Defining Fantasy According to TermiteWriter



Ki'shto'ba and the Companions confront
"Trojan" Warriors in the marches of Thel'or'ei.

       I always have difficulty pigeonholing my books as to their genre. Are they science fiction, fantasy, literary fiction, or a blend of the three?  The Termite Queen certainly is science fiction.  It has most of the characteristics associated with that genre: it's laid in a future period, it has space travel, extraterrestrials of several types, an off-world adventure, some real science (mostly softer sciences, like entomology and other biological sciences, psychology, anthropology, and linguistics), and some fictional physics.  It laps over into literary fiction with its love story, which could have been recast in a contemporary setting without the trappings of science fiction.
 

       But then it has giant termites and their conculture, which includes their religious beliefs and practices.  Should that be called fantasy?  The question becomes more pertinent in my series The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head, in which I retell Earth myths in the context of my termite conculture.  This series incorporates only minimal elements of science fiction (it's laid in the same century as The Termite Queen, the tales are edited by one of the characters in The Termite Queen, and there are frequent references to events that occurred in that earlier story).

       So let's examine the meaning of the term "fantasy."  To some people, it implies a particular and rather narrow literary genre, of which Tolkien's LotR is the prime example.  It incorporates a constructed world in which magic rather than science is the motivational force.  That, however, is hardly the only meaning of the word "fantasy."
 

       Here is the definition of the noun from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fantasy?s=t :
 

1. imagination, especially when extravagant and unrestrained.

2. the forming of mental images, especially wondrous or strange fancies; imaginative conceptualizing.

3. a mental image, especially when unreal or fantastic; vision: a nightmare fantasy. 

4. Psychology. an imagined or conjured up sequence fulfilling a psychological need; daydream.

5. a hallucination.
 

       Please note that the definition of it as a particular literary genre isn't even given.

       If you Google "fantasy definition," you get similar explanations with the addition of the following:
 

"a genre of imaginative fiction involving magic and adventure, esp. in a setting other than the real world."
 

      If you Google "epic fantasy definition" you get referred to Wikipedia,.  The following is worth considering:
 

       "High fantasy (also referred to as epic fantasy) is a sub-genre of fantasy fiction, defined either by its taking place in an imaginary world distinct from our own or by the epic stature of its characters, themes and plot. Quintessential works of high fantasy, such as A Song of Ice and Fire, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant and The Belgariad, have both of these attributes. Accordingly, works where the fantasy world impinges on our world, or where the characters are concerned only with adventure or personal goals (as in sword and sorcery fiction) are less likely to be classed as high fantasy."
 

       I don't want to get bogged down in a discussion of the subgenres of fantasy (we also have paranormal fantasy, urban fantasy, and all sorts of horror fantasy).   I only want to call attention to the fact that all forms of fantasy derive from "imagination" or "imaginative conceptualizing" and only one type of fantasy depends on the presence or absence of "magic" as a motivating force.  I started out writing "high fantasy," but I was never very comfortable with the magic element and always tended to base my plots on character.  In an early attempt to publish the novel that built on my free Smashwords book "The Blessing of Krozem," I was told that it had merit but didn't have enough magic.  Yet you can't deny it's a fantasy, with its race of spirit beings and presence of gods on that world.

     To return to epic fantasy, note that it is "defined either by its taking place in an imaginary world distinct from our own or by the epic stature of its characters, themes and plot."  By that light, The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head has to be called epic fantasy.  Even though it's laid in a "real" extraterrestrial world governed by scientific laws, it has gods and Seers (which certainly fall in the general category of "imaginative conceptualizing"), it takes place in an imaginary (constructed) world, and its characters, themes, and plots have epic stature.  The only reason you might say they don't have epic stature would be if you felt the following Earth myths lack epic stature:  the events in the life of Hercules, the Trojan War, Beowulf, The Song of Roland, or myths to be included in later volumes (the story of Atalanta, Meleager, and the Calydonian boar; and Hercules, Chiron, and the Erymanthian boar).  And of course I mustn't omit the Golden Fleece!  Could anything be more epic than Jason's voyage to recover that lost item?  (Parenthetically, I previously wrote a couple of posts about the characteristics of the epic form.)

       In The Termite Queen, the termite conworld and the events that take place there also contain elements of epic fantasy:  war, single combat, a goddess who meddles and who speaks to the Seer (I maintain all gods are products of the imagination because their existence can't be proved, but that's a different topic).  Therefore, while the book is basically science fiction, it undeniably contains fantasy elements.

       And that brings me to my idea that all significant books have an element of fantasy in them.  My latest venture into that idea was in my analysis of The Great Gatsby over on my other blog.  Gatsby may not have magic, but it definitely has "imaginative conceptualization." 

       I really like that phrase! 

So What Makes Fantasy Literature Valuable?

       This piece is a response to a guest post in the website Mythic Scribes entitled Secrets of Fantasy Literature – Interview with Harry Potter Scholar John Granger

 

       I looked up John Granger's biography because he is obviously an academic.  While reading the article, I felt like I was back in graduate school, charged with preparing an exposition of I. A. Richards' Practical Criticism (I believe that was the title in question -- it's been a long time!)  I'm not sure such an approach is very accessible to the 19-year-old college freshman who has just read Tolkien and is inspired to write a fantasy novel, but I did find some interesting material here.      

 

The post opens as follows:

 

       "I think Mircea Eliade was right when he wrote that reading serves a mythic or religious function   in a secular society, which is to say that we read fiction in general because it offers us an escape from or transcendence of our ego existence.

       "I think we read fantasy literature because it, more than any other genre, is designed, if you will, for just that sort of persona transcendence. As Ralph Wood said, fantasy literature is not an escape from reality but a means of entering into it, our subjective existence being a relative delusion."

 

       In other words, fantasy provides a mythic function for a society that has rejected traditional dogmatic religions but is willing to accept traditional religious stories as myth (fantasy).  This may not be exactly what Granger meant, since it seems he is a Christian and I'm a spiritual humanist, but it certainly plays perfectly with my Mythmaker philosophy -- that (according to Precept No. 6) "The closest humans can attain to deity is the symbolism of myth and art."

 

       The interview then goes on to discuss how fantasy achieves the goal of achieving "not an escape from reality but a means of entering into it."  In fact, this question boils down to -- how do you write a good novel?  (The genre really doesn't matter.)  Granger mentions three things.  Two of them are givens for all fiction:  great plot, great characters.  I won't even discuss those. 

       I will quote the third requirement: "Artistry of the traditional sort — ring composition, literary alchemy, symbolism, soul triptych/diptych, etc. — that not only delivers meaning alongside the morality of the plot points but an experience of the meaning the reader has alongside the protagonist."

       Frankly, in reading this sentence several times and supplementing it with the subsequent paragraph, I don't especially get it.  Let me paraphrase what I think Granger means.  The writer should work within a realistic context, while utilizing symbolism, metaphor, and analogy, together with subtle literary structuring according to certain rules.  This helps the reader suspend disbelief and be carried along in an empathic relationship with the characters.  The reader can thus absorb the "moral" (the "mythic content," the underlying implications of the story) -- in a way that causes it to enter and become part of his or her consciousness -- "the reading heart."  Is that any clearer?

 

        So what is "this ring composition"?  It seems to me that it's really just parallelism (or even dramatic ironies) within the plot -- tying everything together and bringing things back to where they were at the beginning.  Let's use the ouroboros for an illustration -- the snake that eats its own tail.  (Remember E. R. Eddison's novel The Worm Ouroboros?)  In Granger's context this even has a "literary alchemy" function, since the ouroboros is an alchemical symbol. 

 

       Here is how Granger defines "soul triptych": including in the story three characters who represent "desires/passions, will/mind, and heart/spirit (what we call 'body, mind, and spirit')"  More on that in a minute.

 

       Being a Harry Potter scholar, Granger uses those books as examples.  But since this is my blog, I'm going to point out some examples of ring composition from my own book, The Termite Queen, and also talk about the "soul triptych" in that context (I have never written anything that includes his "literary alchemy" thing in it -- I don't get the point of that unless your book is about the kind of magic that uses alchemy).  My main premise here will be that I suspect very few writers sit down to write a book and first say to themselves, "Now how am I going to make this circular?   And I must be sure to have characters that represent body, mind, and spirit."  That certainly is not how I think.  I rarely think in terms of literary theory, although I certainly studied it back in my higher-education days.  I have an idea -- an inspiration -- and I just start writing.  It has to come out the way it wants to come out, or it won't come out at all.

       Strangely enough, The Termite Queen actually exhibits the quality of ring composition.  Three events in the book mirror one another, one near the beginning, one at the big climax at the end of Part III, and one right at the end.  (If I tell you what these events are, I'll be playing the spoiler!)  It seemed natural to do it that way.  Other incidents and events mirror each other throughout the book and foreshadow each other -- the emphasis on the concept of forgiveness, for example, and the discussion of ancient religious values.  I think I did pretty well in unwittingly creating an ouroboros!

       What did I do about a "soul triptych"?  I have to say, I don't think I have that.  I can't say, Kaitrin is mind, Gwidian is body, Kwi'ga'ga'tei the Shshi Seer is spirit.  I suppose you could divide it that way, but it's too simplistic.  Kaitrin finds her sensual side during the course of her relationship with Gwidian, and her spiritual side in the way she copes in Part IV.  Gwidian holds all three aspects within himself, although we can't see that that until near the end of the book.  Kwi'ga'ga'tei is both mind and spirit but hardly body.  And then there is Mo'gri'ta'tu. He fits only as a personification of evil.  I think any story where a character is too rigidly tied to one aspect of this triptych is going to be shallow and lack satisfying complexity and ambiguity.

 

       So what does all this amount to?  My advice to beginning fantasy writers is to produce a well-written book with a soundly constructed plot and great characters -- a book with something complex to say that is portrayed not overtly and moralistically but through metaphor and ambiguity (almost as if the book were poetry).  This is what myth does, and fantasy writers are constructing the myths for a modern age.

 

       Or, as John Granger says at the end of his interview, "If you just like dragons and swords, well, I guess there is a place for that, too"!

 

[Illustration from Wikimedia Commons: "Ouroboros drawing from a late medieval Byzantine Greek alchemical manuscript"]

      

Conlanging for Beginners: Building a Naming Language for Your Fantasy Novel

[Follow this up with an addendum: Conlanging for Beginners, Some Things to Avoid]       

As a member of the Language Creation Society and of the Yahoo conculture forum, I've been discussing world-building and conlang-building lately.  I've also joined the forum at the excellent website Mythic Scribes, which is subtitled "The Art of Fantasy Storytelling."  They have many resources available, including a thread on building conlangs for your book.  Since I've composed two conlangs and several naming languages for my writings, I thought a post drawing upon my own experiences as a beginner might help out other beginners.

       First, let me stress that you don't need to be a professor of linguistics to write a conlang.  A lot of the members of the LCS are just that; they know every subtlety of language and they know  the lingo.  They're so learned that they can be a little intimidating, I'll confess.  I'm not a professional linguist, but I have studied Spanish, French, and German (French is the one I pursued the most deeply) and when I was cataloging books as a librarian, I dabbled in several other languages, including Russian, other Slavic languages, and Swedish (catalog librarians have to be able to handle any language -- there are manuals to help you do this).  I also investigated Hebrew a little bit at one point.  I've always been fascinated by languages and syntax.  If you find these subjects tedious and you never took a beginning language in high school and you barely squeaked through high school English and can't remember a thing about its structure, you may not be very successful at writing conlangs.  It's possible to get somebody else to write one for you if you're serious.
 

       However, if all you need is a naming language (a minimal conlang that consists simply of sounds thrown together, without contructing any syntax), you can still manage to do that convincingly.  Let's assume you're setting out to write a fantasy laid in an imaginary world where nobody ever heard of English.  You may have several different countries and several different peoples.  These peoples probably speak different languages, but you can have them all speak a common language -- a language of diplomacy, say -- in which case you can just render everything in English and be done with it. 
       But even then, you will have many names that remain in the languages of those countries.  You need names for the countries themselves and their citizens, for some of their cities, and for other places like rivers or mountain ranges.  You might also find yourself needing names of foods and flowers and minerals and gods and philosophical concepts. You can just unsystematically make up nonsense words for these, or you can try to systematically diffentiate the several languages of your countries.
       One way to do this is to make up a system of phonology for each language.  Just some notes will serve (I'm avoiding the International Phonetic Alphabet here):  Let's say the country of Talasu speaks Talasian.  So you decide that what makes the language different is that it has no voiced fricatives. 
       What is a voiced fricative, you say?  In a voiced consonant the vocal cords vibrate, in an unvoiced consonant, the vocal cords do not vibrate.  Here is a list of voiced fricatives in English (with examples): v (as in van), th (as in then), z (as in zip), zh (as in pleasure).  The corresponding unvoiced fricatives are f (as in fan), th (as in thin), s (as in sip), and sh (as in pressure).   Say them out loud and you'll hear and feel the difference.
       Thus you would be able to milk a little comedy by making a name (e.g., Zazavi) in a language that uses voiced fricatives.  A native of Talasu would pronounce the word "Sasafi" and might get teased about it, or he might be discriminated against because his speech patterns reveal where he comes from, thus becoming a shibboleth.
       From the rules, you know that the word "Talasian" will not be pronounced "Talazhian" but "Talassian."  But this introduces another point.  If you make the language "Talasian," you are making use of an English suffix -ian, which we use frequently in words like Italian, Indian, Canadian, Australian, etc.  Suffixes and prefixes like -ian  or -ed or un- are called morphemes (an indivisible basic particle, a building block for a word).
       Your imaginary people would never build their words using English morphemes, so you might want to call your language Talasunta (where the suffix -nta means "speech" or "language.")  Or you could call it Nis-Talashu (where "nis" means "language" and "Talashu" is a genitive case, thus making the word mean "Language of Talasu."  In your other countries' languages, if you needed a genitive case, you would construct it differently. 
       For my purposes here, I'll call the language "Talasunta."
       I find I can't write even about a naming language without getting into some minor linguistic terminology. But I hope you get my point -- set a few phonetic rules, make them vary among your languages, and don't use any morphemes (basic word particles) that are found in English.

       Now, I'll confess -- I have usually violated the rule of devising the phonology first!  I've always just thrown a bunch of sounds together to start with.  And I've gotten in trouble, too.  When I started writing "The Termite Queen," I had to name my dying termite right off (see sample chapters 1 and 2 on my other blog, Ruminations of a Remembrancer.) because the first line in the book is "My name is ... "  So I blithely thought, "What would be a good name?  I know!  Ti'shra!"  And I wrote "My name is Ti'shra." Then when I got to working out the details of the language, I thought, "So what does 'Ti'shra' mean?  I know!  Sweet Flowers!  Lovely!  Perfect name for this harmless little creature who gets abducted by aliens!" 
       But then I thought, "So 'flowers' is plural.  What element of the name makes it plural?  I know!  In the Shshi language, prefixing sh- makes a plural, just like with the word 'Shshi.'  You have one Shi, two Shshi."  And I stuck myself with that system.  Unfortunately, in English the combination of sh plus certain consonants doesn't occur and so leads to difficulties of pronunciation.  When we get the Shshi word "shza'zei|" for example, which means "little ones," you're likely to spit all over your computer trying to pronounce it!   Other tough combinations are sh+f, sh+d, sh+h, sh+j ... you get my point. 
       So another rule is, try to think about the consequences of a rule before you set it in stone!

       Names often mean something, like my "Ti'shra," and all words derive from older roots, so you have to decide -- do my names of people, provinces, cities, mountains, rivers, etc., have meanings apart from themselves?  If so, you need to decide how the component parts fit together.  Maybe the country of Talasu has a range of mountains called the Black Jaws (obviously you're going to make something sinister happen there!)  "Jaw" becomes "frago," "black" is "nat."  You decide that in Talasunta, the adjectives follow the modified word, as in French or Spanish, so your mountain range becomes the "Fragonat." 
       At that point you should begin making a vocabulary list -- extremely important, because there is no way you can remember every word you've used, and as your book gets longer and you create more words, you'll never be able to find them again.
      You should also write out every decision you make regarding syntax, like the rules for placement of adjectives, for how to construct plurals and genitive case, etc. 

       What if you want the people in your world to sometimes speak privately, not using the common language?  You want someone to overhear a few phrases in Talasunta.  You can construct just a few rules and usually you can come up with something that will work.  That's what I did in the beginning with !Ka<tá, the Bird language spoken by my Prf. A'a'ma, the avian alien that plays such an important role in "The Termite Queen."  Mostly what I constructed were expletives (birds apparently curse a lot!) but there are some full sentences, too.   In Chapter 2, he says, "Prf. Jerardo ali ♫hi ♫ko’ó∙wa gi !i po∙atré]” and Kaitrin humorously upbraids him, "Tió’otu!  That’s not nice!  But what’s going on?  You surely didn’t go to all the trouble to contact me just to make fun of one of our colleagues.”
        I don't tell the reader of the book what Prf. A'a'ma's insult meant, but I'll reveal it here: "Prf. Jerardo has dung beetles in his head."  When I first wrote the book, I decided on the English of what I wanted him to say and then I just cooked up some words that sounded like birds might twitter them -- I had done nothing on the phonology yet.  I did come up with some non-English sounds and some characters to represent them, like ∙, which is a cough, and ♫, which is a warble and, as a prefix, makes words plural.  
       But this remark did require devising a third person singular present tense form of the verb "to have."  In English, "to have" is an irregular verb.  Most languages have some irregular verbs, but I decided that in !Ka<tá, "to have, to possess" is regular.  I don't remember whether at that point I decided on a form for the infinitive, which would be "khe'ali."  I think I just  said, "OK, 'ali' sounds good for 'he has'" and went from there. 
       But again, I kept careful notes on what I'd done -- I made a little table of verb forms and started by filling in the 3rd person singular masculine present tense.  At first I had just two or three entries, but later it grew to include all possible forms and tenses and aspects and moods ...  So I stress again, keep records on all grammatical decisions! 

       Now I'll construct an example of Talasunta: The hero hides behind the curtain and he overhears two men talking in that language, which he doesn't understand.  You could just write, "so the Prince rushed off to find the Ambassador, who spoke Talasunta, and repeated the words as near as he was able.  The Ambassador was horrified at what he heard ... "
        But it would be much better this way: "The Prince overheard two men speaking in Talasunta, but all he could catch was "Asolya dimerumu chinsa."  A few moments later, he was consulting the Ambassador, who spoke the native tongue.  And the diplomat was horrified.  "He said, 'We plan to kill her at dawn'!"  That enhances the realism of the story.
       In this language, the subject pronoun is suffixed to the root of the verb, so "asolu" means "to plan" and "asolya" means "we plan."  Infinitives end in -u, so "dimeru"  is "to kill" and "mu" is the objective case of the third person feminine pronoun, which is suffixed to the full infinitive.  "Chin" means "dawn" and the suffix "-sa" is a postposition (the language doesn't have prepositions) meaning "at the time of."
       As you can see, if a conlang, even just a naming language, is done right, there are multifold complications!  But you know what?  Writing a conlang is the most fun of anything in the world, for anybody to whom language is fascinating and not a tedious bore!  Actually, I got quite interested in Talasunta while I was writing this, but conlangs can be very time-consuming, and so I don't think you'll ever learn any more about that language!

 

Summation of How to Write a Naming Language

• Set up a system of speech sounds (phonology) for each of your languages in order to differentiate them.
• Never use any morphemes (basic word particles) that are taken directly from in English, or for that matter from any other Earth language. That is, you could use the syllable, but it can't have the same meaning as it does in Earth languages.
• Try to think about the consequences of a decision before you make it (and that's harder than it sounds!) But this is important, because going back and changing a whole language structure is almost impossible.
• As you construct words, make a vocabulary list, preferably in two directions, Talasunta to English and English to Talasunta.
• Keep careful records of rules of syntax, so you won't put adjectives after nouns on p.6 and before nouns on p.300.  (And parenthetically, don't use the same grammatical structure for all your languages.)
• And if you can work it out, use syntax that resembles English or other Earth languages as little as possible (that's one of the tougher rules to follow, unless you're more familiar than I am with all the languages of the Earth). 

       When I started this, I had intended to talk about the naming language in "Monster Is in the Eye of the Beholder," but I got sidetracked.  Maybe I'll write about that in a later post!