interesting choice. If I was going to pick one anthropomorphic aminals childrens book I think that would probably be last on the list. Then again I am at the oppostie end of the cat spectrum to our host.
(Original spelling mistake retained since it seemed appropriate.)
How about _Grendel_ by John Gardner?
Hi Martin. Varjak Paw: I enjoyed its directness & lack of pretence. Half the problem with contemporary commercial fantasy is its sophistication of everything but the central imaginative act. It’s all narrative bells & whistles & worldbuilding gadgetry. The guy who carved the dragon just went for it, & I think, to the degree that he could, Said did too. This reminds me of an earlier post I made, here–
http://tinyurl.com/pqtqas
Hi Mike M. On Volksmund: I do agree, but I’m no more certain of any of this than I ever was, especially in such a nuanced situation.
The woodcarver–since he no longer carves for his kids but for tourists–is, after all, already up to his neck in a commercial operation. Yet the liveliness is preserved.
Commercial fantasy so often parasitises that kind of liveliness. Easy to imagine a commercial animation which relied upon that visual style but tamed it via rationale, plot & “freedom” motif. You’d end up with the usual “world” & that would be that: it would be easy to tell the developed from the raw aesthetic. It’s less easy now, without becoming an “expert” on Mexican woodcarving, with all the tunnel vision that would imply.
I wish I had your clarity on the subject–especially your political clarity–not to say your articulacy.
To Dave, euphrosyne & Aaron: it looks as if this comment thread has become too interesting to cut. Is it ok with you guys if I leave it ?
Always feel free to do with my comments as you deem fit.
It’s not a democracy!
>>Easy to imagine a commercial animation which relied upon that visual style but tamed it via rationale, plot & “freedom” motif.
A good addition to the list which *doesn’t* do this would be Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Tortoro. What begins as a beautifully drawn children’s story with Shinto motifs reminiscent of Machen at his most animistic, turns bizarre with the appearance of a cat bus which whirls along with the hectic energy of a small child’s dream. Of course there’s a great deal of carefully crafted artifice behind all of this, not to mention sentimentality, but it never explains itself away.
I’m not sure whether Miyazaki is connecting with the Japanese Volsmund, but his later Spirited Away seems to return to this native animism, with all of its attendant dangers and elations. Quite apart from the colourful cast of spirits and devils, Miyazaki plays off his chromatic fantasy against the collapsed baburu keiki or “bubble economy” of the late 80s represented here as a failed theme park.
Comparatively Disney/Pixar’s attempts, such as Wall-E, are flashy but pedestrian.
Thanx, Aaron. & thanx for your observations on the “overlapping connections & contradictions” that make the shifty links between Viriconium narratives, too. Astute comparison.
Hi Z. Never explaining yourself away seems to be the point. I don’t mind lots of technique–or sophistication–as long as they aren’t in the bells & whistles department. What gobsmacked me about Primer was that the mediation came over as almost painfully raw.
What about the Codex Seraphinianus? A good article about it at The Believer here http://www.believermag.com/issues/200705/?read=article_taylor
with some images from it too. That would be on my list for sure.
Nice one, Edwin.
[…] a comment on one of Harrison’s follow-up lists, an artist named Edwin Rostron mentions something called The Codex Seraphinianus. Following the […]
[…] guten Phantastik-Werken erweitert. (Wer an mehr als Texten interessiert ist, sollte einmal zur original Liste surfen – außerdem gibt es am Ende einen schrillen Drachen.) Die ursprüngliche Liste hatte ich ja […]