malvasia bianca

I’ve been rereading The Book of the New Sun while listening to some podcasts that cover the book in various levels of detail. Excruciating detail in the case of the first of those podcasts, ReReading Wolfe: the series (and, I believe, most of Gene Wolfe’s books) has a lot hidden in it that only reveals itself on rereading; there’s a puzzle box nature to these books; and, based on that podcast, it’s not at all clear that anybody other than Wolfe can solve some aspects of this puzzle.

Which I had Feelings about, so I tried to turn them into a blog post. But, so far, I’m failing, just sitting on the post without maing progress for weeks and without liking what I’ve written so far. So instead I’m just going to write a post listing a grab bag of topics that this has set bouncing around in my head; I doubt this will end up turning into a coherent post, but hopefully it will flush the ideas out of my head so I can move on to blogging about other stuff.

Last year, I reread The Waste Land. The book contains end notes to the poem; at first, I was glad to see them, because I figured they’d make my reading richer, but once I dipped into them, I realized that wasn’t the case. I’d have to do the work of digging up the sources mentioned in each end note, I’d have to go through a fair amount of that source to figure out what specific bit in it was linked to the given line in the poem. That’s a huge amount of work; and it wasn’t at all clear to me that I would get anything out of it, given that neither The Waste Land nor the works referenced therein were enough of my personal canon to set up resonances for me. (I hadn’t read most of the referenced works at all, in fact.)

So I bounced off of those end notes, but I’m glad they exist. A T. S. Eliot scholar or somebody who was already quite familiar with many of the works in the end notes probably actually would get a lot out of them. There was a lot of stuff bouncing around in Eliot’s brain, and it’s going to come out in a particularly oblique / condensed form in a poem like The Waste Land; giving people a bit of help in unpacking that is all to the good. And if you’re not interesting in doing that unpacking, that’s fine too, the poem stands quite well on its own.

When I was an undergrad, I went on a talk about memorization given by two speakers, one of whom talked about how Chinese literature functioned in an imperial social context. Because of the country’s exam system and related social forces, people not only memorized a huge numbers of texts, they memorized a huge numbers of texts that referred in turn to other texts. So what might just look like a simple phrase to you or me would be, to those people, a phrase that was originally used in text A a couple of millennia ago, and then famously referred to by texts B–1, B–2, and B–3, which in turn were referred to by texts C–4 and C–5.

That’s a very foreign world: we get the first layer with bible quotes and Shakespeare and even quotes from pop culture, but going even one level of reference beyond that is very rare. But still, there are references bouncing around in all of our heads; it was kind of cool to hear that one culture at least had made that manifest, collective, and productive.

One of my favorite ReReading Wolfe episodes was their interview with Ada Palmer. She wrote one of my favorite series, Terra Ignota; and, in that interview, she made the point that both Terra Ignota and The Book of the New Sun are presented as if they’re written by an author living in a world that is quite foreign to our own. And, as a corollary, there’s quite a lot in both series that assumes context of an in-world reader that actual readers don’t have. (Especially on a first reading.) I like that sort of puzzle!

When I was growing up, Isaac Asimov published a set of novels that unified two of his settings (the Robot novels and the Foundation novels) into a single shared universe. This did not recapture the magic of the original settings. And Anne McCaffrey wrote a series of followups to her first two Pern trilogies that told the full story of certain pieces of historical lore that played a key part in those series; the lore in question turned out to be much less powerful in novel form than it was in a more oblique form.

The conclusion that I drew from that (and other similar examples) was that the best science fiction / fantasy series are built on worlds where you have a strong feeling that there’s a world with a rich context and history behind the parts that you see in books, and that it’s probably healthy for authors to actually have worked out a decent amount of that context; but mining that context for further novels is not going to turn out well. (At leat from a quality point of view; quite possibly it does great from a financial point of view.)

For what it’s worth, I’ve bounced off of The Silmarillion every time I’ve tried to read it, and I’ve never tried to read the other Middle Earth back history books. But that’s a different sort of thing: they’re much closer to raw author’s backstory notes than to new novels telling the history of the existing setting.

Having said that: Tehanu is my second favorite Earthsea novel, and I’m glad Translation State exists. So returning to a universe can work; it’s possible that what I’m observing has more to do with reversion to the mean than anything about persistent context. After all, if an author has written something that really does feel magical, what are the odds that their subsequent books will recapture that same magic, whether those subsequent books are in the same setting or a different one?

I’m still pretty dubious about explicitly expanding fragments of backstory into future novels, though.

We live in a decade where Marvel and Star Wars have become massive worlds that more and more art works are set in. Definitely not to my taste, and I don’t want every popular series to turn into that sort of thing; but part of me thinks that it’s probably a good idea for a few settings like that to exist? Maybe something interesting will come out of it, after all; heck, some people would certainly claim that something interesting already has come out of it, and maybe if I read more Marvel comics I would even agree with them.

I assume the corporations involved are doing that out of a risk mitigation strategy; understandable enough. (Though also it doesn’t really matter if it’s understandable: I should train myself to not spend time nearly as much time evaluating and second guessing the motives behind corporations’ actions as I do.)

It is potentially worth spending a little bit of time figuring out if I think the outcomes of corporations’ actions are likely to be good or bad; if shared universes were soaking up too much of our society’s ability to produce creative works, then that would be a problem. But there are tons and tons of movies being made, tons and tons of TV shows being made, tons and tons of comics being made. So whether the net impact of the Marvel and Star Wars shared universes on overall cultural production is slightly positive or slightly negative, the production of art works overall is doing fine.

I suppose I should gesture at myth here. That’s a harder one to analyze: I think it’s reasonable to say that, for example, The Divine Comedy takes place in a shared universe, but I’m not willing to describe the source texts for that universe in the same way as I would describe the source texts of more recent shared universes. But there’s certainly power in producing art works coming from shared tales: we see this with Greek plays, with Italian poetry, with German music.

Maybe that’s the problem with modern shared universes: they (generally) haven’t yet left copyright.