Greekish

[hawkwing_lb]

I have been thinking, since I read Xenophon's Anabasis, of how close the Greeks lived to those who were not Greeks. (I refuse to call them barbarians, because that merely feeds into Hellenist chauvinism.)

One of the things one forgets, when one reads 'classical' - or traditional, at least - histories of the Greeks is that the histories of Athens and Attica, Sparta and the Peleponnese, do not provide anything like a full picture of the Greek world. I forget how many city-states called themselves Greek after the Peleponnesian war, but it's something on the order of hundreds.

And these cities - some of them not even large enough to call city-states, really - occupied the islands, the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, where most of them spent time under the authority of Persian satraps and alongside Persian modes of living, and the coast of the Dardanelles and Black Sea. And this is interesting, because the Anabasis made it clear that along the Black Sea and up into Thrace, the Greek communities lived very close to non-Greek communities, at war or at peace with them depending on the season and who was passing through.

And it occured to me, you know - I don't think I've seen this sort of set-up done well in fiction, have I? Fantasy does feudaloid, medievaloid, and imperial, standard, and a couple of other permutations (mostly Chinese and/or Norse related, that I can think of) if you're lucky. But I am trying to think of sort of interestingly Greekish fantasy, and coming up blank.

Anyone?

Comments

[clarentine]

Personally, I think far too much fantasy is of the Protag and Buddies Save The World mode. Small-scale fantasy is rare no matter the setting, IMO--and I'd love to hear if people think I'm wrong, because these are the stories I want to read, the stories where what's at stake will shake Protag's world but not necessarily matter in the larger regional picture.

(Mmm, feudaloid. *g*)

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Yes. This exactly.

I would really like to read more fantasy in very specific settings or worlds, where the stakes are local or regional - at most quasi-national - rather than global. The Privilege of the Sword, Lois Bujold's Chalion books, and, surprisingly enough, Jacqueline Carey's Terre d'Ange books, among a handful of others work really well for me in this way. But I'd like to see a wider variety of cultural settings.

[clarentine]

Agreed.

And, you know, some genres do better at this than SFF - it's one of the reason I like crossovers. Mystery crossovers are usually smaller-scale stakes. Romance, if you can stomach it, is all about smaller-scale stakes. (The word gives me hives, so I don't generally go there, but there's a whole subgenre called women's fiction that can be far less cliched.)

Oh. Just had another thought: YA. How much of YA fiction, including SFF fiction, is about Save The World stakes? Not much, I think. So, maybe the Rule about avoiding Coming of Age stories in SFF stories is taking those sorts of small-stakes stories away from us?

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Mmf. I think you can have a smaller-scale stakes story without it necessarily being a Coming of Age. Or a romance, for that matter.

(I do like historical mysteries, if the history is sufficiently well done, though.)

My prejudices are showing, perhaps, but I think there is a lot of mileage in the caper and/or espionage plot; local politics; local wars that end in messy peaces; messy peaces that end in local wars; that kind of thing: very character-centred specific arcs.

I think modern fantasy has not yet shaken its debt to Tolkien and the idea of the epic - although Tolkien did have both local and grand layers to his epic - the idea of the epic, especially, is terribly seductive: the temptation to keep raising the stakes until they cannot go any higher as a substitute for the kind of focused character development that some few literary-historical novels have done very well seems to be a large factor.

Another element that modern fantasy is indebted to, to some degree, is "Golden Age" science fiction - which seems to have a preponderance of simple answers to complicated questions, and very clean, neat, tidy ways of smoothing out loose ends. Zelazny and LeGuin are serious outliers, with their complicated answers to (ostensibly) simple questions.

And fantasy is also influenced by the watering-down of history and of myth, I think. Very few people are aware that nearly all myths have several - sometimes mutually contradictory - versions. And I'm frequently suprised by how shallow an understanding of various historical systems of society not only certain fantasy authors, but some authors of popular history works, as well, display.

Smaller-scale stakes rob people of the opportunity to make things black and white: the problem of local stakes is that they really only come in shades of grey, because they're about people, not Ancient Evil's Latest Incarnation Wants to Rule/Destroy The World, oh noes! or Evil Villain Wants to Destroy Our Heroes Just Because.

In short, they reflect the world as it is, and aren't quite as simple or as comforting as many people want their fictions to be. Which is probably why there are not nearly as many of them as I'd like.

Oh. I has opinions, don't I? That could be dangerous. :)

[clarentine]

Heh. *g*

[jennygadget.livejournal.com]

"Very few people are aware that nearly all myths have several - sometimes mutually contradictory - versions."

Yeah...it always kind of amuses me - in a cynical way - how modern retellings of Little Red Riding Hood are "twists" on the tale, the Grimm's is the only "real" version, and lots of people think I'm just making shit up when I talk about the versions before Grimm's.

In a slightly related tangent, my current reading for "Information and Society" is the chapter on the history of American libraries - which includes significant events in European library history from the time before the creation of the American colonies. Events such as the invention of the printing press. According to my textbook (which has been much better than the articles previously mentioned on my journal in terms of NOT using terms like "barbarians") one of the advantages of the creation of the printing press was the ability to have an "authoritative version."

I thought that was just such an odd way of putting it. Not a "common version" or a "shared version" but an "authoritative version." As if the main advantage to being able to make exact copies easily is that an authority can proclaim one version correct over another - thereby shutting down discussion, not that exact copies can facilitate clear communication and shared social experiences. And really, I think that kind of thinking is part of why modern authorities are having such a hard time dealing with issues like copyright and why so many people misunderstand things like fanfiction.

Which brings me right back to that same book's very confusing diagram of the relationship between libraries and artists and users in a digital age. My main problem with it being that there was no acknowledgement that modern technology blurs the line between artists and users. The printing press allowed a lot of people to become readers, but only a much smaller group of people could become writers. This was even more true of radio and television. Now lots more people can be writers/artists and that's confusing a lot of people, I think - despite it being a good thing in the end.

Speaking of copyright, I was very amused that when the book was talking about all the publishers in the colonies publishing lots of European author's works, there was never any mention of the American colonies being chock full of copyright theives for a good half century past the time when we were no longer officially colonies. :)

"Oh. I has opinions, don't I? That could be dangerous. :)"

Well, I'm right there with you, at least. :D

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm currently reading a book on the last two centuries of the Balkans, so I was thinking about national myths, as well.

We humans are awful blind monkeys, sometimes.

I thought that was just such an odd way of putting it. Not a "common version" or a "shared version" but an "authoritative version." As if the main advantage to being able to make exact copies easily is that an authority can proclaim one version correct over another

Fortunately, the advent of the printing press meant more problems for authorities, not less. But yeah, that sort of phrasing is definitely an artefact of a hierarchical worldview, isn't it?

My main problem with it being that there was no acknowledgement that modern technology blurs the line between artists and users.

Hierarchical worldview. Pernicious thing. :)

(You run into the same problem in discussions of cultural authenticity, but at least there some people are starting to acknowledge that any hierarchy is a chimera created or maintained to serve political ends. This is one of my pet topics to rant on. :P )

[clarentine]

And Chalion! Love that book. Not the others in the series, or her Sharing Knife series, but Caz, hell yes.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I love Ista best. But Caz is also made of win.

(And I really thought the Sharing Knife series was an incredibly interesting experiment, in a fascinating world. It's become comfort reading for me: they're very gentle books, in a way.)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

I love Ista too, from the perspective of a 40+ woman, although I don't need a career change.

Caz is a grand adventure, but Ista is more personal. Hallowed Hunt is the only one I don't re-read all that often; it just doesn't fit me the way the first two do.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Hallowed Hunt feels awfully unbalanced for me, for a Bujold novel - it starts off being about Ingrey, Ijada, and the leopard, and ends up being about Ingrey and the bad guy. Who is not nearly as interesting as Ijada and the leopard.

Or at least that's how I feel about it.

But Paladin is my One Perfect Book, and I have to ration my re-readings of it, lest I end up getting tired of it. :)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

I think you've explained my vague dissatisfaction with HH. As for Paladin, well, that's why I alternate re-reading Paladin and Chalion.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Mm, Caz. I should reread Chalion soon.