19.44: A Close Reading on Structure: Tradition and Innovation
Today we’re zooming out to see where N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season fits into the canon of fantasy literature. How does Jemisin interact with magic, words, and the expectations of the genre? And what expectations do the readers bring themselves?
How does Jemisin repurpose parts of the hero’s journey while creating something fundamentally different? Does this work start a new lineage for epic fantasy? We think so! We talk about what other works this book is in conversation with, and what it even means to be in conversation with something.
Thing of the Week: Family Reservations by Liza Palmer
Homework: Make a list of the books that you consider the antecedents to the book that you’re working on now. What other works are your book in conversation with? Are you following in and building upon their foundation, or are you disrupting and disputing their legacy?
Do you want a signed special edition copy of The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin? Preorder The Orbit Gold Edition set before November 19th to get 20% off! Visit orbitgoldeditions.com to order.
Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, and Howard Tayler. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
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Transcript
Key points: Where does it fit into the fantasy lineage? Using tradition, but also breaking from it. In conversation with… What the writer intends and what the audience thinks. The conversation that the author is having with the genre and the conversation that the reader is having. Anxiety of influence! Fifth Season is a break from the restoration line of epic fantasy. “The world is what it is. Unless you destroy it and start all over again, there’s no changing it.” Each POV is in a different genre. Story as unfolding and telling. When writing, do you think of being in conversation with other books, or with the canon? What has made you the storyteller you are? Who are you telling stories to? Be aware of the traditions you are following, and of the ones you are breaking.
[Season 19, Episode 44]
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[Season 19, Episode 44]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Structure: Tradition and Innovation
[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you’re in a hurry.
[Howard] And we’re not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I’m DongWon.
[Erin] I’m Erin.
[Howard] And I’m Howard.
[DongWon] So, this week I wanted to talk about another aspect of Fifth Season. I think we’re going to zoom out a little bit, a little further away from the text. This is coming from a little bit of my perspective, both as an English major and someone who almost went into academia, and also as a publisher. But one thing that I’m really interested in talking about this book is the way it fits into the lineage of fantasy novels. I think this is a really interesting thing to think about when thinking about how to structure a book, how to frame a book. This kind of touches on some stuff like Hero’s Journey kind of things and the way that’s used in fiction. But also, just the place that this book has in the canon of fantasy literature, to use a loaded term. So, in a lot of ways, modern epic fantasy is established by Lord of the Rings and a lot of it is descended from that. I think Fifth Season is a really interesting break from that tradition that nonetheless is in conversation with it. Right? One thing that struck me on my second reading of the book several years ago was how much of it uses the classic fantasy tropes. Right? To me, it felt so contemporary and so fresh and so different. But when I stepped back for a second, I said, “Wait a minute. This is a book about wizards who go to a magic school and use crystal magic.” I was like, this is just the most classic fantasy I’ve read in a second. Like, harkening back to, like, Tolkien seventies, eighties fantasy. And the way she pulled from that and yet flipped it and reversed it to create such an exciting, fresh work.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things… I’m glad you brought this up. One of the things that I also love about that, in that is that much like when you look back at the Wizard Master… Excuse me, The Wizard of Earthsea, that magic does basically one thing, you use words and you can change things. Yes, there are nine different Masters, but it’s basically, you use words and you can change things. The thing that’s happening here is you’ve got one thing they can do, they can do some vibrational stuff.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Mary Robinette] It’s all of the different ways in which it can be twisted and pushed, and then is in conversation with this whole, larger body of work that is outside of fantasy that causes it to be doing some really interesting fresh things. Also, I just need to put out a little shout out to Dark Crystal, which is my favorite crystal magic.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] I [garbled really] like the phrase in conversation with… Such an interesting one, because some of it is like we don’t actually know…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Like, we believe that a work is in conversation with another work. I remember earlier you were saying that this work is maybe a little bit in conversation with Octavia Butler. I agree with all these things, but it’s interesting, like, how do we know sort of what tradition a book is drawing from? How much of that is the book doing it, and how much of it is us doing it? Because we bring our own context…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] With us. So we’re like, oh, I see these things here, and I’ve seen them in other places.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] It’s a really interesting thing. Unless you ask the author, which we will…
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] It’s hard to know.
[DongWon] Well, it’s the difference between sort of intent and the reader. Right? My subjectivity… Sorry, we’re getting a little academic here. But my subjectivity as the reader is projecting all of the stuff that I’ve read. Right? Like, I’m not super familiar with Dark Crystal, so I don’t see that. I do… I am familiar with Earthsea and Lord of the Rings and parable of the sower. So, for me, I’m seeing this book as being deeply in conversation with those three things. We were off mic talking about Omelas as well, the ones who walk away from Omelas, another Le Guin story that this feels very in conversation with as well. Right? So…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] I think what traditions it’s pulling from is fascinating.
[Mary Robinette] So, for me, one of the definitions of genre is that it is literature that is in conversation with itself. That you are both be… Not just that it’s the writer is thinking about it. It’s that it is… The readers are having conversations about it. So, regardless of what Nora intended with this, because of the way it’s being read, because of the way it’s positioned, it is in conversation through the conversations of the readers. Actually, as we were talking about it, I think for me… I said Dark Crystal because it is puppets, but for me the thing that it actually brought to mind more was Crystal Singer. Which is a much older…
[Howard] McCaffrey. [Garbled]
[Mary Robinette] Anne McCaffrey. Sorry, my brain just… Similar, one of the similar things there is that you have to have this particular skill, which is, in that case, perfect pitch. Then you go to this planet and you go through this transformation. Some people get turned into rock people by accident. But you are locked into this career now. Because you can no longer exist… There’s a symbiont in this case, is the mechanism. But it’s still that idea of this being locked in, being enslaved, for the benefit of this other civilization that then convinces you that the reason it’s okay is because you are highly valued. So that then the characters become part of their own narrative.
[Howard] I just realized that’s exactly like being a web cartoonist…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Because I could no longer exist without the Internet.
[DongWon] Also, you start to turn into rock…
[Howard] I was just going to die…
[Laughter] [garbled]
[Howard] I started to turn into a rock. No, the… Sorry, the important thing that I was going to say was that whether or not the author is consuming, is aware of, is having a conversation with the genre, the reader probably is. The best example I can think of for this is the TV show Heroes, which, when it came out, a bunch of us said we’ve already read this comic book. It’s just the X-Men. Why are you trying to read tell it? We’ve already done this. Heroes was wonderful. It did neat things. But it was trying to do so without the audience having read comic books. Which can’t happen. So, when you talk about tradition and innovation, it’s entirely possible to convince yourself through anxiety of influence that you are innovating because you are not reading everything else. That’s probably not the way it’s going to be read.
[DongWon] Right. One thing that I think about Fifth Season is it is deeply in a lineage, in a tradition, and I do think that Nora knows that. Or N. K. Jemison knows that. But… How she thinks about it, I’m very curious to hear. I’ve not had a conversation with her about it. But, something that I do think is really important is that this book also represents a rupture. This is a very stark departure from one of the core… What I think is one of the defining impulses of epic fantasy, and what I also think is exciting is that because of this rupture, we’ve seen the start of a new lineage. I see fantasy works now in conversation with Fifth Season, rather than Lord of the Rings as they sort of… I mean, the Poppy war is the example that this brings to mind the most. And because… What I see the difference is, is most epic fantasy… I’m not saying that N. K. Jemison was the first person to do this, but she did it, I think, in a way that was very effective and sort of opened the genre up, is most epic fantasy is what I think of as restoration fantasy. Right? So, Lord of the Rings, the world was good, it has fallen through the rise of Sauron, and just the general, like, rise of the age of men, and the goal is to restore the former glory. The goal is to get Aragorn, the heirs of Numenon, back on… Not Numenon…
[Howard] Numenor.
[DongWon] Numenor, back on the throne. That is so much of what that book is about. The farmboy finds a magic sword can defeat the evil, restore the kingdom to the place of justice and glory and good. It is about restoring a former order. Right? This is part of what makes a lot of epic fantasy inherently conservative, because it’s saying things that used to be good, we need to get back to those ways of being. Right? Fifth Season is saying the exact opposite, of examining structures over and over again and saying these things are broken beyond repair. Because we are exploiting people, damaging people, hurting people in a way that the only answer is to burn it down and start something new. Right? Or it’s not even particularly interested in what the new thing to start is. It is interested in the examination of what has gone wrong entirely at this point, to the parts that we, as the readership… I don’t know that every reader is feeling this way, but are coming around a little bit to maybe Alibaster was right. Maybe he had a point. This is the Magneto is right argument for X-Men fans, of which I’ve been a big component of. This is Kill Monger’s right, this is siding with the villain a little bit because restoration can’t be the answer for everybody.
[Mary Robinette] There’s a line in the book that is the world is what it is. Unless you destroy it and start all over again, there’s no changing it.
[DongWon] Exactly. Speaking of accepting things being the way they are, let’s go to break for a moment, and will be right back.
[Mary Robinette] I want to tell you about Family Reservations by Eliza Palmer. This is so good. It is not a science fiction or fantasy book. This is mainstream. You should read it. It weaves together some of the most complex family dynamics I’ve seen. Part way through it, I was thinking, “Oh. Oh, this is King Lear.” Eliza describes it as succession meets fine dining. So it has some of the most delicious food descriptions ever. The story does a beautiful job of handling omniscient narrator. And I highly recommend it, not just because it’s a fantastic read, but also because it is a masterful use of omniscient narration. If you been wanting to play with this tool, this book is a really good one to read to see how it’s been handled in a modern context. Although you should expect to come away being very hungry.
[DongWon] Okay. Before the break, Mary Robinette, I think you had a point that you were trying to expand on with the quotation of that line.
[Mary Robinette] So, it’s just that when we talk about things that are in conversation, and when you look at when this book was written in the conversations around Black Lives Matter and breaking the world, there are parallels that a modern reader will bring to that, whether or not it is intended. Then, I think, also one of the things about it for me that is interesting structurally is that if you think about the structure of the book also breaks structure. Like, it is not structured the way you’ve seen other books structured. That is part of what makes it feel so fresh, is that we aren’t seeing regurgitation of the hero’s journey. Although she is re-purchasing parts of it. Like, when you look at a hero’s journey, there’s a mentor, there’s a character, like, Alibaster is literally called the mentor. The Guardians, one of the other things that happens when they go into the Threshold is that… In the Monomyth, you meet the Guardian, and they are literally called the Guardians. But they are the evil ones in this. It’s… It is interesting to me that then the way that first book works, it interrupts the hero’s journey at what some people call the dark night of the soul. Sometimes people call it the descent into the abyss, where we literally go into the earth. Like… So… But it is fundamentally not the hero’s journey.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] This book is fundamentally not that. It is taking those elements, it is breaking them, and it is re-purposing them to build this entirely new structure.
[Erin] I think it’s like bringing new things in. I mean, the… It’s so funny to think about the hero’s journey. It’s also maybe… It’s there, but, like, it is only one small… There are a lot of ways to tell stories.
[Mary Robinette] Exactly.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] There are a lot of traditions of storytelling. We have a small one that we’ve taken and sort of, like, that has been part of fantasy that I think does come from that Tolkien way of thinking. I feel like one of the things that I’ve been really loving in recent works in general is seeing different ways of telling stories coming into things. I think that probably there’s also some of that that this… That this book is in… Is in conversation with. Even though not everyone may know that that’s a voice that’s being…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Added to the conversation.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] I think that’s something really cool that books can do, which is that you don’t have to understand every single thing that the book is working with in order to enjoy that story, in order for that story to be influential on other stories that are being told.
[DongWon] Exactly. It goes into the ambient conversation and space, and then people start responding to it.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that I particularly enjoyed is that each kind of track of the story has a different structure.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] That works with each other’s. So, Dam…
[DongWon] Damaya.
[Mary Robinette] Damaya. Damaya is very like, “Oh. Here is the orphan child who is becoming the chosen one,” kind of thing. Syonite is getting very much the reluctant hero journey. For the beginning of it. But then when you start braiding them together, where these things are working in parallel, they fracture, they go in different directions. Then you got this other thing, the whole second person section, which doesn’t play by any of those rules.
[DongWon] This is a trick I think of most clearly used in Game of Thrones, where each POV character is in a different genre of story. Some are in event, like… You have… What’s the young girl’s name, I’m blanking on her. But each of the characters, they’re like, some are in an adventure story, some are in a political stunt story, some are in a straight up horror story. Right? Some are in a supernatural story, some are in a grounded political fantasy. N. K. Jemison has done that here, where again, we have the child coming into her own power, we have the wizard at the height of her power exploring the world, and then we have the very contemporary sort of like tragic hero story. Again, going back to the parallelism or the POV, realizing that all three are the same person…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Is just… Makes it a stunning trick in terms of how it operates within the genre conversation.
[Howard] Um. I was just reading a bit from Leverage Redemption, the new seasons of leverage. One of the characters says, “Hey, look. We’re going to mess this guy up pretty hard. Are we the bad guys here?”
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Sophie says, “Oh, yes. Never forget that, Brianna. We’re not heroes, we’re just necessary.” I love that moment, because in one context, yes, you’re necessary and I’m siding with you. You are in… You’re hurting this person, but you’re doing a good that needs to happen. And on the other hand, I look at it and say, in the context of Fifth Season, well, this is probably how the Guardians feel about themselves. Oh, we’re not the good guys, but we’re necessary. And just that brushstroke across the Tolkien line of black-and-white, good versus evil… That’s silvery gray brushstroke, it just shimmers and invites you to stare at it. I love it.
[Mary Robinette] There’s an interlude at the one third mark in this book, which arguably is the end of Act One, sure. But it literally says, “A break in the pattern, a snarl in the weft. There are things you should be noticing here, things that are missing and conspicuous by their absence.” I think that’s one of the things that makes this so powerful, is that she is… There’s a line from Hemingway that says that a story is the things that you leave out. And the things that she’s choosing not to show, the structural elements that she is choosing not to use… We don’t get the reconciliation. We don’t get the restoration. All of those things that are being left out on purpose are what makes this so interesting.
[DongWon] Yeah. An earlier [garbled] reference how she calls out I’m not going to tell you the nice part of this story…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So, no rude.
[Howard] When we talked earlier, previous episode, about… Erin and I had this conversation off-line about… Sometimes we’ll just read spoilers because we want to know what happens, but we still want to enjoy the story. A story is an unfolding, and it is also a telling. I can appreciate the telling without the unfolding, and I can appreciate the unfolding while not paying attention to the telling. The consuming media with that in mind, feels to me like a break with tradition. It also, and I’m just going to put a pin in this, argues really well for this book, because it is so well told. The telling is so much more than the unfolding.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] That’s why we would encourage you to read it more than once.
[DongWon] I have one question that’s a little bit of a pivot. As a publisher, I’ve talked about this a lot on podcasts and elsewhere, I think in comp titles. Right? I’m inherently wired to think, this book is like these other books. This book is in conversation with these other books. I’m curious, as a writer, are you guys actively thinking about lineage in that way, or, like, canon in that way, and the idea that a canon can be a personal thing. Right? In terms of, like, what you’ve read and where that comes from.
[Mary Robinette] Um, I mean, definitely, I’ve never done anything like Jane Austen with magic or The Thin Man in space…
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Yeah, that is true. Yeah. So I think you’re very unaware of your influences…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely. Definitely never done Apollo era science fiction that was influenced by Ray Bradberry. Absolutely haven’t done that. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] I don’t know that I… I mean, I know what I’ve read and if I… I could reconstruct the things that have made me who I am as a storyteller. I think it’s a lot of things though. I think some of it is canon science fiction, I think some of it is barbershop tales.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Erin] I think some of it is a lot of things.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] And I do think that this is something that I a lot of times will challenge a student to do, which is to think about what has made you the storyteller that you are.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And who are you then telling stories to?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] I think those are two really key things, because otherwise, other people will tell you, like, when you put a book out in the world, anyone can tell you who you’re in conversation with. But when you’re writing it, you get to decide.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] At that moment, take the power and say, this is who I am and here is how I want to tell this tale.
[Howard] The better you get at reading, at comprehending what you read, the more able you are to, when you write, to consciously say, I am writing like the things I have consumed and to be able to say I am going to attempt to write unlike the things I have consumed. I am aware enough of the traditions I’ve been consuming that I am going to break with them and I’m going to write differently than them.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] That’s a… I see that as a late career skill that takes a long time to develop and you develop it by reading.
[DongWon] That’s what I love about Fifth Season is it is both deeply honoring and in conversation with the traditions that it comes from, but also is so deeply interested in being like, “Uh uh, I’m doing something different.”
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Erin, I really loved what you said in terms of the books that made you a writer or, like, the things that you’re in con… The stories and not even just books. Right? We’re pulling from all parts of our lives. For you, that being different from the conversation that you think the audience is, like, who is this for, what books are they reading, what books will they know and understand? Then, thirdly, the one that you can’t control in any way, which is, what people will actually say your book is like. Right? What people will say once it’s out in the world. I think your relationship to each of those three different interpretations is really, really important. As a publisher, I’m most interested in the second one, the one that I want writers to come in with is an understanding of here’s my audience, here’s what they’re reading, this is like that. But you understanding for yourself why you’re writing this and where you’re coming from I think is so important and so powerful.
[Mary Robinette] I think it is the most important thing. To know why you’re writing it and who your writing it for.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Because you can lose yourself. I mean, I think it’s important, you want to get published, you want your stuff out in the world. But I think if you lose hold of who you are as a storyteller, then you won’t be happy with the story no matter how successful it is, no matter how many other people like the way that you told it.
[DongWon] 100 percent.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It is a common thing that I will see with… When I was going through the slush pile, I would see people attempting to mimic someone else.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] And seeing people thinking about what does this editor want? What does that editor want? But it is that thing about what you want… I’m also going to say one other thing about the conversations that we’re having. I would not be surprised if Nora had read Crystal Singer and forgotten that she had read it, and that that turned up in the book. Because I have, when I’m gone back and reread some things, I’ve been like, oh, I didn’t actually think about the fact that when I was writing Glamorous Histories, I’m like I’m going to do this something fresh and new with my magic, it’s all going to be based on folds and threatens. Then, I’m watching Game of Thrones… Not Game of Thrones. Wheel of Time. I’m like, oh, look at them using folds and threads. No consciousness of that. But this is what we’re talking about, that you can be influenced by something, it can come into the book, but it’s still your own.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] It’s still your own, even if you have been in conversation with something and forgot the the conversation happened.
[DongWon] This is me talking about patterns once again. That’s okay, that’s how stories work. We are all absorbing stories that we’ve read, we are all absorbing fiction that we’ve engaged with, and recombining it and putting it back together in our own ways. Right? So just because a reader will come up to you and be like, “Hey. This is just like that thing from… That Anne McCaffrey did,” doesn’t invalidate your work at all. Your work is still your work.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] So don’t let that throw you. It’s okay to have influences, it’s okay to come from a place and… In fact, I think it’s one of the most important things, is to recognize you come from a place and try to understand that. If you don’t have a perfect understanding of it, that’s fine too.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] With that, I have some homework for you. Very much along these lines. I want you to make a list of the books that you consider the antecedents to this book that you’re working on now. What works is your book in conversation with? Are you following on and building on that foundation, or are you disrupting and pushing back on that legacy in one way or another?
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.
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