ICFA 45 Debrief: Notes from the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts

I’ve recently returned from the 45th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Since I’m an introvert and have to push myself to network, I set a goal before the conference to talk to three new people each day and have at least one interesting conversation. Well, that goal was absolutely an underestimate of how much fun I had talking to all these wonderful scholars and creatives. It was an absolute dream to attend. When you want to study fantasy and science fiction, there are a lot of people in English departments who won’t take you seriously. Being in a place where everyone else is also interested in what speculative fiction has to say was so refreshing.

My presentation was part of a panel of two papers on Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. It was a fascinating panel in that my co-presenter and I came to exactly opposite conclusions about whether the novel supported or denied the idea of Escape into the fantastic, as theorized by Tolkien. John Pennington (whose work on George McDonald I’m going to have to look into when I finally get around to reading Phantasties) framed the novel as rejecting the premise of a secondary world in favor of a world that is deeply intertwined with, and even formed from, the primary world. He also cited a lot of postsecular theorists in his discussion, which gave me a whole different way to understand the book that I’m going to need to spend some time working on.

My paper, “‘The Beauty of the House is Immeasurable’: Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi on the Uses of Speculative Fiction for Escape During the Covid Pandemic,” took an opposite tack. I looked at the relationship of the protagonist to the artistic and symbolic world he lived in as representative of our relationship with speculative fiction, coming to the conclusion that the book demonstrates how Tolkien’s idea of constructive Escape functions. I tied in the public reaction to the book when it was published in the early pandemic as well as my own experiences using media to cope with 2020.

I was blown away by the discussion which brought up ideas that could spark at least 3-4 other papers about the novel. (Edited collection on Piranesi, anyone?) It was an honor to be in a panel with such an intelligent audience. I felt like I finally experienced the purpose of an academic conference: getting feedback on your ideas from people who really care about the subject.

David G Hartwell Award co-winners, Liz Busby and Sasha Bailyn

I guess the people running the conference also liked my paper, because at the closing banquet, I received the David G. Hartwell Emerging Scholar Award, along with Sasha Bailyn, whose interesting publication Inglenook Lit combines creative nonfiction and speculative fiction which blows my mind. I’m really honored by this award; it gives me real validation and encouragement for my crazy desire to spend the rest of my career focused on speculative fiction.

Below are some comments and notes on my favorite papers and panels that I attended. There were so many good panels that I didn’t get a chance to attend as well.

Breaking All the Rules NowJulia DaSilva gave a fascinating anarchist reading of CS Lewis’s The Last Battle. It was a bit heavy on theory I’m not familiar with, so I’ll need to do some further reading to really understand it. With that caveat, the main point seemed to be that the presence of the rings from The Magician’s Nephew contradicts the overall feeling of that Aslan is in control of who has access to Narnia and when, which seems to indicate an “overflow” of meaning that opens up possibility beyond the Christian allegory that Lewis may have intended. She also compared the novel to an intriguing book called Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison, which is from a similar time period and seems to be Narnia-esque only Norse mythology. I pushed back a bit on her conception of Lewis as a political conservative, especially given some of the politics evident in Out of the Silent Planet; I think he can’t quite be pigeonholed by the modern political dichotomies, though she’s right that he’s not an anarchist by any means. However, I think her point about the significance of the rings in the theology of the series is worth further consideration. I had some great conversations with Julia after her presentation and look forward to hearing more of her takes on Lewis’s work!

Religion and Fantasy – I was assigned to chair this panel, but you know I would have gone anyway. This turned out to be a really interesting mix of papers. Cat Ashton shared an analysis of the Evangelical worldview and how it has been spread through fantasy literature. As a religious person myself, I had a bit of an allergic reaction to some of her framing, but on the other hand, I also tend to not agree with the types of evangelicals she was describing. I worry about the idea of painting Evangelical Christian novels as propaganda and novels with a more liberal worldview as open and honest explorations of ideas. Is this characterization merely due to whether we happen to agree with the worldview presented? I know plenty of conservative Christian readers who would reverse that characterization. I think it’s not as simple as dismissing any book promoting a Christian worldview. But since I only had a chance to hear the paper aloud, I will have to follow her work and give it a second chance in written form.

Andy Dibble presented on whether CS Lewis’s portrayal of the damned in The Great Divorce is convincing to the non-Christian reader. He posted a similar version of his ideas in a recent blog post. One really interesting insight I took away was how strangely Lewis’s self-insert character is positioned. It’s weird that the narrator is portrayed as uncertain and the questioner of doctrine given that Lewis is the author and constructor of this speculative world designed to convey exactly that doctrine.

Robert Stauffer gave a peek into some original research he is doing to recover some early religious fantasy short stories written and published in a periodical funded by the Horlix powdered milk company. It was an absolutely wild tale, which I look forward to picking up in book form. He mentioned the existence of a story by Evelyn Underhill (who wrote a long text on mysticism and is honored on the Anglican liturgical calendar) that explores the idea that Christianity existed before Christ, which I’m interested in for obviously Latter-day Saint reasons.

War/ Peace: Fantasy’s Critical PotentialDavid Sweeten examined the Battle of the Two Rivers in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time as a remaking of the Scourging of the Shire. Both Tolkien and Jordan were veterans of war but very different wars (WWI and Vietnam, respectively), and Sweeten tied this to the different outcomes of the “attack on home” motif. Liam Drislane also presented on the motif of “white slavery” episodes in epic fantasy, particularly using the example of Egwene from the Wheel of Time.

Of most interest to me on this panel was my friend Paul Williams‘ reading of Orson Scott Card’s Tales of Alvin Maker series as an example of positive peacemaking in the epic fantasy genre, which often seems to endorse violence as a means of settling disagreement. He didn’t explicitly tie this to Latter-day Saint theology in the panel, but I could definitely see the allusions he was making to D&C 121:41-46, which discusses how righteous power can be achieved “only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned.” He also quoted Patrick Mason’s work on LDS peacemaking.

Analyzing Publishing Practices in FantasyDennis Wilson Wise gave a spirited defense of the fantasy novels published in the wake of Tolkien’s success with Lord of the Rings, like Terry Brook’s Sword of Shannara series. Many see these books as mere formulaic imitators trying to cash-in on the trend and barely worth any critical attention. Wise reframed this narrative as the cultivation of the epic fantasy genre by husband-and-wife editing team Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey, who gave authors the personal attention needed to develop their stories into something that would meet market demands. Yes, they introduced some of the tropes they loved from classic science fiction into fantasy at a time when sci-fi itself was moving to critical respectability, but they were as critical to the development of fantasy as John Campbell was to science fiction.

At this same panel, Jordan Jantz presented a fascinating data analysis showing that small literary presses are moving towards being more accepting of speculative elements. She did this by looking at the publishers of books that won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prizes, getting the list of the last 20 years of their publications, and analyzing their Goodreads tags for indicators of genre elements. The trend towards speculative elements seems to be going up over time, though almost 60% of the speculative books are in the gray area of “fabulation,” a category that includes magical realism or books with surrealist elements, which not all scholars of the fantastic would include in speculative fiction. However, I think Jantz made a good case that the gap between literary and genre publications is closing, which means there will be more respectability for the study of fantastic fiction as a whole.

Anyway, that’s what I got out of ICFA 2024! I’m already thinking about my plan for what to submit on the theme of “terror” for next year. If I met you at ICFA, please drop me a note to say hi!

What I Read: Feb 2024

February was a busy month outside of school. My presentations at LTUE 42 went well and I had fun meeting up with old friends. I read from my essay “Through the Wardrobe: Inhabiting the Divine Story” at the Wayfare issue 3 launch party; I’m always impressed by the quality of writers they find, so I’m very humbled to be among them. Check out the previews of issue 3 (including this amazing art combining The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe and the Kirtland temple that was commissioned to go with my piece) and consider subscribing to get one of the beautiful print copies.

Close up of art by Jessica Beach

This month I’ll be presenting a paper on using CS Lewis’s interpretation of Spenser’s Faerie Queene to understand the poetry of another early modern poet, Amelia Lanyer, at BYU’s English Symposium. I’ll also be travelling to Florida to attend the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts and read my paper on Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi and using speculative fiction to cope with trauma. So many conferences this semester! Remind me to limit myself to one next time.

The podcast has been a little dormant due to grad school, but we did release a; short today on a short Pixar film called Self. The episode is twice as long as the film itself; we do some interesting twisting of the short into a religious reading that the filmmakers certainly didn’t intend. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy it, and we’ll get back to more regular episodes soon.

I also made a concerted effort this month to revive my non-school related reading. I find that reading for school becomes more interesting when I have things from my own interests to connect with it. So even though February is a short month, I’ve got 10 book reviews for you. Let’s jump to it!

Continue reading “What I Read: Feb 2024”

What Netflix’s Avatar Did Wrong: Four Fantasy Adaptation Failure Points

Last week, I was really excited to watch the Netflix live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender. I had been skeptical when the original show creators departed, but they’d earned back a bit of trust with the amazing trailers they released. I had hopes that even though I knew they would change some aspects of the series, they would still get the vision of it and make it more accessible to adults who are still too self-conscious to watch a “kids show.” My husband and I set out to watch the first episode for date night. We popped popcorn and everything.

Within about 20 minutes of the first episode, it was clear that Netflix had absolutely flubbed this adaptation. The fantasy fan criticizing the adaptation of their beloved property is cliche, but the recent string of Hollywood misses on big-budget fantasy projects is hard to miss. While Stranger Things, Shadow and Bone, and Arcane have done well, Rings of Power and The Wheel of Time have been notable failures, both artistically and financially. This mixed bag of major successes and failures is made worse than typical streaming shows because of the big investment that these series represent.

If we don’t want Hollywood to stop making fantasy (and science fiction) properties, they’ve got to learn to do this better. Some errors that future adaptations should avoid, with examples from Netflix’s Avatar:

Too much time gawking at the fantasy elements – The first two Harry Potter movies are nigh unto unwatchable because they spend so much time being amazed at the Wizarding World (which admittedly was so cool to see on screen) and neglect to move the plot along. There seems to be a belief in Hollywood that fantasy TV exists as a vehicle for cool special effects rather than for the same reason all film exists: to convey a story. If you don’t get the story right, no one is going to care how cool your costumes and special effects are. The Avatar YouTube channel is full of cool behind the scenes videos about the bending and other worldbuilding stuff, and the show also spends a lot of its screen time on wide shots of cool stuff while rushing through the dialogue and plot.

Not trusting the audience to get the worldbuilding: One major fault with Netflix’s Avatar is the way it explains all the background explicitly instead of letting the audience piece it together slowly. We get the explanation of the four nations and the Avatar at least three times in-world in the first episode. While info-dumping is always a storytelling no-no, it seems prevalent in fantasy adaptations, maybe because the people working on them aren’t used to the genre conventions for gradual explanations of world-building. The key is to reveal things when the audience has a reason to want to understand them, which is not necessarily when the audience first sees them. If we can wait to gradually understand that Ted Lasso’s marriage is on the rocks over several episodes, we can also wait for several episodes to understand Zuko’s motivation for chasing the Avatar.

Changing major plot points or character arcs: A movie is like a cookie recipe. You can easily substitute the chocolate chips, but if you want to change the flour or go vegan, beware. Look, I get that some things have to be cut and adapted in the move from book to film. It’s a different medium with different strengths: it can’t do interiority as well as a book, but it can cover description so much more compactly. But the original property worked not because of the fantasy concept but because of the story. The character arcs of Aang and Sokka were probably more crucial to the original series’ success than Netflix’s adaptation realized, and cutting them undermined so many other aspects of the story that they tried to keep. When you change endings or character arcs, that change alters not just one scene but the whole balance of the story. It takes a lot of skill to make that kind of change work. Unless you’ve written an original best-selling novel or show, you probably don’t have it. Have some humility. Otherwise, you look like the people in the recipe comments section who substitute five ingredients and then complain that the cookies didn’t turn out.

Get the tone right: By itself, fantasy is not a tone. Fantasy can be gritty, optimistic, mysterious, or zany. When the Netflix creators kept using Game of Thrones as a touchstone for the audience they wanted to reach, we should have known they had drunk too much cactus juice. An adult fantasy property is not automatically Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings. A YA fantasy property isn’t automatically Harry Potter or Hunger Games. Comp titles should match the overall tone of the show rather than just glomming on to the most successful fantasy craze you can think of.

As a fan of Brandon Sanderson, I’m sort of glad that he hasn’t gotten an adaptation yet; the chances for a failure are so high. It’s a large book with a ton of interconnecting plots and pieces going on, and an adaptation has so many people working on it with so many chances to not get it. Still, I’ve been rereading to prepare for the release of Wind and Truth in December, and I couldn’t resist taking my own stab at what a faithful adaptation of The Way of Kings that takes into account the differences in medium might look like. I’ve gotten some interesting feedback on it over on reddit. Perhaps you could help me improve it?

The Postsecularism of Arthur C. Clarke

If we’re going to talk about the connection between postsecularism and speculative fiction, there can perhaps be no better example than Arthur C. Clarke. According to his Wikipedia page, Clarke described himself throughout his life as an atheist or logical positivist. He demanded that no religious rites of any kind be associated with his funeral and famously said, “One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.” On the other hand, Clarke praised C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy, which as a work of science fiction is just about as explicitly religious as possible. He was fascinated throughout his life by supernatural phenomenon, hosting several television series about unexplained events. He had “pantheist” printed on his WWII dog tags, and he sometimes claimed to be Buddhist (while insisting it wasn’t really a religion). Clear as mud, right?

This internal conflict is written all over Childhood’s End, Clarke’s third novel and the one that made him famous as a science fiction writer. The beginning of the book subscribes thoroughly to the secularism hypothesis, the idea that as science advances, religious belief will naturally decrease to the point of extinction. Childhood’s End begins with the invasion of Earth by a strange alien vessel that forces humanity and its governments to start acting in a logical, humane way. Working through the middle manager of the United Nations, the aliens stop all wars and conflicts, including the torture of animals. People’s standard of living increases dramatically overnight. Everything seems to be going for the best.

There are those who resist the alien takeover, and their resistance is portrayed as “a religious one, however much it may be disguised” (11). They claim some secular reasons, such as the right to self-determination and agency, but ultimately the narrative makes clear that these are all desperate excuses for their real concern. The UN Secretary General receives this perfect summary of the secular hypothesis from the Overlord when he explains the resistance to the imposition of a utopia:

“They know that we represent reason and science, and, however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily through any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now” (19).

These religious resistors are portrayed negatively in the first half of the book. They kidnap the Secretary General in an attempt to get to the Overlord and are easily swatted away by his superior technology and benevolence. Their resistance is one of irrationality in the face of the obvious superiority of rationality and science-based progress.

At some point in the book, there is a turn in perspective. Mankind has everything it wants; people thrive in the post-scarcity culture brought on by the logical dictatorship of the Overlord. Yet something is dreadfully wrong. Humanity has lost almost all interest in the science of new discoveries, preferring simply cataloging of various species and other naturalistic pursuits. Additionally, the production of new art has almost completely stopped. The Overlord acknowledges this connection between the loss of humanities “superstitions” and the loss of human creativity near the end of the novel: “I am well aware of the fact that we have also inhibited, by the contrast between our civilizations, all other forms of creative achievement as well. But that was a secondary effect, and it is of no importance” (198). One scientist still seems to pursue the big questions in spite of the general malaise, and an artist colony nation forms in an attempt to reinvigorate the human spirit that has been somehow lost in the comfort of having all its needs provided for, but they are the exceptions fighting against the spirit of the secular age.

Why would someone who believed in the triumph of science write this? It becomes apparent that even though Clarke considered science edging out the old superstitions a good thing, he also believed something would be lost as it happened, and that this something was an essential part of humanity. The loss of religious belief seems, according to this book, to lead directly to the loss of everything that made humanity worthwhile.

Near the end of the story, humanity arises from this doldrum through what can only be called an ascension narrative. Children all over the world begin transforming from individual human beings into a metaphysical Overmind, eventually leaving their bodies behind to become part of the noncorporeal superbeing that sent the Overlords to Earth in the first place. There’s really nothing to distinguish this Overmind from a sort of supernatural God, other than the idea that it is the natural end-state of the evolution of most species. The Overlord describes it as something, while not identical, at least adjacent to the Latter-day Saint conception of God: “We believe—it is only a theory—that the Overmind is trying to grow, to extend its powers and its awareness of the universe. By now it must be the sum of many races, and long ago it left the tyranny of matter behind. It is conscious of intelligence, everywhere” (200). It is seemingly omniscient and omnipresent, and though it acts by commanding dead-end species like the Overlords, one could argue it is omnipotent as well.

This sense of the need for something beyond the rationality of science, the sense that in leaving behind religion we have lost something essential, is one of the major thrusts of postsecular literature. While science fiction might be the genre where we’d expect rationality to be celebrated, in fact I think we can find many authors, even in the golden age of sci-fi, who show this conclusion to be naive, including Arthur C. Clarke.

Ragging on Mormon Culture is a Problem

I often hear people complain about church culture, with the implication that we ought to get rid of as much of it as possible and live the pure gospel. “Let’s get rid of Latter-day Saint lingo; it’s confusing to investigators.” “Trek is such a weird thing; can’t we stop doing it?” The simplifying of church programs. And then there are also those scary stories people tell about Utah culture.

Part of this is what I recently heard Christopher Blythe call the “self-loathing Mormon,” the need to distance ourselves from the culture we know so many of our more sophisticated friends distain. We worry that liking Saturday’s Warrior or admitting to having read all the volumes of The Work and the Glory will make us look like backward yokels. Additionally, the move towards fewer church activities seems like a good idea because it helps us focus exclusively on the gospel, on Jesus, rather than the church and its many traditions; and besides, we have so many other things to be busy with.

bryce canyon with sandy rocks in national park of usa
Photo by Jenny Uhling on Pexels.com

Eugene England tried to counter this exalting of the gospel at the expense of the church in his famous essay “Why the Church is as True as the Gospel.” He pointed out that only in interacting as a community can we truly practice the principles that we are learning through the gospel. Learning and intellectually assenting to gospel principles is irrelevant if we don’t practice them on those around us. Our wards are the ideal gym through which to practice love and charity by close association with those who we might otherwise avoid, practice leading and following without compulsion.

I love Brother England’s point, but I’d like to approach the necessity of the church from a different angle: the need for culture. Wherever humans are, this strange amorphous thing called culture develops. To misquote scripture, “where two or three are gathered,” there culture will be, that amalgamation of unique vocabulary, folklore, rituals, traditions, and activities, not to mention my favorite part, stories.

We can’t eliminate church culture any more than we can eliminate language. It’s something that’s going to happen either way. But what we can do is weaken it, starve it, actively suppress it. We can cancel traditional activities in favor of simplifying our ward’s social calendar. We can stop publishing fiction featuring contemporary LDS characters at our bookstores. We can take our distinctive Latter-day Saint music with its strange references to missions, pioneers, and the Book of Mormon, and water it down into something that would be unobjectionable to a nondenominational Christian. (Guess how I feel about the modern FSY albums…)

The key word here is unobjectionable, which I think is a synonym of undistinctive. All that has resulted from efforts to downplay LDS culture is culture that is almost not there because it is so bland. The issue is that the culture at large that we swim in is hardly likely to do us the same courtesy.

When forced to choose between a culture of thin translucence and a culture of vibrance and interest, we will tend to go with the stories in our hearts rather than the doctrines in our heads. Our beliefs have less to do with the arguments and theology than they do with the people we want to be around. As Arnold Kling puts it, we decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. If church movies are bland and basic, their messages are less likely to stick in our children’s minds when they have to compete with the interesting stuff being put out constantly from all sides. If our church activities are all solemnly focused on Jesus with no insertions of Pioneer Day fireworks or neighborhood roadshows, they simply can’t compete with the world’s celebrations or diversions. Not to mention that if we don’t create our own stories about what our culture means, the larger entertainment industry is sure to paint one instead. One solution to this is to shut the world out, but we all know that’s only a temporary one.

So I propose an alternative: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Let’s build up some Latter-day Saint treasure. Let’s stop trying to be like everyone else and instead be so interesting and compelling that people want to find out what’s going on over here. Of course, it would also be naive to equate Latter-day Saint culture with Utah culture. As the church grows more global, we need to have not less church culture but more church cultures. We can’t do that by playing it safe, by creating a gospel culture of lowest common denominator. We have to be not only true and good, but beautiful, interesting, fascinating, hilarious. Let’s stop apologizing and be our weird, peculiar selves.