Look. I like Conan. If stories let us play out our secret fantasies in widescreen technicolor, then clearly there’s a part of me that longs to be a muscular barbarian, crushing my enemies and hearing the lamentation of their women. While Robert E Howard’s original Conan stories aren’t quite as good as the epic John Milius/Oliver Stone movie that launched Arnold Schwarzenegger to superstardom, they are still gems of pulp fiction well worth reading.
Conan’s rippling pectorals have proved a suitable fantasy vehicle for generations of geek boys, but the macho white male is only the fantasy ideal for a minority. As Lisa Cron argues in her excellent Wired For Story, the power of story reaches far further than mere entertainment. Our brain thinks in stories, but when stories don’t reflect our lived experience and our sense of identity, our brain will often reject them.
Seth Dickinson is one of a growing movement of fantasy authors re-engineering older stories for readers who don’t see themselves reflected in Conan, Frodo Baggins or Luke Skywalker. The Traitor Baru Cormorant begins with one of fantasy’s most famous tropes, the hero’s tribe are conquered by an oppressive empire, and he must take revenge. Or, as in the case of Ms Cormorant, she. And how will Baru Cormorant bring down the empire that murdered one of her two fathers? By learning to swing a sword? No! But by becoming a civil servant.
There’s a clear logic to the conceit at the heart of Dickinson’s novel. Lone barbarians, however ripped, don’t defeat armies. But politicians and bureaucrats can wield the power to topple empires. Baru Cormorant is a woman, from a conquered people, who discovers she is attracted to other women, trapped in an empire that kills her kind. Her only chance to survive is to learn the Masquerade of lies and deception that power the empire, and beat it at its own game. Dickinson’s novel arguably pursues the same strategy as its protagonist, imitating the genre it seeks to subvert, and perhaps one day, topple.
Dickinson’s re-engineering of the heroic fantasy genre is not entirely successful. The Traitor Baru Cormorant has neither the heart stirring adventure of a heroic fantasy, or the political depth of a Wolf Hall. But in a field where too many writers simply retell the same old stories, Dickinson’s originality and ambition are to be applauded, even when he doesn’t quite manage to meet the narrative engineering challenges he has set in himself.
Good books keep the mechanics of storytelling opaque to readers. But good writers can’t resist cracking open old stories and re-engineering them for new audiences. Kameron Hurley has proved one of the most adept revisionists of fantasy in the modern genre. Her God’s War trilogy and Worldbreaker Saga both gender flip the “traditional” structures of the sci-fi and fantasy genres, and appeal in part to an audience of readers who love fantasy fiction, but laugh at the hackneyed gender roles the genre so often reinforces.
“Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert. Drunk, but no longer bleeding, she pushed into a smokey cantina just after dark and ordered a pinch of morphine and a whiskey chaser.”
Conservative pro-lifers might detest Nyx for taking control of her own body, but for a new generation of fantasy readers the opening lines of Hurley’s debut novel were a blast of fresh air in the stale atmosphere of genre fiction. Nyx isn’t a rolemodel character. Like Conan, she’s a violent psychopath whose heroic acts are driven by her own selfish ambitions. She’s wish fulfilment for people who want to crush their enemies and hear the lamentation of their husbands, and as that she works just fine.
The fantasy genre has always contained a progressive streak. From Angela Carter and Michael Moorcock to China Mieville and Kate Elliot, writers have re-engineered older narratives for audiences who don’t share the traditional values of Howard or Tolkien. But as the values of our society shift, those writers are creating the new mainstream of the genre. NK Jemisin’s Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings and Ilana C Myer’s Last Song Before Night, among many others, joy in re-engineering the traditional fantasy narrative to create new kinds of story.
“See, this is the thing about history. His story. That’s all it is. The Old Man’s version of events, which basically the rest of us are supposed to accept as the undisputed truth. Well, call me cynical, but I’ve never been one to take things on trust, and I happen to know that history is nothing but spin and metaphor, which is what all yarns are made up of, when you strip them down to the underlay. And what makes a hit or a myth, of course, is how that story is told, and by whom.”
The trickster god Loki, given voice by the expert pen of Joanne Harris, expresses why the freedom to re-engineer our stories is so important. Harris’s The Gospel of Loki is an escapist fantasy of a very different kind, one in which we can revel in the trickster’s power to break all of the old man’s rules. It’s no wonder that, as our society finally abandon’s the patriarchal values of the old men, we today find Loki such an appealing character. The old stories of myth, legend and fantasy were important ways of setting those values. Today they have become important ways of changing them.
