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January 8th, 2007
04:37 pm - Maguire on Licensed Settings
In comments on the last post, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) brand_of_amber wrote about literalization within licensed settings. This matches what M. John Harrison said in his essay about thinking about what Sauron looks like. It's thinking about the elements in the story as real things rather than simply as vehicles for the meaning. So, on the other hand, we have transformative works like Maguire's Wicked. Pondering this, I just read this Interview with Gregory Maguire. In it, he talks about what lead up to Wicked. He did not start thinking that he would write a book in Oz, but rather than he would write a book about evil. However, his earlier imagination was a key factor. He talks about how he was intrigued by the subject:
Oh, the Wicked Witch of the West. Gee, we don't know much about her, do we? She wears black and she's kind of ugly; she doesn't seem to take care of her skin very well; but she's still interested in those ruby slippers. Why? There's a complication there. What is it?
She always tells the truth. In the movie, the Wicked Witch might be scary, but she never lies. Glinda, in a sense, lies to Dorothy; Glinda knows from the beginning that the shoes can take Dorothy home, and she doesn't bother to say anything. She puts Dorothy in danger. And the Wizard lies all over the place; that's his job really, like any unelected public official; it's all propaganda. But the Wicked Witch doesn't lie.
Even as a kid, I was aware of that. I thought, What's behind that? Why is she like that? What's this all about? It just happened that my interest was matched by the interest of what is probably now about 750,000 people, to read and find out, well, what is she about? It was awfully lucky. It was an awful good stroke of luck the day that I thought about that.
Note his citing his imagination as a kid. As a child, he thought about what the Wicked Witch was like as a person. He wondered what was behind her -- how did she grow up and what did she feel. He didn't think "Oh, her truth-telling is just there to exposit the danger of submitting to authority, to force Dorothy into taking a stand."
In the same way, I suspect Jacqueline Carey's Banewreaker came very much from imagining Mordor as a place and the life of its people. Who are they? Why do they live the way they do?
I find that imagining about a setting as a real place and its people as real people is an excellent creative tool. It might or might not be what the author wants you to think, but it can lead to fascinating thoughts. I ran several Star Trek games based around my imagining of the Federation as a democracy. Based on Journey to Babel, it seemed like a madhouse to have several hundred aliens to each other trying to hash out in infrequent sessions what the laws of the Federation were to be. So how did they cope? How did voting work? It occurred to me that the Prime Directive would be a necessity not on moral grounds per se, but to prevent more advanced Federation members from effectively buying the votes of less advanced members by economic and cultural domination. This lead to a lot of very interesting games.
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10:28 am - More on Licensed Settings
There was a lot of discussion on my last post, centered on M. John Harrison's essay, "What it might be like to live in Viriconium".
There was a bit of discussion on my interpretation of the essay, though I think it was mostly agreed. As I see it, the point of the essay was that derivative works "tame" the "wildness" of the original. I mostly concur with the objective points here. A derivative work takes elements of the original, but puts those together in a new work which doesn't have the same message or essence. The derivative creator who borrows those elements is instead putting in his own message and ideas, which will presumably be more familiar to him than the work of another.
Types of Derivative Works
Derivative works include sequels or fan fiction within the world, parodies, sampling, alternate covers of songs, mash-ups, parodies, collages, and so forth as well as role-playing game adaptations. Examples abound of sequels (John Gardner's Grendel, Gregory Maguire's Wicked, John M. Ford's The Final Reflection, etc.), parodies (Corey Yuen's vicious High Risk), sampling (2 Live Crew's Pretty Woman), covers (Joan Jett's punk cover of Ronald Isley's song "Shout"), mash-ups (like the Go Home Productions' "Rapture Riders" or "Love Will Freak Us"), and so forth.
None of these are intended as a replacement for the original, though. They are aimed at people who are already familiar with the original, and derive their power from familiarity with the original. Are they more tame? Well, the creator of a derivative work is taking the material and putting their own stamp on it -- so the material is most likely going to be more familiar to them. However, to a third person, the derivative might well be more wild. (This is often the case with samping and parodies, say, but I think Wicked is no less wild than The Wizard of Oz even though I like the latter better.)
At the same time, these do not generally try to retain the essence of the original. In general, I would say that if you want to represent the essence of a work, you should direct people to read the original. If you are making a derivative work, you should try to distinguish yourself and do something distinctly new. Most of my favorite derivative works are reversals which take the opposite side of the original, which casts all of it in a new light.
Now, I do have some concern about another class of derivative work: remakes and adaptations. The problem with these is that they do supplant the original and often form people's first exposure to the material. For example, the film version of The Wizard of Oz is quite different than the original book -- and in many ways reverses the message. (In the original, Dorothy is the sole light and color of the grey Kansas farm, and everyone else learns from her. In the film, she is being taught to appreciate the dull normal life.) It is a terrific film, but being exposed to the film first actively harms reading of the original. princeofcairo had this complaint about August Derleth supplanting Lovecraft, which I can understand.
Quality
However, all of this is independent of the quality of the derivative. Even if you think that your work is better than the original, that does not excuse supplanting it, in my opinion. Conversely, I do not think that not being able to live up to the original is a reason to not try. The world should have creative works which are unskilled and/or clumsy. (Indeed, I think that having them is required for more skilled works.) No one should refrain from singing a song just because they can listen to a recording of a professional artist singing it. And I consider the fans who write their own stories a step above the fans who pride themselves simply on the literary works they have read. Creativity is not something to be left to only the experts. I might not want to read the fan fiction of some random person in Poland, but I don't want them not to try it.
It's certainly true that the average person will make a hash out of writing fiction or playing an RPG in a literary setting. Most likely, the results will be banal and kitsch -- just like typical singing is painfully off-key or lifeless hitting of notes. However, its not like their other efforts would be any different. Efforts to make original settings are typically dull pastiche, with flavorless listings of lands and races -- only with Chiropti and Ular and Aasimar rather then elves and dwarves.
None of this dissuades me from saying that it is a good idea to try. I can understand that there are purists who don't want to read multiple interpretations of an original work. I see this as a matter of taste in the same sense that some people don't like spicy food or pistachio ice cream. I've had that impulse for some flavors myself. Though often, I find I don't like what the original artists themselves do with later works -- like Lucas' prequels to Star Wars, or Zelazny's later Amber series.
Questions
That said, I do have some questions. So, droog64 suggested that there was something wrong in principle with using a derivative setting that was independent of the idea of ownership. The objection was an aesthetic judgement of that. However, I don't understand what the substance of this is. For example, if someone in 1939 wanted to write an epic in the same setting as The Hobbit, would it matter who the owner is and who the author is?
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January 5th, 2007
04:18 pm - M. John Harrison and Licensed Settings
So in a recent thread on theRPGsite on licensed settings, Jeff Zahari (aka Droog) brought up an old debate which I haven't talked about on my blog. In the course of discussion, he added this post where he cited an essay by M. John Harrison. I also recall that a few months ago in a an RPGnet thread, I came across Matthew Cheney's post "Maps and Fantasy" -- where he paraphrases China Mieville, and also quotes from the same M. John Harrison's essay.
Not to beat around the bush, but the essay is called "What it might be like to live in Viriconium". I remember discussing that essay a while ago on the Forge -- in the thread, "A wild and untamed thing - how literature refuses gaming" from November 2004.
Since I first read it, I disagreed sharply with Harrison's essay. As I see it, it is opposed to imagination on the part of the reader. Specifically, he is opposed to the idea of reader's imagining what it is like to live in Viriconium. Instead, he wants the reader to only follow the words on the page and not allow their imagination to wander afield and envision things beyond that which he wrote. Or at least, certainly not speak of their imaginings to others.
Now, I can see this as a matter of taste. That is, I can understand someone who only wants to hear one canonical source for Viriconium -- and doesn't want anyone else's imaginings of the same material. However, as a general principle, I think it is a good thing. In artistic terms, I'm a post-modernist -- and specifically I like and approve of sampling, alternate covers of songs, mash-ups, parodies, collages, and so forth where people mess with the work of others. All of these are ways of creatively reacting to and commenting on the original, making something new which comments on the old. I see this as questioning and taking different views on material, as opposed to only accepting the canonical works of a distant popular author. It's related to what I touch on in my old post on "Personal vs Impersonal Art".
So, some things which spring to mind for me: John Gardner's Grendel... the film version of "The Wizard of Oz" (which reinterpreted the whole as a dream) and Gregory Maguire's book "Wicked"... Joan Jett's punk cover of Ronald Isley's song "Shout"... All of these are great ways of taking earlier material and messing with it. I approve of respect for earlier material, but respect shouldn't go overboard to reverence where you feel you shouldn't be allowed to re-interpret it.
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