In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Dan Hartland is joined by Cameron Miguel and Nick Hubble to discuss fantasy and its relationship to history and history-writing. Is some sense of the recordable past baked into the genre? And, if so, with what effects?

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 18: On Fantasy and History

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be joined by the reviewer—and newest member of the excellent Strange Horizons proofreading team—Cameron Miguel, and the scholar and critic, Nick Hubble.

In every episode of Critical Friends, we discuss SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going. In this episode, we’ll be talking about fantasy in particular, and its relationship to history and history-writing. Is some sense of the recordable past baked into the genre? And, if so, with what effects?

We take in Tolkien and Virginia Woolf, Augustan Rome and the Yukon Gold Rush, and we ask ourselves how power operates through history—as well as what history even is. Most of all, though, we wonder: What can fantasy teach us about history writing … and how can it change it?

But we began our conversation with Cam’s most recent review for us. Fittingly enough, it was of K. J. Parker’s Making History.

[Musical Sting]

Dan Hartland: Okay, both. My job on this podcast, as I see it at the moment, is to put reviews and reviewers in conversation with each other, to try and give the reviews some more legs, to give the issues they discuss more airing. Just get the conversation a little bit wider.

Sometimes my job is super easy because some great reviewers put in some fantastic pieces that are talking to each other without even knowing it. And your two most recent reviews for Strange Horizons fall into that bracket: They just did their job for me. And Cam, I thought we’d start with yours, because what really struck me about your review—one of the many things—was that you started it by saying, “Look, guys, this, this book is just made for me.”

And what really struck me, was how your interests in history and language all aligned in this world that’s been built by K. J. Parker, in a book called Making History. So I just wonder whether you could talk us through what you think that book is doing, how its worldbuilding is working towards a sort of vision of how we interpret the past?

Cameron Miguel: Well, I’d say that the main way that K. J. Parker’s novella approaches the past is by viewing it as history being this malleable thing that can be shaped, molded, remade, subject to peer review, scholarship, reinterpretation—just re-analysis of all the evidence that we have. And I was rereading the novella in preparation for today, and there actually is a scene near the end of the story where the narrator discusses exactly that: How we know for certain that this group of people migrated, one million en masse to a different location, to settle this specific region. The narrator later goes on to say, “We know now that none of that is actually true and that a few of them were brought over as slaves and they multiplied, and they either overthrew or flat out enslaved the people who enslaved them, and became the settlers of that region.”

I really like how he played with this idea of history and our understanding of history—how everything that we read in books ultimately gets updated, revised in accordance with new knowledge that we learn. And it was really interesting for me, coming out of the academy not too long ago as a classicist, the ways that we constantly had debates about the classics and what they meant. And in my specific field, which was examining same-sex relationships and antiquity, there’s this predominant assumption of just how every ancient relationship would’ve worked. If you’re looking at same-sex male relationships, we rely entirely on Plato, we rely on Athens; but the problem is every city-state had its own culture. And we see how those cultures are different, but we still try and impose this one model on everything else. And I think it’s sort of hindered our understanding of the variance of sexuality, sexual behavior, and other things in antiquity—because we’re trying to impose an understanding of the world on them when we don’t even understand ourselves.

We know today that sexuality, gender, all of it is just incredibly fluid, inconsistent; but somehow we think that it’s stable and sturdy in the past, that they never bucked their cultural norms or had illicit relationships. Everything just perfectly fit into these models. I like the way that Parker challenged that.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. And we will definitely come back to the ways in which fantasy literature sort of calls on the past and sometimes reflects it well and sometimes doesn’t, and the kind of generic knee-jerk responses that fantasy sometimes has with how it deals with quote-unquote history.

But one of the things that interests me as well about how you characterize Parker’s approach to history is that the novella has this character, this dictator, right? I think he calls himself a “first citizen,” but actually he’s a prince, right? And he’s just trying to swap clothes to retain power—whatever it takes. And it’s this figure that is behind a lot of the most obvious misuses of history in the novella, right? He basically tells the academy, he tells all these historians, “Go away and write a history that suits me, that makes my power authorized.”

And that’s a really interesting grace note on what you’ve just said, right? Because yes, sometimes it’s misunderstanding that makes us misuses history or misinterpret history or miss out on the nuances and the valences of the past; but sometimes it is knowingly done. The novella, you talk about it being a meta-narrative of history. Can you talk a little bit more about how the first citizen’s kind of approach to power shapes that kind of historical record in the novella?

Cameron Miguel: I’m so glad you asked that because on my reread I was actually thinking, “Wow, this guy kind of reminds me of Augustus.” And as I got further and further, I said, “Oh, he reminds me a lot of Augustus. Uh-oh!”

Because again, in the academy there’s speculation—debate, even—about the influence Augustus had over not just politicians or the citizens, but also just the artists in the world. You mentioned, Prince Gugu, which is his original name, and then Gyges, if I’m pronouncing that correctly, maybe it’s Giese or something else. Not only does he tell them to write a history, in the narrator’s specific instance, but he tells them to build an entire city that they can just uncover and use to create an expansionist project of making Aelia—that’s the land in the story—far bigger, so they can eventually attack this other group called the Sasha.

And it was reminding me a lot of Augustus, because Augustus supposedly strong-armed Virgil into writing the Aenid. You got the Aenid, you got the Lea. I’m seeing parallels. There’s even an in-universe story called the Lea which tells the story of how these nobles from a fallen city traveled to Aelia and became the Aelians. I’m like, that’s, “That’s the Aenid. That’s just the Aenid! I really saw a lot of parallels between Augustus and Gyges and the way that they try and use power to form narratives that suit them, their pursuit of power.

Dan Hartland: There’s so much going on in this. I mean, did you say like it’s sixty-odd pages, this novella?

Cameron Miguel: Yeah, it’s about sixty-eight pages.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. And you are getting so much out of it, there’s so much going on. You know, the people in the novella, the characters of the novella, are using history, but also Parker is using history, as you say, calling on that kind of Augustan sort of thing. And Nick, that’s why it just seemed to me like I had to get you and Cam talking, because Cam in their review makes clear that this is a novella about history—and when you are writing about Alix Harrow’s The Everlasting, you start the review with history!

You say, “One thing we’ve learned”—and I’m not sure we have learned it, but you’re a hopeful person!— you say the one thing we should have learned is history is not a linear process, right? The Harrow, it seems to me, is doing similar things—there are academics that are told “you’ve gotta write this certain thing,” and there are old stories that are refashioned in order to authorize power and authority. So I just wondered what similarities, what differences, are you seeing in The Everlasting when you’re listening to Cam talk about Making History?

Nick Hubble: Yeah, I think there’s clear—I have to say, I’ve actually read Making History, given that it was only sixty-odd pages long.

Dan Hartland: So you two are just making this too easy for me!

Nick Hubble: Yeah, I mean, there’s a couple of absolutely direct parallels. One is that in both there’s a kind of … well, it’s more of a wannabe ruler in The Everlasting, Vivian Rolfe, and she’s a minister—the Minister for Defense or something at the beginning of the book. But in various versions—because they go backwards and forwards in history, and in that sense, it’s a different kind of book because they move backwards and forwards in history—and at various times she used to be the chancellor, she used to be the Prime Minister. She’s trying to run history so that she’s in power. And of course, part of the thing is you can’t control it quite that well, so, you know, it doesn’t quite work out.

But she says specifically at one point, she has a quote where she says, “I invented a lineage for myself, gave myself a name, a title, a birthright. Oh, don’t give me that. Look, how do you think any king gets his crown?” And that’s kind of exactly what Gyges is trying to do in Making History: invent this kind of past. So it’s the same kind of process.

We’ve also got the historian, and also they’re very also similar characters. The two historian characters, I don’t think the historian is actually named in Making History, but the one in The Everlasting is called Owen Mallory. And there’s also a sense that it’s kind of a play on Arthurian stories, because you’ve got Mallory, and when the historian goes back in it is all to do with writing the history of a famous knight who is a woman: Una (or Oona!). So it’s kind of like a gender flip to Arthurian romance.

But the point of kind of similarity in both cases is that the historians are not from the actual nation that the ruler is trying to manipulate. The guy from Making History is not actually an Aelian. He says at some point, you know, “And thank God I’m not,” without specifying exactly where he might be from.

And it’s similar, it turns out, in The Everlasting—that the historian is not actually from Dominion. (The country’s called Dominion, so the kind of politics of it are rather, you know, made evident, because they took about dominion and everlasting dominion and so and so on and so forth!) But he’s not from that country, it transpires, and also he looks different. At first it’s not such a thing, but gradually, as the novel goes on, you realize that this is a significant part in that part of the history of nation—that he actually looks different. He’s a different sort of size. He has very much darker eyes. He has kind of crinkly hair. I don’t … it is not explicit exactly how different he looks, but he clearly looks ethnically different to the people of Dominion. And he’s actually from the people they’re kind of conquering in, you know, ever expanding their empire.

So I think there are these two direct parallels, but then for the rest, you know, there’s a more general sense that we’ve both got historians who are at universities. There’s a little bit of kind of playing around with university politics in this, so that every time the guy writes the story of Una the Everlasting—which he doesn’t want to do on the one hand, but he does because it gives him a chance to go back in history and meet her every time—it’s not that he’s commanded to do it. He’s told to do it, to get tenure!

So it’s a kind of a nice sort of … it nicely satirizes how academia works. Which is—I can say as an academic, well, former … no longer a paid academic, put it that way—you end up doing things, obviously you do things, that you don’t necessarily want to do because you have to do them to go through the system, or you get told to do them, or it’s to your advantage in some way—and it kind of, it satirizes very nicely as well, the making history. Making History, I would say, is a funnier book than than The Everlasting in that sense.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. There’s something about—we’ve talked about novellas on previous editions of the show, and I wouldn’t want get sort of sidetracked again by the endless question, but! Satire seems to me something that a novella is particularly well disposed towards.

I think it’s really interesting to think about the academic side of it because that is in miniature a power structure, right? And it’s a type of power structure under which the historians are laboring and must to some extent or another pay due deference—certainly in order to advance within the structure, but also partly just to be able to do the thing that they want to do in the small space that’s left to them by said structure.

You quote, Nick, in your review, from The Everlasting, where one of the professors says, “If the history you were reading wasn’t filthy, then someone had censored the good bits.” Are both of these works also trying to get at this idea that Cam began our discussion with: this idea that history was a lot messier actually than … let me put it another way. The past was actually messier than this thing we call history. Is that something you find in the Harrow?

Nick Hubble: Yes. I think that that’s definitely the case. And that particular professor, although academically superior to Mallory, is actually in some ways one of the moral consciences of the novel. I think she also says at one point, “You can be a historian or a patriot,” to Mallory. “You can’t be both”—implying that actually, what he’s doing is, obviously, writing stuff for the greater glory of Dominion, rather than good history. And actually there’s several points where we see him exactly doing that—you know, sanitizing history.

There’s a kind of time loop thing in it, in that actually—although he’s supposedly interpreting and translating this ancient medieval text telling the story of Una the Everlasting—he’s actually writing it himself when he goes back into history. So he is kind of rewriting his own story continuously. But there’s a point where the Queen is supposed to have sent for her, when she was at prayer at some point, and she says something like, “Well, uh, yes, I will put off my God in order to, to fight for my destiny.” And then she, you know, tells him, “No, that’s not how it happened. I was completely drunk. And I told them to go fuck themselves!” And he thinks about it and he goes, “Hmm, well we don’t need to include all that detail in the writing.” I’m, you know, I’m paraphrasing!

So you said something … Una responded as she always had done. How he writes it. So it just nicely … it is exactly messier, more fluid, than the version that … I think another difference between the two stories, perhaps, is he, doesn’t … he kind of becomes more self-aware as the story goes on.

I think the narration of Making History is perhaps more self-aware from, from the beginning. So you get a slightly different kind of story in that respect. But the point of Owen Mallory becoming more self-aware is he gradually becomes aware that it’s actually … he himself is complicit, and in writing this history has to kind of contend with his own sanitizing tendencies, if you like, and that comes across very well across the length of the novel.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: One of things that struck me as I read both your reviews—and as I’m listening to you now—is that there are so many echoes in these novels of prior fantasies that do similar things. So one of Harrow’s previous works was The Once and Future Witches, right? Which is, you know, in its title plainly a homage to T. H. White, who famously sort of did the Arthurian thing in this kind of fantastically rich, mixed historical setting: You know, you have Normans but also kind of pre-Christians, and also they play games that seem similar to what we might imagine a nineteenth-century student at Eton would have played. You know, there’s this great kind of mixture of historical periods in this one supposedly coherent world.

And it reminds me of this scholar, Irina Ruppo. She wrote this essay, “What’s Wrong With Medievalism?”, and she argues that epic fantasy plays a kind of game with history. There’s definitely game-playing in both of these. Like, Nick, you say that Making History is funnier than The Everlasting. But there’s no doubt that, from how you characterize it, The Everlasting is having fun, if nothing else, right? Like, it might not be funny, but it’s good fun.

Nick Hubble: It is funny. Sorry, it is funny. It’s just not … I don’t think it’s so self-consciously comic throughout, put it that way. Yeah.

Dan Hartland: So I’m just thinking of all these ways in which these books talk to each other, but they also talk outwards. The commonplace about fantasy is that it looks backwards to the Middle Ages—that it is, you know, kind of informed by medieval epic and all of that. And I think, you know, maybe the canonical statement of that—and pretty much every recent history of fantasy talks about it—but was W. A. Senior who wrote, I mean this is years ago, but in the Journal of the Fantastic Arts that fantasy looks back to medieval literature because it seeks, in a similar way to medieval literature, to confirm certain moral certainties, right? It is comfortable as a genre when ontologies are concrete.

There’s a lot of secret knowledge in fantasy. There are a lot of occult groups—you know, I think of China Miéville, or I think of the Aes Sedai in The Wheel of Time—and that’s fine because nevertheless they have the knowledge. It might be secret, but it is gettable. The use of history in fantasy can work towards that. It can work towards, “Oh, well this world has a past.” Like Tolkien: “I can literally tell you thousands of years of history of this world. That must mean it’s real.” But of course it kind of also isn’t, and this game with history is really interesting to me.

But Cam, you talked about Classical history, and it seems to me that recently certainly there’s been quite a bit of fantasy that draws on other histories, and I wouldn’t want to necessarily echo this flat assumption that fantasy is just European medieval. I don’t think that’s true anymore. What thoughts do you have about that, about this idea that these books … yes, they’re in dialogue with each other, but also they’re in a long tradition of fantasy being interested in history?

Cameron Miguel: I would say that history writing is kind of baked into the nature of fantasy, as you’ve already said. In fact, one of my thoughts was just about Tolkien and Martin, because these two authors create entire histories that go along with their stories, and they’re built into their narratives. That way, everything that shows up in the story has some sort of weight to it. It’s just this sort of way of confirming the truth of the narrative itself: If the narrator is reliable, everything that the narrator says is true because the narrator is reliable; so therefore everything the narrator has to say at the past, unless the narrator is being deceived, is therefore true.

And being able to have these concrete facts about the world helps you build up an understanding of what type of culture, what type of language types, of education systems that these people may be building, experiencing—and the ways that they just influence each other constantly. At least to me!

Dan Hartland: I think Juliet McKenna’s written—there’s an essay on her website—in which she talks about how she uses history to do exactly that, to like provide kind of texture and ballast and believability to the world. But what’s interesting, of course, is that these books—these two books, Making History and The Everlasting—make it absolutely clear that that’s not what history is, and that in fact it’s much more complicated than that and much more partial and much less reliable.

So is there an issue—and this is to either of you—is there an issue here where fantasy has come to rely on history and chronicle and the idea of building a world from a verifiable past when in fact, you know, those are not solid foundations in the way that the genre has sometimes assumed?

Cameron Miguel: Yeah, history is pretty messy overall. I think that fantasy narratives tend to rely a lot on the fact that they are narratives. And again, that they create the facts of the world straight from the author’s brain, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But when you look at history and fantasy and then history and antiquity—specifically Herodotus—you get a lot more plausible deniability in Herodotus!

Every tale that he tells you is prefaces with “supposedly” … “they tell me this is what happened.” “I wasn’t there!” “It could have gone down this way, but it might not have.” Whereas in fantasy, you’ll get, even with my own writing, details about someone, a specific person’s past—that’s their history, and how it led them to where they are currently—or a group of people, a nation’s, past, and how it led them to where they currently are.

Simply because it’s an easy way to communicate with the reader. A period where we don’t have worry about being plausibly deniable.

Dan Hartland: I think it’s Kari Maund, who is well known to fiction writers—fiction readers—as Kari Sperring, in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy who says something to the effect that, you know, fantasy and history are completely, she believes, completely interlinked, totally interrelated.

Some people, I think, might imagine that, “Well, fantasy is all made up and history is all real, right?” But there’s something actually that is … that’s not true of either. And this hybridity is part of what they are. They reflect each other in that way, that approach to history. You know, the sort of Lord of the Rings Appendices approach to history: The timeline, the absolutely irrefutable fact of it. It’s very seductive. It has a power because we kind of want to believe it.

I just wonder whether there’s something here, Nick, about identity—where we want to believe that Middle Earth has this verifiable past because it means that Aragon is definitely who Aragon is meant to be, and the hobbits are slot where they are meant to be. History gives us this illusion of “slotability”: I mean, is there a way that that really helps a fantasy world and also comforts a reader? Maybe? I don’t know what you make of that.

Nick Hubble: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s exactly true. I mean, one thing that comes to me is both Tolkien and Martin, who we mentioned, both actually do have a level of self-reflexivity. The Tolkien stuff is supposedly begun by Bilbo and finished a bit by Frodo, and Sam sort of tops it off in these three volumes of the Book of West March or whatever it’s called. Martin, in Fire and Blood—which is the source material for the House of the Dragon TV series—gives a historical narrative compiled by some archmaester who does sort of point out, “This actually might not be entirely true because, you know, the sources are in conflict and you know, and this stuff.” So they play those games, and obviously, yes, we do!

I mean, both of those books are immensely popular because they have that in-depth kind of history, but actually both of them are so big that they’re not internally consistent. And you know, we can read that because the level of scholarship into Tolkien, we can see that. And also because he changed it, so if you’ve got a second edition of The Hobbit—which I’ve got, because that was the one I read as a child, you know—it’s still got all this stuff about policemen on bicycles and stuff that at some point got taken out to make it more internally consistent. So you can reinsert that playful bit. And again, both of these writers are, when the mood takes them, playful as well, they kind of can’t help themselves.

So there’s that level in there. But I think the issue with these kind of fantasies—and I think it’s even true to an extent of somebody like Terry Pratchett, who’s more cynical and more trying to show his readers the kind of flaws in this kind of thing—there’s still a sense that they’re still in hock to history in some sense, to this idea of history, the idea of history itself that we can in the West—or in a country like England, that can trace a history back to, I don’t know, Egbert or whatever, who fought with Charlemagne and stuff, and then came, you know, Boedica and Alfred the Great and so on—there’s this kind of history which in some ways is, “Yeah, you can trace a history back, but also obviously it’s a myth.”

It’s a story and immensely powerful story. And I think all these fantasy versions of it, although they play off that, they’re also partly in awe of that kind of structure. So you can read Tolkien and Martin and Ursula K. Le Guin for that matter—I mean, you can read it from a kind of politically right, conservative kind of position. It’s not like the readership of all of these texts is kind of necessarily progressive or liberal or whatever. Whatever you want to describe the other side as! I mean, Joe Abercrombie, for example, has also done that kind of replay from an even more cynical kind of perspective.

But it’s still … I mean it’s good for the writers, obviously, because they get big, big readerships—because it kind of appeals to everyone. But I think The Everlasting is definitely taking a side in that. It’s not kind of in awe of that kind of history. It’s trying to pull that history kind of apart and say, “You know, it’s part of the process of imperialism.” And so, in that sense, I think it’s different to this other version of, you know, the more dominant, if you like, epic fantasy kind of reliance on history.

Dan Hartland: And it’s interesting that you talk about epic fantasy specifically there. You know, we are painting with quite a broad brush here. I mean, I wonder whether there are examples in, you know, whatever you want to call other types of fantasy—the uncanny or the weird—where this kind of quote-unquote reliance on history is less pronounced, or maybe not.

I’m not convinced, for example—I mentioned Miéville earlier—I’m not convinced that the sort of the leading lights of the new weird—you know, Miéville, VanderMeer, and Steph Swainston—really kind of broke away from it as much as the New Weird might have liked to believe it did. But there are currently quite a few fantasists, I think, who are very actively trying to kind of dissolve that.

You know, I’m thinking of maybe Kai Ashante Wilson, you know? Sorcerer of the Wildeeps: You read Sorcerer of the Wildeeps and I don’t feel the certainty. This is an episode of Critical Friends, so we have to mention Vajra Chandrasekera, it’s not allowed for us not to. So The Saint of Bright Doors does this very explicitly—you know, deals with past and history and identity and how those things are built up over time in a fantasy setting—but is aware, you know, of what are the perils and the pitfalls of this.

Is fantasy able to sort of get around its own reliance on history? Because we started this conversation with The Everlasting and Making History both … I mean, basically the villains in those novels are trying to convince us that history is verifiably the truth. The villains are doing that, right? So that seems to me really important, because if fantasy as a genre isn’t escaping that assumption, we’ve got ourselves a problem. Do we feel like it is, it has, it can?

Nick Hubble: Well, I suppose that’s the question—you know, you’re right!—that’s the question we’re asking. But it’s kind of a big question!

Dan Hartland: Have a swing at it!

Nick Hubble: Having said all those fantasy texts are complicit, I mean, I think we have agency as readers. That’s what I try and tell people, and used to try and tell students at one point: you know, we have agency as readers, so we don’t have to necessarily … I mean, there’s also resistances in all those texts.

And that’s kind of what modern literary criticism is: You read for complicities and you read for resistances, and you try and sort of negotiate what you can out of that. But then, you know, like, I kind of grew up reading Tolkien, you know?! I can’t actually excise that from myself! There’s no way I can do that. And I must admit I like all those fantasy writers and Steph Swainston’s version of doing it if we go into the New Weird.

But yeah, I do think it is … on the other hand, if you ask me to be cold-blooded about it, yeah, it is kind of complicit. I mean, the other thing is the genre is evolving, so something like The Everlasting—which I think will be a (I’m sticking my neck out at the moment!), I think it will be a landmark thing—in a sense, it’s kind of fantasy where the actual goal of the fantasy is to escape from history in some ways, to escape from nation. And I think that’s probably the key? Well, one of the key things, because what it highlights for me, what the novel really highlights for me, is the relationship between fantasy, history, and nation.

It’s about, I mean, with, in this case, as I said, the nation’s called Dominion, so it’s like fairly clear. It’s a bad, I, you know, it’s a bad thing. And then when you think about all those. They’re always about nations. I mean, some are more cynical than others. Actually. The fantasy I was thinking about, which I don’t think we’ve mentioned so far is, is The Witcher, because I was trying to watch series season four, the Witcher, but, and that’s kind of quite cynical about nation, but the nations are still there.

But I think that is the key thing: Do we get away from nation? What would it mean to get away from nation? What would that kind of society be like? And that would possibly involve, it would involve not just going back to history and realizing things were a bit more fluid and messier than we thought; it would involve actually saying that should be the state we want, where everything’s fluid and kind of messy.

And it’s this sort of fixed hierarchies and binaries that you get in nation and history that have to be kind of opposed. I think that’s what Harrow’s doing in The Everlasting. She is actually trying to pull apart those kind of binaries and hierarchies at the same time as satirizing history and fantasy, and also kind of pulling it apart, but also homaging a bit to people like T. H. White and other twenties, thirties writers. She’s just recently written—Alix Harrow has recently written—an introduction to a reprint of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, and those twenties, thirties fantasy writers were also kind of cynical.

I mean, some, something like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is very cynical about history, although it kind of relates four hundred years of it. And it is about kind of escaping from the history, escaping from gender, as it were escaping from hierarchies. Similarly, Hope Mirlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist is another one that does that. There’s a number of fantasies in that period, and I suppose they are also key fantasies in the history of fantasy—and I think what I like about The Everlasting is it seems to be able to draw from a lot of these traditions and do something different with it that’s very, very contemporary, but pay respect to all of those things.

Dan Hartland: Cam, when Nick was talking—particularly when they were talking about nation and history and escaping from it—I was thinking about your review of Ley Lines. Do you remember this book?

Cameron Miguel: So I do remember Ley Lines. It’s such a weird little book!

Dan Hartland: Isn’t it? And your review of it really gets into the weirdness of it. And it’s a fantasy—it’s not an epic fantasy, but it’s definitely a fantasy, in the way that it is a …

Cameron Miguel: Psychedelic Odyssey is how the blurb described it.

Dan Hartland: I was gonna say in the way that a bad trip is a fantasy, but yeah! Psychedelic odyssey works, too. Yeah. But it looks like a western at first, it looks, you know, gold rush and saloons and all that stuff. But it’s not that at all, and it completely dissolves all of the kind of assumed …

Cameron Miguel: It’s Canada, so there are a few less guns!

Dan Hartland: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s kind of a Call of the Wild thing, right? It’s, it’s a Jack London White Fang thing. So my question … I guess the reason I bring that up is that this is a book that really does dissolve all of the silent symbologies of nation and history, and I mean—just so that people have … if they haven’t read this review, I mean—basically it starts out as a sort of cowboy thing, but before long they’re being chased by giant disembodied ears and noses and things. Right?

Cameron Miguel: Not even chased, more like just followed, casually menaced. But instead of ascending this mountain—coming back with their glory to get their bounty, whatever it was—they come back with this ear that’s just slowly floating after them. It’s not even doing anything. It’s just standing there, not even standing, just floating and it doesn’t do anything. But it gives this weird eminence that seems to have an effect on everyone and drives just pilgrimage to this dying town in the Yukon.

It is a really interesting book, especially because, while it deals with history, it seems like it’s more about examining the way our exploitation of the environment creates this death cycle where things progressively get worse and worse and worse. There was a book that came out a little while ago, everyone in the left political sphere was talking about, I think the name was Enshitification: How Everything Just Got Worse. And thinking about enshittification and then Ley Lines: Yeah, everything in this book just keeps progressively ratcheting up in a way of getting worse and then coming back to where it was, getting worse and coming back to where it was, but being in different locales and transcending time.

Dan Hartland: Which I think is kind of valuable because, if we think like Nick does—and I tend to agree that (I’m holding you to this, Nick!) fantasy is complicit in some way in this kind of deadening narrative that the past leads to the future in a sort of meaningful chain of events—there’s a danger that we become nostalgic for a time when things weren’t so enshittified.

Every schoolchild in Britain at one point was thrust a copy of a book called What Is History by E. H. Carr. This is a book that’s really easy to kind of roll your eyes at now—it’s a very kind of certain mid-century British thing. But it ends with a chapter in which Carr worries about nostalgia. He worries that Anglo-American historiography is not going to be open to all the new ideas it needs to be open to in order to escape this sort of dread gravity of, “Oh, things were better in the olden days.”

And I think sometimes fantasy can fall into that because it’s often construed as, if not set in our past, then certainly something that looks like it. Is that something we experience when we are reading fantasy or are there recent or older fantasies that we read that feel a bit more forward footed? Can it project forward or is it always going to be kind of a little bit backwards-looking?

Cameron Miguel: As someone who engages not just with reading but also with other forms of media, and who is in the comic book space and the film space necessarily by living in LA, in the friend group that I’ve built—the creator friend group that writes comic books, has people in the industry—I’ve noticed there’s this dramatic shift towards nostalgia in everything, a hatred for anything potentially new.

And I don’t necessarily blame them. Because everyone wants to go back to, “Back in my day when cartoons felt good”—because you were young and cartoons were great because you were a child! You didn’t have to think too critically about the story of a cartoon. But then you look at a kid and they’re like, “This cartoon rocks!” I know because I’m an educator—I see how these kids react to their cartoons—and not only are we becoming stuck in nostalgia, it’s going to create this sort of vortex where any type of new narrative goes. And it’s already happening. It’s just dismissed as woke or garbage or anything because it doesn’t live up to impossible expectations we have because of something we saw when we were younger.

Something that reminds me of this already is the discourse happening about the recent Predator movie, which is science fiction. But having watched the 1987 Predator film just yesterday, uh, because I watched Badlands and loved it, so of course I go all in on things. I was thinking, wow, “Badlands just takes the Yautja far more seriously than Predator 1987 does.” And I know people will come for me when I say that! But what I mean by “takes them seriously” is: It fleshes them out as a people. It gives them culture, it gives them history here, it gives them norms. Really interesting! And then the first Predator movie, you sort of just have this apex predator—as in the name—who’s trying to kill a bunch of commandos. And there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s a good film; but if you want something that takes its subject seriously, I think Badlands is a bit better of a film.

[Musical sting]

Nick Hubble: For all that I’m giving, you know, my sort of emancipatory readings of Making History and The Everlasting, they are also just narratives as well—I mean, “just”—but, you know: narratives, stories, novels all work, you know, on one level have to work as entertainment—and they do. They’re both very entertaining. I can assure everybody who’s listening! So, yeah, in some ways you don’t, you can’t, quite ever kind of escape from the circle, but maybe that itself is understanding it as a circle.

Because we can still … even nostalgia is not necessarily bad if you don’t think that history is linear. To get back to my starting point, if it’s not completely linear, then nostalgia is not necessarily bad because this doesn’t mean you’re necessarily just going back into the past. It can be nostalgic for the future in a way, as well. You know, there’s different ways that that can play out.

I think that the way to do that is to be kind of mentally agile. And I think that’s what both of these books do. They sort of encourage you to be mentally agile. So, you know, it’s not that you have to abandon everything from the past. It’s not that, you know, we don’t have to … I was saying that earlier with Tolkien. It’s not that we have to completely throw out Tolkien or you know, anybody else.

Dan Hartland: Do we think that we, that fantasy as a genre is—or at least parts of fantasy as a genre, I wouldn’t want to talk about, you know, all fantasy, that’d be silly—is it moving forwards? You know, where are we? It feels to me like a lot of the things that we’ve been discussing here—and we’ve been very circumspect and careful, you know, we’ve talked about medieval Europe, we’ve talked about the Roman Empire, we’ve not talked about today, right now—but I think a lot of what we’ve been talking about has, you know, urgent contemporary resonances. Is fantasy sufficiently conscious of all of this?

You know, we’ve been sort of bringing this forward, these complicities or these potential sort of areas where we might sort of break free. Do we have confidence that this is something that fantasy can do? Where is all this going? It seems to me that fantasy is really very current right now: In the end of year lists that are coming up soon, my suspicion is—partly because of romantasy, but also I think just generally—fantasy will be well represented in a way that science fiction might not be. Between the two of them, it feels fantasy is having a moment.

If that’s true, is that okay? Are we … is fantasy gonna look after us in this moment of its zenith?

Cameron Miguel: I mean, in the same way we don’t expect perfection from literary fiction, especially when it was the dominant genre, we expected just good art, I think fantasy is in a similar position. Fantasy has narratives that appeal to all types of people and some of those narratives deal with things that are current or don’t deal with things that are current at all. I think for readers that’s completely fine, but if the aim of fantasy itself is to be critical of how things currently are, it may not be prepared to meet that challenge.

I mentioned that I had reread Making History in anticipation for our meeting, and as I’m looking at Gyges, not only am I thinking about Augustus, but I’m thinking about the orange guy in the White House, and the fact that he just mobilized our biggest warship off the coast of Venezuela, supposedly to target drug cartels. You need missiles to target drug cartels?!

This idea of strong men, dictators or strong men—would-be dictators—who rely on lies and mixed stories that allow them to get away with committing crimes up the wazoo: That’s all Gyges decided to do. He even went as far as abducting the academics at the beginning of the story, just having his guards wrestle them out of their homes into that little crowded room, so he could tell them, “You guys are gonna make a city for me so I can go invade somewhere.”

Nick Hubble: Because we are living in fantastic times—I mean, we are not living, you know, in the sort of periods where … we are not living in this kind of rational, instrumental change period that would suit some of … science fiction and fantasy in some ways, I think, is a slightly false distinction because they quite often play off similar ideas as we know, and the boundaries are not hard and fast. But you can imagine there’s a kind of cold sort of … there’s a kind of Star Trek moment of optimism and enlightenment that is possibly not just not consonant with what’s actually happening in the world at the moment to us.

That’s why we—I think why we—are reading fantasy. But on that hand that makes it the field of contestation, and we don’t quite know how that’s going to play out. I mean, in some ways it’s quite exciting that fantasy is the dominant genre. I mean, who would’ve thought that, you know? That would’ve been, as recently as the nineties, considered absolutely ridiculous. The fact that that’s actually happened itself is just, you know, interesting. I don’t think we pay enough attention to it.

And perhaps, you know, that might be a way to go. You mentioned romantasy there, and I do, in the review, sort of discuss a bit where the Harrow is. I don’t think it’s really a romantasy-type novel, but it might attract some of that readership. You know, it’s kind of romance. Romance is a way of learning the world. It’s a way of getting agency. It’s a way of thinking about different systems of power or thinking about power dynamics in sort of interpersonal ways. As a critic, I feel we can work with that. As a reader, I feel we can work with that. So, I mean, therefore, that’s my optimism if you like.

Dan Hartland: I agree. We should be paying more attention as critics to what is going on there. But of course one of the critics, one of the notable critics, that has been is Cameron Miguel!

Cameron Miguel: So are you about to talk about The Entanglement of Rival Wizards?

Dan Hartland: We are.

Cameron Miguel: Is that what we’re doing?

Dan Hartland: We are!

Cameron Miguel: OK, let’s do it.

Dan Hartland: OK, let’s do it! So go for it. You reviewed this for us relatively recently. It was the last book before Making History that you reviewed for us. Yeah. That’s a romantasy book … and you loved it, right?

Cameron Miguel: Yeah, I’m big on romance. When I was growing up, as a child there wasn’t much representation of queer people in literature. At least there wasn’t much representation of queer people in literature that I was allowed to read as a little kid. I would certainly not recommend this book for little kids, either, but, as a grown adult now who has free will and choice, I chose to read this book, and of course I enjoyed it.

It has queer characters in it. It handles serious topics pretty well, including abuse and the way family members can deny abuse if it’s done by someone else; the way institutions abuse people, the way that academics play into institutions. And I was just thinking about The Entanglement of Rival Wizards when I finished discussing fantasy that’s not meant to or not able to meet the moment of being critical of power. I wouldn’t expect an Entanglement of Rival Wizards to challenge an invasion off the coast of Venezuela. That’s something that I do from Making History, and that doesn’t make an Entanglement of Rival Wizards bad. It just makes it a different book that appeals to a different audience.

Entanglement of Rival Wizards can challenge our assumptions about sexuality, gender, the nature of gender, culture, all of that. You can look at other books and how they target race and the superstructures that we’ve invented across the Western hemisphere to subjugate certain groups of people. There are certainly ways that books can be sophisticated, critical. All of it really just depends on what the author is going for.

Nick Hubble: You just have to have a slightly more agile way of thinking about it. And I guess that’s kind of what the culture—you know, the broader whatever-you-wanna-call the fan/critical culture embodied in something like Strange Horizons—is trying to do in some … I’m not giving it a conscious purpose, which is perhaps overdoing it, but it works as a kind of hive mind collective. That’s kind of trying to do something, something like that. So that would be my … I mean, maybe that’s just me! I would always want to try and find some optimistic take on things.

Dan Hartland: Critical Friends isn’t known for its optimism, so let’s try, let’s try!

[Musical outro]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for persevering through another episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. Our music is “Dial-up” by Lost Cosmonauts. You can listen to more of their music at grandvalise.bandcamp.com.

After our last episode, on hope in science fiction, friend of the show Abigail Nussbaum wrote to push back on the idea—sort of raised during our discussion of Forfeiture by J. P. Nebra—that forcibly displacing a population, quote, “for their own good” is a positive, hopeful storytelling choice. Ruthanna Emrys’s A Half-Built Garden isn’t perfect, Abigail says, but at least it recognizes that this would be—is—colonialism by another name. As Abigail notes, the prime directive exists for a reason.

Meanwhile, Paul Kincaid reflected on Paul March-Russell’s remembrance of he and our late colleague Maureen Kincaid Speller being baffled that anyone could enjoy the work of Becky Chambers. In his defense, Paul says, the world that Chambers paints is in fact far from hopeful—because it faces no obstacles and overcomes no challenges. PK writes that, because everything in those novels is predicated on everyone being so unutterably nice, everyone can afford to be nice to everybody else because they’re not putting anything on the line to get to that point. Paul emphasizes that building a community out of difference is not easy. And that hope might be found in the measure of discomfort those giving something up might be willing to experience.

And on that note, Roseanna Pendlebury on Bluesky found herself tending towards the belief that literature can’t, and generally doesn’t, change the world, or even really hearts and minds. She wondered if anyone has written about this more generally. Answers on a postcard! Zadie Smith in the NYRB comes to my mind, as does a collection of essays entitled Can Fiction Change the World?, edited by Alison James, Akihiro Kubo, and Françoise Lavocat.

As for changing the world … well. See you next time.