The Novel From Beyond the Future! ...crazy-ass depository

dondomat · Mar 21, 2015

So I was thinking (and also musing whether this thread belongs here or in the roundtable section, I hope higher powers will kindly decide), about the Novel From Beyond the Future!

This is 2015. Deep into the future for anyone born in the 20th century. Yet the novel, especially the genre novel of tall tales and fantastic happenings, still appears to be stuck in the last millennium.

Even the epub/self-pub revolution has brought about, as far as I can see, only three changes:

1. flexibility of wordcount--revisiting the possibilities of the pulp paperback era with the 40K novel, and the pulp magazine era from beyond that, with it's 10K installments of a saga;
2. Flexibility of price;
3. Sex

All jolly good, and one can write a hundred graduation theses about gender and class and corporate and age shift and stuff, however...what if I were to write a new type of thriller, for example, or a fantasy. "New" not in the sense of ideas no one has ever come up with, but "new" as presentation.

What would that be? For example, I imagine dipping into the bag of tricks of the avant-garde modernists and post-modernists to describe POV fluctuations during fights, or near-death experiences, or getting high.

...Let me start from another angle. Two Russian writers: Vladimir Sorokin and Boris Akunin. Sorokin had a few books burned by the Putinjugend at a rally, Akunin was an opposition leader for a while--but that's just what postmodernists in the east do, I guess. Goes with the territory.

Anyway.

I read a novella collection by Sorokin, and three consecutive style-shifts hit me in the face. The first novella was abstract modernism, the second--very good imitation of 19th century romanticism, the third--mid-20th century social realism. Then a fourth--a highly subversive imitation of that same mid-20th century social realism, with the tiny detail inserted into every scene--the characters having to eat a bit of dried shit as mandated by law--except the furtive dissidents, of course.

Boris Akunin, on the other hand, wrote a serial concerning the 19th century detective Erast Fandorin, a highly successful one, with sales in the millions, and movies made, etc., before the political climate declined, natch, and every installment of the series is a different crime-fiction sub-genre. That's the way he planned it, and the way he executed it.

Sometimes the commercial anglosax, when confident enough, appear to play around in a subdued manner: Dean Koontz in Winter Moon shifting into poetic mode when a POV character feels weird vibrations from an alien presence:

He was standing in the intended doorway.
On the threshold.
He was seized by the bizarre conviction that if the door opened while he was standing in the way, he would shatter into disassociated atoms as if he'd never existed. He would become the door. An unknown caller would enter through him, out of the fire and through him.
Jesus, help me, he prayed, though he wasn't a religious man.
He tried to move.
Paralyzed.
Within his raised hand, within his entire body, within the trees and stones and earth, the fire grew less amber, more red, hotter, entirely red, scarlet, seething. Abruptly it was marbled with blue-white veins to rival the consuming brightness at the very heart of a star.
The malevolent pulsations swelled, exploded, swelled, exploded, like the pounding of colossal pistons, booming, booming, pistons in the perpetual engines that drove the universe itself, harder, harder, pressure escalating, his glass body vibrating, fragile as crystal, pressure, expanding, demanding, hammering, fire and thunder, fire and thunder, fire and thunder-
Blackness.
Silence.
Cold.
When he woke, he was lying at the perimeter of the forest, in the light of a quarter moon. Above him, the trees stood sentinel, dark and still.

Stephen King in Firestarter going into narrative fragmentation when a POV character receives an unknown govt psychedelic drug:

Everything will be fine, Wanless said, and smiled more widely. He passed on. Horseman, pass by, Andy thought bemusedly. He looked over at Vicky again. How bright her hair was! For some crazy reason it reminded him of the copper wire on the armature of a new motor . . . generator . . . alternator . . . flibbertigibbet . . .
He laughed aloud.
Smiling slightly, as if sharing the joke, the grad assistant crimped the line and injected a little more of the hypo's contents into Andy's arm and strolled away again. Andy could look at the IV line now. It didn't bother him now. I'm a pine tree, he thought. See my beautiful needles. He laughed again.

...So I'm beginning to think, that perhaps the next stage of the genre novel, the stage that will bring it screaming and kicking into the third millennium, would be such a diverse approach to structure and style. A middle ground between the more grandomanic style--and even genre--shifts as done by Sorokin and Akunin, and the tiny intrusions of radically different styles by King and Koontz.

Like, let's say, a "normal" international thriller, or space opera, or sword and sorcery plot, but each type of scene presented in the most powerful style available, even if it belong to a completely different genre.

And what would the metaphysical context be? Realist, as in mainly objective and ordered reality with bits of subjective absurdities, or modernist, as in highly flexible consensual reality with a tiny core of objectivity and stability, or outright postmodernism with no respite from absurdism in sight? Sort of like a mega-versatile noir thingy?

And no, not just a bizarro experiment or an ivory tower meta-post-hyper thing, but an upgraded version of the popular commercial novel, which would be actually recognized by the ordinary Reader Ron as something kick-ass, in spite of the kick-assery being achieved through use of madcap narrative tricks. You know, the type of new and unexpected thing that works so well that everyone instantly accepts it and its seems super logical and as if it has always been there...

I'm not making much sense as yet, since I can't as yet formulate coherently what it is exactly I'm thinking off.

Comments and ideas, please.

*EDIT* Do you have a favorite short detour into crazy narrative land by a favorite author? Would you like to quote it here? If nothing else, this would a fun thing--a depository for the crazy-ass bursts of otherwise "normal" authors...

VeryBigBeard · Mar 21, 2015

I think I generally agree with where you're going. And I made sense of it.

I joined AW to read and learn how to write for market. It's a tremendous site for that because of its huge population of experienced folk. Being here has gone a long way towards teaching me what will work, what is expected, the tried and the true--all of this stuff the creative writing classes and workshop groups and personal reading couldn't really tell me.

When I read, I'm always looking for that something a bit different. It is out there. I think it's actually there in pretty much every story if one looks deep enough which perhaps illustrates the difficulty of defining a normal even in literature from the 20th century. Think of people like Pratchett, Adams, Iain Banks--all of them have plenty of unique qualities, all of them blend genres and styles to some extent.

I still get (privately) a bit frustrated in workshops or on SYW when I read Yet Another Fantasy opener because I want something different. There are clichés of form and style as well as character and plot. I used to think this was an American vs. British thing because my favourite authors are British, but now I realize it's a good writing vs. bad writing thing and all of us, including the Published, are in the process towards gaining the credibility, confidence, and reputation to experiment properly.

A good experiment is what makes the book, in my mind. It just has to work for the story. My favourite example is the first sentence of the jacket copy and opening line of Iain Banks' Transition:

Jacket copy said:
There is a world that hangs suspended between triumph and catastrophe, between the dismantling of the Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers, frozen in the shadow of suicide terrorism and global financial collapse.

That's the main setting for the book. The opening line:

Transition said:
Apparently I am what is known as an Unreliable Narrator, though of course if you believe everything you're told you deserve whatever you get.

The fact that Banks wrote the Culture novels first makes it several orders of magnitude easier for him to write Transition, of course. He had the skill to make it work in the story and the reputation to sell it.

Anything is allowed as long as readers can follow. What readers can follow is entirely dependent on us as writers.

Filigree · Mar 21, 2015

Last year I had the pleasure of reading Alis Franklin's LIESMITH. It is an urban fantasy, sweet romance, dark fantasy, mythological revision, LGBTQ story ostensibly following the adventures of geeky human Sigmund and his love interest Lain (who is more than he appears, even on second glance.)

It's also got some wicked tense shifts, wonderfully obscure Norse mythology, and surreal sequences. The complexity put off a lot of 'straight' fantasy readers but many others loved it.

dondomat · Mar 21, 2015

Have a variation of your avatar's theme, Big Beard...
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/35

Filigree said:
Last year I had the pleasure of reading Alis Franklin's LIESMITH.........

It's also got some wicked tense shifts, wonderfully obscure Norse mythology, and surreal sequences. The complexity put off a lot of 'straight' fantasy readers but many others loved it.

Yes, wicked tense shifts and surreal sequences is definitely something I imagine The Genre Novel From The Year 3000 to have in all the right places.

Jamesaritchie · Mar 22, 2015

I like the way you think, but I think some questions can't be answered by contemplation, but only by action.

I'm glad you noticed Koontz and King doing these things. Koontz has written entire chapters in iambic pentameter, but few readers seem to notice, perhaps because they have no clue what iambic pentameter is.

Somewhere along the line, King began using a style that I don't know what to call, unless maybe it's "extreme realism".

Russian and French writers seem to be pushing the boundaries of style and content, but since I can only read the English translations, well, as they say, some things get lost in translation. What they don't say, but that's equally true, is that sometimes things are gained in translation.

I'm not at all certain that the future holds much in the way of changes, other than the fairly rare experimentalist writer. We've been writing novels for a lot of years, for centuries, at least, and probably a lot longer, and teh trend has always been toward simplification.

I love what Koontz and King do, but neither technique is new. Both are ancient, simply reborn in the hands of talented writers. Few readers care, or even notice, and this is probably as it should be.

What has never changed is that the average reader wants a good story, filled with characters he or she wants to spend time with. The writing is merely a carrier for story and character, and good writing lets both rise off the page, let's the reader not only watch the action as if it were a stage play, but that lets the reader step into the play and participate.

Good writing may come in a thousand forms, experimental and avant-garde, plain and fancy, but good storytelling means invisible writing.

Such writing asyou mention may please teh experimentalist and the avant-garde, but few average readers will care, and if they notice it, they will not notice it in a good way. I don't think the future will change this. Centuries of experimentation has brought us to greater simplification in storytelling, not to experimental and avant-garde techniques.

I believe there is a solid place for the experimentalist, the avant-garde, the futuristic writer, but I doubt that place will ever be with mainstream readers. Those who write for mainstream readers may borrow a tidbit of experimental writing here and there, and steal a wafer thin slice of avant-garde, but if so, it will be to aid in making writing less visible, not more so.

Too many worry about the writing, forgetting that it's content that matters. The experimentalist and the avant-garde will, I think, always be around, but I think they will always be on teh periphery of storytelling, writing largely for each other, and bypassing teh average reader who wants the content of story and character, not the writing that interferes with both.

But the answer to such question is always to write, and to see what happens.

dondomat · Mar 22, 2015

Jamesaritchie said:
I like the way you think, but I think some questions can't be answered by contemplation, but only by action.

On it

Jamesaritchie said:
Somewhere along the line, King began using a style that I don't know what to call, unless maybe it's "extreme realism".

I...to me it's mostly teh darkish TV melodrama when not kept in check by B sci-fi plots, which thankfully still happens, although not as often as before.

Jamesaritchie said:
Russian and French writers seem to be pushing the boundaries of style and content, but since I can only read the English translations, well, as they say, some things get lost in translation. What they don't say, but that's equally true, is that sometimes things are gained in translation.

Gained indeed. I've read Len Deighton Harry Palmer adventures in Russian, which were almost Fitzgerald-level, unlike the original, to which I rushed to compare the versions of the scenes that had such impact on me. I've also compared a dozen translations of LOTR in various languages; not one has the all the ingredients of the meal at Tom Bombadil's place, haha, not one. The world of translations is fascinating.

A quick aside, here are four versions of an Anna Karenina bit:

1. “Oh, oh, oh!” he kept repeating in despair, as he remembered the acutely painful sensations caused him by this quarrel.”

2. That is the whole tragedy,’ he mused, and recalled despairingly the most painful aspects of the quarrel.

3. ‘Oh dear, oh dear!’ he muttered despairingly, as he recalled the most painful details of the quarrel.

4. “Oh! Oh! Oh!” he repeated in despair, recalling what, for him, had been the most painful impressions of the quarrel.

Jamesaritchie said:
Such writing as you mention may please teh experimentalist and the avant-garde, but few average readers will care, and if they notice it, they will not notice it in a good way. I don't think the future will change this. Centuries of experimentation has brought us to greater simplification in storytelling, not to experimental and avant-garde techniques.

In the gold age of 2.5 men it would work perfectly on three levels: on the infantile level it would be a torrent of poop and dick jokes, on the adolescent level it would have relationship twists and turns, and on the mature level it would have joyful deconstruction and reconstruction of language and also throw in gestalt jokes.

In a sense this is also what I imagine the New Genre Novel to be--it's impact would be across the demographic lines, with each demographic noticing what it needs, and only a limited few appreciating all the layers meshing together.

Since most readers do not notice the mechanics of what they read, only the internal movie in their heads that these mechanics bring about--like most music listeners also notice not the mechanics of the music, but only the overall melody and the emotions it produces in them--I think a gradual introduction of madder techniques that produce those emotions and internal movies faster, with more impact, with more conviction, is a thing.

A pleasure discussing this with you, sir.

Aggy B. · Mar 23, 2015

This passage from Kaye Gibbons Ellen Foster has always stuck out to me. (It has a strong surreal voice throughout, but this section where the narrator is at her mother's funeral is more deliberate.) The entire book is done without proper dialogue as well. The narrator recounts conversations, but there are no quotation marks. Which is interesting. Kind of a literal first person POV that doesn't allow for anything other than the narrator to speak. Even when she's telling you what someone else said.

Do not do that with everybody looking. Folks do not want to see a body disappear before their very eyes. Not me at least.
Do I have to watch?
Is she in there?
It is all done with lights said the magician.
Where is she? Not in the box. You cannot rest in a box.

There's also some lovely experimental stuff in Abram Tertz The Trial Begins.

The Novel From Beyond the Future! ...crazy-ass depository

dondomat

VeryBigBeard

Preparing for winter

Filigree

Mildly Disturbing

dondomat

Jamesaritchie

dondomat

Aggy B.

Not as sweet as you think