I've often struggled with how to describe the aesthetic, tone, and ultimately genre of my fiction. My initial loves were primarily science fiction, and in that sense I really mean some of the titans of the genre - the first grown-up show I ever watched regularly was Star Trek: The Next Generation. It would be a bit later that I got into Star Wars, but when I was around nine I fell so in love with the movies (at the time it was only the original trilogy, which we had on laser disc) that I remember some period of time in 4th grade that I watched two movies a day - cycling through them over and over, popping in A New Hope (the home video at least by the mid-90s had that title added) soon after I'd seen the Ewoks celebrating at the end of Return of the Jedi.
The summer before I started high school, I read The Hobbit and then spent a good chunk of my freshman year reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The timing was perfect: the editions I had of the books (except the Two Towers, for which I had an older paperback version) advertised the upcoming new movie trilogy from New Line Cinema, and in the winter of the next school year, I went with my family to see the Fellowship of the Ring, and was totally blown away.
I would say that it was during that time that I became enamored with fantasy, though in truth, there were earlier influences. Actually, Magic: The Gathering was probably one of the most important of those, which I started playing about a year after its debut, buying primarily packs from the cheapest set, Fallen Empires, which was, I think, also the most recent when I first started. I'd also always been a fan of Greek Myth.
Indeed, while I'd had various ideas for movies and stories before (see the title of the blog,) it was actually in I believe 8th Grade that I first had the idea of a story where the protagonist was a Merlin-like figure whose role was to act as a magical advisor to the ruler of Atlantis, but was later forced to destroy the island after some evil force turned it into a gateway for a demonic invasion (honestly, that elevator pitch doesn't actually sound that bad, come to think of it). That story took on a lot of scattered ideas - I'd always been obsessed with time travel (again, see the title of the blog, which was my first movie idea, in which a kid had a jetpack that let him travel through time - maybe the most "this was dreamed up by a six-year-old" premise I could even come up with now) and so I had my Merlin-like figure actually be a modern person (actually, once again, I made him basically me).
The existence of this character: named John O'Connor (because I think I was trying to assert my matrilineal Irish heritage as part of my ongoing ethnic identity crisis - this character was half-Jewish as well, but with the parental heritages swapped - which, actually, would make this character with a profoundly white name accepted more as a Jew than I have been) but referred to by his more esoteric, wizardly name, was kind of the textbook example of wish-fulfillment fantasy writing. Here, I was imagining myself as the pinnacle of wisdom and power, where I had Jedi-like powers that were not even subject to the limitations of magic in a world filled with it.
I realized at some point that my ambitions to write his story were too grand to ever really accomplish, but he remains canonical. Part of the fantasy of that story was that at some point, he would become completely, irrevocably immortal (I've always been terrified of death, but it was particularly intense I would say from about age 6 through maybe 20) and, in the process of that moment (essentially being temporarily exiled from the universe at the moment he was fated to die, and thus permanently missing his appointment) his existence in a space that shouldn't have been able to allow anything to exist caused him to more or less accidentally create an entire separate universe.
This moment of apotheosis was meant to be a kind of "last major plot point before the climactic finale" of the epic tale I felt I was destined to write, but it never really came to fruition.
However, I still have a love for this figure. The "creating another universe" was, I think, also tacked on only after I had started writing a different story, called Sky. As is true of a lot of things I've struggled with, Sky hasn't really taken off despite spending nearly two decades with it rattling around in my brain, though in this case I did at least write a first draft when I was 17.
If you've read my fiction blog (which I haven't added to for years, sadly,) Dispatches from Otherworld, you're familiar with that world that my author avatar character created. And you're familiar with the setting for Sky, which is one and the same.
Sky had a number of influences - the eponymous protagonist was, at least in terms of look, inspired by the player character from the N64 game "Shadow Man" as well as Andre Braugher's Corporal Thomas Searles from the 1989 movie Glory. But I can't really talk about Sky without mentioning the most direct influence on it, which is Stephen King's Dark Tower series.
King has written that his own ambition when he was 19 (not much older than I was writing my first draft of Sky) was to basically do the American Lord of the Rings. (Funny, then, that Tolkien's ambition was to write the actually British foundational legend, rather than the legend of King Arthur, which he considered to really be a French import).
The Dark Tower is a glorious mess of a series - the last three books were written in haste after King was nearly killed by a reckless truck driver, and King feared he'd die before his grand opus was complete (eighteen years later he seems fine). And the tone and quality of the writing varies significantly - indeed, the series kind of meanders, and by even book three, the events of the first book take on a mythic sheen in part because it doesn't even really feel like the same author.
They say not to judge a book by its cover, but if not for the surreal image of three free-standing doors on a beach on the cover of the second book, The Drawing of the Three, I don't know that I would have picked up the first volume (my mother, a hopeless bibliophile, basically always bought me just about any book that piqued my interest - I think I also bought George Orwell's 1984 at the same time, but I never got around to that one).
Whatever flaws the series might have, I am nevertheless an unabashed fan and even champion of the Dark Tower series. When I saw that you could have an American cowboy treated with the same iconic reverence as an Arthurian knight, and put that character in a world with wizards and demons... and then also make that world one with robots and ancient, post-apocalyptic cities and a kind of hyperreal tower that stands at the center of all reality, whose existence is what allows the universe to persist...
It was surreal and enigmatic and strange and I loved it to death.
So, before the series was even over, I began writing my story about a gunslinger as well, who was in a post-apocalyptic world (later, I'd make it just an entirely different and decidedly non-apocalyptic world, the twist being that the eponymous Sky was actually from ours). The key, though, was fantasy that eschewed knights and castles and elves and wizards (at least in the classical white-beard and robe sense).
Now, this was still at a time in my life where the idea of lower stakes not necessarily making for a less interesting story didn't really compute. The villain of John O'Connor's story was basically an entity that was more or less the devil, but where malevolence was really the power of darkness and non-existence.
The villain of Sky (spoilers, I guess, should I ever actually write this damn thing) was originally going to be called The Dark Titan - I imagined that it was the being known as Cronos in Greek Myth, who had been corrupted by the void between universes (I'd also conflated Kronos and Chronos - and to be fair, the iconography is not entirely different) and thus replaced the Devil with the Grim Reaper as my main villain, but still sought the erasure of existence.
This idea evolved over time. In college I wrote a screenplay that was probably influenced by the release of Robert Rodriguez' Sin City, but I had a somewhat more optimistic and not even very noir-ish story about a ghost named Shade who got wrapped up in an effort to rescue a young woman's brother from an evil corporate force. The screenplay (of which a later draft became my senior thesis) for Arcane City mostly used familiar fantasy tropes and creatures despite being set in a modern, New York-like city (I went to NYU, so that was the environment I was thinking about at the time) save for one creation that has stuck with me like a recurring nightmare - the faceless man (lack of capitalization here is a stylistic choice).
I'd integrate the faceless men into the mythos of Sky, and if you've read Dispatches from Otherworld, you'll be familiar with them. I had them serve as the scariest monsters, and agents of what I changed from being called the Dark Titan to now being known as The White King.
(Truth be told, I've never been able to decide if the faceless men are agents of The White King or if they are, collectively, the closest the White King has to a physical form.)
If you have not read my Dispatches stories, the faceless men appear as essentially black-suited businessmen who have no face - they have hair (I usually imagine it slightly long, as if they're based on a kind of 1970s fashion) but there are no eyes, nose, mouth, or facial hair of any kind. I usually describe there being something like a ribcage-like ridge pattern you might be able to make out beneath the skin of their faces, resembling something like an old microphone, though only just barely. Furthermore (and this was not part of the Arcane City screenplay,) you don't notice you're looking at them unless you can somehow see in some non-physical way. They're not invisible, but unless you have vision that is magically empowered, or if, like both John and Sky, you have the Jedi-like powers that, at their most extreme degrees, allow you to shape reality around you, you'll look right at one and maybe wonder why you can't see what's behind them, but won't register that they're standing there.
I do want, here, to point out that I created these monsters before the debut of Slenderman or The Silence from Doctor Who, which both bear some similarities (in particular, the Silence, who don't have quite the same "you just don't notice them" thing, but whose instant-memory-wipe-when-you-look-away is pretty similar). DC Comics' The Question of course predates all of these, and while I wasn't consciously aware of that character, it's possible that I glanced at an illustration in a comic shop and unconsciously internalized it.
I guess we can also mention a key aesthetic influence: The computer game Myst, which came out in 1993. If you weren't alive or aware of it at the time, Myst was mind-blowing, because basically, video/computer games could either have illustrated sprites, or they could have blocky 3D polygons with monochromatic, smooth textures. Myst was the first game that looked realistic (at least for the time) and the creators chose to do so using profoundly surreal imagery, like a ship growing out of the side of an island.
And I think that kind of uncanniness stuck with me - it's probably part of the reason I was so drawn to The Drawing of the Three's free-standing doors. I've grown to adore the incongruous - particularly the human, man-made existing in a place that should only be natural forms.
Genre expectations can often be strangely narrow.
Though, oddly, there seem to be a lot of people who lump all speculative fiction together as simply science fiction.
But these impulses, both to narrow an expectation of certain tropes and aesthetics while also mislabeling or using too broad a label are kind of entwined in a way that limits genre potential.
My first genre love was sci-fi, but I'm also a little rankled when people imply that science fiction (and particularly "hard," "realistic" science fiction) is superior to fantasy. But the true thing that frustrates me is when people place arbitrary limits on either genre. One of the absurdities of the modern day is that conservative voices will complain about "woke" representation in works of fantasy - I believe that some bigots (who will claim not to be bigots and merely historical purists) complained about the existence of Black Targaryens in House of the Dragon, as if this wasn't a wholly separate world with an entirely different history of ethnic diaspora, and will say it's "not historically accurate," forgetting that the history of a fantasy world is pure fiction anyway (that's even before we get to the fact that, you know, Black people also existed in the real world's middle ages as well!)
But even setting aside these bad-faith arguments by people who don't want to be reminded that there are people who aren't totally like them, there do seem to be these kind of expectations that people fight hard to cling to. I don't know what George R. R. Martin plans for the actual end of his books, if he even thinks he'll get around to finishing them, but Game of Thrones' producers seemed to laugh at the idea that the story could end with the establishment of anything approaching a democracy to replace the clearly destructive and flawed absolute monarchies that had led to so much suffering. But it's fantasy! Why can't we have this civilization adopt something like that in the aftermath of a massive, world-changing crisis? (Hell, in the real world, democracy predates the medieval feudal system.)
But, getting back to Stephen King:
When King was coming of age (he's a year older than my father) the Western was a huge piece of American identity. The genre dominated film decades, and eventually went through its 1960s deconstruction through both Spaghetti Westerns and New Hollywood, eventually kind of petering out in the 80s and 90s (I think Heaven's Gate, which also kind of crashed New Hollywood, was a major culprit, though the 90s had a handful of popular Westerns like Unforgiven). Still, there was this era in America where the Western really was the epitome of the American self-image, and I think someone like Stephen King, seeing a movie like the Good the Bad and the Ugly, could easily glom onto that as the basis for his American Lord of the Rings - his American legend.
Perhaps ironically, or maybe inevitably, I think members of my generation (and a half or full step generation older) might see the era of King's youth as more emblematic of the American identity.
Post World War II, America took on a new identity. Following a near-apocalyptic war (never forget that this world has actually seen one nuclear war) America took on a role of global leadership - no longer the "independent nation far from the chaos of Europe," we made ourselves the center of the world, rather than a happily distant frontier.
Social transformation, along with industrial and technological transformation, were supercharged in the latter half of the 20th Century. But in a weird way, that early era of transformation took on its own iconic feel in and of itself.
To me, at least, there is something deeply appealing about that mid-to-late 20th Century aesthetic. The faceless men are products of it - they are the nightmare of the new conformity, where even as social change has seemed to free us to be whatever we want, the trudge of unfettered capitalistic wanting (not only for money, but for power and influence as well) creates a conforming pressure.
But it's also an aesthetic I associate with my parents - and while I don't think anyone has an uncomplicated relationship with one's parents, the kind of yellowed plastic and fuzzy speakers and the smell of old electronics that I associate with my dad's home office are beloved and familiar sensations that are linked to my affection for him.
I don't think I really realized when I first came up with the faceless men or the metaphors for my fears of literal death that it also applied to a kind of erasure of identity that could happen in the face of a conformist culture. The connection was there all along, but it took over a decade for my conscious mind to catch up with the unconscious mind.
The imagery I find so compelling and fascinating is the mundane made strange. A rotary phone sitting on a messy desk with contemporary papers and office supplies is, perhaps, a dated image, but not a terribly unusual one.
But that same phone, floating three feet above the ground in a massive desert, with a single sourceless spotlight shining down on it as it rings despite not being connected to anything, makes you reconsider what you're looking at. Is this even a phone at all? Or, in contrast, is it more a phone than any other phone you've ever seen before?
And do you answer it?
It was not until perhaps the last year that I discovered there might be a term for my genre of writing: The New Weird.
Now, as with all critical categories, there's open debate as to the exact nature of it. And it's a term that's been retroactively applied to previous works. As an avid (if late-blooming) player/DM of Dungeons & Dragons, I've seen the "Planescape" setting for that game described as a New Weird one, despite that term coming about ten years after the first sourcebooks were published. Unsurprisingly, of all the canonical settings, this one leaps out to me as the most "me."
I also think there's a question of whether the genre is defined by aesthetic or by structure.
Yesterday, in a feat that I haven't done many times, I bought and read the entirety of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihiation (book one of three of the Southern Reach trilogy, that was adapted into a movie a few years ago, though what I've heard of the movie makes it sound like it was a very loose adaptation).
I certainly recognized a familiar tone to "Old Weird" fiction, by which I mainly mean the H. P. Lovecraft stories I read as part of a collection (which included the most famous ones, like Call of Cthulhu, Shadow over Innsmouth, the Dunwich Horror, The Colour Out of Space, and The Shadow Out of Time, the last of which I never finished despite finding the premise interesting). I appreciated some of the ideas there - most compelling to me was the protagonist's discovery of a run-on sentence of vaguely scriptural words formed from some kind of fungal growth on the interior wall of a subterranean tower - an ambiguity as to whether the words had simply grown there on their own or been written, and then, whether the creature that might have written them even understood them to be words (I actually suspect that the ending implies a more direct human connection to the words, which I frankly found a little disappointing compared to the enigma).
But there's a sort of embrace of the anti-human or maybe post-human, or perhaps trans-human ending that I found myself kind of intellectually appreciating but not really liking (again, it's only the first book of a trilogy, so I should reserve some judgment).
I think one of my insecurities as a writer is that I aspire to literary greatness but I'm still looking for the happy ending, the triumphant hero, and the resolution of conflict that leaves the world of the story better than where it started. It seems as if a "serious author" eschews such conclusions, such pat and convenient tying up of loose ends. There's a sense that this is some flaw in my character - that I am too privileged (and hence want to retain an exploitative status quo that preserves my privilege) or that I am too immature (that only a childish mind would so desire such a comforting ending as good triumphing over evil).
And so, there's a kind of intimidation I feel when approaching a movement like this - even if, in fact, I should be recognizing that the very pretenses of what gets to call itself literary fiction versus genre fiction - the age-old false dichotomy of high and low art - are what the movement/genre was formed to rebel against.
When I was a kid, I thought I'd be the greatest writer of all time, at least from my perspective, because surely I would know to write the stories I wanted to read, see, or hear. It's definitely easier said than done, but I think the challenge of my adult life is to let myself feel that way again, at least until I've got the words down on the page.
