Sidewaysness

My mother got me a copy of Robert Heinlein’s Red Planet in 1961, when I was nine years old, and for ten years after that I read virtually nothing but science fiction and fantasy – and in those days it was still possible to read virtually everything!

Since then I probably read a lot more mysteries and nonfiction than I do science fiction and fantasy, but when it comes to my writing, all my dials were were immovably fixed by those ten years – if I were to try writing a mainstream novel about, say, an average guy in Pittsburgh dealing with divorce and car payments, it wouldn’t be chapter two before he’d start getting phone calls from his dead grandfather, or a visit from himself from an alternate timeline.

But science fiction and fantasy have intrinsic credulity problems. You want readers to vicariously experience the stories, but the situations in the stories are impossible.

Well, okay, the places and events in a science fiction story could be possible – a lot of them, anyway – some day – sort of. But I write fantasy, and fantasy doesn’t have even that frail support. Nobody’s ever going to tell me, “Well, people used to laugh at that ghost and werewolf stuff.”

The problem with fantasy is that everybody knows it’s completely impossible. Secret immortals, ancient gods, magic kingdoms! So how do you maintain suspension of disbelief in readers? How do you get them over that big speed bump? You want the events in your story to seem to be taking place in real places, to real people -- real creatures, anyway. Ideally you want the readers to be taking your vampires and ghosts as seriously as they take cops and lawyers in a detective story.

I was on a panel about vampire stories one time, and one of the panelists said, “Well you know, Dracula is actually about the plight of 19th century women.” And I said, “No, it’s actually about a guy who lives forever by drinking other people’s blood. Don’t take my word for it, check it out.”

The thing is, Dracula wasn’t a metaphor. He was a vampire. Somebody once pointed out that what fantasy fiction does is literalize metaphors. To say “She lives through her children” might very well mean that she has psychically possessed them; if we hear “Her nephew is a real leech,” we can’t rule out the possibility that he sucks her blood. The long-dead ancestor who casts a shadow over his descendants probably really is standing between them and the sun, on real pavement somewhere.

If our ghosts and vampires are metaphors for social or political concerns, then they're not real ghosts and vampires. They're useful puppets, and the story is actually about something else, outside the apparent concerns of the characters.

It does seem more respectable that way! In literature classes you get the idea that good fiction is a vehicle for social commentary. I’ve heard fantasy writers claim that their stories are a way to “sneak up on the reader,” and make points about the ills of modern society while ostensibly talking about imaginary worlds.

I don’t do that. I hate relevance. In my own stories, I never feel that I’m “holding up a mirror to society” -- well, maybe to see if it’s still breathng.

Critics tend to dismiss plain adventure stories are as “escapism.” Like, You don’t want to face the current problems of the real world!

Well no, I don’t, when I’m reading fiction.

Ursula K. LeGuin and J. R. R. Tolkien both said, more or less, Yeah, it’s escapism. And who most disapproves of escape? Jailers!

And fantasy lets us escape right out of what’s even remotely possible. It lets us experience lots of marvelous situations that actual reality can’t provide and won’t ever be able to provide.

Mainstream fiction -- for all its often humbling virtues -- is like a straight line highway between null forests. Like any line, it’s got an infinity of points, an infinity of possible events -- but that’s it, they’re all possible! Cops, cowboys, spies, insurance salesmen. New York, Hong Kong, Yoknapatawpha County. It’s like the real numbers line, 1,2,3 ...

But fantasy fiction is a perpendicular look, rotating the view 90 degrees -- diverging at right angles from the real numbers line to the imaginary numbers line. It's a sudden second dimension, like being on that straight line highway and taking a look to the side, down a corridor of trees to a clearing – and it doesn’t matter whether it’s to see a unicorn, or a dragon, or Cthulhu. The sidewaysness of the view is the point.

Yes, this stuff is impossible. It’s on the imaginary numbers line.

But somehow you’ve got to make readers -- modern, sophisticated, educated readers! -- take it seriously. You don’t want them to be reading it with a “Let’s pretend!” attitude: “It’s like a fable, a tall tale, like Paul Bunyan!” No -- at least for the duration of the story, you want the readers to be as credulous of the supernatural as they are of the lottery and the IRS. You want them to forget it’s impossible!

Luckily, readers have a big capacity for forgetting it.

We’ve still got the circuitry in our heads. People say, "I ain't scared of ghosts, I'm scared of urban gangs and nuclear war." Right, say that now! It’s noon and there’s a lot of people around! But if that skeptic were the only person in an old house at 3 AM and heard something dragging downstairs, they wouldn’t think, “I bet that’s an urban gang member!” They’d know exactly what it is – some awful undead creature of the night.

In his book The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton wrote, “"Suppose somebody in a story says, 'Pluck this flower and a princess will die in a castle beyond the sea.' We do not know why something stirs in the subconsciousness, or why what is impossible seems almost inevitable. Suppose we read, 'And in the hour when the king extinguished the candle his ships were wrecked far away on the coast of Hebrides.' We do not know why the imagination has accepted that image before the reason can reject it."

There's a moment -- maybe longer than a moment -- when the subconscious says, "Aha! Magic -- of course!" and the rational top half of the brain hasn't had time to jump in and say, "No, that's not possible."

And if the subconscious has a louder voice than the rational mind, then the reader is with you, believing it.

Unfortunately, there are lots of ways to kill that credulity!

The most effective way to kill it is to take a flippant, ironic tone -- tongue in cheek -- snarky! Cynical! If the characters don’t react believably when big supernatural stuff intrudes in their lives -- if they just make wisecracks -- the reader won’t believe big supernatural stuff really did intrude in their lives.

Another way to kill or at least hamper credulity is to give readers a careless and clumsy impossibility. Blowing out a candle might be the doom of the the king’s fleet, but a revolver is never going to eject spent shells. Picking a flower might mean a faraway princess dies, but there’s no way somebody’s dark hair turns white overnight.

If a 250 pound man turns into a 100 pound wolf -- or a 1 pound bat! – I want at least a hint about where the extra mass went. You can come up with an explanation that works -- by fairy tale logic, at least. In a recent book of mine, I wanted a guy to turn into a crow, but he weighed 180 pounds and the proposed crow weighed only a pound – so I had him turn into 180 crows.

I’m skeptical of a completely invisible man who can see. His eyes, his retinas, don’t stop light! I want to hear something like … he’s telepathic, and can tap into the eyesight of people nearby.

There’s a credulity speed bump if you show us big dragons flying. When we picture them -- go ahead, imagine a dragon! -- we can see that their bodies are too heavy for those wings to lift them. But you want flying dragons in your story -- so what can you do?

Well, you make some gesture toward plausibility. What I’d do is say that they’re native to the moon, and for them the moon’s gravity partly counteracts the Earth’s, enabling them to fly. That has a sort of fairy-tale plausibility about it. And it would mean they can’t fly when the moon is down -- they just float in remote areas of the ocean, and dragon-hunters set sail to find them.

Obviously these explanations I came up with aren’t physics! But they’re implicit acknowledgment of the problems, they can seem real because they have collateral effects, and they incidentally provide some nice plot opportunities.

In their innermost cores, everybody wants to believe supernatural stuff happens -- that there are fairies in the garden, spirits in trees and rivers, old gods haunting ruins on Greek islands, voices singing at midnight far out on the ocean.

The ancient credulity is still hardwired into the bottoms of our brains -- still glowing in old vacuum tubes down there below our modern skepticism and sophistication.

All you’ve got to do is take it seriously, on its own story terms – picture it as if it’s really happening, and show it to us sincerely, without cynicism -- and let literature students figure out what metaphors, if any, are in it.